I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character, with insatiable curiosity and intense amusement; but as a quiet priest of a long-past age, with contempt and disgust enough, not unmixed with fear and anxiety.
He roared out snatches of doggrel verse as
he went along, drinking songs, hunting songs, robbing songs, lust songs, in a voice that sounded far and far above the roaring of the wind, though that was high, and rolled along the dark road that his lantern cast spikes of light along ever so far, making the devils grin: and meanwhile I, the priest, glanced from him wrathfully every now and then to That which I carried very reverently in my hand, and my blood curdled with shame and indignation; but being a shrewd priest, I knew well enough that a sermon would be utterly thrown away on a man who was drunk every day in the year, and, more especially, very drunk then. So I held my peace, saying only under my breath:
“Dixit incipiens in corde suo, Non est Deus. Corrupti sunt et abominables facti sunt in studiis suis; non est qui faciat bonum, non est usque ad unum: sepulchrum patens est guttur eorum; linguis suis dolose agebunt, venenum aspidum sub labiis eorum. Dominum non invocaverunt; illic trepid-averunt timore, ubi non erat timor. Quis dabit ex Sion salutare Israel?”
and so I went on, thinking too at times about the man who was dying and whom I was soon to see: he had been a bold bad plundering
baron, but was said lately to have altered his way of life, having seen a miracle or some such thing; he had departed to keep a tournament near his castle lately, but had been brought back sore wounded, so this drunken servant, with some difficulty and much unseasonable merriment, had made me understand, and now lay at the point of death, brought about by unskilful tending and such like. Then I thought of his face—a bad face, very bad, retreating forehead, small twinkling eyes, projecting lower jaw; and such a voice, too, he had! like the grunt of a bear mostly.
Now don’t you think it strange that this face should be the same, actually the same as the face of my enemy, slain that very day ten years ago? I did not hate him, either that man or the baron, but I wanted to see as little of him as possible, and I hoped that the ceremony would soon be over, and that I should be at liberty again.
And so with these thoughts and many others, but all thought strangely double, we went along, the varlet being too drunk to take much notice of me, only once, as he was singing some doggrel, like this, I think, making allowances for change of language and so forth:
The Duke went to Treves
On the first of November;
His wife stay’d at Bonn—
Let me see, I remember;When the Duke came back
To look for his wife,
We came from Cologne,
And took the Duke’s life;We hung him mid high
Between spire and pavement,
From their mouths dropp’d the cabbage
Of the carles in amazement.
“Boo—hoo! Church rat! Church mouse! Hilloa, Priest! have you brought the pyx, eh?”