“Adonai! I have sinned and done evil, all my life long. Specially I have sinned against this man, who has left me to die here in this horrible place. Now therefore, O my God, I beseech Thee, let the sufferings of Thy servant be accepted before Thee as an atonement for his sin, and let this one good deed, that I have preferred death rather than break Thy law, rise before Thee as the incense with the evening sacrifice!”
Yes, it was utter error. Yet the Christians of his day, one here and there excepted, could have taught him no better. And what had they offered him instead? Idol-worship, woman-worship, offerings for the dead,—every thing which the law of God had forbidden. In the day when the blood of the martyrs is demanded at the hand of Babylon, will there be no reckoning for the souls of those thousand sons of Israel, whom she has persistently thrust away from Christ, by erecting a rood-screen of idols between Him and them?
When day dawned on the Monday, they pulled out of the cess-pool the body of a dead man.
One month later, in the chapter-house at Canterbury, King Henry the Third stood, an humble and helpless suppliant, before his assembled Barons. There he was forced, utterly against his will and wish, to sign an additional charter granting liberties to England, and binding his own hands. It was Simon de Montfort who had brought matters to this pass. But Simon de Montfort was not the tall, fair, stately man who forced the pen into the unwilling fingers of the cowering King, and who held out the Evangelisterium for the swearing of his hated oath. King Henry looked up into the cold steel-like glitter of those stern blue eyes, and the firm set expression of the compressed lips, and realised in an instant that in this man he would find neither misgiving nor mercy. It was a great perplexity to him that the man on whom he had showered such favours should thus take part against him. He had forgotten all about that April morning, twenty-three years before; and had no conception that between himself and the eyes of Richard de Clare, floated
“A shadow like an angel’s, with bright hair,”
nor that when that scene in the chapter-house was over, and Richard returned his good Damascus blade to its scabbard, he murmured within his heart to ears that heard not—
“I have avenged thee at last!”
But Richard never knew that his heaviest vengeance had been exacted one month sooner, when, with that bitter mirth which Anselm had misnamed, he left an unknown Jew to perish in misery.
The sun was setting that evening over Lincoln. Just on the rise of Steephill stood a handsome Norman house, with a garden stretching behind. In the garden, on a stone settle, sat an old priest and a very handsome middle-aged lady. Two young sisters were wandering about the garden with their arms round each other’s waists; a young man stood at the ornamental fountain, talking playfully to the hawk upon his wrist; while on the grass at the lady’s feet sat two pretty children, their laps full of flowers. A conversation which had been running was evidently coming to a conclusion.
“Then you think, Father, that it is never lawful, under any circumstances, to do evil that good may come?”