Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (407 page)

These words opened before Mr. Sorrell such an abyss of dark social considerations, that he really found nothing to add to his arguments. He had been meaning to say that when they came to build his airships, he was not going to have the propellers made of silver-gilt set with carbuncles, or the sails of embroidered silk, whilst the dynamos were scamped for want of money. And he was not going to have his gun-carriages carved in fantastic shapes and gilded whilst the barrels were made of cheap pig-iron.

But before he could recover himself sufficiently to be coherent, they had entered a room which almost exactly resembled the bower of the Lady Blanche. Here too there was a bed covered with skins of the grey wolf, and at the foot of the bed was another large hutch, and this was all the furniture save that in a corner of the room there lay a large leather portmanteau. Except that it had no brass lock or fittings, this so exactly resembled Mr. Sorrell’s own largest piece of travelling gear, that he had a momentary impulse to say to the Lady Blanche:

“Now I’ve caught you! I bet that thing has got some chap’s ordinary clothes in it!” But he checked himself in time, for upon racking his mind he once more discovered that he did not in the least know what would be an anachronism and what would not. And for the moment this cost him a bitter mortification.

The Ladies Blanche and Dionissia sat themselves at either end of the hutch, the four other ladies perched on the sides of the bed. The Dean sat himself between the Ladies Blanche and Dionissia, the Bishop’s chaplain pulled out from the wall the leathern portmanteau and sat himself down upon it. The little Jehan entered the closet, which was made of planks walling off one end of the room, and fetched from it a torch, which he lit and stuck in an iron ring in the wall. The ring was so high that he must stand on tiptoe to get it there. Then he went outside the door and stuck his own torch in yet another ring.

All their eyes were fixed upon Mr. Sorrell.

“Oh, hang it all,” Mr. Sorrell said, “do you expect me to make a speech?”

The Dean yawned suddenly.

“It is very late in the night,” he answered, “yet it would be well if the most weighty matters could be now debated and set to rest.”

“Why,” Mr. Sorrell said, “I’m very tired, and I don’t feel as if I had anything to say whatever.”

The Lady Dionissia was gazing at him with her lips slightly parted. It distracted Mr. Sorrell more than he could say, and the dazzling whiteness of her skin made the Lady Blanche’s weather-beaten and coloured beauty appear dusky and negligible, so that for a short moment Mr. Sorrell wished that he had not so precipitately entered into a business partnership with the Lady Blanche.

The Lady Blanche started suddenly with vexation.

“By the eyes of Christ,” she said, “I had forgotten that I had meant to have the Abbess here, so that she might hear of her utter downfall, and be properly chastened.” And immediately in high tones she bade the little page run to bid the Mother Abbess, who was in the Great Hall, to hasten before her. The Lady Dionissia said in deep, and startling tones:

“Lie down upon the Dean’s bed, holy man, and rest your limbs.” And before Mr. Sorrell could recover from the emotions which her voice caused in him, with exclamations of delight the four youngest ladies had seized Mr. Sorrell and had conducted him to the bed. They laid him down and, screaming with laughter and tittering, they kissed him upon both cheeks before they left him alone. He could not bring himself to remain in a recumbent posture, but he was glad enough to sit down on something soft, so, leaning against the pillows, he crossed his legs as well as he could beneath him and sat up.

“So! It is even in that way,” the Dean’s chaplain exclaimed in his huge voice, “that the heathen peoples of the East sit upon their cushions. I have seen them do it in Bethlehem.”

“I learnt the trick in Syria,” Mr. Sorrell said cheerfully. “It’s quite comfortable when you’ve got used to it, though these hoops on my legs are rather in the way.”

And suddenly the Lady Dionissia exclaimed again:

“Let us pull the hutch from the bed and sit round the other way so that we may all face the holy man.”

This proposal appeared to fill the Lady Blanche with a deep anger. She had never heard of hutches being sat upon in that fashion. The Dean smiled with indulgent surprise. He too had never heard of such a thing, but it appeared to him to be reasonable to act exceptionally in exceptional circumstances.

“When the stream is full,” he said, “we cannot go by the ford.” And he chuckled amiably, regarding the Lady Dionissia as a madcap, but exceedingly attractive child. The Lady Blanche was protesting that such a thing should never be done in her castle. But with her large hand the Lady Dionissia beckoned to her two ladies to help her, and bending down powerfully, she lifted the one end of the hutch without effort, whilst it took all that the other two girls could do to scrape the feet of the hutch along the floor.

“Now let us sit down,” the Lady Dionissia said gravely.

And the Dean sat himself beside her, facing Mr. Sorrell with his hands clasped upon his stomach, and his eyes blinking, whilst he shook gently with contained laughter.

“Surely,” he said, “with these varieties, I shall be cured of my jaundices and distempers. And since tomorrow is blood-letting day, I think on the day after to-morrow I might well get me back to my chapter, though I have never before been cured under three weeks. Yet so it is as Ovid says:
Loetet Sanguis.
A constant occupation of the mind makes the blood limpid and not thick and heavy.”

The Lady Blanche stood behind them, her eyes flashing appeal to Mr. Sorrell, to strike with lightning both those people who defied her.

“Never shall I sit upon a hutch,” she exclaimed, “with my back where my face should be, and since this is my castle, I will call immediately four men to set you all in irons and in dungeons for disobeying my orders, which is a feudal laches.”

The Lady Dionissia paid no heed at all to her cousin’s speech, but gazed at Mr. Sorrell, who gazed back at her. The Dean turned his chubby and comfortable head over his furred shoulder, and blinked at the enraged lady.

