The Salernitan shrieked rather than said, “This is too horrible, too atrocious! Malignant monk, wouldst drive me mad, and make me slay thee here in the midst of thy brothers?”
“In this hallowed place I am safe from thy magic and incantations,” said the prior.
Girolamo could not speak, for the words stuck in his throat, but he would, mayhap, have sprung upon the prior with his dagger, if the Lord Abbat had not instantly raised his hand and his voice, and said, “Peace! stranger peace! Let the prior say all that he hath to say, and then thou shalt answer him. Nay, by Saint Etheldreda! by Saint Sexburga, and by every saint in our Calendarium, I will answer him too! For is he not bringing charges against me, and seeking to deprive me of that authority over this house which was given me by heaven, and by King Edward the Confessor, and by the unanimous vote of the brethren of Ely in chapter assembled? Prior, I have long known what manner of man thou art, and how thou hast been pining and groaning and plotting for my seat and crozier; but thou art now bolder than thou wast wont to be. ’Tis well! Therefore speak out, and do ye, my children, give ear unto him. Then speak, prior! Go on, I say!” In saying these words, Lord Thurstan was well nigh as much angered as Girolamo had been; but his anger was of a different kind, and instead of growing deadly pale and ashy like the Salernitan, his face became as red as fire; and instead of moving and clenching his right hand, as though he would clutch some knife or dagger, he merely struck with his doubled fist upon the table before him, giving the table mighty raps. All this terrified the craven heart of the prior, who stood speechless and motionless, and who would have returned to his seat if the cellarer had not approached him and comforted him, and if several cloister-monks of the faction had not muttered, “Go on to the end, oh, prior! thou hast made a good beginning.”
And then the prior said, “I will go on if they will give me pledge not to interrupt me until I have done.”
“I give the pledge,” said the Abbat; and the Salernitan said, “The pledge is given.”
Being thus heartened, the prior went on. Girolamo the Salernitan, he said, had been seen gnashing his teeth and shooting fire out of his eyes at the elevation of the Most Holy; had been heard muttering in an unknown tongue behind the high altar, and among the tombs and shrines of the saints; and also had he often been seen wandering by night, when honest Christians were in their beds, among the graves of the poor of Ely, and gazing at the moon and stars, and talking to some unseen demon. He had never been seen to eat and drink enough to support life; and therefore it was clear that he saved his stomach for midnight orgies in the church-yard with devils and witches. It was not true that all the devils at Crowland were sham-devils, for some of the novices and lay-brothers of the house, and some of the clowns of Crowland town, who had been seduced, and made to disguise themselves in order to give a cover to what was doing, had since declared that, although all their company made only twelve in number, they had seen twice twelve when the infernal lights were lit in the dark cellars of the house where their pranks began; and it was a notable fact that one of the Crowland hinds, first cousin to Orson the smith, had been so terrified at this increase of number and at all that he had heard and seen on that fearful night, that he had gone distraught,[[218]] and had never yet recovered it. It was known unto all men how, not only on that night and in that place, but also on many other nights and in many other places, the alien had made smells that were not of earth, nor capable of being made by earthly materials, and had made fire burn upon water, mixing flame and flood! Now, the Lord Abbat himself had said that fire and water would not mingle! Nor would they but by magic. The convent would all remember this! Not content with possessing the diabolical arts himself, Girolamo had imparted them to another: Elfric the sword-bearer, from whom better things might have been expected, considering his training in a godly house, had been seen mixing and using these hellish preparations which he could not have done if he had not first spat upon the cross and covenanted with witches and devils. Nay, so bold-faced had this young man been in his crime that he hath done this openly! The stranger had been seen many times in battle, and in the thickest of the fight, yet, while the Saxons fell thick around him, and every man that was not killed was wounded, he got no hurt,—no not the smallest! When the arrows came near him they turned aside or fell at his feet without touching him. There was a Norman knight, lately a prisoner in the Saxon Camp, who declared that when he was striking at the thin stranger with the certainty of cleaving him with his battle-axe, the axe turned aside in his firm strong hands as though some invisible hand had caught hold of it. Moreover, there was a Norman man-at-arms who had solemnly vowed that he had thrust his sword right through the thin body of the alien, had driven the hilt home on his left breast; and that when he withdrew his sword, instead of falling dead to the earth, the stranger stood erect, laughing scornfully at him, and losing no blood, and showing no sign of any wound. Now all these things fortified the belief that the stranger was the Jew that could not die! Seeing that a deep impression was made upon many of his hearers who had gone into the hall with the determination of believing that there had been no magic, and that nothing unlawful had been done by the defenders of the liberties of the Saxon people and the privileges of the Saxon church, the cunning prior turned his attack upon Thurstan. It was notorious, he said, that Thurstan had been a profuse and wasteful abbat of that house, taking no thought of the morrow, but feasting rich and poor when the house was at the poorest; that he was a man that never kept any balance between what he got and what he gave; and that he had always turned the deaf side of his head to those discreet brothers the chamberlain, the sacrist, the cellarer and refectorarius, who had long since foretold the dearth and famine which the convent were now suffering. [Here nearly every monk present laid his right hand upon his abdomen and uttered a groan.] It was known unto all of them, said the prior, that under the rule and government of Thurstan such things had been done in the house as had never been done under any preceding abbat. The shrine-boxes had been