CHAPTER XXI.
THE MONKS OF ELY COMPLAIN AND PLOT.
As no corn came, and no wine could be had, the tribulations and murmurings in the monastery grew louder and louder. Certain of the monks had never looked with a friendly eye upon Girolamo the Salernitan, but now there was suddenly raised an almost universal clamour among them that that dark-visaged and thin-bodied alien was, and ever had been, a necromancer. Unmindful of the many services he had done, and forgetting how many times they had, when the drinking-horns could be well filled, rejoiced and jubilated at his successes, and specialiter on that not far by-gone day when he had burned the Norman witch, in the midst of her incantations, with the reeds and grass of the fen, the monks now called him by the foulest and most horrible of all names, and some of them even called out for his death. These men said that if Girolamo were brought to the stake and burned as he had burned the Norman witch, the wrath of Heaven would be appeased, and matters would go much better with the house of St. Etheldreda, and with all the English people. Albeit they all knew how innocently those devils had been made; and, albeit they had seen with their own eyes, that Girolamo was constant at prayers, mass, and confession, and that he never prepared his mixtures and compounds until after prayer and long fasting (to say nothing of his frequently partaking in the Sacrament of our Lord’s Supper), they rumoured, even like the Normans, that he had raised devils, and employed fen-fiends, and incubuses, and succubuses, and had lit hell-fires upon the pools and within the holy house at Crowland; that he was ever attended by a demon, called by him Chemeia;[[212]] that he had been a Jew, and next a follower of Mahound;[[213]] that he had sold his soul to the devil of devils at Jerusalem or Mecca: that he did not eat and drink like Saxons and Christians, only because he went to graves and charnel-houses at the dead of night, and feasted upon the bodies of the dead with his fiends and hell-hounds—with a great deal more too horrible and obscene to mention.[[214]]
Now before a breath of this bad wind reached him, Girolamo had begun to grow a-weary of the Fen-country; and but for his deadly-hatred to the Norman race and his great love for the Lord of Brunn, he would have quitted it and England, long before this season, to wander again into some sunny climate. Ofttimes would he say to himself in his solitary musings,—“Oh flat, wet, and fenny land, shall mine eyes never more behold a mountain? Oh fogs, and vapours, and clouds for ever dropping rain, shall I never see a bright blue sky again?[[215]] Oh fireless, watery sun, scarcely brighter or warmer than the moon in my own land beyond the Alps and the Apennines, shall I never see thee again in thy glory? Am I to perish in these swamps—to be buried in a bog? Oh for one glimpse before I die of mine own blue mountains, and bright blue seas and skies!—one glance at thy bay, oh beautiful Salerno, and at the mountain of Saint Angelo and the hills of Amalfi, at the other mountains, and hills, and olive-groves, and gay vine-yards that gird thee in! There be no hills here but mud-banks; no trees but dull alders and willows.[[216]] But courage, sinking heart, or sinking, shivering frame, for there is food here for my revenge; there be Normans here to circumvent and kill!”
So did the Salernitan commune with himself in his many lonely hours (many because he sought them and avoided the society of men) before the evil tongues were wagged against him. Upon his first hearing what the monks were then beginning to say of him, he only muttered to himself, “This is a dull-witted generation that I have fallen among! These Saxons go still on all-fours! They are but ultra-montanes and barbarians, knowing nothing of the history of past ages, or of the force and effect of the natural sciences! Dolts are they all except the Lord Hereward, and his share of wit is so great that none is left for his countrymen. But Hereward is worthy of ancient Rome; and it is not the stupid sayings of his people that will make me quit his side and disappoint my vengeance. I have done these same Saxons some good service, and I will do them more before I die or go hence. They will think better of me when they know more of me, and of the natural means wherewith I work mine ends. Ha! ha! I needs must laugh when I hear that Girolamo of Salerno, the witch-seeker and the destroyer of witches, the sworn foe to all magic save the Magia Alba, which is no magic at all, but only science, should be named as a wizard and necromancer! Oh! ye good doctors, and teachers of Salerno who flourished and began to make a school for the study of Nature before the Normans came among us, think of this—think of your pupil, penitent, and devotee, being taken in these dark septentrional regions for a sorcerer! Ha! ha!”
But when Girolamo saw that the Saxon people were beginning to avoid him as one that had the pest, and that the monks of Ely were pointing at him with the finger, and that silent tongues and angry eyes, with crossings and spittings on the ground and coarse objurgations, met him wherever he went, he grew incensed and spoke freely with the Lord of Brunn about it.
