His sword half leaped from its scabbard. No!—the trenchant blade that had cut Suleiman Ben Malek Ben Buckskin from helmet to chine disdained to daub itself with the cerebellum of a miserable monk: it leaped back again; and as the chaplain, scared at its flash, turned him in terror, the Baron gave him a kick!—one kick!—it was but one!—but such a one! Despite its obesity, up flew his holy body in an angle of forty-five degrees; then, having reached its highest point of elevation, sunk headlong into the open grave that yawned to receive it. If the reverend gentleman had possessed a neck, he had infallibly broken it; as he did not, he only dislocated his vertebræ,—but that did quite as well. He was as dead as ditch-water.
"In with the other rascal!" said the Baron, and he was obeyed; for there he stood in his boots. Mattock and shovel made short work of it; twenty feet of superincumbent mould pressed down alike the saint and the sinner. "Now sing a requiem who list!" said the Baron, and his lordship went back to his oysters.
The vassals at Castle Shurland were astounded, or, as the seneschal Hugh better expressed it, "perfectly conglomerated," by this event. What! murder a monk in the odour of sanctity,—and on consecrated ground too! They trembled for the health of the Baron's soul. To the unsophisticated many it seemed that matters could not have been much worse had he shot a bishop's coach-horse;—all looked for some signal judgment. The melancholy catastrophe of their neighbours at Canterbury was yet rife in their memories: not two centuries had elapsed since those miserable sinners had cut off the tail of St. Thomas's mule. The tail of the mule, it was well known, had been forthwith affixed to that of the mayor; and rumour said it had since been hereditary in the corporation. The least that could be expected was, that Sir Ralph should have a friar tacked on to his for the term of his natural life! Some bolder spirits there were, 'tis true, who viewed the matter in various lights, according to their different temperaments and dispositions; for perfect unanimity existed not even in the good old times. The verderer, roistering Hob Roebuck, swore roundly, "'Twere as good a deed as eat to kick down the chapel as well as the monk."—Hob had stood there in a white sheet for kissing Giles Miller's daughter.—On the other hand, Simpkin Agnew, the bell-ringer, doubted if the devil's cellar, which runs under the bottomless abyss, were quite deep enough for the delinquent, and speculated on the probability of a hole being dug in it for his especial accommodation. The philosophers and economists thought with Saunders M'Bullock, the Baron's bagpiper, that "a feckless monk more or less was nae great subject for a clamjamphry," especially as "the supply considerably exceeded the demand;" while Malthouse, the tapster, was arguing to Dame Martin that a murder now and then was a seasonable check to population, without which the Isle of Sheppey would in time be devoured, like a mouldy cheese, by inhabitants of its own producing. Meanwhile, the Baron ate his oysters, and thought no more of the matter.
But this tranquillity of his lordship was not to last. A couple of Saints had been seriously offended; and we have all of us read at school that celestial minds are by no means insensible to the provocations of anger. There were those who expected that St. Bridget would come in person, and have the friar up again as she did the sailor; but perhaps her ladyship did not care to trust herself within the walls of Shurland Castle. To say the truth, it was scarcely a decent house for a female Saint to be seen in. The Baron's gallantries, since he became a widower, had been but too notorious; and her own reputation was a little blown upon in the earlier days of her earthly pilgrimage: then things were so apt to be misrepresented: in short, she would leave the whole affair to St. Austin, who, being a gentleman, could interfere with propriety, avenge her affront as well as his own, and leave no loop-hole for scandal. St. Austin himself seems to have had his scruples, though of their precise nature it were difficult to determine, for it were idle to suppose him at all afraid of the Baron's boots. Be this as it may, the mode which he adopted was at once prudent and efficacious. As an ecclesiastic, he could not well call the Baron out, had his boots been out of the question; so he resolved to have recourse to the law. Instead of Shurland Castle, therefore, he repaired forthwith to his own magnificent monastery, situate just without the walls of Canterbury, and presented himself in a vision to its abbot. No one who has ever visited that ancient city can fail to recollect the splendid gateway which terminates the vista of St. Paul's street, and stands there yet in all its pristine beauty. The tiny train of miniature artillery which now adorns its battlements is, it is true, an ornament of a later date; and is said to have been added some centuries after by some learned but jealous proprietor, for the purpose of shooting any wiser man than himself who might chance to come that way. Tradition is silent as to any discharge having taken place, nor can the oldest inhabitant of modern days recollect any such occurrence. Here it was, in a handsome chamber, immediately over the lofty archway, that the superior of the monastery lay buried in a brief slumber snatched from his accustomed vigils. His mitre—for he was a mitred abbot, and had a seat in parliament—rested on a table beside him; near it stood a silver flagon of Gascony wine, ready, no doubt, for the pious uses of the morrow. Fasting and watching had made him more than usually somnolent, than which nothing could have been better for the purpose of the Saint, who now appeared to him radiant in all the colours of the rainbow.
"Anselm!"—said the beatific vision,—"Anselm! are you not a pretty fellow to lie snoring there, when your brethren are being knocked at head, and Mother Church herself is menaced! It is a sin and a shame, Anselm!"
"What's the matter?—Who are you?" cried the Abbot, rubbing his eyes, which the celestial splendour of his visiter had set a-winking. "Ave Maria! St. Austin himself!—Speak, Beatissime! what would you with the humblest of your votaries?"
"Anselm!" said the Saint, "a brother of our order, whose soul Heaven assoilzie! hath been foully murdered. He hath been ignominiously kicked to the death, Anselm; and there he lieth cheek-by-jowl with a wretched carcass, which our sister Bridget has turned out of her cemetery for unseemly grinning. Arouse thee, Anselm!"
"Ay, so please you, Sanctissime!" said the Abbot: "I will order forthwith that thirty masses be said, thirty Paters, and thirty Aves."
"Thirty fools' heads!" interrupted his patron, who was a little peppery.
"I will send for bell, book, and candle."