PART I

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes

I

Mr. Sorrell stepped out into the swaying corridor from the carriage into
which he had gallantly accompanied Mrs. Lee-Egerton. He wanted to smoke
a cigar and, now that he was off the boat, he wanted in cold blood to
reflect as to whether he had not made a fool of himself. The carriage
was swaying tremendously, the train travelling at an unheard-of speed,
and this speed pleased Mr. Sorrell. He felt, if he were not responsible
for it, he was at least a friend of its author, Mr. Makover, of
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Indeed, he himself had gone with the
Pennsylvanian to interview the driver. The millionaire had promised the
mechanic a ten-pound note if he would get them up to town in time to
dress, dine, and go to the Empire before the ballet began. And in the
speed at which they travelled Mr. Sorrell took a personal pride. You
cannot, as a rule, do much with trains, but he himself had had a hand in
this acceleration.

His left shoulder struck with violence the outer window; his right
pained him considerably when it hit a brass hand-rail of the inner one.

“Oh, steady!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed.

He was bending down to peer into the carriages in order to discover one
in which he could smoke, when his eyes hit upon the broad expanse of
spotless white of a nun’s large head-dress, and at the same moment he
was once more thrown so violently against the glass of the outer window
that, for a moment, he experienced a feeling of panic at the thought
that he had just missed breaking it and going clean through.

“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed. “This won’t do.”

He set his feet hard against the outer wall of the corridor and his
shoulders against the inner. Decidedly he was going to smoke, and
equally decidedly he was not going any farther. He got out a cigar,
pierced the end of it with a patent American stiletto, set it in his
clean-shaven mouth, lit it, and began to smoke. Then he took another
peep at the nun.

She excited in him an almost unholy curiosity. He could not remember
ever to have seen a nun before; at any rate he had never before been so
near to one. He had not, indeed, really been certain that nuns any more
existed. And it seemed to him absolutely odd that one should be seated
in a railway train. It was still more odd that she should be coming back
from America. He supposed that there might be nuns in England
still—survivals, perhaps, of monasteries that had been forgotten at the
Reformation—but he was quite certain that the up-to-date United States,
with its salutary laws against undesirable emigrants, would not permit
one of them to enter its territories. But on second thoughts Mr. Sorrell
considered that his first must have been too rash. There must, after
all, be some Roman Catholics left somewhere in the world! And, of
course, when he came to think of it, he remembered that in his youth
there had been a Home Rule Agitation in Ireland and that one of the main
objections to giving Parnell what he wanted had been that Home Rule
would have spelt Rome Rule. Then Mr. Sorrell remembered that there was
still a Pope. Indeed, when Mr. Sorrell had still been the proprietor of
_The Fourpenny Magazine_, he remembered that they had published an
article with illustrations on a day’s work in the life of the Vatican.
And he remembered, even, that he had commissioned the editor to try to
get for the magazine an article written by the Pope, even if it cost him
a hundred pounds.

“How extraordinary of me!” Mr. Sorrell said to himself. And he meant
that it was just as extraordinary for him to have forgotten that Roman
Catholics existed as it was that he should ever have wanted such truck
as an article by the Pope, and been ready to pay a hundred pounds for
it. Of course, it was the extraordinary rush of modern life. To-day a
subject seemed of enormous importance. In a month you would not touch it
as any kind of publishing matter. And Mr. Sorrell had a moment of
misgiving when he remembered the sum he had paid to the Theat Publishing
Company of New York for the account of the travels of Mr. Car K.
Claflin, the intrepid explorer. It was perfectly true that Mr. Claflin
had gone completely round the earth, never deviating by as much as half
a mile from the equatorial line. But on the other hand he was paying Mr.
Theat as much as £10,000 for the English publishing rights of the
intrepid explorations. Mr. Sorrell repeated these words rather
frequently in his mind, because all the way over from New York he had
been occupied with writing a sixteen-page pamphlet about Mr. Claflin’s
book. In this production the word _intrepid_ occurred thirty-four times
and the words _explorer_ and _exploration_ twenty and fourteen times
respectively. These lapses from literary style would afterwards be
corrected by Mr. Sorrell’s typewriter. The main thing was to get the
pamphlet, the book, the illustrations, the preliminary puffs, and the
advertisements out as quickly as possible. Mr. Sorrell reckoned that he
could do it in a fortnight. The American printed sheets of the book were
in the hold of the S.S. _Eurytonka_. They would be in London that night
and delivered at the binders’ next morning, giving the press seven
preliminary days in which to write their reviews, and his travellers the
same seven days in which to get orders from the libraries and
booksellers, and devoting himself and the whole of his staff with a
furious energy to the task of obtaining publicity from the halfpenny
papers, which are easy to manage as long as you give them plenty of
advertisements. With that pulling together of the whole crew, with that
devotion to the team of his whole staff which is the cricket of
publishing, Mr. Sorrell imagined that he would score another immense
success. And it would have been done in record time. It was only eleven
days at that moment since the day when, in London, he had received from
Theat and Company, of New York, the cable announcing that they had
secured the full rights of Mr. Claflin’s book, Mr. Claflin having
arrived the day before in New York with his memoirs in his hand-grip.
Yes, it was a pretty smart piece of work.

And, bending down to peep again at the nun, Mr. Sorrell felt a rush of
satisfaction at the fact that he lived in the present day. For it was
the day of rushes. There was no saying how many deals you could not get
through in all sorts of fragments of time. He was even proud that he
felt exceedingly tired. Except for the few hours that he had spent in
the society of Mrs. Lee-Egerton, he did not think that he had really had
any leisure whatever in the five days that the journey from New York to
Southampton had cost him. He was proud too of his profession, which was
that of a publisher. There were not any effeminate frills about the
business any more. In the old days a publisher had to consider what was
Literature. It was something impracticable, it was something fanciful,
and you went through it in a kid-glove sort of way, trying to establish
friendly relations with authors and nonsense of that sort. Now it was
just a business. You found out what the public had to have. For what Mr.
Sorrell supplied was just that. He gave them encyclopædias that every
clerk in the Fulham Road and every commuter from Brooklyn to Manhattan
Beach could not hold up his head without having. _Commuter_ is the
American for season-ticket holder, and Mr. Sorrell held up his head with
pride at the thought that it was he, more than anybody else, who
supplied the sort of printed stuff that the suburban season-ticket
holder must indispensably have. In his day Mr. Sorrell had done to this
end many extraordinary things. Yet he had started out in life as a
mining engineer. He had not begun with the least idea of publishing. He
had rather remarkable mechanical talents and a still more singular gift
of tongues. He used to say that he could pick up any South American
dialect in ten minutes and drop it completely twenty minutes after he
had no more use for it. In his career as mining engineer this had been
to him of extraordinary use, because he could be sent off at any minute
to inspect any mine, whether in South Africa, in Galicia, or on the
Klondyke. And without having to rely on the representations of the
Anglo-Saxons or Semites who might be trying to sell a mine, he had been
able to pick up nearly always quite tidy little bits of information from
native miners and the hangers-on at bars. So that, of course, he had not
limited himself to his mechanical and mineralogical efforts. He had had
a finger in a pie or two of his own.

Thus he had been regarded already as a remarkably warm business man,
when his cousin, William Sorrell, had died. His uncle, William Sorrell,
senior, of the firm of Sorrell and Sons, the publishers, established in
1814—his venerable uncle, William, had then offered him a share in the
business direction of the ancient and august house. The literary side
Old William had intended to maintain in his own hands. And having gone
into the matter carefully, considering that his uncle, by methods as
antiquated as those of the builders of the Ark of Noah, contrived to
extract from the business an income of between six and seven thousand a
year, and considering also that, as his uncle’s sole heir, now that his
cousin was dead, the business would ultimately fall to him, Mr. Sorrell
had accepted his uncle’s offer. It had, indeed, only taken him five
minutes to consider it. He had remembered that the business was old and
not much supervised. There must be innumerable screws that could be
tightened; there must be innumerable economies that could be effected.
Half the staff could probably be kicked out. The site of the snuffy old
Georgian house that the firm owned could be converted into a veritable
goldmine by building modern offices upon it. And “William Sorrell, Son
and Nephew” could be floated as a public company. At first, indeed, Mr.
Sorrell had imagined that he would practically limit his energies to the
floating of this company. Publishing had then struck him still as
something connected with Literature and in consequence as something
effeminate. But before very long Mr. Sorrell had averaged it out that
books, if you got hold of the right sort of book, were something that
the city clerk must have. The right sort of book was as indispensable as
a season ticket, a clean collar, or a ten-and-sixpenny top-hat. At the
same time Mr. Sorrell had been not so obtuse as not to see that it would
be difficult to square the old-fashioned publishing traditions of
William Sorrell and Sons—they _were_ worth between six and seven
thousand a year—to make them square with publishing what the city clerk
would want. The long-standing reputation of the house was an asset that
Mr. Sorrell did not at all want to depreciate. It had cost him a great
deal of thought, but at last he had achieved the happy medium. He had
begun with encyclopædias. He had gone on to cheap editions of the
classics originally published by Sorrell and Sons. After all, had not
they published works of explorers like Speke, Burton, Grant, and
Livingstone in solid quarto volumes? So that what, as a development, was
there against their publishing gentlemen like Mr. Car K. Claflin? It was
all in the very tradition itself. It _was_ the tradition. It was
perfectly true that you had to print Mr. Claflin upon heavy glazed paper
so that his reproductions from photographs should come out well, and you
had to publish him in sevenpenny-halfpenny fortnightly parts, so as to
appeal to the pockets of season ticket-holders and commuters. But the
old flag flew where it used to fly. The Firm was still the Firm, though
just every now and then Mr. Sorrell chafed at his traditions and wished
that he had been born an American citizen. His old uncle was still
actually alive at Reading, where he insisted on perusing all the
manuscripts that were sent into the firm and discussing them with his
two maiden cousins of incredible ages who kept house for him. But at any
rate Mr. Sorrell at the moment was able to think that he had
accomplished the smartest bit of publishing that had ever been known
since the makers of books began to move their offices from Paternoster
Row.

He peeped again at the nun. She sat perfectly tranquil and
self-possessed, and, when she moved a little in her seat, he obtained
through the small windows a good view of her face. She had very red
cheeks, as if she had been much in the open air, blue, rather hard eyes,
and large teeth that appeared to impart to her face an air of rustic and
rather hoydenish good health. She looked, to Mr. Sorrell’s eyes, like a
prosperous market woman, and this disappointed Mr. Sorrell. He had
expected, as long as he could not see her face, that she would appear
pale and dark and ascetic, and with all the traces of suffering. His
cigar drew well, and, propped between wall and wall of the corridor, he
felt, upon the whole, comfortable. He had come out to think whether he
had not made a fool of himself with Mrs. Lee-Egerton. But having the
kind of brain which is able to cut off its thoughts into hermetically
divided compartments, he was determined to leave the subject alone until
he had come much more nearly to the end of his cigar. And suddenly it
came into his head to think what a bully time he might have if with all
his present faculties and knowledge he could be thrown right back into
the Middle Ages. What would not he be able to do with those ignorant and
superstitious people! He would invent for them the railway train, the
electric telegraph, the flying machine, the motor-car, and the
machine-gun. Above all, the machine-gun. He would be the mightiest man
in the world: he would have power, absolute and enormous power. He could
take anything: he could do anything. No king could withstand him. The
walls of no castle and of no mint could keep him out. And he felt in his
physical being a tingling, impatient sensation, an odd emotion of
impatience as if just at his right hand there must be suspended an
invisible curtain, which, could he but see it, he had only to draw back
to enter into the region of impotent slaves over whom he could be lord
of wealth as of life.

It was, of course, the sight of the nun that had aroused in him this
train of thought. When he once more looked at her she was, with an
expression of enjoyment, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag. And Mr.
Sorrell laughed. It seemed to him as absurd that a nun should eat
sandwiches as that she should travel in a Southampton-to-London express.
He did not know how he ought to consider that they should subsist any
more than how he should consider that they ought to travel. He rather
imagined them consuming myrrh and hyssop, drinking the tears of
affliction, and gliding in their stiff black skirts without touching it
over the ground, quite close to it, as Mr. Sorrell was accustomed to do
in a recurring dream that he had in common with most of the rest of
humanity. The nun brushed the crumbs off the wide expanse of linen over
her breast, and then, becoming aware of Mr. Sorrell’s eyes she frowned
slightly at the thought that he must have seen her eating and moved over
to the other corner of the vacant compartment. Mr. Sorrell did not see
her again. And as if it were a signal to him to resume thinking upon
whether he had made a fool of himself, Mr. Sorrell thrust his right hand
into the deep pocket of his long grey ulster and drew out a leather
jewel-case that had “L. E.” stamped upon its slightly domed top in gilt
letters of a German-Gothic character.

II

Mr. Sorrell was accustomed to regard himself as a typical representative
of the Homo-Sapiens-Europæus. He was rising forty; he was rather fair
with fresh, brown hair; he had a drooping brown moustache and a pink,
clear skin. His eyes were blue and slightly threatening, as if his
condition in the world was that of militant assertion of his rights and
rectitude. He had been nearly married several times, and he had had one
or two affairs of the heart that he did not particularly care to think
about, and in one case he had burned his fingers rather severely. His
rival in the affections of an erratic married lady having persuaded her
to give up to him Mr. Sorrell’s letters, which the rival afterwards, to
save his own skin, handed over to a remarkably injured husband, it was
only by the most extraordinary exertions that Mr. Sorrell had kept out
of the Divorce Courts, and this had proved to him such a warning that,
as he stood there reflecting, nothing in the world would have persuaded
him, except on shipboard, to have had anything whatever to do with Mrs.
Lee-Egerton. It was not that anybody knew anything against her: it was
that there was always enveloping her such a perpetual and cloudy feeling
of insecurity. Her husband was the sort of man who was always shooting
in the Rockies. He was, indeed, shooting in the Rockies at that moment,
which made it all the more remarkable that Mrs. Lee-Egerton should have
appeared anywhere as near him as New York. Lee-Egerton was the son of a
peer of so many descents that Mr. Sorrell would have been glad to know
him. To know Mrs. Egerton was not, however, nearly so remarkable, since
it was so extraordinarily easy to come across her, attended as it seemed
always by a band of laughing cavaliers. On the other hand Lee-Egerton,
whom few people ever saw, was said to be a happy, dangerous person, who
might descend upon you at any time with a magazine rifle or worse.
Nevertheless, with the idea of this rather thunderous personality at the
back of his head, Mr. Sorrell had felt himself quite remarkably soothed
by her frequent companionship. He had not, indeed, ever been soothed by
anything or anybody quite so much for quite a long time. It was not that
she was in her first youth, for she had a son, as Mr. Sorrell had
remarkable reason at that moment to know, actually at Cambridge, where
he had got himself into scrapes, all the more damnably complicated in
that he was the heir-presumptive to the title, though his uncle could
not be got to speak to any of his relatives. But Mrs. Egerton had a sort
of haggard, pale, passionate repose. She was very dark and very tall and
very aquiline, and her eyes appeared perpetually to be searching into
mysteries. She was, moreover, exceedingly thin, and Mr. Sorrel imagined
that he found her so infinitely restful because she was so exactly the
opposite of himself. In the last five years, that is to say, he had been
putting on flesh. As a mining engineer he had been rather thin and
hard-bitten, but five years of publishing, though he kept himself fit
with Turkish baths and mechanical exercises, had contrived considerably
to obscure the former outlines of his figure, and the face that looked
out at him from the glass was much more heavy-jowled and deep and
threatening-eyed than he at all cared to see. That middle age was
descending upon him did not distress him so much, but he strongly
objected to being fat.

And whereas Mr. Sorrell was distinctly bulky, Mrs. Lee-Egerton was
exceedingly thin and graceful; whereas upon the whole he was exceedingly
prosperous, she was oppressed by a very great grief. The great grief was
her confounded son. And to him, feeling, as he did, large, fatherly, and
protective, Mrs. Egerton had confided her almost unbearable sorrow. She
had started for the United States, intending a campaign of social
pleasures and triumphs that was to begin in New York, end in Washington,
and culminate in a scandalous book of which, with immense success, she
had already written two or three. But in New York itself, before she had
had time to get her foot really planted, she had received a most
lamentable letter from her son at Cambridge. This she had shown to Mr.
Sorrell on the second night out, whilst after dinner they had reclined
side by side in arm-chairs in a pleasant nook on the upper deck. Mr.
Sorrell had taken it to a porthole to read, and he had gathered from it
that young Egerton would be in the most damnable scrape in the world if
he could not have two hundred and fifty pounds on the very moment that
Mrs. Egerton landed at Southampton. Mr. Sorrell had returned to Mrs.
Egerton in a frame of mind as grave as it was consolatory. He said that
she might be quite sure it would be all right, though it was quite
certain that the young Jack must be in as disgusting a hole as it was by
any means possible for a young man to be in. And Mrs. Egerton, the
enormous tears in her enormous eyes, plainly visible in the Atlantic
moonlight, had declared to him that he could not by any possible means
imagine what a mother’s feelings were like, or what a good boy her Jack
really was. And at the thought that he might have to go to prison she
shuddered all over her long and snake-like body. Mr. Sorrell said that
of course it could not possibly come to that. Next evening, whilst they
sat side by side at dinner in the _à la carte_ restaurant of the upper
deck, she suddenly thrust over his plate of _hors-d’œuvre_, whilst the
select band played, and the waiters appeared to skim through the air, a
marconigram form bearing the words:

“_Bulmer pressing. All up if necessary not here by eight to-morrow.
God’s sake help.—Jack._”

“Oh well,” Mr. Sorrell had said cheerfully, “you must send your
husband’s solicitors a message to wire the money to him.”

Mrs. Egerton stared at him with huge eyes. She swallowed an enormous
something in her throat, and since she ate nothing else during that
meal, Mr. Sorrell’s dinner was completely spoilt. She disappeared,
indeed, before he had finished it, and Mr. Sorrell went to pace in
solitude upon the comparatively deserted deck where, although they were
only two days out and were not yet past the Banks, he had acquired the
habit of expecting to find this charming lady. It was not, however, for
at least an hour and a half, which in his impatience seemed an
interminable agony, that, through the moonlight, she came to him and,
exclaiming “I can’t do it!” burst into tears.

