“Sin, I will no longer sin with thee, nor come into thy company.”
“So! And son, thou wilt come with thy squires and thy men on Friday to town cross.”
So Montjoy rode by the prison.
It was dark in there, fetid and dark, and Morgen Fay the sinner had little to think of but her sins. She could not blink them that they were many.
Her sins and death, and after that the Judgment. Death and Judgment and for her Hell, or at the best the direst corner of dire Purgatory and the longest stay. Ages there, while souls of thieves and murderers left her one by one and went upward, and never a word for the one who must stay. At the best, the very best, and perhaps even that gleam had no reality! Not Purgatory, but everlasting Hell.
CHAPTER XX
Richard Englefield, in Westforest cell, might lie without movement, head buried in arms, but that was when he must sleep in order to gain and keep strength, or when Prior or Brother Anselm visited him, it being posture good as another for a monk now in sooth going melancholy mad.
Once Brother Anselm, who had been taken from strollers playing in barns and inns, said to the Prior, “He playeth!” Whereupon the Prior strictly watched, but at last said, “Not so. Truth!” And then, like such chess masters, because he had bent what he thought all his mind to it and was assured, he obstinated in his opinion of the board and every piece upon it. “No, it is truth! I have seen it before. Melancholy that forgets how to speak and then after a time mere childishness that will not stint from speaking, though it be only of green fields and cowslip balls! Then silence again like an old sick hound and at last he dies!”