Anything that turned the people away from Silver Cross became in that act the enemy of Montjoy; anything that kept them flowing there, that made them more in number, the friend of Montjoy.
But Abbot and Prior, lodged in connecting chambers and speaking together before they laid themselves to sleep in huge beds, shook their heads over him. Or rather the Abbot did so. The Prior was not liberal with sighs and gestures. “He’ll agree to no shift that smacks of the lie, however slight, necessary, simply defensive, pious it be—”
“Are you sure? I am not,” answered Matthew. “But if he will not—keep him blind like other men, blind and usable! He may indeed prove more usable for being blind.”
CHAPTER III
That same night the monk, Richard Englefield, lay upon his pallet in his cell at Silver Cross. The moon shone in at the small window. He was addressed to observing with his mind’s eye a round of other places upon which she shone. The grange where he had been born and had spent childhood and somewhat of boyhood, rose softly. The mill water caught light, the gable end of the house stood, a figure like a silver shield enlarged,—shield of Arthur, shield of Tristram, shield of an old enchanter! The fields spread in moonlight where he worked. He smelled the upturned clods and the springing corn, and he smelled the sere fields under October moon. The moon shone on the town, that was not Middle Forest, where he had been apprenticed to a worker in gold. The moon made the roofs that mounted with their windows, and the plastered house with the criss-cross of timbers, into a rood screen for a giant’s church. Beyond lay the sea, and the moon made for herself a path across that.
Stella Maris—
The sea under moon. He had been across the sea, to France and to Italy, but that was after the rood-screen town. It was when he had become a master workman, a skilled goldsmith, working for princes, working as an artist works, and when he had come to books—to books—to books.—The moon on the sea, on the coasts of Italy!
The moon on the graves of kindred and friends,—the cold moon. The moon above weariness and sighing—nights unsleeping, walkings abroad—plans spun and plans torn apart and shredded to the winds. The moon upon sins, the moon upon sorrows.