“You can’t do what?” Mr. Sorrell asked. And then there came out the
whole lamentable story. Mr. Sorrell imagined that he must be the only
man in London, or in the space between London and New York, who really
understood what Mrs. Egerton was, just as he was the only one who would
be really absolutely able from henceforth to champion her. But the
immediately active part of her sad history was the fact that her husband
allowed her the merest pittance—not twenty pounds a week—for her
private needs; that his solicitors were instructed in the most
peremptory manner never to advance her a penny of this pittance; that
having come out expecting to exist upon the hospitality of the United
States, she had upon her hardly more than her return ticket; that the
real stones of her jewellery were all in pawn and replaced by
imitations; and that she could not anyhow in the rest of the world,
although she was surrounded by seeming friends, raise anything like the
sum of a quarter of a thousand pounds. Her husband was fourteen days’
journey beyond the nearest telegraph station in the middle of a savage
region.

“And oh,” she said, with a glance at the heaving bosom of the sea, “I
couldn’t _live_ if anything happened to Jack. I understand that they’d
shave off the little ringlets that I used to twine round my fingers when
he was an innocent boy saying his prayers at my knee.”

“Oh, of course, they wouldn’t do it at first,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Not
while he was under remand. But it’s quite beastly enough that he should
have committed—er—er—done the thing, without his being punished for
it. In fact . . .” And after a good deal of hesitation and stammering
Mr. Sorrell got out the offer to lend the lady the required sum.

She said, of course, she could not think of it; as her son had made his
bed so he must lie; comparative strangers, however intimate their souls
might feel, could not bring financial matters into their relationships;
her husband would murder her if he came to hear of it, for Mr. Sorrell
could have no conception of that gentleman’s ferocity. But the more she
protested the more Mr. Sorrell thrust it upon her, and at last, in the
midst of a burst of tears, Mrs. Lee-Egerton came to a pause. “There’s
the Tamworth-Egerton crucifix,” she said.

Mr. Sorrell had never heard of the Tamworth-Egerton crucifix, and she
explained to him that it was a gold beaten cross of unknown antiquity
that had been in the hands of the family ever since the thirteenth
century. It was considered to be of almost inestimable value and indeed
the Jewellery Insurance Company had granted upon it a policy of £1,000.
She had it actually upon the boat with her, for she had desired to
impress certain choice members of American society by the sight of it
now and then. If Mr. Sorrell would lend her the money, or still better,
would wire it to her son, she would at once give the cross into his
keeping until she could repay him.

Mr. Sorrell without more bargaining—for at the moment he did not want a
cross or anything but this woman’s gratitude, had routed out the Marconi
operator from his supper, and had telegraphed by private code to his
bankers instructing them to pay £250 to Mr. Jack Lee-Egerton before noon
on the morrow. And shortly afterwards in the public boudoir of the ship,
Mrs. Egerton had handed over to him the Egerton cross in its leather
case, in return for an acknowledgment from him, that he held it against
the sum of £250 that day advanced.

In the corridor of the train Mr. Sorrell opened the leather case and
looked at the battered, tarnished, light gold object. It was about the
size of a dog biscuit and the thickness of a silver teaspoon, the cross
being marked upon the flat surface with punched holes much indeed like
those on the surface of a dog biscuit itself. And the feeling that had
been lurking in the mind of Mr. Sorrell ever since, quitting the glamour
of the ship, he had stepped upon the gangway at Southampton, put itself
into the paralysing words: “Supposing I have been done!”

After all, he did not know anything about Mrs. Lee-Egerton, except that
she was a Mrs. Lee-Egerton, and the other things that she had told him
might or might not be true. This thing might just as well be a gilt
fragment of a tin canister for all he knew. And upon the moment he
snapped the case to and determined to return it to the lady. After all,
if she were honest, she would pay him back the money in any case. If she
was not the thing would not be worth keeping. And he swayed back into
their compartment and sat down opposite her.

“I don’t at all like this speed,” she said. The train was shooting
through round level stretches of heather. It seemed to sway now upon one
set of wheels, now upon the other.

“That’s all right,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Nothing ever happens in these
days. I’ve travelled I don’t know how many thousand miles in my life
without coming across the shadow of an accident.” And he extended the
jewel-case towards her. “Look here,” he said, “this thing’s too valuable
for me to have in my possession. You take it. After all, you’re the best
person to keep it.”

In the unromantic atmosphere of the railway carriage Mrs. Egerton
appeared much older. She was dressed all in black and her face was very
white and seamed, with dark patches of shadow like finger-prints beneath
her eyes.

“No, you must keep it,” she said earnestly. “After all, it’s a thing to
have had in one’s possession. Why, it was brought back from Palestine by
Sir Stanley Egerton of Tamworth. Tamworth is quite close to here, and
Sir Stanley, they say—that’s the touching old legend—died on landing
on English soil, and the cross was carried to Tamworth by a converted
Greek slave, who was dressed only in a linen shift and knew only two
words of English—Egerton and Tamworth. Of course, Tamworth has been out
of the family many centuries now, but the cross never has, never till
this moment.”

And if Mrs. Egerton appeared to have grown older she appeared also to
have grown more earnest. She leaned forward, and taking the cross out of
the case she put it into Mr. Sorrell’s hands.

“Look at the funny, queer old thing,” she said. “And think of all it
means, of loyalty and truth.”

“Well, I suppose it does if you say so,” Mr. Sorrell said. “You mean
about the chap who carried it about in his nightshirt? I wonder how _he_
travelled? I suppose they had stage coaches then, didn’t they?”

“Oh, good gracious no!” Mrs. Egerton answered. “He walked bare foot, and
the country was beset with robbers all the way from Sandwich to here.”

“I don’t know that I should like to do that,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Though
I suppose it would take off some flesh! But you don’t mean to say that
they didn’t have any kind of public conveyance?”

“Dear me, no!” the lady answered. “It was in the year of the battle of
Bannockburn. Sir Stanley set out with twenty knights and more than a
hundred men-at-arms, and when he came back they were all dead and his
only companion was this slave.”

“Well, that was a pretty heavy bill of mortality,” Mr. Sorrell said
cheerfully. “The army doctors can’t have been worth very much in those
days!”

“No, but don’t you see?” Mrs. Egerton said. “That’s why I should like
you to keep the cross, if only for a little time. Since it was in the
hands of that slave it hasn’t been out of the hands of an Egerton until
now. But my son is the last of the family, and you’ve saved him from a
dishonour worse than death quite as certainly as it is said that slave
many times saved his master.”

“I guess,” Mr. Sorrell said, “that chap must have been a handy sort of
fellow to have about one. You don’t get them like that now for thirty
shillings a week. I’d just like to see one of my clerks walking from
London to Brighton in his nightshirt carrying my gold stylo!”

“They say,” Mrs. Egerton went on, “he lived for some time at Tamworth
and then he died. He’s said to have had weird gifts of prophecy and
things. He prophesied steam-engines and people being able to speak to
each other hundred of miles apart and their flying about in the air like
birds. That’s recorded in the chronicle.”

“You don’t say!” Mr. Sorrell said. And he took the cross out of the case
by the heavy gold ring at its top. “I should think he must have scared
them some. I rather like those faithful characters of the Dark Ages.
They didn’t produce much else that was worth speaking of, but they did
invent the trusty servant. Did you ever see the picture at Winchester?
It was called the trusty servant, and it had a head like a deer and half
a dozen other assorted kind of limbs. I’ve forgotten about it now.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Egerton said. “I don’t think people have
very much changed even nowadays.” And leaning forward she spoke with a
deep and rather sonorous earnestness. “They say that in all the ages the
blessing of a mother upon the preserver of her child——”

“Oh come!” Mr. Sorrell said. And he felt himself grow pink even down
into his socks.

“No it hasn’t,” Mrs. Egerton continued. “It hasn’t ever lost its power
to console the unhappy. So that if ever you find yourself in a tight
place——”

“Oh well, that’s never likely to happen,” Mr. Sorrell said. “You’d have
to bring down the country before you could bring our house down. Why,
we’re——”

Mrs. Egerton suddenly clutched at her heart. Her eyes became filled with
an agony of panic, her mouth opened to scream. The smooth running of the
train had changed into a fantastic hard jabbing. The glass of the inner
windows cracked with a sound like a shriek and fell splintering over her
knees. There was a rattle like the volley of machine-guns. He was thrown
forward on to Mrs. Egerton and she thrown back upon him. Then with a
frightful jerk all motion ceased. Mr. Sorrell perceived that the glazed
photographs of beauty spots served by that line, together with all the
wall of the carriage, were descending upon his upturned forehead. The
two opposite seats of the carriage were crushed one in upon the other so
that he screamed with the pain it caused his legs. The carriage turned
right over; he was hanging head downwards in a rush of steam. For a
moment he was conscious of a great pain in his temples.

III

Mr. Sorrell felt that his blistered feet pained him very much. His legs
ached from long walking: his head was dizzy with the heat of the sun,
and he hated the voices of the larks that, with a monotonous and
penetrating sound, drilled down all over the immense landscape. He
walked on, on, and on. He seemed to have been walking on and on for
ages. He had no idea why he was where he was, but it seemed to him
perfectly natural that he should be there. And beside him there paced a
large white mule, with little silver bells on the tips of its ear-caps,
In the hot sunshine the mule nodded its head and closed its eyes.

He plodded on in this way, mechanically and without will. There was a
buzzing in his ears, and his eyes felt intolerably heavy. Suddenly he
stumbled over a stone, and a voice behind him said, “Gare!” Behind him,
sitting sideways upon the mule, was a nun with a white head-dress. She
had red cheeks, large teeth, and a kindly smile. The mule was wandering
slowly upon its way without any guidance from her. Slung around her were
packages of coarse linen cloth tied with leather thongs, and upon her
arm was a large wickerwork basket filled with eggs. She said something
to Mr. Sorrell and he felt himself muttering to himself, “Some Southern
French dialect.” And suddenly too, without knowing exactly why, he heard
himself utter the words, “Egerton” and “Tamworth.” The nun smiled
energetically and said, “Yea, yea, yea!” She lifted her black draped arm
towards the horizon of the ascending down. She said, “Là haut et puis
descendre!”

Mr. Sorrell found himself shaking his head in a muzzy fashion, and he
uttered the words, “Serai-je en France?”

The nun shook her head. “Non, non,” she answered. “Cestung paid bin
Wiltshire, tousprès Sarum.”

Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “Esperanto, by Jove!” And the nun exclaimed
energetically, “Oi, oi, oi! Bonne esperantz, fidesle serviteur!”

Mr. Sorrell’s legs carried him perpetually and mechanically forward.
“When I wake up,” he said to himself, “I wonder if I shall remember all
this. It’s the flying dream, of course, and I’m short of clothing as
usual, but I wish I could do the gliding step. We don’t get along fast
at this rate.” And mechanically he attempted to pull what he considered
to be his nightshirt further down over his shins. Then he perceived that
he carried in his right hand a package swathed apparently in palm
leaves. “That’ll be the old cross,” he said to himself. And still pacing
onward he began to undo the stiff and cracked covering. The nun’s eyes
were large and eager. The thin golden object came out from amongst its
brittle swathings.

“O bel! O gai!” the nun exclaimed. And suddenly she was down from her
mule. She fell upon her knees close to his feet, and with avid fingers
clutched the relic and pressed it to her lips, her eyes streaming with
tears.

“I can’t let it go out of my hands, you know,” Mr. Sorrell said. “It’s
only pawned to me, though I haven’t got a pawnbroker’s licence. And if I
let go of it heaven only knows where it will vanish to! You never can
tell in dreams.”

The nun had burst into a great number of prayers in what Mr. Sorrell
recognised was Latin pronounced, he should say, in a Portuguese manner.
And out of politeness Mr. Sorrell remained still dangling the cross
before the eyes of the religious, so that he felt as if he were holding
out a watch to a little child who had asked the time in the streets. The
beautiful mule had wandered to a little distance and was cropping the
grass. From time to time it shook its head and the little bells jingled.

“By Jove!” Mr. Sorrell said. “If anybody kodaked us now!” For there the
three of them were in exceedingly bright weather—in weather so bright
that all the little shadows were blue and sparkling—in an immense fold
of the downs like a bowl with the blue arch of the sky inverted over
them like another bowl, he himself in a single long white garment, the
nun in a multiplicity of folds of coarse black, in a white head-dress
spreading out on each side like a swan’s wings, kneeling upon the soft
turf, her hands upraised, her lips moving. . . .

“We should come out very well,” Mr. Sorrell said, “if the chap could get
in the donkey and basket of eggs.” His head paining him a little less,
he lifted his eyes and took a glance across the valley. On the brow of
the hill before him were a great number of sheep, all lying down in the
noontide heat, and high against the skyline, very small, and draped in a
cloak so that he resembled figures that Mr. Sorrell had seen when
surveying mines in Spain, a shepherd leant motionless upon the shaft of
a great crook.

“Well now, these are the good old times!” Mr. Sorrell said. “What set me
dreaming of them? It’s better than being chased by alligators when you
can’t run away. It’s more tranquil, but it’s queer all the same. I wish
the ants wouldn’t run over my feet.” And with the sole of his left leg
Mr. Sorrell gently rubbed the instep of his other foot. The nun rose
slowly to her feet. She pointed to the cross in his hand. “Vint de la
Tierre Trèssaincte? Messire de Egerton a Tamville?”

“Why, certainly,” Mr. Sorrell said. “It was brought from the Holy Land
by Sir Stanley Egerton of Tamworth. Mrs. Lee-Egerton was telling me so
only just——” Mr. Sorrell stopped and started violently. “Merciful God!
What’s that?” he said. His eyes had wandered farther round the skyline,
and where their road mounted he perceived a solitary, broad-spreading
oak tree. From its great branches there descended three ropes, and at
the ends of them, their feet pointing straight to the earth, their hands
apparently clasped behind their backs, were the bodies of three men,
their heads cocked at one side with a sort of jaunty defiance, whilst
upon the crown of the highest sat a large raven. The nun looked at them
with a friendly and cheerful smile. “Trèsmeschiants gents, voleurs
attrapés par le très noble Sire de Coucy avant son depart.”

“So Mr. Coucy left them when he went away?” Mr. Sorrell asked. “Sort of
a visiting-card, I suppose? But how you can look at them like that so
calmly just after you’ve been saying those pretty prayers, I can’t
think. I don’t say the law should not take its course, but it ought to
be done out of the way, calmly and prettily. It’s not the sort of thing
a lady ought to have to take the risk of looking at.”

The nun shook her head to show that she did not understand, and then she
walked up to the mule and clambered slowly into the saddle. Having
settled herself down comfortably, she made signs that Mr. Sorrell should
lift her basket of eggs, and with slow footsteps they resumed their way,
Mr. Sorrell carrying the cross by its large ring which he fitted on to
his little finger. But they had hardly been gone ten yards before the
nun gave a little scream.

“Well, I thought you wouldn’t get much nearer to those corpses and still
keep a brave face on it,” Mr. Sorrell said.

The nun once more got down from the mule, and having set the basket of
eggs on the ground she ran swiftly with awkward movements back along the
track they had taken, and Mr. Sorrell perceived that she was bending
down to pick up something, with her voluminous clothes disposed all
round her.

“I’m hanged if she isn’t picking up those palm leaves!” Mr. Sorrell
exclaimed. And when she returned to him with her hand stretched out
holding with great care the thin, crackling objects he exclaimed, “Why,
you can get half a dozen of them for a penny—fans, you know—almost
anywhere. No, I don’t want them,” he continued. “I’ll get a piece of
brown paper and wrap the thing up the first place we come to.”

And interpreting from his manner that he disdained these precious
objects, which had formerly enveloped the sacred emblem, the nun drew
from her breast a little leather wallet closed by a leather thong into
which, very carefully, she introduced the dried-up fragments. There sat
upon her face an expression of supreme, of beatific contentment. A
sinister, earthy odour swept slowly down upon them from the large oak
tree. The raven flapped slowly and heavily into the blue air.

“Oh, hang it!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. “You aren’t going any closer? I
say, it’s horrible and it’s infectious too. You don’t know what you
won’t catch.”

The nun was looking at him with a patient want of comprehension, and Mr.
Sorrell had the conviction that she did not smell anything at all.

“Il m’est impossible de la supporter!” he exclaimed. And closing his
nostrils tightly with his fingers he ran up the hill at right angles to
the course they had been pursuing.

And suddenly fear seized him. “Hang it all!” he exclaimed. “This isn’t a
dream. This can’t be a dream. It’s all too clear. What the devil does it
mean? Where am I? What country is this?” He looked down the hill. The
white mule and the nun with her many packages were continuing their
course, which led them almost immediately beneath the tree with its
sinister decorations. The corpse which the raven had abandoned was
veering slowly round and round. The others remained quite motionless.

“It must have been that thing that happened to the train!” Mr. Sorrell
exclaimed. “I’m delirious. I’m mad. I must have escaped from a lunatic
asylum. That’s how I come to be here. That must be a sick-nurse—that’s
why she doesn’t mind the sight of dead bodies. But hang it all, they
don’t hang people from trees nowadays! And three chaps can’t have gone
and committed suicide at once!”

He gripped his head with both his hands, the golden cross tapping upon
his cheek, but his hands came away again in sudden astonishment. His
whole head was enveloped in linen cloth. “That must have been the
accident,” he said. “My head is bandaged up. But how could they have
been so careless as to let me escape if I _was_ in an asylum!”

The sun, great and glowing, was descending in the heavens, and the
greatness of the heat being past, the sheep on the other hillsides were
getting up to feed once more. The tinkle of their innumerable little
bells swept down to his ears and mingled with the song of the larks. A
couple of peewits rose from the hillside round the sky, uttering their
cries that are like the last wails of despair. And with motionless wings
an enormous bird sailed slowly over the lip of the down, and, great,
brown, and moving very slowly, it drifted down the valley. The shepherd
on the other hill suddenly burst into loud cries and violently agitated
his cloak. But with absolute indifference the great bird drifted on.

“An eagle!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. “Good God! That must have been an
eagle! But there aren’t any golden eagles any more except in Spain. I
must be in Spain. My God! I must get to the bottom of this!” And
suddenly bursting into a run he went across the hillside in pursuit of
the nun, who had very nearly reached the rim of the valley.

IV

In the ordinary course at such a moment Mr. Sorrell would have cared
little about views. He was very much out of breath and his feet hurt him
a great deal, whilst a strong wind coming over the hill-top fluttered
the skirt of his single garment. So that for a minute he had to stop. He
was upon the top of a high ridge and the aspect of an immense tract of
country burst suddenly up at him. Though the sun still shone brightly,
it was all blues and greys. Only in the distance the wine-purple of
heather stretched itself before him. And this expanse ran down very
steeply from before his feet and swept up again towards the horizon.
With some idea of identifying, if possible, the place in which he stood,
Mr. Sorrell turned straight round and scrutinised the view which lay
behind him. This was, upon the whole, simple and green. It was a closely
grassed valley like the hollow of your hand, running downwards, the
gallows-tree, little and plain at some distance below him, with the
shadow cast by the climbing sun stretched flat on the turf behind it.
Suddenly Mr. Sorrell said “By Jove!” again. A long way beyond the
descending lip of the valley, against the blue sky, a chalk-white object
tapering to a point with, at its head, a glitter of gold, rose up
exceedingly motionless and exceedingly silent.

