Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (396 page)

“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.

CHAPTER 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.