“Yes,” I answered, “I am bound to the town, but I have not yet chosen a master.”
“Then you are all the more sure to go to the fighting, for every one, just now, who has no other calling, is apprentice to arms.”
“It will not be the first time I have taken that honorable indenture.”
“No, I guess not,” said the shrewd Friar, eyeing me under his penthouse eyebrows, “for thou art a stout and wiry-looking fellow, and may I never read anything better than my breviary again if I cannot construe in your face a good and varied knowledge of camps and cities. But there was something else I had to say to you.” [“Here comes the point of the narrative,” I thought to myself.] “Now, so trim a soldier as you, and one wherewithal so reflective, would surely not willingly go where hostile swords are waving and cruel French spears are thicker than yonder tall-bladed glass, unshriven—with all thy sins upon thy back?”
“Why then, monk, I must stay at home. Is that what you would say?”
“Nay, not at all. There is a middle way. But soft! Hast any money with thee?”
“Enough to get a loaf of bread and a cup of ale.”
“Oh!” said the secret pardoner (for his calling was then under ban and fine), a little disappointedly, “that is somewhat small, but yet, nevertheless,” he muttered partly to himself, “these are poor times, and when all plump partridges are abroad Mother Church’s falcons must necessarily fly at smaller game. Look here! good youth. Forego thy mortal appetites, defer thy bread and ale, and for that money saved thereby I will sell thee one of these priceless parchments here in my wallet—scrolls, young man, hot from the holy footstool of our blessed father in Rome, and carrying complete unction and absolution to the soul of their possessor! Think, youth! is not eternal redemption worth a cup of muddy ale? Fie to hesitate! Line thy bosom with this blessed scroll, and go to war cleaner-hearted than a new-born babe. There! I will not be exacting. For one of those silver groats I fancy I see tied in thy girdle I will give thee absolute admittance into the blessed company of saints and martyrs. I tell thee, man, for half a zecchin I will make thee comrade of Christ and endow thee with eternity! Is it a bargain?”
Silent and disdainful, I, who had seen a dozen hierarchies rise and set in the various peopled skies of the world, took the parchment from him and turned away and read it. It was, as he said—more shame on human intellect!—a full pardon of the possessor’s sins wrote out in bad Norman Latin, and bearing the sign and benediction of St. Peter’s chair. I read it from top to bottom, then twisted its red tapes round it again and threw it back to that purveyor of absolutions. Yes; and I turned upon that reverend traveler and scorned and scouted him and his contemptible baggage. I told him I had met two sad fools since noon, but he was worse than either. I scoffed him, just as my bitter mood suggested, until I had spent both breath and invention, then turned contemptuous, and left him at bay, mumbling inarticulate maledictions upon my biting tongue.
No more of these shallow panderers fell in my path to vex and irritate me, and before the white evening star was shining through the brilliant tapestry of the sunset over the meadow-lands in the west, I had drawn near to and entered the strong, shadowy, moated walls of my first English city.