It affected Mr. Sorrell as if he had been watched by something stealthy,
and, as the vane veered round and lost the light of the sun he
exclaimed: “Salisbury Spire!” He looked a little anxiously at the sun,
and then, considering that it must be about four o’clock in the
afternoon, he estimated that he must be some seven miles to the
south-west of Salisbury and going south-west. He remembered distinctly
that once he had motored from London to Bath by a road that went through
Salisbury, but though he racked his brain he could not for the life of
him remember the name of any single town or village through which he had
passed.

And for the moment he felt a regret that then he had travelled so fast.
He had thought it was rather fine because, leaving London at eleven and
giving two hours for lunch at Salisbury itself, they had reached Bath at
half-past four, giving them a speed when they were on the road of an
average of about thirty-three and a half miles an hour. He remembered
that they had run over a pig, but as they had not stopped to make any
inquiries he could not tell what the name of the place was. He
remembered that there had been an awkward bridge off to the left and
that the main road was narrow with high hedges. It certainly was not, as
he and his friends had said, the place to let pigs lie about on the high
road.

And then, again, he remembered the railway accident. The last thing of
which his eyes had been conscious had been the fact that the photograph
of a beauty spot, together with the wall of the carriage and the
luggage-rack, were descending immediately towards his forehead. And the
next thing was, that he was there in his night-shirt seven miles or so
from Salisbury. That the railway accident had taken place actually in
Salisbury he was fairly certain. He had been trying to wriggle away from
Mrs. Lee-Egerton’s maternal blessing, which she had administered to him
sandwiched in between fragments of the tale of a Greek slave who had
brought the Tamworth cross to Tamworth Castle, which was within a few
miles of Salisbury. He remembered that the story of the slave had
interested him very much—the bare-footed traveller in a single garment
of white linen, who, bearing a cross of gold, had travelled some
hundreds of miles all alone through a country infested by robbers.

Decidedly, Mr. Sorrell thought, he had escaped in delirium from the
hospital to which he, along with other victims of the disaster, must
have been taken. And, without doubt, the nun, who was a sick nurse, had
been sent out to pursue him. He wondered whether he had better stop
where he was until she sent someone to look after him, or whether it
would be better to consult the shepherd, borrow a pair of trousers of
him, and get up to London by the first train from Salisbury. He turned,
however, once more to regard the carcases that were dangling from the
oak tree.

“Of course, they don’t hang people like that, even in these
out-of-the-way places,” he said to himself. And then he considered that
they had been having a pageant there. There were pageants in every
corner of England. The thing was being a good deal overdone. And when he
considered the tops of the other hills, he thought that they had been
overdoing it altogether a great deal too much. On the skyline of a very
uplifted range upon his left hand he perceived the outline of no less
than three gallows; and on his right, upon the summit of a dark and
forbidding heather-clad hill, scalloped and ridged so that Mr. Sorrell
considered that it must be the remains of a Roman camp, there rose up
desolately another gibbet. A heavy chain descended from its outstretched
arm, and from the bottom hung a repulsive fragment decorated with rags.

“Oh, this is altogether disgusting!” Mr. Sorrell said. “Someone will
have to write to the papers about it.”

They must have been searching for every blessed hill which had ever had
a gallows in the good old times. Even in the Dark Ages they could not
have hanged as many people as that. It would have taken half the
population. But he admitted that of its kind the thing had been well
done. He had had a decidedly eerie sensation, as if the bat on his skull
had knocked him clean through space into another generation. There
really had not been anything whatever to show him that he was not in the
thirteenth century. Except, perhaps, for the eggs. Eggs in a basket
struck him as being exceedingly modern sort of things. He did not
believe they had eggs in the thirteenth century.

He did not know much about history, but he thought they had been
introduced into England by Sir Walter Ralegh, along with potatoes and
brandy. He did remember—the fact had somehow impressed itself on his
mind because it was philological, and he had always taken an interest in
the study of languages, which was a sound commercial pursuit—he
remembered distinctly having read somewhere that Chaucer or Caxton,
taking a voyage from the coast of Kent to Suffolk, had landed in search
of eggs. They had not been able to get them, because in Suffolk—or
perhaps it was the other way round?—at that date eggs had been called
_eyne_. This had distinctly interested him, because it had shown him
that in mediæval England there were as many different dialects as there
are in South America, and because the word so nearly resembled the
modern German _Eier_, which signifies eggs. And, thinking about it, it
came distinctly into his mind that he had read this in two specimen
pages from his own encyclopædia that he had reproduced in facsimile for
his prospectus.

He remembered the woodcut that had illustrated his specimen page. It had
the word _Harleian MS._ below it to show the care with which the
encyclopædia had been compiled, and it represented a mediæval gentleman
with knock-knees and pointed shins, something representing a kilt and
about forty yards of woollen stuff wound round his head, holding an
anchor and jumping out of a boat about the size and shape of a piece of
melon peel. He could have sunk it with one foot.

And then acutely it came into his head to wonder what they were doing
with the account of the travels of Mr. Car K. Claflin, the intrepid
explorer who had rushed round the Equator. He did not know what they
would have been doing with it, he did not know how long he had been ill,
but he started impulsively down the valley because he had got to get to
the nearest railway station. He would have to take things in hand again.
He stopped once more and with anxious eyes surveyed the immense field.
He was looking for the trail of smoke of an approaching train. It was
impossible that there should not be a line in all that expanse of
country. He had never seen a really great view of England that had not
at least one, two, or sometimes as many as three plumes of smoke
ascending and flying across space. But he saw nothing. He could not make
out even a road running along the valley at his feet. He looked for the
dust of an oncoming motor. There was none. Green grass ran down into the
valley: in the bottom there were some high trees, dark and very full of
foliage, like a ribbon along the stream. In the bottom too there were
some thatched huts, so small that they resembled rabbit boxes. There
were too, here and there, some small enclosures with little hedges round
them. Mr. Sorrell imagined that these must be Small Holdings. “That
blessed Act doesn’t seem to make much progress here,” he said. Hidden
deep amongst some very tall elms he could see the shoulder of a square
church tower. And then, coming round the angle of a spur of the downs,
once more there was the nun progressing slowly very far below him upon
the mule that, tiny and distinct, appeared like a fragment of white
chalk.

“Oh well, I’m going after her,” Mr. Sorrell said. “I suppose she’s got
the hang of the situation. She seemed to know something about Mrs.
Lee-Egerton.” At any rate, she had certainly mentioned the family name,
and the legend of the family slave who had travelled half England over
with only the words “Egerton” and “Tamworth” in his vocabulary. And Mr.
Sorrell considered that no doubt Mrs. Egerton had sat at his bedside
whilst he had been, in hospital, and had told the nun all about the
cross. Probably he had held on to the cross like grim death when he had
been insensible, and they had not liked to force it away from him. That
was, without doubt, why it was still in his grasp. No doubt the palm
leaf had been some patent hospital packing that they had put on to
prevent the cross from being banged about.

He plodded on determinedly after the nun. But the grass here and there
was pierced with tiny little, very sharp sprigs of broom, and Mr.
Sorrell had to tread with care. The mule on the other hand, as if it
smelt its stable, was travelling faster and faster. It was fully a mile
and a half ahead, and decidedly it was gaining upon him. And Mr. Sorrell
felt a desperate desire to overtake the nun. After all, she understood
the position. She was, perhaps, the only person in the countryside who
would understand the position. In the ordinary way he would have felt an
extreme shyness about appearing before a lady in attire so exiguous. But
if he met anybody else—even a man—he would have to explain, and that
would make him feel very awkward. He had got the hang of the story by
now; his head was perfectly clear, just as the wrappings round it were
perfectly clearly hospital wrappings. But he did not want to have to
explain to anybody that he had been practically a wandering lunatic. It
would make him appear small and ignominious, whereas he was actually the
distinguished Mr. Sorrell, one of the most up-to-date men of his day.
No, decidedly, he would not mind meeting the nun. He wanted to meet her
more than anyone else in the world. She did not, after all, seem so very
much like a lady: she was more like the laundress of his chambers in the
Temple. Probably she was a lower class nun. And Mr. Sorrell had never
felt embarrassed when, for instance, he had asked a housemaid to fasten
a stiff evening collar for him. Besides, it was a sick-nurse’s duty to
look after her patients. And with these ideas in his head Mr. Sorrell
trotted onwards as swiftly as he could. He imagined that decidedly he
must be losing weight; it was probably better than Turkish baths. The
nun disappeared round another fold in the downs. From her swaying and
uneven motions Mr. Sorrell imagined that the mule must be actually
galloping. And when, a little later, he came upon a broken egg, he felt
positively sure of it. He trotted on.

V

The Lady Blanche D’Enguerrand de Coucy of Stapleton stood yawning upon
the watch-tower of Stapleton Castle. There was no reason why she should
have stood there, for upon the three stone steps in the north-east
corner the ancient watchman with his horn slung from his neck leant in
an attitude of dejected boredom upon his pike. It was his business to
signal to those in the keep below the approach of any traveller. Thus he
would blow four gruff grunts—his horn being of wood—to signify the
approach of a knight-at-arms with his company, or he would blow five,
supposing that he had observed upon the hill-tops any person in armour
and with a company whose cognisances might be unknown to him or whose
appearance suggested that they might be malefactors of the one sort or
the other. Or, on the other hand, if the man approaching appeared to be
a merchant with pack-mules, he would make one gruff sound. If,
apparently, it was a knightly minstrel, he would do his best to produce
three high notes and a flourish, though this he did very seldom now, and
for the last month he had been seeking to train himself to blow one very
high note long and sustained when he observed the approach of Lady
Dionissia de Egerton de Tamville, who had lately acquired the habit of
riding over from the castle of Tamville to supper every other evening.
This last call had, indeed, been of late almost the only one that his
aged lips had had occasion to make, though it is true that when it
sounded it would cause some little commotion in the castle, the due
states and ceremonies having to be observed. Thus in the quadrangle
below he would see offal and egg-shells and hot water being thrown on to
the heap of garbage that formed the centre of the courtyard. Women and
pages and old men would hurry from side to side far down below. The Lady
Dionissia would ride up with her attendant train of women, little boys,
old men, a chaplain or so, and shortly afterwards the washing trumpet
would blow and the commoner sort of people would be observed cleansing
themselves in the courtyard. But at that time it was only two hours
after noon and it wanted two hours more for supper-time.

The old watchman leant upon his pike; the Lady Blanche yawned. In
another corner of the small, square enclosure formed by the breast-high
battlements, and of sheet lead warmed by the sun underfoot, the Lady
Blanche’s ladies, Blanchemain and Amoureuse, whispered and tittered
continually with the little golden-haired boy Jehan, her page and the
cousin of her husband. The Lady Blanche could not imagine what they
could find to talk about. There was nothing in the world. And it seemed
to her to be disgusting that there should be nothing in the world. She
remembered that as a Lady of the Queen-Mother she had never found the
time hang heavy on her hands. If they had not anything else to do at the
Court they could at least play cat’s-cradle, and there had always been
gossip. Nowadays there was not any gossip, since, except for the
outlaws, the clubmen and robbers, who made riding out a dangerous
pursuit, there was not probably an able-bodied layman within twenty
miles of the neighbouring castles of Stapleton and Tamville. Her
husband, Sir Guy, was tiresome and foolish when he was present. In
espousing the cause of the late King—he was said by now to have been
murdered in Berkeley Castle by means of a red-hot horn—in espousing the
cause of the late King and his favourites as against the now
Queen-Mother, the always foolish Sir Guy, who always did the wrong
thing, had done it once again, and the thought of it added to her
nervous exasperation. This entirely foolish husband of hers had
undoubtedly ruined her life. With the Queen Isabella she had always been
a favourite. But her husband’s insolence to Roger Mortimer had not only
cost him various fines and amercements amounting to more than two
hundred pounds, which they could ill afford, considering that by his
silly joviality and easy manners the peasants had been encouraged to
neglect their work upon the demesne lands—whereas in his father’s time
they would have had at the end of the year seventy pounds from the sale
of hay alone and that in bad years, nowadays, it was much if they got
forty in the best of years;—not only had his folly cost them two
hundred pounds’ worth of fines, but they were totally estranged from the
Queen-Mother, who, having returned from France with a small company of
knights of Hainault, had utterly discomfited and put to death, not only
the late King, but all his favourites.

And now Sir Guy, utterly without cause, had got together all his
fighting men and kinsmen and retainers, and had gone at his own cost to
aid the new young King in his campaign against the King of Scots. This,
indeed, was a crowning folly, for in this war Sir Guy had not been
summoned to do any service at all. The war was in Scotland, and no
knight had been called for by the King or by the Queen-Mother from
farther south than Lincolnshire. It was an utterly foolish piece of
braggadocio. What Sir Guy had wanted to do had been to impress the
Queen-Mother with the sense of his power and importance. But the Lady
Blanche knew Isabella well enough to be certain that she would see how
Sir Guy was weakening himself and his cousin, Sir Egerton de Tamville.
Even on their own showing, these two foolish men had confessed that the
expedition would cost them at least two thousand pounds apiece, and she
had made her own inquiries of the Jew Goldenhand of Salisbury. Jews were
forbidden to live or to lend money in these parts at that time; but the
town council of the city had paid no attention to the writs that came
down from London for the expulsion of Goldenhand. They had baptised him
by force instead, without washing the habit of lending money away.

She had learned that the two knights had borrowed of him at least eight
thousand pounds, impignorating all their joint and several rights over
land, the lordships of Old Sarum and Wiley. And where in the world
should they find eight thousand pounds, even if they made fat
plundering, going to and from the war and in the war itself? Why, each
man of the four hundred that they must take with them must bring back,
as the Cantor Nicholas had informed her, the value of at least twenty
pounds in booty before they could make it good. And her husband and his
cousin were not the type of men to bring back money by way of booty.
They were inspired by the modern crazy notions of forbearance towards
their foes if their foes had fought well. These silly ideas had come
from France. Why, after the siege of Hardeville, when Sir Guy had taken
with his own hand the Sire Jehan D’Estocqueville, whose ransom might
have been a thousand crowns, Sir Guy had set the Frenchman free. He had
done it with great pomp and ceremony, approaching the French knight whom
he had served during dinner in the midst of two hundred people, and not
only bidding him go free but setting on his head the chaplet of pearls
that he had worn in his own hair. It was perfectly true that Sir Guy had
gained much praise for this absurd action and many amorous glances from
the ladies, which had been what he desired. But what lordships, demesnes
or estates, could stand this riotous drain, this foolish and sentimental
ostentation, and what did it mean to her?

There she groaned and twisted her nails in aching solitude during how
many months! Had they but husbanded their resources she might have
ridden north with Sir Guy, and lain with the Queen, who was in the New
Castle, just short of the Scottish border. And with twenty minutes of
the Queen’s ear, she would have done more good to Sir Guy than all he
would ever get by the cracking of rusty iron on the heads of penniless
Scottish knights. And, for all she knew, her husband had got himself
into a new folly, for might it not be he who had roused the archers
against the men of Sir John of Hainault, who were aiding the King in the
Scotch war? These outrages were said by the juggler, who brought them
news, to have been committed by archers from Lincolnshire, who had
fallen on Sir John of Hainault and his fellows as they went back at
night from the King’s lodgings to their own. But how could she tell that
it was not their own Wiltshire archers, of whom Sir Guy and his cousin
had taken many bands with them, in addition to the men-at-arms and the
gentlemen armed cap-à-pie, and upon the greedy destriers that ate so
much hay and fodder? It was part of the folly of Sir Guy and his cousin
that they could not, like other knights, ride to the seat of war upon
light hackneys, with their armour in carts behind them, but they must go
prancing England from north to south upon great wasteful chargers that
they might very well have waited to buy until they came to the northerly
parts. Of this folly and vainglory of men there was nowadays no end, and
the Lady Blanche dug her fingernails into her palms and breathed a tense
sound of exasperation and rage.

The old man with the horn blew a single high-stopped note.

“Oh yes, a woman upon the road from the Plain,” she said impatiently.
And she did not trouble to look over the battlements. “When will there
come again knights riding or men with bears and jugglers with their
little flutes and golden balls?”

She called petulantly to the old man who stood three steps high. “What
woman is it upon the road?”

He answered huskily, wiping the rheum from his eyes with the back of his
hand:

“Mistress, it is the nun Lugdwitha, upon her white mule.”

“And what makes the nun Lugdwitha upon the road?”

“Mistress, I do not know,” the watchman answered. “Maybe the Lady
Blanchemain shall tell you.”

“Why, ask her,” the Lady Blanche said. “I am tired of the sound of my
own voice.”

Being in private, for she could reach the leads of the watch-tower by
narrow stairs in the wall from her own chamber, the Lady Blanche was
wearing only a tight-fitting dress of grey homespun wool that she had
had for seven years. She was a woman of twenty-four, with a hard mouth,
a high colour, a very erect back, and dark, resentful eyes. The Lady
Blanchemain, on the other hand, was quite fair, and, although on account
of the parsimony or poverty of her mistress and kinsman, she too was
dressed in grey homespun wool, nevertheless from feudal respect she wore
a large white coif and plaited sleeves of white and grey. The Lady
Blanche liked her very well, since she was very tiny, for she had been
born in the castle of Hardelot on the first day of the siege that lasted
five months. Thus she had been very stunted at the outset of her growth,
for for most of that time there had hardly been either spoon meat or
mother’s milk for her. Her father had died in a dungeon, her mother in a
convent, and at the age of ten, according to the law, she had come to
act as kinswoman and serving-maid to her cousin the Lady Blanche upon
her marriage to Sir Guy seven years before. And since she was very gay,
insignificant, and contented, the Lady Blanche liked her well enough.
She had, besides, a very nimble ear for gossip.

She looked, crinkling up her eyes, over the ramparts that reached almost
to her nose.

“The Sœur Louise,” she said, preferring for the moment to speak in
French, “went into Sarum this morning to buy sugar and spices and eggs.
She went along the valley with some merchants from Warminster. I think
she will come back over the Plain, because it is a safer way along by
the gallows that Sir Guy set up to be a warning to evil gentry.”

