The venerable head was bent over the parchment, upon which the grotesque outline of a griffin began to grow, twisted round a very conventional tree, with the stem issuing from its mouth, and its elongated tail executing marvellous spiral curves. The illuminator was taken by surprise the next instant, and the curve of the griffin’s tail then pending was by no means round in consequence.
“Alway at work, Father Wilfred?” (A fictitious person.)
“Bertram Lyngern,” said the monk calmly, “thou hast marred my griffin.”
“What, have I made him a wyvern?”
“That had less mattered. A twist of his tail is square, thy sudden speech being the cause thereof.”
“Let be, Father Wilfred. ’Tis a new pattern.”
The monk smiled, but shook his head, and proceeded to erase the faulty strokes by means of a large piece of pumice-stone. Bertram sat contemplating his friend’s work, curled up in the wide stone window-ledge, to which he had climbed from the horse-block below it. The lattice was open, so there was no hindrance to conversation.
“I would I were a knight!” said Bertram suddenly, after a few minutes’ silence on both sides.
“To wear gilded spurs?” inquired Wilfred calmly resuming his pen, and going on with the griffin.
“Thou countest me surely not such a loon, Father Wilfred? No,—I long to be great. I feel as though greatness stirred within me. But what can I do,—a squire? If I were a knight I could sign my shoulder with the holy cross, and go fight for our Lord’s sepulchre. That were something worth. But to dangle at the heels of my Lord Edward all the day long, and fly an half-dozen hawks, and meditate on pretty sayings to the Lady’s damsels, and eat venison, and dance—Father Wilfred, is this life meet for a man’s living?”