The upshot of it all was that after much talk of old times and new times, Angelo was asked to make a series of stained glass windows for the Abbey, with all the aid that the friendship of the Abbot and Brother Basil could supply. He kept his little room at the farm, where he could see the sunset through the trees, and have the comfortable care of Dame Cicely when he found the cold of the North oppressive; but he had a glass-house of his own, fitted up close by the Abbey, and there Alan worked with him. The Abbot had met in Rouen a north-country nobleman, of the great Vavasour family, who had married a Flemish wife and was coming shortly to live on his estates within a few miles of the Abbey. He desired to have a chapel built in honor of the patron saint of his family, and had given money for that, and also for the windows in the Abbey. The Abbot had been thinking that he should have to send for these windows to some glass-house on the Continent, and when he found that the work could be done close at hand by a master of the craft, he was more than pleased. With cathedrals and churches a-building all over England, and the Abbot to make his work known to other builders of his Order, there was no danger that Angelo would be without work in the future. Some day, he said, Alan should go as a journeyman and see for himself all the cathedral windows in Italy and France, but for the present he must stick to the glass-house. And this Alan was content to do, for he was learning, day by day, all that could be learned from a man superior to most artists of either France or Italy.
TROUBADOUR’S SONG
When we went hunting in Fairyland,
(O the chiming bells on her bridle-rein!)
And the hounds broke leash at the queen’s command,
(O the toss of her palfrey’s mane!)
Like shadows we fled through the weaving shade
With quivering moonbeams thick inlaid,
And the shrilling bugles around us played—
I dreamed that I fought the Dane.
Clatter of faun-feet sudden and swift,
(O the view-halloo in the dusky wood!)
And satyrs crowding the mountain rift,
(O the flare of her fierce wild mood!)
Boulders and hollows alive, astir
With a goat-thighed foe, all teeth and fur,
We husked that foe like a chestnut bur—
I thought of the Holy Rood.
We trailed from our shallop a magic net,
(O the spell of her voice with its crooning note!)
By the edge of the world, where the stars are set,
(O the ripples that rocked our boat!)
But into the mesh of the star-sown dream
A mermaid swept on the lashing stream,
A drift of spume and an emerald gleam—
I remembered my love’s white throat.
When we held revel in Fairyland,
(O the whirl of the dancers under the Hill!)
The wind-harp sang to the queen’s light hand,
(O her eyes, so deep and still!)
But I was a captive among them all,
And the jeweled flagons were brimming with gall,
And the arras of gold was a dungeon-wall,—
I dreamed that they set me free!