"Faith, not I," replied the warder. "That business of last night seems to have galled him sorely, and he is just in the humour to fire a man out of a culverin, as we know his father once did; but in these days it won't do: culverins make too loud a report, you know. I will not go near him again."
"Then I will go myself," replied the priest. "He won't hurt me. Nay, warder, you would not squeeze the Church in the wicket gateway! By Heaven—or, as I should say less profanely, by the blessed rood—if you pinch my stomach one moment more you will pinch forth an anathema, which will leave you but a poor creature all your life."
"Well, be it on your head," cried the warder, with a grim smile; "though a two-inch cudgel or a fall from the battlements is the best thing to be hoped for you."
The priest was not to be deterred, however; and, making his way onward, he crossed the outer court, turned to the right, and, passing through a long stone passage, feeling damp and chilly after the bright sunshine, he entered a colonnade or sort of cloister which surrounded the inner court. It was a large, open space of ground, with tall buildings overshadowing it on all sides. The sun seldom reached it; and there was a coldness and stillness about its aspect altogether—its gray stones, its small windows, its low-arched cloisters, its sunless air, and the want of even the keen activity of the mountain wind—which made most people shudder when they entered it.
But there was nothing the least chilly in the nature of Father Willand. His heart was not easily depressed, his spirits not easily damped; and when he entered the cloister, and saw the Lord of Masseran walking up and down in the court, an irresistible inclination to laugh seized him, notwithstanding all the warder had said of his lord's mood at that moment.
It is true—although, from the description of the worthy officer of bolts and bars, one would have expected to see the Lord of Masseran acting some wild scene of passion—he was, on the contrary, walking calmly and slowly backward and forward across the court, with his eyes bent on the ground, indeed, but with his countenance perfectly tranquil. It was nothing in his demeanour, however, that gave the priest a desire to laugh, for he was very well aware that the passions of the Lord of Masseran did not take the same appearances as those of other men, and he saw clearly that he was at that moment in a state of sullen fury, which might, very likely, have conducted any other man to some absurd excess. His personal appearance, also, had nothing in it to excite mirth in any degree. He was a tall, thin, graceful-looking man of the middle age, with a nose slightly aquiline, eyes calm and mild, lips somewhat thin and pale, and a complexion, very common in the northern part of Italy, of a sort of clear, pale olive. His dress was handsome, but not ostentatious; and, on the whole, he looked very much the nobleman and the man of the world of those times. The priest, however, laughed when he saw him; and, though he tried to smother it under the merry affectation of a cough, yet the effects were too evident upon his countenance to escape the eye of the Lord of Masseran as he approached.
"Ha! Father Willand," said the marquis, as their eyes met, "I told the warder to say that I did not wish to see you to-day."
"Ah, but, my excellent good lord," replied the priest, bowing his head low, with an air of mock humility and reverence, "it was I who wanted to see your lordship; so I e'en ventured to make my way in, though the warder—foul fall the villain—has so squeezed my stomach in the wicket, that, like a bruised tin pot, it will never again hold so much as it did before."
"You are somewhat of a bold man," said the marquis, with a cold, bitter, sidelong look at the priest; "you are somewhat of a bold man to make your way in here when I bid you stay out. You may come in once too often, Father Willand."
"Heaven forbid, my lord," replied the priest; "I shall never think it too often to serve your lordship, even though it should be at your funeral: a sad duty that, my lord, which we must perform very often for our best friends."