“Why, priest, what art thou talking of?—Paradise and long-dead saints? ’Twas of the Saxons—Harold’s Saxons—my jolly comrades and allies in arms when last in life, I spoke.”
“Ho! ho! Was that so? Why, I thought thou wert talking of things celestial all this while, though, in truth, thy speech sorted astounding ill with all I had heard before!”
“I think, Father,” I responded, “there is more burnt sack under thy ample girdle than wit beneath thy cowl. But never mind, we will not quarrel. Sit down, fill yon tankard (for dryness will not, I fancy, improve thy eloquence), and tell me soberly something of this nap of mine.”
“Ah, but, Sir, I was never very good at such studious work,” the monk replied, seating himself with uneasy obedience: “if I might but fetch in our Clerk—though, in truth, I cannot imagine why and whither he has gone—he is one who has by heart the things thou wouldst know.”
“Stir a foot, priest,” I said, with feigned anger, “and thou art but a dead Abbot! Tell me so much as your muddled brain can recall. Now, when I supped here before that yellow-skinned Norman William sat upon the English throne——”
“Saints in Paradise! what, he who routed Harold, and founded yonder abbey of Battle—impossible!”
“What, dost thou bandy thy ‘impossible’ with me? Slave, if thou cast again but one atom of doubt, one single iota of thy heretic criticism here, thou shalt go thyself to perdition and seek Sewall de Monteign and Gerard of Bayeux,” and I laid my hand upon my crook.
“Misericordia! misericordia!” stammered the Abbot. “I meant no ill whatever, but the extent of thy Holiness’s astounding abstinence overwhelmed me.”
“Why, then to your story. But I am foolish to ask. You cannot, you dare not, tell me again that lie of thy acolyte, that three hundred years have passed since then. Look up, say ’twas false, and that single word shall unburden here,” and I struck my breast, “a soul of a load of dread and fear heavier than ever was lifted by priestly absolution before.”
But still he hung his face, and I heard him mutter that fifty white-boned Abbots lay in the cloisters, heel to head, and the first one was a kinsman of William’s, and the last was his own predecessor.