“Ah, this convent!” the Lady Blanche said spitefully. “What surveillance
is it that they keep up that they must needs buy eggs when to-morrow is
Friday?”

“Why, all their hens have died,” the Lady Blanchemain said. “A
pestilence or a murrain struck them, and a mouldiness is fallen upon
their corn wells, and their fowler was drowned on Monday, and their
fishponds ran dry so that most of their fish are dead.”

“That, then, is a judgment upon them,” the Lady Blanche said. “Blessed
be He that has done it, that they may know by their empty bellies what
it is to grasp at the rights of the Lord that protects them.” And,
intent upon wounding the feelings of her other handmaid, the Lady
Amoureuse, that was of a pious nature, the Lady Blanchemain opened her
heart as to the grievances she had against the religious of both sexes
who dwelt on either side of the castle, the convent being to the right
and the priory to the left, though the priory was for the most part
within the lands of Egerton de Tamville.

With the intent to wound the feelings of the Lady Amoureuse, the Lady
Blanche went at extraordinary length into grievances against the
convent, the priory, the lordship of Tamville, and the inhabitants of
the little town of Wishford that was perhaps a quarter of a mile from
the castle of Stapleton. It was a matter of extraordinary complication,
and it was one of the Lady Blanche’s chief grievances against her lord
that he could not set his mind seriously to grasping what were his
actual rights.

On the one hand, the lords of Stapleton Castle claimed by rights of the
most ancient nature the service of the bullock teams of every peasant of
the manors of Stapleton St. Michael, Berwick St. James, and Wishford le
Virgin upon every third day of the week not being a holiday and the
holidays being counted against the peasants.

The convent claimed by virtue of rights granted to them before the
Conquest the right to three-fifteenths of the labours of every ninth
day. On the part of the lords of Stapleton it was argued that this
right, because it was granted before the Conquest, had been abrogated by
the grant of the land to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, by William the First.
The nuns set up the plea that on account of the exceeding sanctity of
their community, which had been established by the Blessed Edward
Confessor, their rights had been specially exempted by the Conqueror. It
had been represented on the parts of the lords of Stapleton that these
three-fifteenths should be properly taken from the time of the peasants
themselves and not from the time which the peasants owed their liege
lords. But on the part of the nuns it was argued that they, being women,
had no power to enforce obedience from the peasants. According to the
spirit of the grant from the Confessor, it must be certainly intended
that the three-fifteenths must be taken from the third day of the lord
of the manor, since the lord of the manor had the means of arms to
enforce his rights, whereas the nuns had not. It had been replied on the
part of Sir Guy that since his grandfather had received the grant of the
demesne his ancestors had hanged innumerable of the peasants, in the
Christian and worthy endeavour to force them to give up their time to
the service of the convent.

The nuns, despairing of enforcing their rights, had sold them to the
priory of St. Michael for the sum of nine hundred pounds. The priors,
having occasion to send to Rome to appeal against the election of a
prior forced upon them against their will by King Edward the Second of
glorious and unhappy memory, had taken the opportunity to procure from
the Pope a writ directing the lords of the manor of Stapleton to procure
for the monks the due observance of the duties of the peasants of the
manor. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the town of Wishford,
owning as a community certain of the lands along the River Wiley,
claimed as a right, which had been ceded to them by Sir Guy’s
grandfather, in return for certain monies amounting to three hundred and
fourteen pounds and a cup of gold worth forty pounds, the pasturing of
certain beasts upon the lands of the peasants of Stapleton, which lands
the monks of the priory of St. Michael claimed to hold in fee from the
estate of Egerton de Tamville the cousin of Sir Guy de Coucy de
Stapleton. The prior of St. Michael’s had threatened with
excommunication, not only Sir Guy de Coucy de Stapleton, but also Sir
Stanley de Egerton de Tamville, along with the inhabitants of the town
of Wishford. And under the threat of this excommunication the jurats of
the town of Wishford had withheld payment from Sir Guy of the rent of
the knights’ fields, a large stretch of land running up to Groley Woods,
a rent amounting by the year to £47 3s. which was claimed, not only by
Sir Guy, but by the prior of St. Michael’s, the chapter of the cathedral
of Salisbury and the Chancellor of the Queen-Mother Isabella.

“And my lord and husband,” the Lady Blanche continued, having explained
all these things now for the hundredth time to the Lady Amoureuse, “my
lord and husband, having expended untold money in the prosecution of
suits before the portman-mote here, in the Sheriff’s Court at Devizes,
upon the sending of solicitors and learned clerks to the King when he
was in France and to the Pope in Rome, is now minded out of a childish
levity and weariness of the flesh to abandon all these his rights,
though he has spent upon the maintaining of them much more than his
rights are worth.”

The Lady Blanche paused, expecting some opposition from the Lady
Amoureuse, whom she detested because she was as tall, as dark, and less
high-coloured than herself. For whereas the Lady Blanche, to attain to
the then fashionable paleness, must daub her features with slaked lime,
Lady Amoureuse could grow as white as a sheet at the expense of one
day’s fasting and one night’s vigil and prayer before the day of any
ceremony when she might desire to appear at her most attractive in the
eyes of men. The Lady Amoureuse, however, answered nothing, but kept her
mournful gaze fixed upon the hills, and the Lady Blanche continued,
speaking now in English instead of French.

“My ox of a husband, who can neither increase his family nor yet his
gear, will neither go on with his suits, nor yet set his hand to the
task of claiming his rights. For if he had been a man in my father’s
day, he would have very lightly ended these quarrels. Upon the one hand
he would have burned down the convent about the heads of the nuns, and
upon the other he would have slit the throats of the priors and going
with a strong many to the portman-hall of the citizens of Wishford, he
would have taken from them their charters and have torn them into a
thousand pieces, so that never more they could have been alleged against
him.”

The Lady Amoureuse, with her eyes upon the distant path, exclaimed in a
deep, hollow, and mournful voice:

“I think some men of the same mind as you—some brigands or outlaws are
pursuing the Sister Lugdwitha, so fast does she gallop upon her white
mule.”

At the same moment the watchman set his horn to his lips and blew a
hesitating blast that was neither high nor low.

“And behold,” the Lady Blanchemain said, “one comes trotting along the
path in a white shift that appears neither man nor woman nor yet priest
of Holy Church.”

“What folly is this?” the Lady Blanche exclaimed. And to the watchman,
“What read you this pursuer to be that comes with such haste after the
Sister Louise?”

The old watchman peered for a long time at the figure. “A beggar it will
not be,” he said, “for his robes are too clean. One it might be that had
been condemned to do penance in a sheet. Nor yet ’tis no sheet that he
wears, and upon his head is bound a cloth for all the world such as is
borne by the pagans that I have seen in the birthplace of our Saviour,
and in his hand is a shining something that in the rays of the sun is
like the weather-cock upon a church steeple.”

The Lady Amoureuse’s eyes distended romantically. “Should it be,” she
said, with her mournful and tragic tones, “the slave of the dead Sir
Stanley whom we have so long awaited?”

With her quick dislike for the Lady Amoureuse, the Lady Blanche said
sharply, “Pack of nonsense and legends! This is some beggar who is
coming along with his clapdish in his hands.”

The little page had stood all the while two steps behind the Ladies
Blanchemain and Amoureuse, in the proper attitude, one hand upon his
hip, one hand behind his back, and his right leg drawn up so that the
point of his long shoe rested upon the ground two inches from his left
instep. A fly had alighted upon his nose, but he had not even stirred.
Yet, at this moment he could not keep silence, his curiosity overcame
him.

“Dear Lady,” he said, and his tones were fluting, his face pink and
white, and his curls long and golden, “what is even the truth about the
slave of the dead Sir Stanley, for the pages say one thing and the old
soldiers another, and the nuns another, and the fathers confessor
another. So that by the one he is held to be a magician and by the other
an angel, and this is a very marvellous matter and one worthy to be
understood.”

“Saucebox!” the Lady Blanche exclaimed haughtily but not so unkindly as
she might have. “Our brachets and lap-dogs shall be daring next to ask
questions.” Then she turned again upon the Lady Amoureuse and continued:
“Nonsense and these follies of chivalry will never be out of your head.
I tell you this slave is long since dead and his eyes picked out by
ravens, and robbers have taken his cross. It is three months since he
left the town of Sandwich, and though the news of his leaving has been
with us sixty days, yet he is not here. Surely he is dead.”

“But so sacred a relic is this cross,” the Lady Amoureuse said, “that
surely an angel will have walked beside him to render him invisible to
evil men by day and to guide him at night.”

“Then if he travelled both by night and day,” the Lady Blanche said, “he
would have been here twice the sooner, and he is not here at all.” She
looked upon the little foot-page and said suddenly, “Saucebox, follow me
into my bower. I will chastise and rebuke you, for it is not well with
your bringing up.” And she descended into the narrow stairway that went
from the leads down through the thickness of the wall into her own
chamber.

This bower of hers took up maybe one half of the watch-tower of the
castle, and yet it was not so very large neither. The walls were of bare
stone, the small windows looked out on three sides upon the blue air,
and the place, though it was then the heat of midsummer, was not so very
hot, since the windows had no glass, but only iron bars that had been
painted red and white in squares to make them look gay. In this room
there was a bed, very large, with pillows of red velvet, curtains of
blue cloth, and a coverlet of red fox’s fur. At the foot was a great
chest or hutch of oak that was carved half-way across with figures
representing the coronation of the Virgin in heaven. This carving was
not yet finished, for since it took a long time, and the Lady Blanche
had need of the hutch, the carver worked upon it when the chamber was
unoccupied. Indeed, upon the stone floor were the shavings and chips
that he had that day left behind him. Upon this hutch, at the foot of
the bed, which was all there was to sit upon, the Lady Blanche seated
herself and remained for a space grinning at the little page who stood
blushing and silent before her. His doublet was of old brown fur caught
in at the waist by a leather strap and reaching to about the middle of
his hips. His stockings were of red wool, fitting very close and being
at once stockings and trousers. His shoes were of old green leather,
very long and pointed and falling in flaps about his ankles. He was
fourteen years old, and having been seen by the Lady Blanche when she
was upon a visit to her cousins, the De la Poers of Southampton, four
years before, she had asked for and received him as her servant, though
till that moment she had taken very small account of him. He had served
at her table, he had learned to fight with her many other pages, and one
clerk and another had taught him his letters and how to sail eastward to
the Holy Land to aid in the perpetual task of recovering and retaining
the Sepulchre of our Lord. But Sir Guy having taken off with him to
Scotland all the pages who were of fourteen and a half years and
upwards, this little Jehan de la Coucy de la Poer had become a servant
at her table and the sergeant of all the little boys that she had then
in training.

He flushed and flushed again, and rubbed the instep of one leg upon the
ankle of another, and at last his lady said, “Little Jehan, talk!”

He said nothing. His colour came and went.

“Little cousin,” his lady continued, “talk, chatter! What is it that you
find to whisper and to titter about with my ladies? You are at it all
the day. Yet I do not see what there is to talk about in this place.”

He was still silent, and large tears filled his eyes.

“Little Jehan, come hither,” the lady said. “Tell me what lady it is
that you love.” And she took him by the hand and drew him towards her.
She fingered the old shabby fur of his doublet, and the hairs came out
upon her hands.

“This is the best clothing that you have?” she said; and then, “Tell me
what lady it is that you prize above all others, and whose name you
mutter beneath your breath when you turn over in bed in the deep night.
Tell me, tell me!”

The little boy burst into tears.

“God is merciful,” he said. “I love my mother and the Virgin.”

“Oh, fie! Oh, fie!” she said, “to lie to your lady. Whom is it that you
love?”

He continued to sob, and repeated, “My mother and the Virgin, and as God
is my life none other.”

“Oh, fie! Oh, fie!” the lady said. “This is very bad. For either you lie
to me, which is evil, or you have no lady that you love, which is far
worse. For I suppose that now you have become the sergeant of the pages,
you will desire shortly to be made a squire, and so to do great feats of
arms and grow into a knight. And then you will send letters of challenge
to fight other knights in the courts of France, of Navarre, of Spain, or
even amongst the Saracens and the knights of Heathenesse, and how will
you do all these things without the love of a lady to bear you up?
Friend, it is time you bestirred yourself. Why is it that you are so
badly clad?”

The little page answered nothing more, and she asked him again several
times, “Why is it that you are so unfittingly dressed?”

Once more he burst into tears.

“It is because my little wages are not paid,” he stuttered at last. “It
is God’s truth that I would be such a great and famous knight, but I do
not know where I should find a lady to love except my mother and the
Virgin.”

“Why, go open the door of my closet,” the Lady Blanche said, “that I may
see my beloved birds.”

Before the foot of the bed was a rough panelling of oaken boards
shutting off a portion of the room, and the door of this, creaking upon
its iron hinges, the page threw open. There came out an ancient and
mouldy smell. Upon three perches there stood two hawks with their hoods
over their eyes, and little plumes rising above them, and a lugubrious
parrot that nonchalantly opened and shut one eye. Upon smaller pegs in
the wall there were, moreover, falconer’s gloves, jesses, straps with
little brass bells sewn on to them, and farther along Sir Guy’s tilting
helmet, his winter surcoat of fur, and the splintered head of a large
lance that Sir Guy had omitted to have repaired in the hurry of his
departure for Scotland.

“Why, fetch me my parrot,” the lady said. And whilst the page held out
to that depressed green and blue animal a gilt staff towards which the
parrot extended an enormous and threatening upper mandible, the lady
felt in her bosom for the great key of the hutch. She had opened it, and
from amongst a medley of silver vessels, plates, and silken clothes and
furs, selected one of the many little bags of cloth embroidered with
silk, and she had again closed the solid slab of the lid before the page
had succeeded in coaxing the parrot on to his staff. The boy placed the
bird upon the lady’s knee, and it climbed slowly up her arm to settle on
her shoulder, where from time to time with its long bill lugubriously
but gently it nibbled at her ear.

“Now take this purse, my gentle page,” the lady said, “and go when I
have done with you to Master Simon the tailor. In the purse are six
pounds. You shall buy with them clothes and a little steel cap and
gauntlets and breastplates and such other things as are proper for the
equipment of a page, and a little horse, and you shall let me see with
what discreetness you lay out your money, and you shall tell the tailor
and the armourer and the horse merchant that the lady, your mother, has
sent you this money that you may be properly equipped because you have
been promoted to the sergeantry of pages, and between that time you
shall think upon a lady that you may love, and on Sunday you shall wear
your new garments, and you shall come to me in them after the dinner is
drawn, and I will send my ladies away and you shall tell me what you
have devised.” And the Lady Blanche raised her voice towards the little
door that ran up the staircase in the wall:

“Ho, Blanchemain, ho, Amoureuse, come down and hear this tale of an
awkward page!”

When the two ladies were come down, “Look upon this awkward little
page,” she said, “who declares that there is no lady that he loves! And
now his mother has sent him money to buy suitable apparel, he shall
think upon a lady that he may love, so that her device may be
embroidered upon the shoulder of his surcoat.” And at the thought of a
page who loved no lady, all the three women burst into loud laughter,
until at last, crimson-faced, the boy blurted out:

“I am sure that in a week I shall not learn to love anybody but my
mother and the Virgin.”

He cast side glances at the door, for he desired strongly to run away
from all this mockery.

But the horn above was grunting out a series of harsh sounds.

“Mercy on me,” the lady said, “is there an army afoot that he signals so
many people?”

“Why,” the Lady Amoureuse said, “the nuns of St. Radigund, with their
confessors and mass priest and the almoner, with crosses at their head
and candles burning, are marching out from the convent gate. And Jenkin,
the cripple, has cried up from the tower foot that they are marching out
to meet Sir Stanley’s slave, who is come bearing the cross of gold.”

“Say you so?” the Lady Blanche exclaimed. And, descending swiftly from
the hutch, she ran to the east window, and craning over the deep masonry
towards the open air, she could see that there was not any doubt about
it. The window was too small to show much of the valley side, but there
below her, their coifs waving and moving like the wings of birds in the
breeze, a procession of nuns, two and two, filed along, two priests in
purple vestments going before, with a man bearing up a silver gilt
cross, whilst a little farther up the hillside the figure in the white
shift stood still, as if it were astonished or afraid.

“Mercy on me, say you so!” the Lady Blanche exclaimed.

VI

Taking very little account of her eggs, the Sister Mary Lugdwitha of St.
John of Patmos galloped her astonished mule up to the locked and barred
gate of the convent that was built four square of grey stone, with a
great pigeon-cote at one corner, and a new chapel with a peaked roof at
the other, the spire of the bell-tower being still in building with the
scaffold poles all round it. The surrounding wall was blank and had no
windows, though upon two sides there were narrow slits, the loopholes
for arrows, which had been quite newly made, because there were so many
evil men about in those days. The Sister Lugdwitha, in her haste, rasped
so violently the pin in its ring that the lay sister Mercy, who kept the
gate, delayed for some minutes to open it, trembling because she thought
it had been robbers. And when they were through, the white mule stood
with its heaving flanks amongst the garbage and in the sunlight of the
courtyard, whilst the Sister Lugdwitha ran swiftly across the courtyard
to the white thatched hut of the Mother Superior.

Of these huts there were twenty-four, each with white mud wall and roofs
of reed thatching. One of each was allotted to the Mother Superior, the
sub-prioress, and the Mother of Ways and Means. Of the others, one each
was allotted to two mothers or lesser officials of the convent, to three
sisters, or to four lay sisters. These twenty-four cells housed in all
sixty-four religious women and took up three sides of the square. On the
fourth side was the stone dovecot that was as large as a church tower,
and had built against its side a little stone box of about the size of a
dog-kennel, in which there lived a pious and celebrated anchorite, who
had no communication with the outer world save by means of an orifice
about the size of a horse’s mouth. Here there were also, built of stone,
and against the wall, a large guest-chamber for the use of benighted
travellers, apartments for the two confessors and the male almoners of
the convent, for the fowler, the water fowler and the keeper of the fish
stews, for four serfs who kept the mules, swine, beasts, and sheep of
the convent, and, in the farther corner, the large chapel itself, which
was very splendid and highly painted. Across the centre of the courtyard
there ran a high fence, separating the men from the quarters of the
female religious. The gate of this was closed twenty minutes after the
tolling of the bell at the conclusion of vespers. Thus benighted
travellers who applied to the convent for hospitality after the closing
of the gates must be waited upon by the mass priests or the almoners,
who, when this occurred, received for their services from the convent
the sum of one halfpenny, whether or no the travellers next morning left
any offering in the box that stood upon the altar of St. Radigunda in
the chapel. This fence and these laws were very much resented by the
community. They had been instituted about a year ago by the new Reverend
Mother Mary Catherine of the Seven Doleurs, who had been brought from
Bayonne, in France, and forced upon them by the Lord Bishop of
Salisbury.

