“Thy history is mostly exits and entries, but perhaps it is none the less accurate for all that. And now thou wilt say this Henry was no more lasting than his kinsman—he too died.”
“Completely and wholly, Sir, so that the burly Richard Cœur de Lion reigned in his stead; and then came John, who was at best but a wayward vassal of St. Peter’s Chair.”
“Down with him, jolly Abbot! And mount another on the shaky throne of thy fantastic narrative. I am weary of the succession already, and since we have come so far away from where I thought we were I care for no great niceties of detail. Put thy Sovereigns to the amble, make them trot across the stage of thy hazy recollection, or thou wilt be asleep before thou canst stall and stable half of them.”
“Well, then, a Henry came after John, and an Edward followed him—then another of the name—and then a third—that noble Edward in whose sway the realm now is, and in whom (save some certain exactions of rent and taxes) Mother Church perceives a glorious and a warlike son. But it is a long muster roll from the time of thy Norman monarch to this year of grace 1346.”
“A long roll!” I muttered to myself, turning away from my empty plate—“horrible, immense, and vast! Good Lord! what shadows are these men who come and go like this! Wonderful and dreadful! that all those tinseled puppets of history—those throbbing epitomes of passion and godlike hopes—should have budded, and decayed, and passed out into the void, finding only their being, to my mind, in the shallow vehicle of this base Churchman’s wine-vault breath. Dreadful, quaint, abominable! to think that all these flickering human things have paced across the sunny white screen of life—like the colored fantasies yonder stained windows threw upon my sleeping eyes—and yet I only but wake hungry and empty, unchanged, unmindful, careless!—Priest!” I said aloud, so sudden and fiercely that the monk leaped to his feet with a startled cry from the drunken sleep into which he had fallen—“priest! dost fear the fires of thy purgatory?”
“Ah, glorious miracle! but—but surely thou wouldst not——”
“Why, then, answer me truly, swear by that great crucified form there shining in the taper light above thy throne, swear by Him to whom thou nightly offerest the hyssop incense of thy beastly excesses—swear, I say!”
“I do—I do!” exclaimed St. Olaf’s priest in extravagant terror, as I towered before him with all my old Phrygian fire emphasized by the sanctity of my extraordinary repute. “I swear!” he said; but, seeing me hesitate, he added, “What wouldst thou of thy poor, unworthy servant?”
’Twas not so easy to answer him, and I hung my head for a moment; then said: “When I died—in the Norman time, thou rememberest—there was a woman here, and two sunny little ones, blue in the eyes and comely to look upon—— There, shut thy stupid mouth, and look not so astounded! I tell thee they were here—here, in St. Olaf’s Hall—here, at this very high table between me and St. Olaf’s Abbot—three tender flowers, old man, set in the black framing of a hundred of thy corded, wondering brotherhood. Now, tell me—tell me the very simple truth—is there such a woman here, tall and fair, and melancholy gracious? Are there such babes in thy cloisters or cells?”
“It is against the canons of our order.”