“Hold it fast! hold it fast, dear sir,” said Tibble, holding out his hands with tears in his eyes, and his face working in a manner that happily Ambrose could not see.
“But how—how? The barefoot friar said that for an Ave a day, our Blessed Lady will drag us back from purgatory. I saw her on the wall of her chapel at Winchester saving a robber knight from the sea, yea and a thief from the gallows; but that is not being free.”
“Fond inventions of pardon-mongers,” muttered Tibble.
“And is one not free when the priest hath assoilsied him?” added Ambrose.
“If, and if—” said Tibble. “But bone shall make me trow that shrift in words, without heart-sorrow for sin, and the Latin heard with no thought of Him that bore the guilt, can set the sinner free. ’Tis none other that the Dean sets forth, ay, and the book that I have here. I thank my God,” he stood up and took off his cap reverently, “that He hath opened the eyes of another!”
His tone was such that Ambrose could have believed him some devout almost inspired hermit rather than the acute skilful artisan he appeared at other times; and in fact, Tibble Steelman, like many another craftsman of those days, led a double life, the outer one that of the ordinary workman, the inner one devoted to those lights that were shining unveiled and new to many; and especially here in the heart of the City, partly from the influence of Dean Colet’s sermons and catechisings at St. Paul’s, but also from remnants of Lollardism, which had never been entirely quenched. The ordinary clergy looked at it with horror, but the intelligent and thoughtful of the burgher and craftsman classes studied it with a passionate fervour which might have sooner broken out and in more perilous forms save for the guidance it received in the truly Catholic and open-spirited public teachings of Colet, in which he persisted in spite of the opposition of his brother clergy.
Not that as yet the inquirers had in the slightest degree broken with the system of the Church, or with her old traditions. They were only beginning to see the light that had been veiled from them, and to endeavour to clear the fountain from the mire that had fouled it; and there was as yet no reason to believe that the aspersions continually made against the mass priests and the friars were more than the chronic grumblings of Englishmen, who had found the same faults in them for the last two hundred years.
“And what wouldst thou do, young sir?” presently inquired Tibble.
“That I came to ask thee, good Tibble. I would work to the best of my power in any craft so I may hear those words and gain the key to all I have hitherto learnt, unheeding as one in a dream. My purpose had been to be a scholar and a clerk, but I must see mine own way, and know whither I am being carried, ere I can go farther.”
Tibble writhed and wriggled himself about in consideration. “I would I wist how to take thee to the Dean himself,” he said, “but I am but a poor man, and his doctrine is ‘new wine in old bottles’ to the master, though he be a right good man after his lights. See now, Master Ambrose, meseemeth that thou hadst best take thy letter first to this same priest. It may be that he can prefer thee to some post about the minster. Canst sing?”