The nuns and sisters objected that this was not only harsh discipline,
but bad husbandry. For the nuns had been accustomed to take innocent
delight in listening to the converse of the travellers, whilst at
eventide they served and tended them. And the Mother Cellarer and
Kitchen Account Sister declared that they could not possibly render
their accounts reasonably, since the mass priest served out to the
travellers ale, wine, and meat with a lavish hand. It was none of his
gear that he was giving away, and the travellers rewarded his vicarious
hospitality with more cheerful and entertaining stories, the nuns
hearing through the night only the echo of their stories and the
choruses of their songs, and the whole community murmured at the heavy
burden that was cast upon them in the payment of one penny to the priest
for his services. If the Abbess would have this thing, it should be
paid, they said, out of her own revenues, and not by the community. And
they were saying even at that moment that the plague which had fallen
upon the hens, so that they withered up and died, remaining mere trusses
of dirty feathers—that this plague was a visitation upon the Mother
Abbess, to whose revenues the poultry money contributed. They
considered, also, that the running dry of the stew pond, so that they
had no fish, and the breaking of his leg by the fowler so that they had
neither wild duck, widgeon, teal, coot, nor moorhen to eat on fast
days—these afflictions, too, should be considered as serious warnings
to the Mother Abbess, though, since they fell upon the community and not
upon her revenues, they feared that she would be too stiff-necked so to
regard them.

But end the quarrel as it might, the Sister Lugdwitha, hurrying through
the dirt of the courtyard, must make her way through the gate in the
fence before she could reach the nuns’ quarters and the cell of the
Mother Abbess.

The Mother Abbess was a little, broad, brown woman with dangerous
twinkling eyes, so that it was not by haughtiness but by good humour,
imperious obstinacy, and never speaking at all except to promulgate her
regulations, that she so strictly ruled the community. Her cell was
formed by the bare walls of the hut painted blue, though in the right
hand corner the Sister Mary Radigunda of St. Veronica was standing
painting in red, blues, and greens a fresco representing the martyrdom
of St. Peter, who bore in his hand a key much greater than the gate of
Rome itself, which was represented in the background with its name
written above it in black letters. Upon a perch that protruded from the
wall high up near the thatch of the roof, sat the Mother Abbess’s
favourite hawk, for the Mother Abbess was a lady of knightly habit of
mind whose health demanded this exercise. Moreover, she was accustomed
to sell at her own price to the community such plovers, bustards, wild
pigeons, jackdaws as her hawks brought down upon the Plain. She was at
the moment standing before a reading pulpit, whereon stood the almoner’s
book of accounts, and she was saying: “Set the price of the oil down to
the community.”

She spoke French—French with which the almoner was little familiar, for
he heard and conversed mostly in the French of England. But so often had
he heard the words, “set that down to the community,” that he had no
need to ask the Abbess to repeat them. He was a fat, dark man who loved
peace, and wore a black gown with ragged white fur at its edges, and he
sighed a little. “The cellaress will cry out at the cost of the oil for
this lamp,” he said. “There will be a great outcry. It will be better
not to let the lamp be lit.”

“Then the convent should lose its rights,” the Abbess said.

“The lamp was never lit,” the almoner said, “in the time of the late
Abbess, and of the Abbess before her.”

“Then that is greatly to our shame,” she answered.

The Sister Radigunda, with her back to them painting at the fresco,
thought that here once more the Reverend Mother showed that she was
determined to ruin the community. The lamp was one provided for in the
deed of grant from the Blessed Confessor to the convent, which was set
down there on Salisbury Plain mainly to be a comfort to travellers upon
that great and desolate expanse. It was provided that it should hang
from a pole forty feet high, set upon the highest point of the convent
chapel, and it should be watched, tended, and kept burning all night, to
be a guide to such as were benighted upon the great Plain. Under the
late comfortable Abbesses whom the sister sighed to remember, this
practice had fallen into desuetude. It had two very serious
disadvantages. Not only did it cost money for oil and watchers; it
attracted many travellers who must be housed and fed.

But the new Abbess, coming from France, had straightway caused all the
deeds and charters of the convent to be read out before her, and hearing
that this pious practice had been abandoned she had for the first time
spoken very harshly, as if the community consisted of fools and impious
wretches, for she had said that it was a great laches against charity,
hospitality, and the love of God and His Mother, that this comfort to
poor wayfarers should have been abandoned, and that to show remissness
in the very action for which the community had been founded, on a day
when lawsuits assailed them on every hand in times that were very
evil—that such a remissness was sufficient to jeopardise the very
existence of the community. Whereas, as the sister and all sane persons
knew, the first duty of a community was to itself and its purse,
and—even supposing that the bodies of travellers dead of exhaustion or
cold on the heather, or drowned by night in the brooks of the Plain,
even supposing these should be found, a mark or two slipped into the
hand of the Bishop of Salisbury might persuade him very easily that
these had been done to death by the wicked gentry in whom the Plain
abounded, and by hanging up a lamp during such nights as those upon
which the Chancellor would be visiting, they could easily persuade him
that a lamp did burn there always.

Nevertheless the Abbess had persisted in her own way, and now with a
sigh the sister heard that the cost of the oil was to be set down to the
community.

The Sister Lugdwitha ran into the room very hot, speechless, and
perspiring. Upon her black skirt was the yolk of a broken egg, and her
coif was disarranged so that there showed itself some of her tawny hair.

“Oh, Reverend Mother,” she exclaimed, “the slave of Sir Stanley Egerton
is coming with the Gold Cross from Antioch, which was fashioned out of
the money of the usurers that our Lord drove out of the Temple!”

The Reverend Mother exclaimed, “Blessed be the Lord God and the saints
in Heaven!” But she appeared otherwise unmoved.

“And, Reverend Mother,” the sister gasped on, “as I rode along upon my
way it came into my head to think—merciful God, how short my poor wind
is!—it came into my head to think how worshipful, praiseworthy, and
religious a thing it would be to secure this Cross for the service and
adornment of our chapel of Radigunda.”

“What a folly is this!” the Abbess said. “And how is it that you are one
that have dared to gallop my own best mule?”

“But, Reverend Mother,” the Sister Lugdwitha pleaded, “this Cross is
renowned throughout all Christendom, for it was fashioned by Joseph of
Arimathea, who picked up secretly the gold that had fallen from the
tables of the money-changers that our Lord upset, and it works wonders,
so that great crowds shall come with offerings if we may but get it into
our chapel.”

“Reverend sister,” the Abbess said, “this Cross is none of ours. And if
our chapel should gain renown from it, it would be a renown that by
reason of outcries, lawsuits, and evil rumours should ultimately ruin
us. I will have none of this.”

The Sister Radigunda dropped suddenly her palette and brushes and she
faced round upon the three of them. The almoner was wiping his brow with
the sleeve of his gown, for the sight of the Sister Lugdwitha’s heat
made him perspire out of sympathy.

“Then if the Mother Abbess will have none of this,” the Sister Radigunda
said, whilst her eyes shone with a dark fury, “the community will debate
upon it. For the chapel of St. Radigunda is our affair and not that of
the Mother Abbess, and to consider of this most excellent project is our
affair and not hers. Come, almoner, come, sister, let us go swiftly from
here and call the others together.”

The almoner rolled large eyes of appeal towards the Abbess.

“Go, go!” she said. “Restrain them from follies if you can, though I
think you are not the man to do it.”

Left alone, the Abbess blinked her eyes contentedly and took the
opportunity to tell her beads, for which task in her busy life she had
not often the time. She was contented that the community should commit
follies, for with each folly the community grew more weak and she more
strong, and she was determined to turn these erring and wayward sheep
into an efficient company for the services of God. All around her the
convent began to buzz like a wasps’ hive, and it was not very long
before she heard how they raised a pious hymn of glorification as they
filed out through the convent gates.

VII

Mr. Sorrell, walking now somewhat gingerly on the warm turf and
descending into the valley which lower down appeared much more full of
trees, perceived a living being approaching him with singular speed. It
resembled a crocodile. It resembled a snake; it was brown and earthy; it
filled him at once with repulsion and with dislike for the fact that he
was so scantily clothed. For, immediately afterwards, he perceived that
it had the face of a very dirty man. scuttling towards him at a great
speed and on all fours, Upon its knees and its elbows it had things like
the clogs that women use when they are hanging out washing in wet
weather, and in one of its hands, which were disengaged because it used
its elbows instead of feet, it held a large earthenware dish with a
metal lid. It came quite close to him; it placed itself before him; it
snapped the lid of the dish with loud sounds, and uttered words of which
Mr. Sorrell could not make head or tail. He imagined that this must be
some kind of beggar, but he could not make out how it put its clothes
on. Its clothes were made up of bundles of rags, of wisps of dried
grass, of straw bands; and all these things seemed to be tied around its
body with old cords. It filled Mr. Sorrell with an indescribable
loathing. It had always been one of his principles never to relieve
beggars, and he had always considered that beggars ought to be
reasonably clean. He did not, that is to say, object to a man looking
like a clerk out of work and standing offering matches for sale just off
the kerb-stone in Regent Street. But this creature was grotesque,
lamentable, mournful, and moving. It was like a disagreeably conceived
picture executed with fantastic skill, and it seemed to bring poverty
much too close to Mr. Sorrell. He exclaimed in a sort of gusty panic:

“Go away, go away! No, no! I’ve no change on me. If you don’t go away I
shall report you to the police.”

He walked round the beggar and onwards down the path. The beggar pursued
him slowly on all fours, uttering mournful sounds, so that Mr. Sorrell
felt as if he were being followed by an objectionable and very dirty
dog. Very shortly afterwards, coming round an angle of the Down he saw a
large, square, stone enclosure which he took to be a workhouse, for it
had an unfinished chapel in one corner. Behind this, placed on a great
mound resembling a pudding-basin in shape, there rose up an enormous
grey, stone, very square castle.

“I shouldn’t have thought,” Mr. Sorrell said to himself, “that they
would have been allowed to put the workhouse so near the castle.”

And it struck him as very odd that round this castle there was no park
at all. It stood upon its green knoll, with the bottom lines of the
walls going straight along the grass. It was quite square, with
battlements all round the top, at a height of perhaps a hundred feet. In
one corner was a watch-tower, upon whose top Mr. Sorrell could discern
quite plainly the figure of a man and the heads of several women. He
stopped still to reflect before he got any nearer. He wondered what
castle this could be? It was very big, it was very complete, it was
obviously inhabited, he thought that he really ought to have known its
name. There could not be very many such edifices in England of that
date. It was very nearly as big and quite as spick-and-span as Windsor
itself.

Mr. Sorrell observed things rather slowly, and one after the other he
saw, firstly, a very large cross in front of the workhouse, and then a
number of hovels with mud walls and roofs of thick reed thatching. They
were scattered here and there amongst trees that ran down to the stream.
Then he perceived a grey stone bridge with what he took to be a
toll-keeper’s house in the centre of it. Yet it had pointed windows and
a large gilt cross on the gable. And then, as his eyes travelled along
the valley, he perceived at a distance of perhaps four miles the great
towers of another castle.

“By Jove! this is a rum show!” Mr. Sorrell said to himself; “here are
two large castles in one little valley. This must be a regular show
district.”

And it came into his head that this might very well be exploited
commercially. You might run excursions down or start a series of guides
to Undiscovered Beauty Spots. And he thought that when he got back to
town he would set Mr. Pudden, a hack writer who wrote popular memoirs
for him, to look up the less well-known castles of England, and see what
could be done with them. There was almost certainly money in it. But his
immediate condition was brought back to him by the fact that the beggar
had scuttled from behind his back and was making for the buildings. Mr.
Sorrell realised that he was confronted by a castle and by a workhouse.
He would certainly have to knock at the door of one or the other. The
castle probably contained a motor car; almost certainly it would have
two or three, and he very much wanted a motor-car. No doubt if he
revealed his identity and the pressing needs of his business, they would
lend him a car and run him up to town. On the other hand, he did not
wish that, in that guise, his identity should be known. It would cause
him to be chaffed for the rest of his life. His fellow publishers could
be very nasty, and none of them, he was aware, really liked him. He had
better knock at the workhouse door.

But if he did that it would mean delay. He was not certain that he would
not be taken into the casual ward and asked to break stones. He stood
still rubbing his naked foot upon his naked shin and cursing beneath his
breath. He could not see, anyhow, how he was to get out of being a
figure of fun for the rest of his life. It would horribly damage him in
business. He would not be able to take things with a high hand any more
when fellows were laughing at him behind his back. And with a sudden
tempestuous vigour he cursed the authorities of the Salisbury Hospital
who had let him escape when he must have been mad.

The gate of the workhouse fell back; there came out a white figure
carrying on high a crucifix. Then there were several little boys in
white, swinging brass censers with brass chains. Some workmen ran out of
the adjoining fields, and some women in grey dresses. There came out
from the convent a man in purple vestments, and behind him two more in
white linen surplices that shook in the breeze. And after that the
nuns—a great number of nuns, two and two, in black habits with coifs
waving like swans’ wings. The sound of singing came to him, melodious
and triumphant.

“God bless my soul!” Mr. Sorrell said, “I thought religious processions
were forbidden by law!”

And he remembered very strongly now that when the Roman Catholics had
attempted to carry the Sacrament through the streets of London, there
had been a great outcry some years before, and the thing was
stopped—quite rightly, as he thought. He must be upon the territory of
the Duke of Norfolk, and the castle must be one of the many castles of
His Grace, whom Mr. Sorrell had once met at a dinner of the Publishers’,
Booksellers’, and Newsvendors’ Association. Thinking himself at a
moderately safe distance, Mr. Sorrell remained still, and watched whilst
the procession came slowly towards him. He imagined that they would be
going to walk slowly round the large cross. And again the idea came into
his head that they must be practising for a large pageant. Perhaps the
whole county of Wiltshire was going to be engaged in it. They certainly
could not find a more picturesque place; but, on the other hand, what in
the world was the connection between a pageant and a workhouse?

In any case, his road towards either this castle or the workhouse was
barred for the moment. He certainly was not going to walk through all
that crowd. Men from the fields were turning up one by one, and, as the
end of the procession left the gate, belated nuns came running out after
it by ones and twos to take their station in its ranks. They had not,
Mr. Sorrell thought, managed the organising very well, and very shortly
afterwards he noticed that oddly-dressed figures were coming by ones and
twos from the gate of the castle, an enormous arch between two high
square towers. And then he realised that the procession was making
straight towards him, the confounded beggar scuttling along on his
elbows and knees as if to show them the way. Mr. Sorrell wanted to turn
back and run along the path by which he had descended into the
valley—but he felt hopelessly tired. He could not face the ascent. On
the other hand, just behind him there were some high mounds of gorse. If
he slipped behind these and knelt down he would be fairly out of sight
till they had passed. He found a nearly circular hollow. It had the
disadvantage that the spines of the gorse pricked him through his
nightshirt, but when he knelt down he was certainly quite hidden from
view. He could not any longer see the procession, but he supposed he
would be able to hear it when it went past. He knelt, therefore, in some
tranquillity. The sun poured its warm rays down into the motionless air;
great bees buzzed sleepily above his head. The sound of the singing died
away, and in his intense weariness Mr. Sorrell dropped asleep.

* * * * *

He was always very dizzy and stupid upon awakening, so that when he was
gently shaken he had not the least idea where he was. Then he saw the
dirty face of the beggar peering at him through the bushes, whilst an
old man in priest’s robes was gently shaking his shoulder, and trying to
remove from his finger the ring of the Egerton cross.

Mr. Sorrell started to his feet and recoiled. The spines of the gorse
bushes ran very sharply into his back.

“Look here,” he said, “for goodness’ sake give me something to put on.”

For, standing up, he perceived that all round the little ring of bushes
were nuns, priests, thurifers, and a small crowd of rather dirty people
in rather dirty fancy dress. The priest shook his head as if he did not
very well understand Mr. Sorrell, and once more he extended his hand
towards the cross.

“Oh no! I can’t let that go out of my keeping,” Mr. Sorrell said; “it
isn’t my property. I believe it is immensely valuable.”

But when he placed the hand with the cross behind his back, the old
priest grasped his other wrist, and said “Come!” in French.

“But I’m not coming,” Mr. Sorrell ejaculated. “I can’t come like this
before all these women.”

The old priest gently forged ahead, pulling Mr. Sorrell after him, and
Mr. Sorrell’s bare feet made resistance an impracticable affair.
Besides, he thought that it only rendered the episode all the more
ridiculous. And it flashed into his head that they must think that that
was his fancy costume, and that he had been coming to take part in the
pageant. Perhaps they had mistaken him for someone else who had not
turned up.

“But I’m hanged,” Mr. Sorrell said, “if I should have come walking in
this costume, even if I’d had to wear it in the pageant. I’d have come
in a motor, jolly well wrapped up.”

And then once more a new flash of inspiration came to him. They must be
acting the legend of the Greek Slave, the simple, faithful soul who had
brought the cross to Tamworth. For all he knew, that was Tamworth Castle
just in front of him, and, indeed, what could be more appropriate than
they should there act that simple and touching story?

“By Jove!” he said to himself, “what will the other chap think if he
turns up?”

But in spite of this comparatively rational explanation, Mr. Sorrell,
when he came out from the shelter of the bushes, could not help a
feeling of abashment. He was surrounded by nuns; they called out with
expressions of delight. He heard words like “Glory, glory!” They raised
their hands on high ecstatically, and one and another of them tried to
take the cross from him. But he was not going to let it go. They might
be quite respectable people in the show, but they seemed to be nearly
all foreigners, and in the large crowd that they had got to act, there
must be some members of the lower classes.

Then the other priest in his vestments shouldered his way
unceremoniously through the women. He was a beetle-browed, dark man. He
took hold of the cross with no faltering grasp.

“Look here,” Mr. Sorrell said, “if you think I am the chap that’s acting
in this pageant you’re mistaken,” and he pulled the cross sharply from
the priest “This is not an imitation thing, and I’m not going to let it
out of my keeping.”

The priest said some harsh words in a French dialect.

“Puisque je vous dis que je ne la rendrai pas!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed.

