"Oh, Biggun! I am so tired of all this talk, let's go to the forest. Good-bye, Eddie; we won't be gone long, and we shall be sure to bring back something better than they have got here."
"I wish I could go too," said Ædric, wistfully; "it seems such a long time since I walked, and, really, it is only yesterday that I was all right. Oh, what things have happened since yesterday!"
He watched the two figures out of the door, and the tears would well up in his eyes in spite of himself.
Brother Corman, who was just like the other two monks, except that he was not quite so sad-looking, came and sat down by him, while Malachi proceeded to prepare the fish he had caught, singing to himself the while, and occasionally exchanging a gentle remark with the children that came to look on as he scraped and cleaned the fish.
The tide had now risen to its full, and the scene was pretty. The still grey tones of the autumn day, the silent water, and the falling leaves, were all in harmony with the monkish chaunt, and the listless forms of the half-starved children. For, as Malachi had well said, the times were dreadful. Such a sore disease had followed the terrible famine, that men in these South Saxon marshes had begun to despair of life altogether, and many times he had seen as many as forty or fifty men, women, and children, drowning themselves for very weariness. They had no strength to till the land, and the land would not produce if they did till it. Their condition had become very desperate and pitiful. They did not seem to know how to fish, and, until Wilfrid had come, they had never attempted to get any food out of the sea. They were able to catch eels, but had become so utterly weary of life that they had rather perish than take any trouble to support themselves.
The worthy monks, who, as some men said, came from Scotland, and others from Ireland, had been doing a noble work. In the true spirit of missionaries, taking their life in their hands, they had left their lonely, but to them dearly loved, island home of Hii, or Iona, hallowed to them by the life and teaching of Columba, and had gone penniless and with nothing but the clothes they wore to teach the Gospel of Christ. "Freely ye have received, freely give," was their motto. "Humility and the fear of the Lord" were their weapons, and they did not seek the blessings attached to these, viz., "riches, and honour, and strength," except as they would redound to the glory of Him whom they served. Simple men they were as regards worldly affairs, naturally clinging to that wherein they were instructed; they put implicit faith in the precepts of their predecessors, who had professed and taught Christianity long before Augustine the Monk had set foot in England. They felt and believed that their Spiritual Father had been a Martyr for the Faith centuries before the hated Saxon, or Jute, or Angle, had left his swampy shore; and that they had received the faith from St. John, from Anatolius, and from Columba. While all Europe was overrun with the waves of barbarism, they had kept the pure light of the Gospel shining in the Western Islands, and it was gall and bitterness that now they were to change their customs and their fashions at the bidding of the emissary of the Bishop of Rome. Were these matters trifles? they urged. Be it so, then; and why make all this disturbance about them? Trifles, alas! in the poor mind of humanity, are very frequently more fought over than essentials. And to both Augustine and Wilfrid after him, zealous for the visible unity of the Church, it seemed a ridiculous thing, as well as pernicious, that these lowly monks, whom they affected to despise, should obstinately cling to their obsolete and unorthodox fashion. Alas! that the charity which suffereth long and is kind was so early forgotten. The poor Irish or Scotch missionaries were worsted in the controversy, because the power of the See of Rome was in the ascendant; but the purity and simplicity of their lives, their utter self-denial, and the piety of their teaching, made the way easier for the more famous men who followed after them, and who combined the fervour of a missionary with the grand ideal of Christian unity.
Corman, who was sitting by Ædric's side, talked to him from time to time if he appeared restless, but tried chiefly to get him to go to sleep. The boy, however, was too much excited by the rapidity of the past events, and the fever caused by his wound, to be able to sleep, and an occasional restless sigh showed that he was thinking of his father and his home.
"When I grow up," he burst out impatiently, "I will wreak full vengeance on that nithing Arwald, for all that he has done to my house and father. I swear by Wod——"
"Hush! Ædric, hush!" broke in Corman, interrupting him, and putting his cool hand upon the boy's fevered brow. "Swear not, my son, by anything; least of all by the false gods of the heathen. And when thou hast lived longer with us, thou wilt not, I hope, wish to avenge thyself on any being, whatever may be the wrongs he has done thee."
Ædric stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment.