Lewin leaned over the parapet and surveyed the dusky world, full of trouble and despair. A great truth came to him. He realised that he had been born too soon, and was not made for that age of blood and steel. The solitary isolation of the tower top intensified the loneliness of his own soul.
Surveying life and its possibilities for him, he could see nothing but misery in it. As the unseen nightwinds began to fly round him and whisper, he took a resolve. When this siege began and Lord Roger attacked Hilgay, he would arm and go out to death, seeking it in some brave adventure. He would give up, he thought, his treason plot with Anselm. There was nothing else that he could do, there was no enjoyment—every man he knew was the same, the same, ever-lastingly the same. Life was dull. He laughed a bitter, despairing laugh, and went down to the castle again.
There was a great carouse that evening at Hilgay, for the works were nearly done, and a spy had brought word that the forces of Lord Roger were not as strong as earlier reports had led them to believe.
While the candles burnt all night by the grave in the chapel, all the castle garrison, with the exception of the sentries, got most gloriously drunk. Lewin was no exception.
It is a relief to turn from the contemplation of that sordid, evil place to the quiet of the Priory in the lake. Yet it must be remembered that Hilgay is an exact type of hundreds of other strongholds existing in England at that time. The incalculable wickedness of the space of years, when the secluded historian wrote that "Christ and all His angels seemed asleep," is very difficult to imagine.
In truth, it was a bestial, malignant, inhuman time. We are not grateful enough for the blessings of to-day. Imagine, if you please, what these people were.
There is no need to outrage our nice tastes by revolting detail. Realism can be pushed too far. But, for the sake of a clear understanding, take Baron Fulke of Hilgay, and listen to a few personal details.
The beast was a very well-bred man. That is to say, he was of the aristocracy, a peer with a great record of birth. We have seen that he stripped his mistress naked, and had her killed by rough scoundrels in his pay. He never had a qualm. So much for his character, which was as much like the legendary devil as may be. But about the man as a personality.
Supposing that we could draw a parallel between that time and our own time. Fulke would correspond to half a dozen young gentlemen we all know, considered from the point of view of social status. A boy we meet at a dance, or a dinner, who is a member of a great family, for example.
Fulke, unpleasant as it is to say it, hardly ever washed. Brutally, in a modern police court, he would be considered as a verminous person. In the time of King Stephen, no one—and we can make no exception for the saints of God themselves—had ever heard of a pocket handkerchief. The world was malodorous! A dog-kennel would hardly have suffered any one of our heroes and heroines, That is one reason why it is so difficult for the veracious historian to present his characters as they really were. It is hard to explain them, people are too accustomed to Romance.