The priest appeared to consider. Then he shrugged his shoulders. He
turned round and addressed some angry words to the nuns. They began to
fall into ranks again. The procession was re-forming itself. The priest
appeared to be a very impatient and dictatorial creature. He struck a
knock-kneed and palsied old man who got in his way such a blow behind
the ear that he fell down into the bushes. He wore an odd sort of cape,
with an old hood that went down like a funnel far below his twisted
leather belt. This, however, did not divert any of the glances from Mr.
Sorrell. The procession had formed itself, the nuns stretching out in a
long double file. The old priest elevated the cross, the two thurifers
held their censers ready, and the priest in vestments motioned with his
hand for Mr. Sorrell to stand behind them.

“I am not really the chap who belongs to this show,” Mr. Sorrell said.

The priest only stamped his foot. And it occurred to Mr. Sorrell that
after all it would be his best way to get into the workhouse. It would
look much less odd to march in his nightgown in the procession than to
walk alone, especially as they seemed to be expecting someone in his
nightgown. When he once got into the building he would be able to
apologise, and then perhaps they would lend him the other fellow’s
clothes.

All these people seemed to be singularly intent upon their acting. They
had not, he remembered, paid the slightest attention to anything that he
said. No doubt it was a strain, taking part in that sort of thing. And,
imagining that he was entering quite into the spirit of it, Mr. Sorrell
took his place immediately in front of the priest and immediately behind
the thurifers. Then, with the censers swinging and the fresh breeze
blowing the smoke aside, the whole body got into motion. The crowd ran
along beside them, calling out in high voices until the singing began
again.

VIII

As well as he could see things for the incense smoke, which rather
stifled him, Mr. Sorrell perceived that a number of people were hurrying
from the gates of the castle towards the building which he had taken to
be a workhouse. There were old men with pikes and axes, two or three
little boys with enormous swords which they bore over their shoulders,
and four or five very old men indeed who carried crossbows.

At last there came running three ladies dressed—one, all in blue with a
great head-dress like a steeple which raked high over her head, was tied
round with gold cords. They glittered in the sun, and from them there
depended a veil of white lawn that fluttered like a flag. She too
carried a great sword, and she ran like a deer to get in front of the
procession, which was nearing the workhouse gates. The two other women
were dressed in grey, with sleeves of white lawn and with white hennins
whose lines resembled the coifs that the nuns wore. The lady with the
sword took up her position in the gateway of the workhouse. With high,
hasty, and angry words she called the incongruous array of armed old men
and boys to form into a knot behind her, so that the gateway was
entirely filled up. A jagged array of spiky weapons, most of them very
rusty, were pushed out towards the advancing procession. And, when they
were no more than a few yards off, the procession itself came to an
irregular halt.

“What the deuce is all this?” Mr. Sorrell asked of one of the little
thurifers in front of him. “What _is_ the old story? Did the lady of the
castle try to bag the gold cross and the faithful slave? Or was it the
nuns who tried to bag it and she enter a gentle protest?”

The boy looked at Mr. Sorrell in a stupid way and shook his head.

“Don’t _any_ of you understand English?” Mr. Sorrell asked.

There was at this point a good deal of shouting, and from the nuns came
sounds of consternation and anger. The priest was consulting with the
foremost of them. He too showed animation and bad temper. And then
suddenly a very high voice called out imperatively in French that there
was no misunderstanding:

“Silence! Dogs!”

It was the lady with the sword.

Mr. Sorrell had let himself drop into the rôle of a dispassionate
spectator. It suited him very well and, since no one appeared to notice
his garment, he had lost any feeling of uneasiness, though he was
growing afraid that with all this delay he would miss his last train to
town. At the same time the pageant itself was really interesting, he
could not deny it. He had no idea that people went about these things
with such earnestness. It might almost have been real life. There was
one old chap with a sort of double-jointed flail that had three iron
spiked balls jangling about on chains at its end. And there was another
old man who had a great deal of difficulty in setting his rusty
crossbow. He put the point upon the ground and pulled up the cord with
both hands until it fitted into the notch. As for the lady with the
steeple hat, she was behaving with the most extraordinary vigour,
shouting out commands in a French Mr. Sorrell could almost understand,
and banging the flat of her great long sword against the doddering and
stupid members of the crowd who chanced to get in the way. The outer
sleeves of the blue gown were so long that they brushed the ground when
she was not waving her arms in the air. The bare sword, when it was not
in use, she carried over her shoulder as if it were a sentinel’s gun.

After a long pause, the priest and two of the foremost nuns approached
the lady. Immediately her eyes blazed with wrath and indignation, and
with both, her hands she elevated the sword above her head. The old men
poked out their pike-heads, the little boys shook their swords as well
as they could, and cried:

“Ho! a Coucy d’Enguerrand!”

The bowmen pointed their crossbows. As far as Mr. Sorrell could hear,
the lady said that nobody was going to be allowed to enter that convent.
The priest uttered a number of inaudible words, and one of the nuns said
something very energetically, pointing at the priest; and there was no
mistaking the lady when she said that she would split the priest in half
like a pig that was going to be killed. At this horror overtook the
nuns, and they screamed. The lady spoke in such a high voice and with
such distinctness, that Mr. Sorrell had very little difficulty in
understanding her. At the same time it seemed to him to be odd that they
should all speak French. He could only think that the Pageant Committee
must have hired a company of French nuns for the performance. From what
the lady said, Mr. Sorrell began to make out dimly the story. They were
certainly quarrelling about him, or rather about the Greek slave that
for the moment he represented.

In his interest at the unrolling of the plot, Mr. Sorrell found himself
moving continually a little nearer. At last he stood almost immediately
behind the priest and two nuns in a little open space from which the
crowd had been driven. He was beginning very quickly to get the hang of
the language, which seemed to him very much to resemble the Provençal
that he had heard when he was inspecting a tin mine in the South of
France. He caught words here and there, and of the rest his brain seemed
automatically to fill in the sense.

As far as he could make it out, the priest’s proposal was that the nuns
should have the custody of the cross of St. Joseph until the return from
the wars of Sir John Egerton of Tamworth. On the other hand, the lady
insisted that if the convent once got possession of the cross they would
never give it up. Her voice was high and hard, and she cited instances
such as how the Priory of Bridgewater went with a band of robbers and
stole from the monks of Taunton the relics of St. Ostaurius, which were
being translated with only a feeble guard from Godstow to Taunton
itself. She mentioned also how certain monks near Cologne by force and
fraud stole from Cologne Cathedral a large number of the relics of the
11,000 Virgins. She seemed, indeed, to Mr. Sorrell to have a memory
exceedingly stored with misdeeds committed by various members of the
monastic orders, and she cited grievances of her own against this very
convent. These matters were, however, too complicated for Mr. Sorrell to
follow, though he immensely admired the lady’s spirit and the way her
eyes flashed. And she repeated again and again, that once the cross got
into the hands of the nuns it would never come out again. For they would
hide it away somewhere, or build it into their altar and swear that it
was sacrilege to take it thence by force.

The priest and the nuns, as far as Mr. Sorrell could understand,
represented that even if they were not themselves the proper guardians
of the cross, no more was this lady whom Mr. Sorrell understood to be
the Lady Blanche de Coucy d’Enguerrand. But surely the cross should be
delivered into the hands of the Lady Dionissia de Egerton de Tamville.
The Lady Blanche gave it to be understood that that was a foolish and a
frivolous remark, for was the Lady Dionissia even married to the good
Knight of Egerton of Tamworth? The Lady Dionissia was not even married,
but merely contracted by proxy and sent for inspection to the Knight of
Tamworth. The Knight of Tamworth had not so much as seen her, for he had
gone away on his Scotch wars before ever the Lady Dionissia had reached
there, coming from her home in the Northern Marches of Wales. It was
therefore evident, the Lady Blanche said, that the Lady Dionissia was
not the proper custodian of the cross, but that she herself was, since
she was the cousin and next heiress to the fief of Egerton of Tamworth.

The priest, on the other hand, persisted that the Lady Dionissia was the
proper guardian, the contract of marriage being made and during the
period of inspection the lady enjoying all the privileges and rights of
a knight’s wife. The Lady Blanche replied that it was true that the Lady
Dionissia enjoyed all the privileges of rights of a knight’s wife, but
these affected only her rank. They gave her no titles to property.

And whilst Mr. Sorrell was amazed at the nicety with which these two
people split hairs, he thought it grew tiresome, and that after all it
detracted somewhat from the merit of the pageant as a rendering of
history. Life in the Middle Ages was such a very simple affair. He did
not really suppose that they actually had any laws at all, whereas what
they were carrying on now was rather more complicated than an average
argument about mining rights in the Court of Chancery. And suddenly the
Lady Blanche acted in a way which much more resembled Mr. Sorrell’s idea
of procedure in mediæval times.

She had been gazing hard at Mr. Sorrell, who was looking at her
admiringly over the priest’s shoulder, and suddenly with both hands she
raised her enormous sword. The nuns shrieked and ran away; even the
priest, beetle-browed and militant, moved several paces to the right.
And then, with an extraordinarily hard grip, she had Mr. Sorrell by the
wrist, dropping the sword on to the ground, where it jangled and
vibrated.

“Come, thou!” she exclaimed, and Mr. Sorrell felt a jerk in his shoulder
such as pulled him past her and right in amongst the men with the pikes
and the axes. He was surrounded by all these armed men, as if he were
inside a British square at Tel-el-Kebir.

“Well now!” he exclaimed, “that’s more like business.”

The nuns surged round them, lifting their hands on high and crying out
with their coifs waving. But the Lady Blanche called out to her men:

“Ho, fellows! March!”

And Mr. Sorrell had to move along with some expedition in order that his
bare heels might avoid the points of their shoes.

Before they had gone a dozen yards the body of them all halted, for they
missed their natural leader. The Lady Blanche—Mr. Sorrell saw her over
an array of weapons that resembled a bedraggled hedge—the Lady Blanche
was talking energetically to the Abbess, who had appeared beneath the
gateway. She was telling the Abbess that thus she was foiled in her evil
design; that it was time that some of the great ones of the land thus
handled the Churchmen who were growing too fat and haughty. She was
minded to come in a very short time with some of her men and to burn the
convent about the ears of the nuns. The Abbess blinked at her with mild
and indulgent irony.

She said that it was none of her business that the nuns had come to take
the cross; the chapel was in the care of the community, and in nowise
affected her revenues as Abbess.

The Lady Blanche shrugged her shoulders, and uttered a laugh of
derision. She said that the Abbess was all one pack with the others.

The Abbess smiled again, and she said that she would to God she might be
the first to suffer amongst the religious of the Church. For assuredly
the Church grew fat by means of persecution, as was well seen in the
case of the Blessed Martyr Thomas of Canterbury, whom the King having
had killed, he was forced to do penance, and afterwards to forfeit to
the Church a good part of his own lands.

The Lady Blanche laughed highly. They were not, she said, in those old
outlandish times, which were a hundred years ago, or more. Now they were
differently inclined.

The Abbess said that that was very well, for no one had laid hands upon
the Churchmen since that time. And if one once more should be slain,
assuredly it would very much augment the faith of that realm of England
in what was assuredly an age of unbelief.

The Lady Blanche retorted: would the Abbess have them returned to the
dark and gross superstitions of their fathers and grandfathers, when it
was believed that by a stroke of the pen a Churchman could turn silver
into gold, the blessings of heavy crops of wheat into black blight, or
night into day? Now that so many could write, these puffed-up
pretensions had had the wind let out of them.

The Abbess raised her voice at last, because she intended to be heard on
all sides:

“Go your ways off our grounds!” she said. “Madam, you are a foolish
woman, and it was the best day that the convent has had that you and not
my flock took the cross to itself. I had rather you had been the thief
than we. But now go off this ground, which is holy, having known the
tread and been the gift of the blessed Edward Confessor. Because you
took the cross I have no ill-will against you, but I have no time to
bandy words with you, nor are a pair of women fit to discuss holy
mysteries, though I dwell among them and am more fit to discuss them
than you. But this I tell you, that if you further profane this ground
against the will of me who am Abbess, an action shall lie against you in
the Bishop’s Court, and be referrable to the Court of Rome—such a
lawsuit as shall cost you some of your land.”

And incontinently the Abbess retired into the little wicket chamber of
the sister that kept the gates. She closed the door in the Lady
Blanche’s face, for it was her intention to have the last word.

The Lady Blanche breathed deep in her chest with rage that she could not
satisfy, and then she called to her the little page Jehan to pick up her
great sword, which still lay upon the ground. Fire flashed from her
eyes, and her hands were clenched as she went towards her armed men,
thinking of how she would be avenged upon this Churchwoman who had
eluded her. She came right in among them, and, calling out to them to
march, she walked herself by Mr. Sorrell’s side.

She looked at him with a keen, hard glance.

“You come from Cyprus,” she said in French. And her words seemed to him
the more intelligible because she must speak in a high voice to be heard
over the clinking of old chain harness, the jangling of swords, and the
brushing sounds of the buskins of her men as they marched over the turf.

“No, I come from New York,” Mr. Sorrell said as loud as he could.

“You come from Palestine,” the lady exclaimed.

“I’ve _been_ to Palestine,” Mr. Sorrell conceded. “I’ve been a little
all over the world. I have travelled a great deal.”

“You were born in the East,” the lady exclaimed.

“I was born in Wimbledon,” Mr. Sorrell answered; “that is not the East
End. It’s Wimbledon S.W. now, though when I was born it was right in the
country.”

“I do not understand you very well,” the Lady Blanche said, “but you are
a very holy man, are you not?”

“I say!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed in English, “have we got to go on playing
this old pageant all the time? Can’t we let it up just a minute? I
should just like to know about the trains from here.”

The Lady Blanche looked at him with the dull eyes of a person who does
not understand. She called to her the old man who had the flail with the
iron balls hanging from it.

“Thou wast”—and now to Mr. Sorrell she seemed to be speaking a sort of
German platt such as you may hear in Hessen-Darmstadt—“Thou wast in the
Holy Land. Speak with this man if you may.”

The old man had lost an eye; his face was very brown and clean, though
his jerkin was stained, weather-beaten, and very ragged. He addressed
Mr. Sorrell in a dialect that Mr. Sorrell could not catch hold of at
all. The words seemed to flow by him.

“Oh! I can’t get the hang of him!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed to the Lady
Blanche. “He seems to be talking of Ragussa and Cyprus and Byzantium and
Jaffa. What is _he_ acting? A Crusader? The Crusaders did not go to
those places, did they? I should have thought they’d have sailed
straight to somewhere near St. Jean d’Acre. They wouldn’t want to go
fooling up in the Adriatic.”

Still the Lady Blanche appeared to understand none of his words.

“I speak no Greek,” she exclaimed; “But you were born in Byzantium?”

“Well, it’s a funny thing,” Mr. Sorrell commented, “my father’s villa at
Wimbledon was called ‘Constantinople,’ because he built it during the
Crimean War—Yes, oui——”

And as she still looked at him with questioning eyes, he added:

“C’est vrai, je suis de Byzance.”

These words appeared to afford her much satisfaction, for her brow
cleared, and she asked him if he had not been a slave of Mahomed,
rescued and baptized by the good Knight Egerton of Tamworth.

Mr. Sorrell was tired to the point of silliness.

“Oh, hang it all!” he said to himself, “if they’re going to carry on
this pageant racket with this deadly seriousness I guess I’ve just got
to give in. It beats me. They’re too persistent.” And he added aloud:
“Oui, je suis venu à pied de Sandwich tout seul.”

The satisfaction upon the Lady Blanche’s face continued to grow. She
said that without doubt he had been protected by the angels of God and
by a mother’s gratitude, for the roads were covered by robbers. Mr.
Sorrell remarked that he supposed that that was the case, though he did
not see where the mother’s gratitude came in. The lady replied that the
mother of the knight had been living until a few months ago, and that
the knight had sent several messengers home from the Holy Land and
whilst he was returning. These messengers had reported how the slave had
watched over his master out of gratitude for having rescued him from the
hands of the Saracens. And Mr. Sorrell learnt how his prototype had in
open battle twice saved his master’s life when his horse was killed; how
he had extinguished the Greek fire that the Saracens had cast upon the
knight’s helmet; and how when his master had been wounded by a poisoned
arrow of the barbarous Ruthenians the faithful slave had sucked the
poison from the wound. Moreover, when the knight had slept in the desert
the slave had watched over him, and had driven away venomous serpents,
or had awakened the knight in time to confront the huge dragons with
which the desert abounded. And all these things being reported to the
knight’s mother had filled her with very great gratitude to the slave,
so that she had passed whole days upon her knees beseeching favour and
protection from heaven alike upon the one as the other.

“It seems to me,” Mr. Sorrell thought to himself, “that I run against
maternal gratitude all the time. It was only just the other day that
Mrs. Lee-Egerton was thanking me for saving the last of the line of
Egerton from prison, and calling down the blessings of heaven upon my
head. I suppose that wretched little bad hat would be the descendant of
this old knight who went walloping dragons round Cairo way.”

And he remembered how Mrs. Lee-Egerton had said that the blessings of
heaven would be poured down upon his head if ever he was in a tight
place.

“Therefore,” the Lady Blanche said, “because of the gratitude of this
mother who was my mother’s sister, you shall be very greatly honoured
and feasted at my castle. Baths shall be made ready for you and wine and
great feasts, so that you shall eat till your skin cracks.”

“Oh! I have to think of my liver,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “but I could
certainly do with a bit!”

“Without doubt,” the Lady Blanche continued, “you are a very holy man,
for you have faithfully served your master and travelled in many lands,
having been without doubt in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Rome, and in
the town of St. Jago of Compostella, and no doubt at Canterbury too.”

“Why!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “yes, I have been in all these places, now
you come to mention it. J’ai roulé ma bosse un peu partout.”

It was the look of returning non-comprehension in the lady’s eyes that
really puzzled Mr. Sorrell. For the slang of his French, if it were
slang, was yet so old-fashioned that _any_ one ought to have been able
to understand it.

And then, with the slightest queer start, Mr. Sorrell found that he was
not any more thinking of these people as taking part in a pageant. They
were too much in earnest. And anyhow, they must have been playing the
pageant for twenty years at the very least. Their lances were old and
rusty; their pikes notched in the blade and greasy in the stave from
long handling. Their clothes were practically all very much worn and
old. No, he could not get away from the feeling that they were just
living their normal lives.

And for a moment he felt like Rip Van Winkle. Supposing that his railway
accident had really made him see something queer? Supposing that all
these people were really just ghosts? He did not believe in ghosts. But,
on the other hand, he was modern enough to know that in these days
anything might happen, and suddenly he found himself saying to himself,
that though he could not for the life of him say what he believed, he
would not equally for the life of him say that he disbelieved any single
thing.

