t ^~- '■'>"• m >f. ii 't^^ e G^S ^ '^^!p^ NEWARK BOOK SOCIETY. MOEIVED. '^/f./^^^ ^ //^iV / L^i'. '7 /^ L 5 (/Zj '^/^ Mr. Burnell, president. — Cla Trebeck ^7\ Sherbrqokt — Walker ^ .f. — Sutton^ — Riddel ^ Godjijey — Marslan — Hole T- Burtt^y -V- Tallents . V — G. Storer . . . . — Norton — HaZZ — Qiarmp^Gt » Sir H, Bromley . . FORWARDED. ;2^ - ^/4^- /^ J L I E) RAFIY OF THE UNIVERSITY Of ILLINOIS T83s V.I Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/stephanlangton01tupp :r.??*ft •tl .«f2 V iVmJ'^^ %]hM- isM]^ ^\n HAM T' 1 M W o T"f I IFFIF; B y^^' -/^/^n/^^^^^/C: vca)]ik„.iLo * ^ gas TSSs CONTENTS THE EIEST VOLUME. CHAPTER I. Time : place : bele Aliz I CHAPTER II. May Day and the lovers : the Prince and the churl . . 12 CHAPTER III. Devon and Lincoln antecedents 27 CHAPTER IV. A short cut through the marshes 44 CHAPTER V. The good old times 49 CHAPTER VI. Old Tangley Manor 59 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. The Fire 64 CHAPTER Vni. The singed moth • . . 68 CHAPTER IX. Newark Priory * • 74 CHAPTER X. Dame Margery's discovery 83 CHAPTER XL Visitors at Tything 89 CHAPTER XII. St. Martha's 97 CHAPTER XIII. Our nunnery, and the monks of old. .... 104 CHAPTER XIV. The new brother of Newark 112 CHAPTER XV. The Nun of St. Catherine's 120 CHAPTER XVI. Consecration, , 128 CONTENTS. Vll CHAPTER XVII. Tything Lodge . 136 CHAPTER XVIir. Hal and his family 143 CHAPTER XIX. The Sleepers in the Silent Pool 154 CHAPTER XX. Lying in state 160 CHAPTER XXL The prince's feather at Gilford 166 CHAPTER XXII. As to our authorities 184 CHAPTER XXIIL Fitz-Ooth and Matilda 192 CHAPTER XXIV. The forest king and queen 202 CHAPTER XXV. A telegram of English history . . . • . 219 CHAPTER XXVI. Calais 226 VIU CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXVII. Alice the nun 231 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Pilgrimage to Gomershal 240 CHAPTER XXIX. The letters and a lock of hair 248 CHAPTER XXX. Maid Marian 256 CHAPTER XXXI. Stephan's valet 265 CHAPTER XXXII. Learning, love, and patriotism 270 CHAPTER XXXIII. The old esquire hears a sermon 275 CHAPTER XXXIV. A father's blessing . 284 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER I. ^Titne: Place: BeU ^li^ If I lead you back in thought some seven centuries, and attempt to quicken your interest for scenes and persons so far away removed from us, you shall not therefore find your guide an antiquarian idler : for Providence was the Great King then as now ; and the men and women of those days were of like passions and affections with our living throbbing selves ; and there is wisdom to be culled from their expe- riences, and amusement to be gained from their VOL. I. B Li 2 STEPHAN LANGTON. adventures ; if not also, and in chief, sympathy due from us to them, and justly to be accorded them in homage for their sorrows. Ay, and even more than simply so ; for the acorns just then sown have since grown up to be the gnarled and strong-limbed oaks of our present English liberties ; and the fruitful vines and fig-trees under which we now sit happily at peace were sprouting in those early times as tender plants out of a dry ground. I will concentrate my pictured fancies in a framework of real scenery round characters of strict historic fame ; and, further than their ornamental details, and such other circumstan- tial filHngs-in of outline as needs must be thus invented, I will set before your patience rather reality than romance, drawing both landscapes and persons from the truth. This beautiful neighbourhood of south Surrey (a right dear home from infancy) is full not alone of picturesque features in the present, STEPHAN LANGTON. 3 but of unrecorded interest in the past ; is rich especially (as you shall prove anon) in all the stirring incidents of Stephan Langton*s earlier life; while yet that future statesman, arch- prelate and chief champion of common liberty against our tyrant King was the humble monk of St. Martha's : and thus a life-time debt of health, country pleasure, and old friendship to many a hill and wood and ancient dwelling- place hereabouts, shall now at length in some sort be repaid. It is possible — may it soon be actual — to make classic ground of certain sweet retired spots set among the fairest hill and vale country in South England; to invest familiar Surrey scenes (as even railway travellers get glimpses of them) with their due historic interest ; and to win the eyes of men this way-wards, not only by our present pastoral beauties, but also by our past chivalrous sublimities; so far at