“That would do well. I tell thee what, Hugh, thou shalt ask the master to come and see me here if he has a mind for another kind of cargo.”
With his usual hopefulness, the idea had taken hold of the wood-carver so strongly that he turned aside all remonstrances, though the prior himself came up to beg him not to be so foolhardy. But it was true, as Bassett maintained, that each kind of travelling had its dangers, and, if the sea offered the most, he felt a sick man’s longing to be spared trouble, and a feverish desire for the salt breezes. Matthew, too, thought it philosophical to be above listening to the tales of sea-perils which the brethren related, it need hardly be said, at second-hand; but it must be owned that he showed no desire to extend his own travels so far as Exeter. Hugh went down the next day and talked to the master, who at first shook his head.
“Two landsmen on board? Where could we stow ye? And if we met with rough weather we should have you crying upon all the saints in the calendar. A sick man, too! How could he put up with our rough fare?”
“My father does not get frighted,” said Hugh, indignantly, though pleased to be counted a landsman.
“Thou art a sturdy little varlet,” said the master, looking at him approvingly. “If my Moll had been a boy, I should have been content had he likened thee. But I would not have her other than she is, and thou wast good to her the other day. I’ll come and see thy father, and if he is a good, honest man, and none of your dandy long-toed fops, he and thou shalt have a passage to Dartmouth.”
The next day was Sunday, and, to the scandal of the grey friars, Matthew insisted upon taking Hugh to St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, the noble Norman church of the Augustinian friars. There was a good deal of jealousy between the orders, and each was ready enough to listen to or to repeat tales which told to the discredit of the others; so that, as Matthew said, black, white, and grey, each held their colour to be the only one in which a friar might travel to heaven. Mass being over at St. Bartholomew’s they went to great St. Paul’s.
This was in that day a splendid Gothic church, twice as big as the present building, and with a dazzling high altar. But, in spite of its magnificence, and perhaps partly on account of its size, it was a notorious haunt of cut-purses and brawlers, and all manner of crimes were committed in the church; so that a few years before the king had given the Chapter leave to surround it with walls and gates, treating it indeed as a town, and keeping out suspicious characters.
By this means matters had mended a little, but there was still a great deal of unseemly conduct which caused scandal to the more devout. Hugh came back to the monastery bursting with all he had to tell, and he was beyond measure delighted when his father said he would himself go out the next day.
Before the sun had mounted high enough for Friar Luke to allow this the master of the Queen Maud arrived, and Stephen saw a sturdy, sunburnt man, with an open countenance, blue-eyed, light-haired, wearing a garment of coarse cloth which reached to his knees, who looked as uneasy at finding himself in a monastery as a freshly-trapped pony from his own wilds of Dartmoor might have looked in a walled town. His discomfort made him surly, so that he gave the carver no encouragement for the voyage.
“Hard living and a perilous life, my master.”