Such queer things did happen, that you would have said would have been
impossible about the time when he had been born in Constantinople Villa,
Wimbledon. What a right down practical modern man like himself had to do
before all things was just to keep an open mind. Twenty years ago people
would have laughed at the idea of flying as the dream of a visionary.
Nowadays, people were flying about just as they liked, so that it was as
easy to fly from Putney to the Welsh Harp as it was to go by bus. And it
was not only in merely mechanical things that advances had been made,
there were all sorts of other queer things. There were new odd
religions, which might or might not do what they professed to do. At his
club there was old General Lathrop, who had one evening bored him to
death by insisting on making him look at portfolio after portfolio of
drawings which the General had said had been executed by spirits in his
own house.

Mr. Sorrell had never taken much interest in spiritualism and that sort
of thing. He had always been too busy. But you could not help knocking
against it. There was the drawing-room of his aunt, old Lady Wells, to
which he went occasionally, out of a sense of duty, on a Sunday
afternoon, and it was always full of estimable people, who told him the
most extraordinary things that you could not in the ordinary way believe
in. He had heard of the dead speaking from a distance, just as he heard
of the stone-blind being cured by Christian science, the new Homœopathy
or by mere psychic force. There was nobody dead with whom he had ever
wanted in the least to communicate; he had never been stone-blind.
Indeed, he had never had any illness that, in his active life, he had
not been able to counteract with a pill or two at the right moment. But
he had always held that if he ever came to suffer from nerves, as the
result of overwork, it would be a quite rational thing to put himself
into the hands of Christian Scientists, or any other healers that claim
supernatural gifts. He had never been anything but a perfectly normal,
tolerant, open-minded man, without any creed in particular other than
that the world was a very large place in which a number of odd things
might happen.

And suddenly he asked the lady at his side:

“What year do you call this?”

The lady looked at him with large eyes that were rather mysterious, now
that her temper had subsided.

“Have you travelled so far, holy man?” she said. “It is the year of our
Lord, 1326.”

Mr. Sorrell said:

“The deuce it is! 1326! What happened then?”

And very rapidly in his mind he ran through the dates of the Kings of
England from the Conquest upwards. He could not get beyond Henry III,
1216. He positively could not remember a single date between that and
the Battle of Agincourt, which he remembered was in the year 1415,
because it was just 400 years before Waterloo. Neither of these dates
helped him to the year 1326. The Battle of Bannockburn, which he knew
happened in the reign of Edward II, must have been somewhere between
1216 and 1326.

For the moment he felt rather ashamed of his ignorance. It was perfectly
true that no modern business man need bother his head about history. He
would not mind betting that his friend Spicer and Wells, who was, next
himself, the smartest man in the book publishing business—he would not
mind betting that Spicer would not be able to get as far as Henry III.
But the lady beside him was probably chock full of historical knowledge.
After all, there was no reason why a woman should not be, for women had
nothing else in particular to do, and could monkey with that sort of
nonsense. At the same time, though it was nonsense, he did not care to
confess himself ignorant even in parlour tricks. The lady would probably
look down upon him, for she would not know much of his other varied and
splendid attainments. So that he did not pursue his historical
investigations any further. On the other hand, because it had struck him
as odd that amongst her retainers there was not one in the prime of
life, he asked her, in order to make conversation—that would be in the
picture—for he was sure that she would not talk about anything
modern—he asked her:

“Why is it that the youngest of your men appears to be sixty, and very
tender on his feet? The eldest of your boys is that one carrying the
large sword, and with golden curls. He can’t be more than fourteen.”

“Holy man,” the Lady Blanche answered, “can you be so ignorant of what
is happening to-day as not to know that my husband is away at the wars
in Scotland?”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Mr. Sorrell said. To himself he thought: “Then I
suppose that this _is_ about the time of the battle of Bannockburn.” He
continued aloud:

“I don’t see why that should leave you with such a singular collection
of armed soldiers.”

“Holy man,” the lady said, “are you so ignorant as not to know that my
husband will have taken with him all the able-bodied men to fight in the
battle of our lord the King? So that in all the countryside there is no
man so proper, so fearless, or so erect as yourself.”

“Well, it’s very kind of you to say that,” Mr. Sorrell said, “but I
should have thought a husband would have wanted to leave a wife better
protected.”

The lady’s eyes hardened; her chest heaved very high and swiftly under
her green dress, and she began to speak so fast that Mr. Sorrell had the
greatest difficulty in following her.

“There you speak the very truth of God,” she said; “this is what the
lords of to-day are. There you have my lord and master gone away. A
thousand or two thousand pounds he will squander, and what will he bring
back of booty? Not one penny’s-worth. What honours? None at all, for he
is embroiled with the Queen Mother past mending. Holy man, you do not
know what a fool my lord and master is.”

And with an enormous swiftness the Lady Blanche poured a torrent of
words in some story of how the Knight Enguerrand de Coucy and his cousin
Egerton of Tamworth had set their archers to shoot arrows upon the
knights of Sir John of Hainault, who lay with the King at Newcastle.

“By little good St. Luke,” the lady concluded, slackening the speed of
the torrent of words and gazing almost affectionately into Mr. Sorrell’s
eyes, “can you wonder that some ladies are unfaithful to their lords, as
is the common complaint nowadays? Do our lords pay us the proper
attention which wife would exact of husband? no! Not at all. In the last
nine years, my Lord of Enguerrand has spent not six weeks quiet at home,
but when he was not prancing in Scotland he was laying waste in
Flanders, or tilting against the Saracens in Spain. And are not women of
certain beauty made to be courted and made much of? But indeed you will
see that in all the country round there is not a personable man. So that
I think the best of them is my little page Jehan, who you will perceive
struts gallantly enough, carrying the large sword. But for anything
else, it is a very tedious and disgusting life that we lead who are the
great ladies of the realm of England. And for myself, I spend days in
plotting revenge upon this monstrous husband of mine.”

She looked fixedly into Mr. Sorrell’s eyes.

“Yes, I will take such a revenge—if only I can think of one—as shall
render my lord and master a laughingstock through all the realms of
chivalry.”

“Oh, I say,” Mr. Sorrell said, “you oughtn’t to think of that sort of
thing—men will be men, you know—and dissensions between husband and
wife are very unpleasant. As for myself, I detest family quarrels. They
just lead to everybody being hurt, and nobody gaining the value of a
centime.”

“Ah!” the Lady Blanche said, “if I can only think how, I will have such
a revenge! . . .”

“Oh, but my beautiful and dear lady,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “that is a
most unfortunate frame of mind to have got into. Just let us see if I
can’t help you with your business affairs, and then you’ll feel better.
You can get up some little fêtes—things like tennis tournaments with
your neighbours—that will make the time pass more easily.”

“Tournaments!” the lady exclaimed, for in her turn she had not
understood more of Mr. Sorrell’s French than that one word. “Why, that
is a very splendid inspiration.”

They passed at that moment under the great archway, and came into the
courtyard, which was all in shadow because of its very high walls.

“Now I will take you to your bath,” the lady said. “I hope you will
clean yourself very well, for in order to do you honour I will have you
eat out of the same plate as myself at supper to-night.”

IX

The armed men all around them had dispersed at the voice of the page
Jehan, and the Lady Blanche was directing Mr. Sorrell’s steps towards
the gate of the large keep. In the middle of the courtyard it frowned, a
great mass of stone, towering high up above the surrounding walls.

“But, look here,” Mr. Sorrell said in English, “isn’t it about time this
pageant business came to an end? I am always anxious to oblige, but I’ve
really got business on hand that makes me want to get up to town as
quickly as possible.”

The Lady Blanche shook her head, and then the two ladies attendant upon
her came upon them. They were somewhat out of breath, for they had not
been able to keep step with the armed men.

“Ladies,” the Lady Blanche said, “it is very negligent of you not to
have attended on me better; but take now this holy man to his bath, and
attend upon him with all the diligence that you may, for such an
excellent man as this is not often seen, and he has put into my head
such an idea as, by God’s grace, shall win us great honour, and redound
for ever to the ridicule of our abominable men-folk.”

All these things seemed to move somewhat too fast for Mr. Sorrell
exactly to get the hang of them. He had a vague idea that he ought to
put his foot down and insist upon some sort of explanation, but his feet
were quite literally the weakest part of him, and on the rough paving of
the courtyard they betrayed him at every step. He felt that he was being
gently coerced by people who were the most amiable in the world, but by
people who did not pay the least attention to any of his desires or even
to any of his words. The Lady Blanche had already, with her swift and
determined gait, entered the arched door of the Inner Keep, the pendant
cloth from her high steeple hat fluttering bravely behind her. The
bowmen and pikemen had mostly disappeared into what appeared to be the
stony hollows of the great walls. But he had the feeling that all sorts
of shaggy and tousled heads were peering at them out of crevices and
crannies that formed the windows in the immense cliff of stone that shut
them all in. A certain grimness, a certain ugliness rather astonished
Mr. Sorrell; he could not see why if people could afford to build a
castle like this, they could not equally afford to beautify it. But
there were no rose bushes on the bare stone of the wall; there was no
ampeloposis; there was not even any ivy. It was all straight up and down
hard, grey stone, so that he had the feeling of being at the bottom of
an immense well; whilst far up above them a flag of red and white
chequers fluttered lazily against the blue sky.

The two ladies led him slowly forward; he was limping painfully, for his
feet had become decidedly tender. Thus before he knew exactly where he
was, he was being led up three stone steps into an immensely large,
draughty, and bare hall. The roof was vaulted, and had wooden beams
across it very high up. The walls were quite bare, except that on the
right-hand side, upon a sort of a platform ascending the wall and coming
forward upon a square framework, was a broad and very long Turkey
carpet.

“Well, that’s a daïs, anyhow,” Mr. Sorrell said to himself. “I know what
that is.”

On each side of the daïs there protruded from the wall a lance, and from
each lance depended a banner. The one was very faded and coloured light
blue with stripes of pale yellow, the other was newer and with a pattern
of red and white chequered. Against the right-hand side of the length of
the hall some very long boards were laid, and beside them were upturned
trestles and long wooden benches. In the left-hand further corner were a
rusty plough, a number of spades, and perhaps twenty or thirty reaping
hooks upon long staves. The windows along the outer side of the hall
were without glass, arched and very tall, and barred with iron bars
which had been painted red and white in chequers, like the banner to the
right of the dais. Near the door there was a great untidy heap of rushes
nearly as tall as a man, and this was being added to from the detritus
of the rest of the stone floor by three other old women with long wooden
rakes. At the same time, through a window at the farther end of the
hall, three old women with pitchforks were shovelling new rushes from a
cart that stood outside.

“Why, you’re tidying up a bit, I see,” said Mr. Sorrell pleasantly; “not
before it was needed either. Look at all those bones! I suppose this is
your salle-à-manger.”

He said this by way of a joke, for he could not imagine that any people
of distinction could, even for the sake of a pageant, sit down to eat in
such a place. The flagstones of the floor were really disgustingly
dirty, and there must be a tremendous draught from all the unglazed
windows.

But the Lady Amoureuse, catching only the one word _manger_, hastened to
assure him that very soon he should eat. The trumpet for washing hands
would blow in a little half hour. The whiteness of this holy man’s skin
after so many days of travel evidenced that assuredly he had been under
angelic protection—if, indeed, he had not actually been received up to
heaven to rest himself after his journey from Palestine to Sandwich—or
if, indeed, he was not actually an angel himself, who had been sent from
heaven as a distinguished mark of favour to the very high and noble
family of Egerton of Tamworth. She understood next that this very holy
man positively desired clothes and linen. She made out at least those
words from the odd perversion of French French that he insisted on
speaking. This appeared to her a singular desire; for his single white
garment, long and spotless in its purity, seemed to her to be exactly
appropriate for one who came bearing the holy cross which St. Joseph of
Arimathea had fashioned from the gold of the money-changers in the
temple. Why should he desire the ordinary and vile clothes of mankind,
when he had himself this garment of a whiteness so peculiar, of a
smoothness so alluring, and of an unknown and possibly celestial fabric?
But there could not be any doubt that this holy man was persistently and
even with agitation demanding clothes before he ate. She commanded,
therefore, the Lady Blanchemain to go to their lady and mistress, and to
put before her this singular demand.

The Lady Blanchemain grumbled ominously. She said that it was exactly
like the Lady Amoureuse, with her pallid beauty, to insist upon being
left alone with anybody of any distinction who chanced to be in her
vicinity. But, with a haughty indifference, the Lady Amoureuse informed
her that this was a command from a feudal superior to an inferior. She
was forced to do her duty: the holy man desired clothes. And reluctantly
the little Lady Blanchemain ran over the dirty floor of the hall to come
to their mistress as soon as might be.

Holding his hand very gently, the Lady Amoureuse led Mr. Sorrell across
the gloomy hall through a little door and out into the warm sunshine of
an inner court. Here in the walls there were many doors, for it was in
this courtyard that there were the kitchens. A pile of the skins of
cattle lay in one corner of the yard, and all the ground was clammy and
noisome with vestiges of the slaughter of beasts and of cookery. The
stench was almost intolerable to Mr. Sorrell, though the Lady Amoureuse
counteracted it quite equably by holding to her nose a small bag of lawn
filled with dry cloves, lavender, peppercorns, and spices, which was
hung round her waist by a silken cord. A narrow causeway of white stones
ran across this evil ground, and in the farthest corner of the courtyard
was a great wooden vat standing high upon a platform. To this there
ascended wooden steps, and the Lady Amoureuse informed Mr. Sorrell that
here was his bath. The agitation which ensued in the holy man she was
not at all able to understand. She told him that it was a very efficient
bath, and the soap which would be brought was of the very best that
could be had of the best soap-boiler in Coventry, whilst the towels were
soft and fine. The warm water, she pointed out, ran along a wooden
conduit from an upper room of the castle, when it was heated and poured
in by scullions. Mr. Sorrell halted resolutely some yards from this
large structure, whilst the Lady Amoureuse called out for a page with
towels and soap. The little Jehan with his long curls came hastening. He
stepped past them on the causeway, the towels floating over his arm, the
soap upon a wooden platter. He approached the bath, and setting the soap
down upon the steps, he pulled out with all his force the large peg at
the bottom of the tub. A spout of water splashed out and added to the
unpleasant moisture of the sunlit court. The Lady Amoureuse explained to
the holy man that this bath was always kept filled with clean
water—firstly that it should be sweet, and secondly that the wood of it
should not start in the heat of the sun. Such a bath as this was not
known to be elsewhere in Christendom except at the Court of the French
King. It was Sir Enguerrand de Coucy who had insisted on setting it up.
And his lady took great pride in it, though she feigned she was utterly
averse from all new and polite ideas, holding that knights and pages
should bathe themselves in the old-fashioned manner in such streams,
ponds, and rivers as the countryside afforded.

In the warm sunlight an ineffable bliss descended upon the Lady
Amoureuse. It seemed to radiate from the holy man; it seemed to radiate
from the gleaming and sacred emblem that he held depending from his
finger. Here at last she who had lived for so long an insignificant life
in this dull castle, subjected to the insults and jealous caprices of a
mistress who hated her as well for her mind as for her looks—here at
last there was come to her a holy man protected by angels and bearing a
relic more sacred than all the feretories of Salisbury itself could
show.

“And, O, holy man,” she exclaimed, “if it is not permitted to me to show
you such honour as should be accorded to great and gallant knights and
to strangers of very high degree, blame not me but the lady who is my
mistress, and who sets her face against all that is new and polite and
the fashion of the day. For in all places now throughout Christendom,
when a knight of highness has travelled far and comes to a castle, he is
very softly and ceremoniously entreated. Thus if I had my will, I should
kneel at your feet and bathe them with warm water, I should anoint them
with the most precious salves and ointments that the castle affords. But
so vigorous is our lady and mistress in her determination to set her
face against all new and gentle usages that I must be gone, leaving you
to anoint and tend yourself, to stand behind the palisade which is
beyond the bath, and to hand you your garments as you have need of them.
And this is the folly of our lady and mistress, who thinks that thus is
a better discipline obtained. As if it were not manifest that that is
the best usage and the most sure discipline which teaches us to be
courteous and gentle in the proper fashion of our own day.”

And having said this, the Lady Amoureuse went back along the causeway
and picked her steps gently. At this moment, too, the Lady Blanchemain
came out from the door in the corner of the courtyard, having behind her
two pages each smaller than the little Jehan, and each bearing a
quantity of wearing apparel. The Lady Amoureuse was able to marshal Lady
Blanchemain and the pages upon the comparatively dry path that ran along
the wall of the courtyard. Thus the Lady Amoureuse had the added
gratification of shepherding the little Lady Blanchemain away from her
holy man, and of seeing the glances of vexation that the little fair
woman threw at the palisade which finally hid them from view.

* * * * *

The little page Jehan had climbed the steps and was now in the great
bath, and Mr. Sorrell was relieved to observe that so large was that
vat, that it entirely hid the page from view. It seemed to him possible,
therefore, that he might be able to perform his ablutions without any
embarrassments from these people, who seemed to him as shockingly
lacking in any sense of decency as of sanitation. He mounted the steps
and peered down into the bath. The little page with a hogshair brush was
engaged in cleaning the wooden sides and bottom.

“I don’t understand,” Mr. Sorrell addressed him, “why in the world you
take such a lot of trouble over washing yourself, when you keep the
courtyard in such a disgustingly filthy state?”

The little page looked at him with large and serious blue eyes.

“Ick han ne Greek,” he exclaimed gently.

“Oh, well,” Mr. Sorrell said, “I wasn’t asking you to speak Greek,
though I suppose that as it’s part of the play that I’m supposed to be a
Greek slave, I may be expected to speak it.”

Mr. Sorrell, indeed, had made up his mind that he was just going to
speak ordinary English. It wasn’t very much against his will that he was
taking part in these absurd proceedings; he rather enjoyed it. It was
like being taken behind the scenes of a theatre; but he did not see why
in strict privacy he should not speak his natural tongue, which the
page, in spite of his pretending ignorance, must perfectly well
understand. To satisfy himself as to all the circumstances, however, he
stepped over the side of the bath and into it. He was relieved to find
that the wooden breastwork formed by its sides came nearly as high as
his chin, and upon looking round the stony walls of the castle he could
see no window that commanded a view of him. On the other hand, when he
looked downwards over the palisade he noticed that his head at least was
in full view of the Ladies Amoureuse and Blanchemain and the two little
pages.

“We are all ready,” the Lady Blanchemain said in her barbarous French,
“to hand you up your clothes.”

“And very fine clothes they are,” the Lady Amoureuse exclaimed. “Oh,
holy man, they are the very habits that were worn by our glorious
master, the Knight of Coucy, upon the occasion of the great supper after
his jousting with Sir Walter de Marnay.”

