“Shields him! Why, Codrington, he has been translated; removed just as he was to celestial places; ’tis on the very word of the Abbot himself we have it, and, where good men meet and talk in England, no other tale can compete for a moment with this one.”
“Out with it, bold Worringham! Surely such a thing has not happened since the time of Elijah.”
“’Tis simple enough, and I had it from one who had it from the Abbot’s lips. That saintly recluse had spent a long day in fast and vigils amid the cloisters of his ancient abbey—so he said—and when the evening came had knelt after his wont an hour at the shrine, lost in holy thought and pious exercise. Nothing new or strange appeared about the Wonder. It lay as it had ever lain, silent, in the cathedral twilight, and the good man, full of gentle thoughts and celestial speculations, if we may take his word for it—and God forfend I should do otherwise!—the holy father even bent over him in fraternal love and reverence the while, he says, the beads ran through his fingers as Ave and Paternoster were told to the sleeping martyr’s credit by scores and hundreds. Not a sign of life was on the dead man’s face. He slept and smiled up at the vaulted roof just as he had done year in and out beyond all memory, and therefore, as was natural, the Abbot thought he would sleep on while two stones of the cathedral stood one upon another.
“He left him, and, pacing down the aisles, wended to the refectory, where the brothers had near done their evening meal, and there, still in holy meditation, sat him down to break that crust of dry bread and drink that cup of limpid water which (he told my friend) was his invariable supper.”
“Hast thou ever seen the reverend father, good Worringham?” queried a young knight across the table as the story-teller stopped for a moment to drink from the flagon by his elbow.
“Yes, I have seen him once or twice.”
“Why, so have I,” laughed the young soldier—“and, by all the Saints in Paradise, I do not believe he sups on husks and water.”
“Believe or not as you will, it is a matter between thyself and conscience. The Abbot spoke, and I have repeated just what he said.”
“On with the story, Lord Earl,” laughed another: “we are all open-mouthed to hear what came next, and even if his Reverence—in holy abstraction, of course—doth sometime dip fingers into a venison pasty by mistake for a bread trencher, or gets hold of the wine-vessel instead of the water-beaker—’tis nothing to us. Suppose the reverent meal was ended—as Jerome says it should be—in humble gladness, what came then?”
“What came then?” cried Worringham. “Why, the monks were all away—the tapers burned low—the Abbot sat there by himself, his praying hands crossed before him—when wide the chancery door was flung, and there, in his grave-clothes, white and tall, was the saint himself!”