The rest did me good. When I opened my eyes again it was with no special surprise (for the capacity of wonder is very volatile) that I saw the chancel where I lay had been lighted up, and that a portly Abbot was standing near, clad in brown fustian, corded round his ample middle, and picking his teeth with a little splinter of wood as he paced up and down muttering to himself something, of which I only caught such occasional fragments as “fat capons,” “spoiled roasts” (with a sniff in the direction of the side door of the abbey), and a malison on “unseemly hours” (with a glance at an empty confessional near me), until he presently halted opposite—whereon I immediately shut my eyes—and regarded me with dull complacency.
As he did so an acolyte, a pale, grave recluse on whose face vigils and abnegation had already set the lines of age, stepped out from the shadow, and, standing just behind his superior, also gazed upon me with silent attention.
“That blessed saint, Ambrose,” said the fat Abbot, pointing at me with his toothpick, apparently for want of something better to speak about, “is nearly as good to us as the miraculous cruse was to the woman of Sarepta: what this holy foundation would do just now, when all men’s minds are turned to war, without the pence we draw from pilgrims who come to kneel to him, I cannot think!”
“Indeed, sir,” said the sad-eyed youth, “the good influence of that holy man knows no limit: it is as strong in death as no doubt it was in life. ’Twas only this morning that by leave of our Prior I brought out the great missals, and there found something, but not much, that concerned him.”
“Recite it, brother,” quoth the Abbot with a yawn, “and if you know anything of him beyond the pilgrim pence he draws you know more than I do.”
“Nay, my Lord, ’tis but little I learned. All the entries save the first in our journals are of slight value, for they but record from year to year how this sum and that were spent in due keeping and care of the sleeping wonder, and how many pilgrims visited this shrine, and by how much Mother Church benefited by their dutiful generosity.”
“And the first entry? What said it?”
“All too briefly, sir, it recorded in a faded passage that when the saintly Baldwin—may God assoil him!” quoth the friar, crossing himself—“when Baldwin, the first Norman Bishop in your Holiness’s place, came here, he found yon martyr laid on a mean and paltry shelf among the brothers’ cells. All were gone who could tell his life and history, but your predecessor, says the scroll, judging by the outward marvel of his suspended life, was certain of that wondrous body’s holy beatitude, and, reflecting much, had him meetly robed and washed, and placed him here. ’Twas a good deed,” sighed the studious boy.
“Ah! and it has told to the advantage of the monastery,” responded his senior, and he came close up and bent low over me, so that I heard him mutter, “Strange old relic! I wonder how it feels to go so long as that—if, indeed, he lives—without food. It was a clever thought of my predecessor to convert the old mummy-bundle of swaddles into a Norman saint! Baldwin was almost too good a man for the cloisters; with so much shrewdness, he should have been a courtier!”
“Oh!” I thought, “that is the way I came here, is it, my fat friend?” and I lay as still as any of my comrade monuments while the old Abbot bent over me, chuckling to himself a bibulous chuckle, and pressing his short, thick thumb into my sides as though he was sampling a plump pigeon or a gosling at a village fair.