“Ah, dear dame,” he said, “you have so great a knowledge of the law, that I am astonished in your haste you should so slip up and trip. As Tatianus has it: ‘in the passion of the head, wise tongues speak folly.’ For I have paid the Lady Dionissia for this my room, and the Lady Dionissia has done that suit and service of one shilling to you for it. Thus you have no more right of ingress or command here than has the King into our Chapter House of Salisbury, once we have done him proper suit and service.”

“Ah, Dean,” the Lady Blanche said — and the prospect of a legal argument with a man mollified her very quickly for the moment, “yet custom and the law have it, that if in a tenant-right, the tenant should do anything sacrilegeous, outrageous, blasphemous, or against the Will of God and the duty to his Over Lord, the Over Lord has the right to enter upon the holding, and to take the person of the wrong-doer and to enact justice upon him.”

“Ah, dear lady,” the Dean said, “and is it sacrilege, outrage or blasphemy to move a hutch and to sit reversed upon it?”

“Ah, Dean,” the lady said, “is it not wilfully to molest and to despoil the gear of an Over Lord, thus to drag a hutch over a rough floor, so that its legs and the feet upon which it stands may be chafed, strained, and parted from the body of the piece.”

“So it might well be, our dear lady,” the Dean said; “but this hutch is my hutch which I bear about with me on the back of a mule, and is no hutch of yours at all, for I believe you have two or at the most three hutches in all your castle, and yours that was in this room I have lent to my chaplain that he might store in it certain charters and cartilleries, that upon this journey we are meditating to devise to tenants of the Chapter of Salisbury: so it is all well,” he added, “and come you and sit upon my hutch.” And leaning back he caught her by the hand.

“Ah, Dean,” the lady said, and she surveyed with kindly friendship his twinkling eyes, since a man of any sort was a pleasant object for her to survey. “It is you that have found the solution to our quarrel, not my cousin’s half-wife, who has the obstinacy and unreasonableness of a white devil.” And leaning back so that his arm encircled her waist, the Dean comfortably and courteously set her upon the hutch. Nevertheless, she sat with her back to Mr. Sorrell, looking at him over her shoulder. And then the Abbess came in, followed by the little Jehan.

“Ah, Abbess,” the Lady Blanche said, on a high note of ironical laughter, “we have asked you here that you may listen to the judgment of the Holy Man in the matter of this cross, that you desire sacrilegiously to steal and convey away, after the sacrilegious and blasphemous manner of all the priesthood.”

“Ah, dear lady!” the Dean expostulated.

“Oh you,” the Lady Blanche said, “you do not belong to the monastic orders, you are no more than a clerk, and clerks are honest people.”

The Abbess made a slight reverence to the Dean, who slewed round upon the hutch, and nodded to her over his shoulder.

“Father Dean,” the Abbess said, “if you will, I would have you come to-morrow morning to my little nunnery, to judge in friendly way between my community and me. For you are a man, very learned in the law, descended from those first Normans who were always barrators and cunning men at haggling.”

“Why, Mother,” the Dean said in his husky, pleasant voice, “it is not for me to judge between you and your community. That is a task for my Lord the Bishop’s Chancellor.”

“Ah, Dean,” the Abbess said, “that I very well know, and very well I know that if this should come before Sir Chancellor, then would result an eternity of lawsuits — so I would have you give judgment on this matter in a friendly manner, I making you some small presents as my humble means afford.”

The Dean waggled his comfortable thumbs that were crossed upon his comfortable stomach.

“Even what is the cause that you would have me consider?” he asked.

“Ah, Dean,” the Abbess said, “I trust it is one that has no precedent in Christendom, for what will you say to a convent that rushes pellmell with all the nuns and its prioress at its head and its almoner and its sacrist and its mass-priest and its little thurifers, all of them rushing out to do robbery upon a highway, against the will and consent of their abbess, whose province it is to take order for them?”

“Why, what is all this folly?” said the Lady Blanche. “I have had out,” the Abbess answered composedly, “the sacrist and the thurifer and the sub-prioress and the cellaress all in irons, but the prioress and the higher priests I have deemed fitter to spare, since their position is of prominence in the community. But if you will give me your opinion upon it, I will abide by it, as a judgment between them and me. For myself, I think the community did very wrong in thus acting against my desires, and I think that they should pay me some heavy fine to benefit not my private good, or to be left to my heirs, but to go into the coffers of all the Abbesses that shall ever succeed me.”

The Lady Blanche had been gasping with indignation. “It was not for this that I sent for you,” she said, “but to hear what the holy pilgrim has judged and decided concerning the cross of St. Joseph, that he brought all the way from Bethlehem.”

“I might say,” the Abbess continued in her calm and level tones, “that what may be decided concerning this cross is in no way an affair of mine. But since you have called upon me, as being very assuredly moral supervisor of these parts, and as far as the Priory of St. Stephen’s bounds, I take it as being very courteous in you, and shall be glad to hear this history.”

The Lady Blanche was convulsed with rage.

“Abominable Prelatess!” she exclaimed. “Is it you that are set in command over the morals and orders of this district?”

The Abbess looked at her with straight and twinkling glance.

“Very assuredly it is,” she said, “and so it is according to all the precedents. For the Bishop of Salisbury is away at the war, and so is the Chancellor of the diocese, and the knights of Stapleford and of Tamworth have gone, and the Prior of St. Stephen’s is but a minor prior, whereas I, though a very poor one, am a full Abbess. So I am above everyone else in this district, as being like a Baron of Parliament and able to wield direct authority.”