“I bring the Vision to this monk; and he 's a-fishing hereabout in the Chase, the porter saith. Saw ye a burn as ye came hither?”
“Yea, verily!” Richard answered her. “We crossed it but fifty paces back, and 't was there the dogs went off the scent and back to the pack and the other folk, in the lower chase. Hark to them now! We 've lost the hunt; let us go with the maid, Etienne. If her father's schoolmaster is the same that sat at my side yestere'en and told me tales, he 'll wile an hour right prettily for us. He said Dan Chaucer, our Chaucer, came hither a little lad years agone, afore mine Uncle Lionel died. I 'd rather fish than hunt. Leave Robert de Vere and my brother John Holland to slay the deer.”
So they went through the wood leading their jennets; and Calote, with the King's horn about her neck, walked by the King's side.
CHAPTER III
By a Burn's Side
ROTHER Owyn gazed dreamily into the flashing waters of the burn. His fish-basket was empty; twice he had lost his bait. But if the hunger and thirst of a man be in his soul, 't is little he recks if he have not fish for supper. Forty years past, when Brother Owyn was a young man, he had fled into the Church in the hope to escape the world. But he learned that monastery gates are as gossamer; and the world, the flesh, and the devil, all three, caper in cloister. To-day he was in disgrace with his prior—not the old dull prior, but a newer, narrower man—for defending the doctrine and opinions of Master John Wyclif, concerning sanctuary, and the possession of property, and the wrong that it is for prelates to hold secular office.
“Dost thou defend a devil's wight that is under ban of Holy Church,” quoth the prior, “and yet call thyself a servant to God and the Pope?”
“Which Pope?” saith Brother Owyn; for at this time there were two popes in Christendom, the one at Avignon and the other at Rome, and they were very busy cursing each other.
“Such levity in one of thy years is unseemly, brother,” the prior made answer, and turned his back.