least, and only so, as may regard just one B 2 4 STEPHAN LANGTON. short era of our long unwritten archives, and just one morsel of romantic biography, gathered from the untold heaps that might be diligently compiled anent our many unnoised worthies. How fair and rich a field then remains, and may remain ever still unreaped for other men to harvest ! Hereabouts, in the famous county Surrey, and all over the three kingdoms one may say the same, we are continually hunting or shoot- ing or rambling or ploughing or pic-nicing on sites where all sorts of w^ondrous things have happened : and blessed are the eyes that can see down the vista of past ages, and people every spot with its interests and incidents ; happy the hands whose eager diligence hath skill to body forth those picturesque adventures. We do not, as aforesaid, indulge in mere romance ; or, where one must in some sort be inventive, truth shall be the ground floor of our airy castle : all whatever else of more ima- STEPHAN LANGTON. 5 ginative tambour- work shall be sewn on the coarse canvas substratum of downright reality. For instance : King John did of old time hunt our country, leaving to us still for wit- nesses thereof, moated old Tangley his whilome hunting-box, and town-quarters at Kingston, and the ruined watch-tower at Woking : he did hold famous festival in ' Gilford at Christ- masse ' as ancient HoUingshed doth testify, — and often oscillated (folks do so still, we see) between Reading and Reygate, both then famous for their castles : the Pilgrim's Way from Winchester towards Canterbury, trodden afterwards by Chaucer's self in his world- famous pilgrimage and made immortal in his * Tales,' is traceable to this day across our val- leys and past our twin chapel-crowned hills, St. Martha's and St. Catherine's ; Newark Priory, now an almost extinct ruin, but in its original phase at least a splendid Gothic structure, was in the early days of John then just founded in 6 STEPHAN LANGTON. honour of Thomas a Becket ; and the chancel of St. Martha's (then called Martyr's Hill) was added, exactly as our tale relates, in the latter part of the twelfth century to the rude old fane built of rough iron-stone and with keyless arches, — possibly quite primeval, as over the grave of some martyred Barnabas or Joseph of Arlmathsea. So then, patient reader, accept me as en- deavouring to connect for your better entertain- ment our evident modern scenes (changed be- like in such accidental features as culture brings about, yet substantially the same as to geogra- phy) with antique but actual incidents ; I will do my best to pourtray human character, to attach to place its stirring incidents actual or probable, and to recognize the Divine Govern- ment, wise and good both then and now, in the tumultuous birth-time of Magna Charta : and for my central figure, I have fixed upon a man hitherto almost unstoried, though the very hinge STEPHAN LANGTON. 7 and pivot in his own person of our national greatness ; a man too, whom (possibly with overboldness, but Demosthenes advises well) we claim for our native county Surrey, and therein more distinctly for our own near neigh- bourhood, this fair valley of St. Martha's. And, ifLangton in Lincolnshire and some other suicidal synonyme in Devonshire may claim, or even seem to have, a prior right on the strength of mere nomenclature — well, let local pundits battle out the proof if they can and will, to their own complacence; — and let me tell them it can be to that only ; for no biogra- pher has yet, even probably, settled Stephan's birth-place, which (see all the Encyclopaedias) to this day rests as conjectural as Homer's or Melchisedec's : whereas it is quite certain that the great and good Archbishop Langton was frequently both at Reygate and at Reading, still oftener at Gilford, and finally died at his manor of Slinfold, just beyond the hundred of Wode- 8 STEPHAN LANGTON. tone and within a crow's flight ten miles of us ; and all know that practically most men hare- like return, if they have the chance, to their native birth-forms when hard run down by death. Furthermore, and still with that wise Demos- thenean boldness, I claim as still extant in St. Martha's chapel (one on each side of the restored chancel) Langton's stone-coffin lid, and that of his long-loved Alice. It may, indeed, be true that there is to be seen at Canterbury Cathedral, fixt under an arch in the Warrior's Chapel a plain and name- less tomb-stone, the very counterpart of ours on the hill-top, which the local cicerone will, if cross-questioned, insist upon pointing out to you as Archbishop Langton's : but it is also true, that when St. Martha's ancient chapel was very recently restored, two and only two stone coffins were found in digging out the chancel, the one rudely carved with a patriar- chal crook, the other with the simple cross of STEPHAN LA.NGTON. 