Mr. Sorrell precipitately withdrew his head. The little page had climbed
up on to the wooden side of the great tub. Here he sat astride, and
lisped gently that if the pilgrim were ready he would call for the warm
water to be sent down the chute. He had little serious and gentle airs,
this page, and Mr. Sorrell at once took a fancy to him.

“Oh well, nipper,” he said, “if you clear out I’ll be ready in a jiffy.”

The little Jehan appeared to understand from his gesture what was
required of him, nevertheless he remained satride of the wood.

“It is good thing and a custom, and, as I have heard, very refreshing
and sanitary,” he said gravely, “to stand beneath the end of the wooden
conduit. Then the slaves pour the water from within the conduit, and at
first it is of the heat of one’s flesh, and gradually they shall make it
grow hotter and hotter, until it is very hot, and then again they let it
grow quite cold. And this is said to impart to the skin a beauty like
that of the good knight Sir Paris of Troy, and to the courage such a
force that you may easily overthrow three knights immediately
afterwards. So it is said, but for myself I do not know if this is true,
for I am only a little page and have not the right to these knightly
luxuries, and wash myself in the cold streams three times a day, by
means of which I shall come to be a good and hardy knight.”

Having uttered these words with extreme precision and gravity, the
little boy cocked his other leg over the side of the bath and
disappeared. His hand once more came over the side, holding the wooden
platter upon which the soap reposed, and immediately afterwards, Mr.
Sorrell having thrown his nightshirt and his linen turban over the side
of the bath, the little boy called out shrilly:

“Oh! let the water come.”

It came, and falling deliciously tepid over Mr. Sorrell’s head and
coursing down his limbs, it gave him really the first pleasant sensation
of the day, and gradually it grew warmer until it was very hot, and then
colder till it was very cold.

“Well, they know how to do things,” Mr. Sorrell said, for the water,
being agreeably scented with mint, did away with the stench of the
courtyard, and when he sat himself down it reached exactly to his chin.
The platter with the soap upon it bobbed up against his face, and
because the bath in which he sat was elevated so high, the sunshine
poured down all over him. He sat luxuriously stretching himself and
sighing. He sat still for quite a long time—he half dozed, and large
flies buzzed all over him. And suddenly the voice of the Lady Amoureuse
cried out:

“Oh, holy man, are you ill, have you fainted, for we do not hear the
plash of the water?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed.

“Because,” the Lady Amoureuse continued, “knights have been known to
faint and to drown in these large baths. Such was the miserable fate
which overtook the miraculously gallant Sir Lois du Destrier Blanc in
the Court of the French King only a twelvemonth was last June.”

“Oh, I’m all right!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed again. But the feel of the
soap which he had taken into his hand filled him with a sudden panic. It
was not like any soap he had ever touched before—or rather, it was
exactly like a soap that he had once purchased when he was inspecting a
mine for some Germans in Syria. He could not for the life of him
understand how they came to have Syrian soap in the middle of Salisbury
Plain. And then suddenly he exclaimed to himself:

“By Jove! I’m not only in the middle of Salisbury Plain, I’m in the
middle of the Middle Ages!”

He put his hand up to feel his hair—there was not a vestige, there was
not a trace of any wound, though there was certainly a scar that might
have been two years old, just above the middle of his left temple. And
this scar had never been there of old.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed again, “it _is_ that. Something must have
happened. Something must have happened in the railway accident at
Salisbury.” He had got a knock—or perhaps it was only a mental
shock—something mysterious, something that he could not understand,
which had knocked him clean back through time—483 years, as a
cricket-ball is struck by a bat. It seemed extraordinary, it seemed
almost incredible. But there he was, there were the hard facts before
him. He was not going to account for this, it was not any business of
his to account for things.

And so essentially modern a man was Mr. Sorrell, so excellently had he
been schooled in worldly practicable things, that his mind immediately
accepted the situation. He had not any doubt that one or other of the
Christian Scientists, New Homœopathists or Psychics that he met at his
aunt’s, could explain the matter in some seemingly nonsensical but
probably quite true method. And he felt vaguely that if the ghosts from
the past could come into the present, why in the world should not ghosts
of the future be able to go back into the past? That was all that it
would amount to. He seemed, indeed, vaguely to remember that in the
Scriptures there had been apparitions of prophets or even of Christ
Himself, several hundred years before the births of the prophets or of
the Saviour. This, of course, was a much smaller kind of thing. He did
not regard himself as being as important even as a minor prophet. But if
it could happen in the one case, why should not it happen in his own?

What he supposed to have happened was this: His soul had been shaken out
of his body by the railway accident at Salisbury; it had gone wandering
back through time until it chanced upon the body of the Greek slave, who
had probably died upon Salisbury Plain 483 years before. Then his soul
had entered the Greek slave’s body. It seemed ridiculous, but there
again he certainly was. He examined himself rather carefully, as far as
he could for the water, and he could not find that he differed
materially from his ordinary self. But, on the other hand, Mr. Sorrell
had never been a vain man. He had never examined himself in a
looking-glass, and although he was moderately familiar with his own
face, which one cannot help looking at at times, he had not for the
moment any mirror in which to inspect himself. The water had become too
clouded with soap to afford him a reflection. But upon the whole he felt
exactly the same. He felt tired in just the same portions of his limbs
that usually felt tired; he felt hungry with his usual hunger. Then,
possibly, all this had something to do with the transmigration of souls.
Perhaps his soul had formerly inhabited the body of the Greek slave, and
perhaps it had just gone back to it. Something like that must have
happened.

With his easy acceptance of things as they are, the only thing that
appeared odd to Mr. Sorrell was that he had not himself the least
feeling of oddity. He was just there, just his normal self, ringed in by
the wooden staves, perfectly comfortable, and with no view save that of
an oval of blue sky above his head, against which the banner on top of
the keep, which was just large enough to come into his view, flapped
lazily its red and white chequers. Though he seemed himself to be a sort
of ghost, he could not discover that he felt anything uncanny at all.
Indeed, even the people around him did not seem to see anything uncanny
in him; on the contrary, they appeared to welcome him with rapture, and
to be inclined to do him as well as their barbarous means would let
them.

The water beginning to grow a little cold, Mr. Sorrell stood up and
looked over the side of his bathtub for his little page. The little
Jehan was sitting on the steps that led up to the tub, alternately
meditating and telling his beads.

“Hallo, nipper!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed; “it’s about time I got myself
dressed.”

And the little Jehan understanding from his gestures what he desired,
handed him the white towels, and once more removed the spiket so that
the water gushed down into the courtyard.

“Now,” Mr. Sorrell said whilst he proceeded to dry himself, “pop along
and fetch my clothes.”

He had to repeat these words in French, for the boy did not understand
him at all. And thus he made himself comprehensible, too, to the Ladies
Blanchemain and Amoureuse.

“Ho, là!” the little Lady Blanchemain cried out from behind the palisade
beneath him, “most holy pilgrim, here are your chausses.”

And Mr. Sorrell perceived that she was handing up to him, at the full
stretch of her arm and on tiptoe, a garment whose purpose he did not
immediately understand. He took it, however, with all the modesty of
which he was capable, so that he exhibited no more than his hand and the
top of his head. Then he perceived that it fulfilled the functions at
once of trousers and of stockings, for it was all of one piece, one leg
being of red woollen work and the other of white, whilst the part which
went about his waist was red and white chequers. It seemed to him to be
a preposterous thing to put on, but having examined it and discovered
that it was quite clean and apparently new, he slowly and with some
difficulty inserted himself into the garment, which fitted as tight as
the skin of an eel. Having got so far, he exclaimed to the ladies below
him:

“Well, and what comes next?”

The Lady Amoureuse took from the hand of the page a white shirt, which
in turn she passed up to him with an air of serious and reverent
gravity. The shirt presented no very serious difficulties. It was of
white, fine, and soft linen, and, having got into it, Mr. Sorrell heaved
a sigh of immense relief. He was at least now in a shirt and trousers of
a sort, sufficiently covered to confront anybody in the world, though he
would not much have liked to walk in it about the streets round Covent
Garden, where most of his brother publishers do their business. And at
that moment he was aware that his feet had got wet. The bath was quite
empty, but naturally a considerable amount of water remained upon the
bottom boards. He therefore approached with a great deal more confidence
the side of the bath which gave on to the palisade, and, looking down
upon the Lady Amoureuse, he told her that he wanted a pair of shoes.
These were handed up to him, two objects so extraordinary that Mr.
Sorrell could really make nothing of them at all. There was obviously a
place for the feet to go into, but the toes were prolonged in a sort of
stiff leather tube for perhaps a foot and a half. And at the end of each
of these leather tubes was fixed a small leather strap with buckles,
resembling a dog’s collar. One of these objects was red in the foot part
and white in the tube, and the other white in the foot and red as far as
the dog collar. But whilst Mr. Sorrell was perplexedly regarding them,
he was aware that the little page Jehan had climbed over the side of the
bath, and was standing beside him. With an air of reverent seriousness
the little boy took one of the things from Mr. Sorrell. He knelt down
upon the ground, and, lifting Mr. Sorrell’s foot on to one of his little
knees, he proceeded to put the shoe on to it. The shoe was of soft and
pliant leather, very beautifully coloured red, and it fitted round Mr.
Sorrell’s ankle by an efficient strap and buckle. And next very
cautiously and tenderly the little Jehan took the strap, which resembled
a dog collar, and buckled it round Mr. Sorrell’s knee. Thus the leather
tubing which had so puzzled him curved upwards and out from Mr.
Sorrell’s toes to his knee.

Mr. Sorrell ejaculated:

“By Jove! I suppose this is the very latest fashion. But they’d be no
end in the way if you went roller skating.”

The little boy in the meanwhile was engaged with his other foot.

“Well, anyhow,” Mr. Sorrell said, “they’ve made a very competent valet
out of you, my little friend. Now, I suppose, they’ll give me a coat.”

He approached, indeed, the side of the bath with more confidence, though
the tubes bowing out in front of his shins made it difficult for him.
The Lady Amoureuse, tiptoeing, handed him up a garment all flaked in red
and white, with a white fur edging. And when Mr. Sorrell stood up in it
he could not help thinking that he must present a very splendid
appearance. His jerkin was on the upper half of the right breast of
vermilion velvet, on the lower half it was of white velvet, and
similarly as to his left chest the upper half was white and the lower
red.

“By Jove!” Mr. Sorrell said, “I must look like a living chess-board!”

But a certain complacency came over his mind at the thought that he
could wear such flaming splendours and yet not be a bit overdressed. He
thought he must present a really fine figure of a man. The little page
now made it evident to him by signs that it would be appropriate to
climb over the side of the bath. It was a task of some difficulty, and
one only to be performed backwards because of his shoes. Nevertheless,
Mr. Sorrell performed it with good humour.

He stood on the platform on which the bath rested, and then carefully
descended the steps, the little page leading him by the hand. On the
lowest step but one Jehan placed a cushion of red velvet.

“My lord, the pilgrim,” he said, “will be pleased to seat himself for
his coifing and the care of his hands.”

“By Jove!” Mr. Sorrell said, “it’s a regular barber’s shop.”

And then he perceived that the Ladies Blanchemain and Amoureuse were
approaching him side by side along the causeway, being followed by the
two smaller pages carrying basins of silver, silver flasks, towels,
combs, and various implements that he could not very well understand.

They surrounded him in a sort of busy swarm, and first the little Jehan
shaved him with an extreme dexterity, and then, approaching him with a
large silver comb, the Lady Blanchemain delicately combed out his hair,
parting it down the centre and leaving a fringe over his forehead. Then
one of the other little pages, with an air of serious reverence similar
to the little Jehan’s, slung round his waist a loose silver belt
supporting a small dagger in a red velvet sheath. The other little page
slung round his neck a long gold chain, which supported a pomander. And
the Lady Amoureuse approached him, having on the one hand one little boy
with a basin and towels, and, on the other the other page with silver
flasks and little silver knives.

“I say,” Mr. Sorrell protested, for the Lady Amoureuse appeared to him
to be of great beauty and obviously high social status, “this doesn’t
appear to be _your_ work.” But he resigned himself; it appeared all to
go by rote.

She knelt on the bottom step before him, and on each side stood one of
the little pages. She placed his hands in the silver basin, not without
exclaiming rapturously at their whiteness, their smallness considering
he was a man, and the delicacy of their shape. She washed them very
carefully with a white kind of soap; she poured over them waters that
smelt of cummin and mint. And then selecting the little silver knives,
she carefully pared his nails and polished them till they shone like
pink pebbles, her fingers holding his with an intense softness which was
exceedingly gratifying to Mr. Sorrell.

“And surely,” the Lady Amoureuse exclaimed, “it is not such a hand that
shall disgust our lady and mistress when it comes into her plate.”

“But I don’t put my hands into other people’s plates,” Mr. Sorrell
exclaimed.

“And be very careful,” the Lady Amoureuse continued, “that you do not
pat upon the head the dogs that lie under the table before you have
finished eating, for nothing can be more disgusting to a person of high
stomach. And this I tell you, for we have seen it done by many very
excellent knights coming from Palestine, such as the Sieur Walter de
Marney himself, for in other countries they have other customs, but this
is our custom here.”

And then, taking it from the little Jehan, she placed upon his head a
small round cap of red velvet, edged with white fur. Round the cap was a
chaplet of the largest pearls that Mr. Sorrell had ever seen, and from
within, round the hinder sides, there depended a half-circle of long
golden curls.

“Oh, I say,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed when he had it on, “I’m not going to
be made to wear a wig. Nobody in the world shall ever make me wear a
wig. I never did at a fancy dress ball, I never will now.”

The Lady Blanchemain exclaimed with pleasure, but a tender and regretful
dismay came over the Lady Amoureuse’s features.

“This is the latest fashion of Paris,” she said, “to wear the hair very
long and curled. And our Lord Enguerrand de Coucy, being always inclined
to gallantry and chivalry, wears himself this hair because he is
slightly bald.”

“Oh, yes, my dear lady,” Mr. Sorrell said; “but the latest Paris
fashions are all very well for women; they don’t do for men.”

He took the cap off and handed it to the little Jehan.

“Just take that hair out,” he said, “there’s a good nipper.”

The Lady Blanchemain smiled. “It is our good lady and mistress that will
be pleased with this, for she is always against these new and foreign
customs, and desires the simple old ways of her father before her. And
those curls have been the occasion of much dissension between our lord
and our lady.”

“Well, I’m always glad to be on the side of the ladies,” Mr. Sorrell
said cheerfully, “though,” he added to the Lady Amoureuse, “I’m sorry I
can’t oblige you in this.”

The Lady Amoureuse took him gently by the hand and led him down the
step. And the Lady Blanchemain approached him with her pink and white
cheek extended towards him.

“What’s the matter now?” Mr. Sorrell said, and, little and small and
gay, the Lady Blanchemain laughed aloud.

“Why, first you shall kiss me, as being the less in degree, and then the
Lady Amoureuse, and this is the requital of our services for waiting on
and attending you.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure I’ve not the slightest objection,” Mr. Sorrell said,
and he kissed her cheerfully, first on the right side, then on the left.

The Lady Amoureuse, however, would have him kiss her upon the lips, and
indeed she almost swooned in ecstasy at the embrace of this holy
stranger, who appeared now like a prince in glory.

“Well, upon my soul,” Mr. Sorrell said, “these times aren’t half as
barbarous as I thought.”

But then his gaze went over the squalor and filth of the courtyard.

“I can’t understand,” he said once more, “how it is since you are so
polite and accomplished in yourselves, that you can put up with such
dirt in your surroundings.”

The Lady Blanchemain laughed again.

“Would you have us wash down and clear our courtyards every day in the
week?” she said. “That is done here once a year, when we move to our
lord’s other castle, near Christchurch.”

“But, really,” Mr. Sorrell said, “it must be most unhealthy, and it’s
surely disgusting to look at.”

The Lady Amoureuse regarded him with wide and apologetic eyes.

“Oh, holy man,” she said, “it would be beyond human strength to imitate
the spotless whiteness of the courts of heaven, where there is neither
eating nor drinking. Consider that you are amongst the mortal
inhabitants of this earth; not even the palaces of the French King are
cleaned more often than once a year, and there the greatest of
politeness prevails, such as is not known in any other Court of
Christendom.”

Her eyes roved round over the courtyard, over heaps of straw and the
rushes that had been thrown out from the great hall, over the skins of
beasts, the offal, the mud, and the green slime. . . .

“Why,” she said, “there is very little disorder here! I would have you
see such a courtyard in time of siege. It is a very different sight,
with all things thrown pellmell.”

“But the stench!” Mr. Sorrell expostulated. “The want of any sanitary
arrangements!”

“Oh, holy man,” the Lady Amoureuse said, “for the stench it is very
little, if anything at all, and you may easily counteract it by holding
your pomander to your nose.”

And the Lady Blanchemain laughed again.

“In the name of the Seven Saints of the Brehon!” she exclaimed, “these
things must lie somewhere.”

“But what I’m contending,” Mr. Sorrell said, “is that they ought to lie
where you can’t see them.”

“But if they have to be,” the Lady Blanchemain said, “and if we know
that they have to be, why should we not see them, for there is nothing
more disgusting in the sight of the hide of a beast than in the sight of
its flesh smoking upon the board, and in this way our forefathers have
lived healthy and lusty ever since William the Norman first built
castles in this land?”

“Oh, well,” Mr. Sorrell said, “I suppose you can score that point, for
there’s no doubt that in the old days of ‘Merrie England’ we were much
stronger and healthier, whereas we’re a degenerate lot nowadays.”

“That is very true,” the little Jehan said bravely. “I have heard that
in the old days there were knights who could fell an ox with a blow of
their fist. There are very few that to-day could do that thing.”

“Yes, it’s all the crowding into towns that’s done it,” Mr. Sorrell
said.

The sun in setting was sending great shafts of blood-red light over the
tower of the keep and the upper walls of the eastern side of the castle,
so that everything there appeared to be rosy and beautiful. And at that
moment a bell began to ring, and suddenly all of them fell upon their
knees where they stood.

“They certainly do seem to be the most extraordinary set of people,” Mr.
Sorrell said, as he followed their example out of a desire not to seem
conspicuous. “You never know what they’ll be doing next.”

A little time afterwards a number of high, clear calls came from the
horn at the head of the tower.

“That will be the Lady Dionissia approaching. In a few minutes the
trumpet for washing hands will blow.”

“Dear me!” Mr. Sorrell observed, “there doesn’t seem to be any end to
all this washing.”