“I know not,” he said, “but these apple trees and cherries all in blossom, this warm soft air, as it were, charged with thunder fire, these daisies opening and blushing upon the fields, the hawthorn there beside us in the hedgerows, all white.... Who shall tell me why I feel troubled and always ready to die or to sleep? And my heart beats so hard when I hear the birds awaking in the trees and see the swallows come back, then I long to go beyond the sun and the moon. And now I am cold, and now hot. Ah! Nele! I would fain no more be in this low world, or give a thousand lives to the one who would love me....”
But she did not speak, and smiling happily, looked at Ulenspiegel.
XXXII
On the day of the Feast of the Dead, Ulenspiegel came away from Notre Dame with some vagabonds of his own age. Lamme Goedzak was lost among them, like a sheep in the midst of wolves.
Lamme freely paid for drink for everyone, for his mother gave him three patards every Sunday and feast day.
He went then with his comrades In den rooden schildt, to the Red Shield, whose landlord Jan Van Liebeke served them with the dobbele knollaert of Courtrai.
The drink heated their wits, and talking of prayers Ulenspiegel declared plumply that masses for the dead are good only for the priests.
But there was a Judas in the band: he denounced Ulenspiegel as a heretic. In spite of Soetkin’s tears and Claes’s entreaties, Ulenspiegel was taken and cast into prison. There he remained in a cellar behind bars for a month and three days without seeing any one. The gaoler ate three quarters of his pittance. In the meanwhile, inquiries were made into his good and bad reputation. It was found merely that he was a sharp jester, flouting his neighbours continually, but never having missaid Monseigneur God, or Madame Virgin or messieurs the saints. And so the sentence was a light one, for he might have been branded in the face with a red-hot iron, and whipped till the blood came.
In consideration of his youth, the judges condemned him merely to walk in his shirt behind the priests, bareheaded and barefooted, and a candle in his hand, in the first procession that should go out from the church.