The Choir, Glastonbury Abbey
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ABBESS AND THE MONK
We did get back to Glastonbury at last, and this time we did not miss seeing the abbey. We spent some time in tracing it all out from its ruins. It was a great and beautiful church in its time. Now it has been crumbling and falling for many years. Worse than that, the people of the country about here, when they wanted stone for building, instead of finding new stone, used to come and take some from the old abbey. But, after all that time and men could do to it, much of it still stands, and it is full of that sad, sweet beauty and stateliness that nothing but a ruin ever has. The walls of St. Joseph's chapel still remain, all covered with ivy, there is a good deal of the choir left, and there are two of the great, tall piers that held the tower. Then, some way off, there is the abbot's kitchen, still all but perfect.
We found the place, or thought we did, where Joseph of Arimathæa first built his little church of wood and woven twigs. We tried to find the spot where King Arthur was buried. That is not easy, but we hit upon a place at last where we thought it must have been. When Henry II was King a search was made for King Arthur's grave by his order. They found it, they said, and Henry had a monument put over it. The monument is gone now, probably carried away, like so much of the abbey, to build stables, or something else just as noble and important, and there is nothing left to show where it stood. If we were talking of history instead of stories I might have something to say about this one of Henry II. But, as it is, it may as well stand with the rest of them.
"There is one more story," I said, "that I must tell you while we are here among these ruins. Then I shall have told you all that I set out to tell, and we shall have made the journey that we set out to make.
"When the letter that Gawain wrote was brought to Lancelot he lost no time in calling his knights and his army together and starting toward England to help King Arthur. If the King could only have delayed that last great battle, as he tried to do, Lancelot would have been with him and all would have been well. But when Lancelot landed at Dover the people told him that he had come too late. They told him of the battle that had been fought there, in which Gawain was killed, and of the greater battle that had been fought afterward far away in the West. All that they could tell him of the King was that he was gone. Some said that he was dead, and some that he had been carried away to Fairyland, where he would live till his people needed him.
"Then Lancelot asked: 'Where is the Queen?'
"'She shut herself up in the Tower of London,' some one answered, 'to save herself from Mordred. Then, when Mordred left London and came here to meet the King, she left the Tower, too, and they say that she went to some abbey and is living with the nuns.'
"Then Lancelot told Bors and the other knights who were with him to wait at Dover while he went to find the Queen. He rode alone through the country, asking at all the abbeys that he found, and at last he came to Almesbury, the place that is now called Amesbury, where we went, you know, on our way to Stonehenge. And at the abbey there he saw the Queen walking in the cloister. She saw him too and came to meet him.