The monk asked all these questions with a breathless speed that they might the more quickly be affirmed or denied. And at last the young lord cried out as if in an agony:
"All that is a child's tale! All that is a weary folly! It was not like that...."
And then he cried again:
"I say I looked upon this woman, clothed in the white of foam and the gold of sun.... I looked but spoke no word.... Three months went by and I knew not of the wheeling of the stars, or the moon in her course, nor the changes of the weather.... I had seen Sathanas and Leviathan and Herod's daughter in the chapel...."
The monk now came more near him and with a calmer eye regarded him. He had known of knights and poor men, too, that had had visions born of fastings, vigils, hot suns and the despair of heaven. For himself he had desired none of these visions, for to each, as he saw it, God gives his vocation. But some that had seen such visions had been accounted holy and had taken religious habits; others, truly had been deemed accursed and burned or set in chains; and yet again others had proved later true knights of God, had fought with Saracens and the heathen, and at their deaths had been accounted saints. And he looked upon his friend whom he had loved, and he considered how tarnished and stained he was with the air and with fasting. And he remembered how, in the tents before and after Kenchie's Burn, they had talked together. Then it had seemed to him, from the way Young Lovell spoke, that it was as if it were more fitting that he, the monk, should be a rough soldier, and that the esquire and lord's son a churchman.
For the Young Lovell had talked always of high, fine and stainless chivalry, of the Mother of God as the Mystic Rose, of the Tower of Ivory, and of the dish that had the most holy blood of God. Of none of these things had Sir Hugh Ridley that was afterwards the monk Francis, heard tell, when he had been a knight of the world. He had considered rather his forbear Widdrington that fought upon his stumps at Chevy Chase as the very perfect Knight; and, rather than of the death of King Arthur of Bretagne, he was accustomed to sing:
"Then they were come to Hutton Ha'!
They ride that proper place about,
But the Laird he was the wiser man
For he had left na' geir without."
But this young Master of Lovell, who had lain in those tents, had travelled far and seen our father of Rome and the courts of France and the envoys of Mahound. Therefore, he might well have other knowledges. And certain it was that the monk Francis had never heard him speak otherwise than decorously of the lords set over him, charitably of the poor, firmly of his vassals and bondsmen and with yearning and love for Our Lady, St. Katharine, Archangel Michael, St. Margaret and of our blessed Lord and Saviour and St. Cuthbert.
And, remembering all these things, the monk Francis considered that too much fasting and too much learning might have made this lording mad. And he deemed it his duty rather to bring his mind back to regaining of his lands so that he might prove a valiant soldier in the cause of the Bishop Palatine and Almighty God.
Therefore he said now: