“My good Lord Abbat,” said Girolamo, looking as we have said, not at Thurstan, but at the prior, “what is this horrid thing that I hear? What are these evil rumours which have been raised against me, while I have been adventuring my life for the service of this house and the good Saxon cause?”
“There hath been some idle talk about sortilege, and it grieves me to say that this idle talk hath of late become very loud in this house,” responded Thurstan.
“And who be they who first raised this talk?” said Girolamo; “where are my accusers? Who are the members of this house that have not seen as well my devotion to Heaven as the earthly and natural and legitimate means by which I have worked out mine ends for the furtherance of the good cause? Where are they, that I may speak to them and tell them to their faces how much they have erred or how greatly they have lied? But they dare not look me in the face!”
And as he said these words he turned his burning eyes from the prior to the chamberlain, and then from the chamberlain to another cankerous monk, and to another, and another, and they all pulled their cowls over their brows and looked down upon the floor. But at last the chamberlain found voice and courage enough to raise his head a little; and he said, “Oh, stranger! since thy first coming amongst us thou hast done things most strange—so strange that wise and good men have thought they have seen the finger of the devil in it.”
Quoth the Salernitan, “It was to do strange things that I came hither, and it was because I could do them that the brave and pious Lord of Brunn brought me with him to bear part in a contest which was desperate before we came. But I tell thee, oh monk, that all of even the strangest things I have done have been done by legitimate and natural means, and by that science which I have acquired by long study and much fasting, and much travelling in far-off countries, where many things are known which are as yet unknown in these thy boreal regions. To speak not of the marvels I have witnessed in the East, I tell thee, Saxon, that I have seen the doctors who teach, or who used to teach, in the schools of my native town before the Norman barbarians came among us, do things that would make thy dull eyes start out of their sockets, and the hair stand erect round thy tonsure; and yet these doctors and teachers were members of that Christian Church to which thou, and I, and all of us belong—were doctors in divinity, and priests, and confessors, and men of holy lives; and it never passed through their bright and pure minds that what the ignorant could not understand should be imputed to them or to their scholars as a crime. Saxon, I say, take the beam of ignorance out of thine eye, and then wilt thou see that man can do marvellous things without magic or the aid of the devil. The real wizard or witch is the lowest and most benighted of mankind, and necromancy can be employed only for the working out of wicked and detestable ends. But what was and what is the end I have in view? Is it wicked to defend this house and the shrines of your national saints from violence and spoliation? Is it detestable in one who hath known in his own person and in his own country the woes of foreign conquest, to devote his sword and his life, his science, and all the little that is his, to the cause of a generous people struggling against fearful odds for their independence, and fighting for their own against these Norman invaders!”
“By Saint Etheldreda,” said Abbat Thurstan, “these ends and objects cannot be sinful! and as sinful means can be employed only for sinful ends, so can righteous ends be served only by righteous means. Fire mingles with fire, and water with water: but fire and water will not mingle or co-exist.” And divers of the cloister-monks, who had never been touched by the venom that was about to ruin the house of Ely and the whole country of England, took up and repeated the Abbat’s words, speaking also of the facts in evidence, as that Girolamo the Salernitan had many times conferred great benefit on the Saxon cause, and the like. And even some of the house who had turned too ready an ear to their own fears, or to the evil and crafty whisperings and suggestions of the prior and his faction, assented to Thurstan’s proposition, and said that verily it appeared the Salernitan was free from the damnable guilt wherewith he was charged, and that if he had used any magic at all, it was only that Magia Alba, or White Magic, which proceeded from the study and ingenuity of man, and which might be used without sin.
Now as these things were said in the hall, the prior, fearing that his plot might be counter-plotted, and the meshes he had woven be torn to pieces, and blown to the winds, waxed very desperate; and, after whispering for awhile in the ear of the chamberlain who sat by him, he threw his cowl back from his head, and standing up, spoke passionately. But while the prior spoke he never once looked at Girolamo, who remained standing in the middle of the great hall, firm and erect, and with his arms crossed over his breast. No! desperate as he was, the prior could not meet the fiery glances of that dark thin man; and so he either looked at the round and ruddy face of Thurstan, or in the faces of those monks of his own faction who had made up their minds to support him in all that he might say or do.
“It seemeth to me,” said the prior, “that a wicked man may pretend to serve a good cause only for the sake of injuring it, and that a weak man may be brought to believe that good can come out of things that are evil, and that witchcraft and all manner of wickednesses may be employed against an enemy, albeit this is contrary to the doctrine of our Church, and is provocative of the wrath of Heaven. Now, from the first coming of this alien among us, things have gone worse and worse with us. Not but that there have been certain victories and other short glimpses of success, meant only to work upon our ungodly pride, and delude us and make our present misery the keener. When this alien first came, the Lord Abbat liked him not—I need not tell ye, my brethren, that the Lord Abbat said to many of us, that he liked not the looks of the stranger the Lord Hereward brought with him; or that I and the cellarius, and many more of us, thought from the beginning that the man was a Jew—an Israelite—yea, one of that accursed race that crucified our Lord!...”
“Liar or idiot,” said the fiery man of Italie, “thou wilt be cursed for saying it!”
“That which I have said I have said,” quoth the prior; “we took thee for a Jew, and the Lord Abbat confessed, then, that thou didst verily look like one, although he hath altered his tone since. And stranger, I now tell thee to thy face (but still the prior looked not in Girolamo’s face) that I believe thou mayest well be that wandering Jew that cannot die until the day of Judgment come.”