9 an Abbess: the lids were brought to upper light, but all that they had covered remain reverently in undisturbed repose beneath ; and any one may see them now at old St. Martha's in the chancel, " to witness if I lie/' That Stephan Langton's true love of a real Alice influenced his whole life, take this strange historical fact in proof : and by all means have the patience to read the extract following (a genuine one, mind, and not invented) as a key to the character of the man. I quote from Thomson's " Essay on Magna Charta," p. 502. " In a communication from the Abbe de la Rue, printed in the ' Archseologia,' vol. xiii. p. 231, it is stated that in the Duke of Nor- folk's library there is a manuscript containing a sermon and two other pieces written by Langton ; and that in the course of the sermon, which is upon the Holy Virgin, there occurs the following stanza : 10 STEPHAN LANGTON. " Bele AHz matin leva, Sur cors vest! et para, Eiiz un verger s*en entra Cink fleurettes y'truva Un chapelet fit en a De rose flurie. Pur Deu trahez vous en a la Vus ki ne amez mie." Thus to be Englished from that Chaucer-like old French : " Fair Alice arose in the morning. And put on her vest and made her ready ; Then she went into her bower And found there five flowerets, "Which she made into a chaplet With the blooming rose : And you will betray God herein If you do not love me." " The orator then," continues this account, " enforces each particular verse, and applies it mystically to the Holy Virgin. The allegorical STEPHAN LANGTON. 11 turn which he gives the whole of the above stanza is very happily handled, and the preacher in speaking of his subject cries out at frequent intervals with enthusiasm, '* Ceste est la Bele Aliz, Cest est la flur, ceste est la liz." " This, this is Alice, fair to see. The flower, the lily, this is she/* That Stephan's " Bele Aliz," (thus pervading even the public sernaons of this poor love- martyred monk, this great enhghtened prelate, but ignorantly supposed to symbolize the Virgin Mary), sleeps at St. Martha's with Stephan himself beside her, no one who reads the fol- lowing tale can doubt. 12 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER II. plas^tjag antJ tj^e ILobers: tje prince mts tje CJurl It was sunset of Mayday, in the year of sal- vation 1186. There had been unusual merrymakings every where throughout broad England, for that the good King Henry had now at last been recon- ciled to his undutiful sons, whom his indiscre- tion as a sort of Lear had too much pampered with honour and power to the impoverishment of himself; but now for a little while there was a truce : and after his penance done as last Mid- STEPHAN LANGTON. 13 summer for Becket's death, (a martyrdom that had grieved him sorely, and whereof the King was an absolute innocent) he stood again in full communion with Holy Church. And nowhere had the national jousts and gambols been rarer than in the snug little hamlet of Aldeburie, where the good old Knight Sir Tris:trem de Braiose gave open hospitality to all comers ; by his hearty welcome and profuse largesse making his mossy-oaked old park more like the thronged gay fair of Gilford, than the quiet home of an octogenarian. Yonder is the many-gabled rambling old house, quaintly timbered and high-chimneyed, between a beech-crowned hill to the south, and the little Norman church among its yews to the northward : and yonder too, everywhere dotted about among the beauteous undulations of Al- deburie Park, you may see an irregular camp of booths decorated with green boughs and gar- lands of spring flowers, with here and there 14 STEPHAN LANGTON. an old heraldic banner lent from the great house. And there was a merry chattering crowd, and good store of ballad-singers and itinerant fools and mountebanks, with a bear-leader and monkeys, and antique Punch and Judy, and a juggler or two, and fortune-telling gipsies with their following of happy true believers ; there were crippled old soldiers, and pilgrims with their scallops, full of eastern marvels strange but true ; and there w^ere chapmen and pedlars hawking their wares; and some of the new- fangled and much- mocked sect of begging friars ; and a sprinkUng of bat-like monks and nuns, good people enough and charitable, won- dering at the gladness of a sunshine hoHday ; and all manner of the county folk, gentle and simple, as happy as could be : there was quoit- flinging, and hatchet-hurhng, and leaping, and racing, and the popinjay, and the quintain, and lots of fun and waggery among the assembled STEPHAN LANGTON. 