“Ah, my Lord, God is no grudging giver,” answered the Prior. “The verse before it, methinks, will reply to your Lordship—‘we exult and are glad all our days.’ All our earthly life have we been afflicted; all our heavenly one shall we be made glad.”
“Glad! I hardly know what the word means,” was the pathetic reply.
“You will know it then,” said the Prior.
“You will—but shall I? I have been such an unprofitable servant!”
“Nay, good my Lord, but are you going to win Heaven by your own works?” eagerly demanded the Bonus Homo. “‘Beginning in the spirit, are ye consummated in the flesh?’ Surely you have not so learned Christ. Hath He not said, ‘Life eternal give I to them; and they shall not perish for ever, and none shall snatch them out of My hand’?”
“True,” said the Earl, bowing his head.
But this was Vaudois teaching. And though Earl Edmund, first of all men in England, had drunk in the Vaudois doctrines, yet even in him they had to struggle with a mass of previous teaching which required to be unlearned—with all that rubbish of man’s invention which Rome has built up on the One Foundation. It was hard, at times, to keep the old ghosts from coming back, and troubling by their shadowy presence the soul whom Christ had brought into His light.
There was silence for a time. The Earl’s head was bent forward upon his clasped hands on the table, and the Prior, who thought that he might be praying, forbore to disturb him. At length he said, “My Lord, the supper-hour is come.”
The Earl gave no answer, and the Prior thought he had dropped asleep. He waited till the board was struck with the iron bar as the signal for supper. Then he rose and addressed the Earl again. The silence distressed him now. He laid his hand upon his patron’s shoulder, but there was no response. Gently, with a sudden and terrible fear, he lifted the bowed head and looked into his face. And then he knew that the weary heart was glad at last—that life eternal in His beatific presence had God given to him. From far and near the physicians were summoned that night, but only to tell the Prior what he already knew. They stood round the bed on which the corpse had been reverently laid, and talked of his mysterious disease in hard words of sonorous Latin. It would have been better had they called it in simple English what it was—a broken heart. Why such a fate was allotted to one of the best of all our princes, He knows who came to bind up the broken-hearted, and who said by the lips of His prophet, “Reproach hath broken mine heart.”
Ademar was sent back to Berkhamsted with the woeful news. There was bitter mourning there. It was not, perhaps, in many of the household, unmixed with selfish considerations, for to a large proportion of them the death of their master meant homelessness for the present, and to nearly all sad apprehensions for the future. Yet there was a great deal that was not selfish, for the gentle, loving, humane, self-abnegating spirit of the dead had made him very dear to all his dependants, and more hearts wept for him than he would ever have believed possible.