emptied; the plates of silver and of gold, the gifts of pious kings and queens, had been taken from the shrines themselves; the treasure brought from the abbey of Peterborough had only been brought to be given up to the Danes and sent for ever from England, together with the last piece of silver the pilgrims had left in the house of Ely! And then the Jews! the Jews! Had not dealings been opened with them? Had not a circumcised crew been brought into the patrimony of Saint Etheldreda, and lodged in the guest house of the abbey? Had not the abbat’s seal been used in sealing securities that were now in the hands of the Israelities? And was not all the money gotten from the Jews gone long ago, and was not the treasury empty, the granary empty, the cellar empty,—was there not an universal void and emptiness in all the abbey, and throughout the patrimony of St. Etheldreda? [The monks groaned again.] In concluding his long discourse the prior raised his unmanly voice as high as it could be raised without cracking, and said—“Upon all and several the indubitable facts I have recited, I accuse this Girolamo of Salerno of magic and necromancy; and I charge Thurstan, abbat of this house, and Elfric, whilom novice in the succursal cell of Spalding, of being defensors, fautors, and abettors of the necromancer. And what saith the sixteenth of the canons enacted under the pious King Edgar? And how doth it apply to our abbat? The canon saith this—‘And we enjoin, that every priest zealously promote Christianity, and totally extinguish every heathenism; and fordid necromancies and divinations and enchantments, and the practices which are carried on with various spells, and with frith-splots and with elders, and also with various other trees, and with stones, and with many various delusions, with which men do much of what they should not.’ I have done.”[[219]]
For a while there was silence, the monks sitting and gazing at each other in astonishment and horror. At length, seeing that the abbat was almost choked, and could not speak at all, Girolamo said, “my lord, may I begin?”
Thurstan nodded a yea.
Hereupon the Salernitan went over the whole history of his past life, with all its sorrows, studies, and wanderings; and bade the monks reflect whether such a life was not fitted to make a man moody and sad and unlike other men. He acknowledged that, as compared with Saxons, and more especially with the Saxon monks of Ely, he ate and drank very little; but this was because his appetite was not good, and his habit of life very different from theirs. He allowed that he was fond of wandering about in lonely places, more especially by moonlight, but this was because eating little he required the less sleep, and because the sadness of his heart was soothed by solitude and the quiet aspect of the moon and stars. All this, and a great deal more, the Salernitan said in a passably composed and quiet voice; but when he came to deny and refute the charges which the prior had made, his voice pealed through that hall like thunder, and his eyes flashed like lightning. In concluding he said—“I was ever a faithful son of Mother Church. The blessed Pope at Rome—Pope Alexander it was—hath put his hand upon this unworthy head and given me his benediction. The pious abbat of the ancient Benedictine house of La Cava that stands in the chasm of the mountain between Salerno and the city of Neapolis held me at the baptismal font; cloister-monks were my early instructors, and learned doctors of the church were my teachers in youth and manhood. I have been a witch-seeker and a witch-finder in mine own country. Ye have known me, here, burn, or help to burn, a witch almost under your own eyes. Jews have I ever abhorred,[[220]] even as much as witches, necromancers, and devils! Saracens and Moors, and all that follow Mahound, have I ever hated as Jews, and as much as good Christians ought to hate them! Oh prior, that makest thyself my accuser, thou hast been a home-staying man, and hast not been called upon to testify to thy faith in the lands where heathens rule and reign, and Mahound is held to be the prophet of God, and superior to God’s own Son. But I tell thee, prior, that I have testified to my faith in such places, and openly on the threshold of Mahound’s temples, braving death and seeking a happy martyrdom which, alas! I could not find. Saxons! in a town in Palestine wherein, save a guard of Saracens, there were none but Jews, I took the chief rabbi by the beard at the gate of his synagogue. Saxons! to show my faith I have eaten swine’s flesh at Jerusalem, in the midst of Saracens and Jews. Saxons! in the Christian countries of Europe I never met an Israelite without kicking him and loading him with reproaches. Bethink ye then, after all this, whether I, Girolamo of Salerno, be a Jew, or Mahounder, or necromancer! If ye are weary of me let me be gone to the country from which I came. I brought little with me, and shall take still less away. If ye would repay with torture and death the good I have done ye, seize me now, throw me into your prison, load me with chains, put me to the rack, do with me what ye will, but call me not Jew and wizard!”
Sundry of the monks said that the words of the stranger sounded very like truth and honesty, and that of a surety the good Lord Hereward would not have brought a wizard with him into England, or have lived so long in friendship with a necromancer. Others of the cloister-monks, but they were few in number, said that Girolamo had disproved nothing, and that it could be but too well proved that woe and want had fallen upon the good house of Ely—that the treasury, granary, wine-cellar were all empty. The Lord Abbat now spoke, but his anger had cooled, and his speech was neither loud nor long. He declared that every man, being in his senses and not moved by private malice, must be convinced that the Salernitan was a good believer and no wizard; and that, whatever he had done, however strange some things might appear, had been done by means not unlawful. This being the case there could be no sin or blame in his having made himself the defensor of the stranger, and no sin in Elfric’s having associated with him, and assisted in his works. “But,” said the abbat, “though the prior hath not been bold enough to name that name, ye must all know and feel that, if this man were a necromancer, charges would lie far more against Hereward, our great captain, than against me or that poor young man, Elfric. Would ye accuse the Lord of Brunn of sorcery and witchcraft? I see ye dare not, nay, I see ye would not!”