“My son,” he said very quietly, “take care how you cast stones.”
And he was more cold to Silvius on the homeward way than the breath of the winter wind.
But Silvius, that dreamer of dreams, that most mundane monk, who thought more of the jewels crusting a reliquary than the Cross of Christ, did a vile and a mean thing that night. Denise, poor child, was to slip away, so Reginald said, at dawn; but Reginald did not tell Dom Silvius that he had left money on the stones whereon she knelt. And Silvius, still venomous because he deemed himself befooled, took pains to betray Denise’s secret going. And the method of the betrayal was the meanest trick of all.
When he had seen Abbot Reginald safe within the Abbey, he called two servants and went out with a basket of victuals to visit certain of the sick poor. That the hour was a strange one for such charity counted for nothing with Silvius whose head was full of the ferment of his spite. Many of the folk had gone to their beds, but some few he found still lingering about the covered embers on the hearth.
It was counted for holiness to Silvius that he should come on God’s errand at such an hour.
“Feed my sheep,” the Lord had said.
And Silvius fed certain of them that night with hypocritical humilities, shaking his head sadly, and dropping a few treacherous words like crumbs into mouths that hungered.
CHAPTER XXII
A red, wintry dawn was in the east when Denise stood ready for her flight from the Abbey lands, her rabbit-skin cloak about her, and the hood drawn over her head. She had knotted the money that Reginald had given her into a corner of her under tunic, and the food that she had saved from yesterday she carried wrapped in a clean cloth. Denise had thought of seeking Grimbald, but her heart had failed her at the thought of meeting the familiar faces of the people who had looked upon her as something superhumanly pure and wonderful. The passion that obsessed her for the moment was the passion to escape from the inquisitive eyes of those who knew her, and to slip away into the world where she would be nothing more than a mere woman.
A robin twittered on the thorn hedge as she left the cell and, crossing the grass, went out by the wicket gate. The land was white with hoar frost, each twig and blade beautiful to behold, and the arch of the east red with an angry dawn. The hills looked big and blue, and very sombre, and in the north the sky had an opaqueness as of coming snow.