Stern, inflexible, I frowned upon them
Then I went back to my friend the Abbot, and stood, reflective, behind him, wondering whether it were not a duty to humanity to rid it of such a knave even as he slept there. But while I stood at his elbow contemplating him, the unwonted silence told upon his dormant faculties, and presently the heavy head was raised, and, after an inarticulate murmur or two, he smiled imbecilely, and, picking up the thread of his revelry, hiccoughed out: “The chorus, good brothers!—the chorus—and all together!”
Die we must, but let us die drinking at an inn.
Hold the winecup to our lips sparkling from the bin!
So, when angels flutter down to take us from our sin,
“Ah! God have mercy on these sots!” the cherubs will begin.
“Why, you rogues!” he said, as his drunken melody found no echo in the great hall—“why, you sleepy villains! am I a strolling troubadour that I should sing thus alone to you?” And then, as his bleared and dazzled eyes wandered round the empty places, the spilled wine and overturned trestles, he smiled again with drunken cunning. “Ah!” he muttered; “then they must be all under the tables! I thought that last round of sack would finish them! Hallo, there! Ambrose! De Vœux! Jervaulx! Jolly comrades!—sleepy dogs! Come forth! Fie on ye!—to call yourselves good monks, and yet to leave thy simple, kindly Prior thus to himself!” and he pulled up the table linen and peered below. Sorely was the Churchman perplexed to see nothing; and first he glared up among the oaken rafters, as though by chance his fellows had flown thither, and then he stared at the empty places, and so his gaze wandered round, until, in a minute or two, it had made the complete circle of the place, and finally rested on me, standing, immovable, a pace from his elbow.
At first he stared upon me with vapid amusement, and then with stupid wonder. But it was not more than a second or two before the truth dawned upon that hazy intellect, and then I saw the thick, short hands tighten upon the carving of his priestly throne, I saw the wine flush pale upon his cheeks, and the drunken light in his eyes give place to the glare of terror and consternation. Just as they had done before him, but with infinite more intensity, he blanched and withered before my unrelenting gaze, he turned in a moment before my grim, imperious frown, from a jolly, rubicund old bibber, rosy and quarrelsome with his supper, into a cadaverous, sober-minded confessor, lantern-jawed and yellow—and then with a hideous cry he was on foot and flying for the doorway by which his friends had gone! But I had need of that good confessor, and ere he could stagger a yard the golden apostolic crook was about the ankle of the errant sheep, and the Prior of St. Olaf’s rolled over headlong upon the floor.
I sat down to supper, and as I helped myself to venison pasty and malmsey I heard the beads running through the recumbent Abbot’s fingers quicker than water runs from a spout after a summer thunder shower. “Misericordia, Domine, nobis!” murmured the old sinner, and I let him grovel and pray in his abject panic for a time, then bade him rise. Now, the fierceness of this command was somewhat marred, because my mouth was very full just then of pasty crust, and the accents appeared to carry less consternation into my friend’s heart than I had intended. The paternoster began to run with more method and coherence, and, soon finding he was not yet halfway to that nether abyss he had seen opening before him, he plucked up a little heart of grace. Besides, the avenger was at supper, and making mighty inroads into the provender the Abbot loved so well: this took off the rough edge of terror, and was in itself so curious a phenomenon that little by little, with the utmost circumspection, the monk raised his head and looked at me. I kept my baleful eyes turned away, and busied me with my loaded platter—which, by the way, was far the most interesting item of the two—and so by degrees he gained confidence, and came into a sitting position, and gazed at the hungry saint, so active with the victuals, wonder and awe playing across his countenance. “I see, Sir Priest,” I said, “you have a good cook yonder in the buttery,” but the Abbot was as yet too dazed to answer, so I went on to put him more at his ease (for I designed to ask him some questions later on), “now, where I come from, the great fault of the cooks is, they appreciate none of your Norman niceties—they broil and roast forever, as though every one had a hunter appetite, and thus I have often been weary of their eternal messes of pork and kine.”
“Holy saints!” quoth the Abbot. “I did not dream you had any cooks at all.”