“Girolamo, my friend and best coadjutor,” said the Lord of Brunn, “think nothing of it! This is but the talk of ignorance or malice. Beshrew me an I do not think that the Normans have gotten some traitor to raise this babel and thereby injure us. But the Lord Abbat Thurstan, who hath shrieved and assoiled thee so often, will now answer for the purity of thy faith as for his own, and will silence these murmurers.”
But it was not so: Hereward made too large an account not of the good will, but of the power of Thurstan, not knowing all that passed in the chapters of the house, nor so much as suspecting half of the cabals that were framing in secret meetings and in close discussions by night in the dormitories. No sooner had the Lord Abbat begun to reprehend such as spoke evil of the Salernitan, than the factious and false parts of the monks declared among themselves that, Christian prelate as he was, he had linked himself with a sorcerer; and in charges they had already prepared, and with great privacy written down upon parchment, they inserted this—that Abbat Thurstan, unmindful of the duties of his holy office, and in contempt of the remonstrances of the prior, the chamberlain, and others, the majority of the house Ely, had made himself the friend and defensor of the said Girolamo of Salerno, that dark mysterious man who had notoriously sold himself to the arch-fiend, who had gone into the depths and iniquities of necromancy beyond all precedent, and who had, by his truly diabolical art, raised devils, trafficked with witches, and brought hell-fires upon earth.
It was at this juncture of time that two pretended pilgrims and devotees of Saint Etheldreda arrived at the guest-house of Ely, giving out that they had with great risk and real danger found their way through the lines of the beleaguering Normans, but that, so entire was their devotion to the saint, no perils could prevent them from coming to the shrine. It was not much noted at the time, but it was well remembered afterwards, and when it was all too late, that these two palmers spent much more of their time in walking and talking outside the abbey walls with the prior and the chamberlain, than in the praying inside the church and in the chapel of the saint: that they seemed to shun the Lord Abbat, and that they took their departure in a sudden manner, and without taking leave of the Abbat as good pilgrims were wont to do. And almost immediately after the departure of the two false palmers, a proclamation was made by sound of trumpet and by Duke William’s orders, that the Abbat of Ely, having leagued himself with a sorcerer (having long before leagued himself with traitors and rebels and robbers), had incurred the anathemas of the church, which would soon be pronounced upon him by bell, book, and candle,[[217]] and with all the formalities in use. And after this had been proclaimed by sound of trumpet in the Camp, and at the cross of the town of Cam-Bridge, and at the crosses of Peterborough, Huntingdon, Stamford, and many other towns, the cloister-monks most adverse to the Lord Abbat began to throw off all secrecy and disguise, and to talk as loud as trumpets both in the streets of Ely and in the monastery, calling Girolamo a sorcerer and worse. Upon this the dark Salernitan came up from the Camp to the monastery, and demanded to be heard in the church or in the hall, in the presence of the whole house. Thurstan, with right good will, assented; and although some of the monks tried to oppose it, Girolamo was admitted to plead his own defence and justification in the great hall. It was the envious prior’s doing, but the novices and all the younger monks were shut out, for the prior feared greatly the effect of the speech of the Salernitan, who by this time had made himself master of the Saxon tongue, while in the Latin tongue and in Latin quotations, Girolamo had few equals on this side the Alps. He presented himself alone, having forcibly and successfully opposed the Lord Hereward, who would fain have accompanied him to the abbey. “If you should be with me,” he had said to the Lord of Brunn, “they will impute it to me, in case of my effacing these vile stigmas, that I have been saved by your favour and interference, or by the respect and awe which is due to you, or by the dread they entertain of your arms; and should I fail in my defence, they might afterwards work you great mischief by representing you as mine advocate. No! good my Lord, alone will I stand upon my defence, and bring down confusion upon these calumniators!”
And thus it was all alone that the dark and thin and sad Salernitan entered the great hall, in the midst of a coughing and spitting, and an uplifting and a turning away of eyes, as if the monks felt sulphur in their gorges, and saw some fearful and supernatural object with their eyes. Nothing abashed, the Salernitan threw off the black mantle which he ordinarily wore, and stepping unto the midst of the hall—the monks being seated all round him—he made the blessed sign of the cross, threw up his hands for a moment as if in prayer, and then spoke. And when he first began to speak, although he more immediately faced the abbat and his friendly honest countenance, his coal-black eyes, which seemed all of a blaze, rested and were fixed upon the envious false visage of the prior, who wriggled in his seat, and whose eyes were bent upon the ground, all unable to encounter the burning glances of that animated, irate Italian.