The next morning all Chatham was in an uproar. The Clerk of St. Bridget's had found himself at home at daybreak, seated in his own armchair, the fire out,—and—the tankard of ale out too! Who had drunk it?—where had he been?—how had he got home?—all was mystery!—he remembered "a mass of things, but nothing distinctly;" all was fog and fantasy. What he could clearly recollect was, that he had dug up the Grinning Sailor, and that the Saint had helped to throw him into the river again. All was thenceforth wonderment and devotion. Masses were sung, tapers were kindled, bells were tolled; the monks of St. Romuald had a solemn procession, the abbot at their head, the sacristan at their tail, and the holy breeches of St. Thomas a Becket in the centre; —Father Fothergill brewed a XXX puncheon of holy water. The Rood of Gillingham was deserted; the chapel of Rainham forsaken; every one who had a soul to be saved, flocked with his offering to St. Bridget's shrine, and Emmanual Saddleton gathered more fees from the promiscuous piety of that one week, than he had pocketed during the twelve preceding months.
Meanwhile, the corpse of the ejected reprobate oscillated like a pendulum between Sheerness and Gillingham Reach. Now borne by the Medway into the Western Swale,—now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters,—it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon discovered by the retainers, and dragged from its oozy bed, grinning worse than ever. Tidings of the godsend were of course carried instantly to the castle; for the Baron was a very great man; and if a dun cow had flown across his property unannounced by the warder, the Baron would have pecked him, the said warder, from the topmost battlement into the bottommost ditch,—a descent of peril, and one which "Ludwig the Leaper," or the illustrious Trenck himself, might well have shrunk from encountering.
"An't please your lordship—" said Peter Periwinkle.
"No, villain! it does not please!" roared the Baron.
His lordship was deeply engaged with a peck of Faversham oysters,—he doted on shellfish, hated interruption at meals, and had not yet despatched more than twenty dozen of the "natives."
"There's a body, my lord, washed ashore in the lower creek," said the seneschal.
The Baron was going to throw the shells at his head; but paused in the act, and said with much dignity,
"Turn out the fellow's pockets!"
But the defunct had before been subjected to the double scrutiny of Father Fothergill and the Clerk of St. Bridget's. It was ill gleaning after such hands; there was not a single maravedi.
We have already said that Sir Robert de Shurland, Lord of the Isle of Sheppey, and of many a fair manor on the main land, was a man of worship. He had rights of free-warren, saccage and sockage, cuisage and jambage, fosse and fork, infang theofe and outfang theofe; and all waifs and strays belonged to him in fee simple.