“There was a strange thrill ran through the monks, but what the prior said was law in those days, Grant, and in a few minutes it was known all through the priory that Brother Anselm was going to cut off the poor swineherd’s leg.
“Then—I say, my boy, I wish you’d go on with your work. I can’t talk if you do not,” said Old Brownsmith, with a comical look at me, and I went on busily again while he continued his story.
“When Brother Anselm had obtained the prior’s leave to try his experiment he felt nervous and shrank from the task. He went down the garden and looked at the trees that he had cut, and he felt more than ever that a man was, as the monks said, not an apple-tree. Then he examined the places which looked healthy and well, and he wondered whether if he performed such an operation on the poor patient he also would be healthy and well at the end of a week, and he shook his head and felt nervous.”
“If you please, Mr Brownsmith,” I said, “I can’t go on till you’ve done, and I must hear the end.”
He chuckled a little, and seating himself on a bushel basket which he turned upside down, a couple of cats sprang in his lap, another got on his shoulder, and he
went on talking while I thrust an arm through one of the rounds of the ladder, and leaned back against it as he went on.
“Well, Grant,” he said, “Brother Anselm felt sorry now that he had leave to perform his experiment, and he went slowly back to the cell and talked to the poor swineherd, a fine handsome, young man with fair curly brown hair and a skin as white as a woman’s where the sun had not tanned him.
“And he talked to him about how he felt; and the poor fellow said he felt much better and much worse—that the pain had all gone, but that he did not think he should ever be well any more.
“This set the brother thinking more and more, but he felt that he could do nothing that day, and he waited till the next, lying awake all night thinking of what he would do and how he would do it, till the cold time about sunrise, when he had given up the idea in despair. But when he saw the light coming in the east, with the glorious gold and orange clouds, and then the bright sunshine of a new day, he began to think of how sad it would be for that young man, cut down as he had been in a moment, to be left to die when perhaps he might be saved. He thought, too, about trees that had been cut years before, and which had been healthy and well ever since, and that morning, feeling stronger in his determination, he went to the cell where the patient lay, to talk to him, and the first thing the poor fellow said was:—