Even such honest men as these had imaginations wherewith to decorate an experience. Grimbald’s face looked the colour of brown earth in the darkness of the pit, and to Oswald and Peter his eyeballs seemed to glare like two white pebbles at the bottom of a well.
“And you ran away from this devil?” he said. “Yes, you ran, my sons, as fast as your legs could carry you. When shall I come by a Christian who is not afraid to stand on his own feet, and to astonish us by making the devil run?”
Though Grimbald scoffed at them, the two men knew his methods. No one had anything to fear from Grimbald so long as he looked him straight in the face and spoke the simple truth. But a liar or a fawner were likely to be thrashed, since Grimbald’s chastening of souls was not wholly a matter of the tongue. He used his hands like a Christian, and for the love of their flesh he did not spare them.
“Assuredly, Father, it was the devil we saw in the beech wood. Night was just falling——”
“So! And he was very black was he? Just as black as charcoal, and had two live coals for eyes?”
The good man’s grim irony drove neither Oswald nor Peter from his breastwork of conviction.
“We would take oath it was the devil, Father.”
“Oswald, Oswald, you seem too familiar with the face of Satan! You are too fond of the mead-horn, my man.”
The accused one accepted the charge meekly, knowing that it was true in the abstract, and that Father Grimbald knew it, for there had been an occasion of second baptism in a somewhat dirty ditch. But Oswald was stolidly sure of his innocence on the night in question, nor had he as yet finished his confessions.
“I had no mead froth on my beard that day, Father,” said he. “Whether it was the devil or no we saw, we saw him with these eyes of ours. And he rode like a black north wind. But what is worse, Father, we have never had sight of our saint since then.”