15 hundreds : for, recollect, the Park is traversed throughout its length, (to say nothing of its other paths in all directions) by the famous Pil- grim's Way. Be sure that on so gallant a Mayday, the company would stream on it towards Aldeburie Park, as naturally as its brawling little native river Tillingbourne. But I was forgetting the chief feature of that Mayday junketting, — how merrily all danced about the Maypole; and, chiefest of all, how prettily the Mayqueen AHce footed it with cousin Stevie. A charming little queen was Alice ; lively, lovely, and good-natured ; with a sweet Madonna face, Ut up by bright blue eyes, and flanked with flaxen ringlets coronalled by a wreath of wild hyacinths : and the swelling white boddice lightly laced across, and the fair bare arms with wristlets of wreathed violets, and the short red petticoat of homespun dyed in Alderbark, and the naked little feet, white as snow, just san- 16 STEPHAN LANGTON. dalled underneath with otter's skin, and the ringing laugh, and the graceful sympathetic tinae-keeping with yon piper's simple music, and innocence and joyfulness and youthfulness and beauty, made Alice verily a natural queen o' the May. And, if young Stevie be less attractive to our masculine eyes, at least he looked as comely in the maiden's. A frank-faced, brave-browed youth was Stephan Langton ; more thoughtful than his fairy queen withal, as well became the stronger, sterner nature ; with the dark down upon his lip, and manliness written on every limb and lineament, daring in his eye, and vigorous self-dependence on his forehead. He was dressed in a close-fitting hunter's frock and leggings of tanned leather, had a flat cap with a drooping cock's plume set jauntily on his crisp black curls, and for a trifle of ornament wore his brass-sheathed forester's knife in a girdle of er-skin : a tall young fellow, and well-favoured. STEPHAN LANGTON. 17 So the couple footed it merrily, and rest as- sured they made the gossips cackle. Ay, and all the more so, when queen Alice was persuaded to sing, beside the Maypole in the middle of that crowded green, a pretty little song written for her that very morning by good-natured cousin Stevie. She sung it sweetly too, because so simply ; but I have after much research been able to rescue from the oblivion of antiquity only one stanza : The merry May, the happy May, "When all that breathes is blythe and gay, And neighbours gather with greeting glad. And even lovers cannot be sad. But, quite forgetting their deep-heaved sighs, Laugh in the hght of each other's bright eyes, — All hail to the happy May ! Thus, the gossips had some reason on their side, good sooth. All this, however, is now some three hours VOL. I. c 18 STEPHAN LANGTON. past : the crowd has melted homewards by many a deep fern-fringed lane and tangled foot path : and, just at sunset, we find (strange to say) Queen Alice and that comely cousin Stevie wandering alone, — if with each other be alone, — in the hazel walk just underneath St. Martha's. How or why they so happened to be there, and in each other's company too, a rational man can hardly guess ; let the gossips cackle if they will ; but it is surely pleasant enough, and natural to boot, for such a pair to find them- selves quite accidentally alone together in that Lover's Walk at the foot of what we now call CoUyer's Hanger : no doubt they had plenty to say to each other ; besides that the morning's coronal of hyacinths drooped so as to look un- becomingly faded ; and then, Collyer's Hanger in May is ever coerulean blue with the weed, in succession to its earlier spring carpet of pale primroses: anotter chaplet is manifestly inevit- able, and so also must be a kiss or two in trying it on. STEPHAN LANGTON. 19 "And when will my sweet consent to be a forester's bride ? Make good speed with a yea to me, Alice ; ay, and ere this hyacinth season passes ; for the blue flowerets in thy flaxen curls become thee bravely, dearest." " Stay a little longer, Stevie ; I am full young yet ; and my mother's ailing sadly, as thou knowest ; and," she added, coyly, " can't we go on loving each other thus heartily and patiently the while ? Here, take this posy, — ay and arede its riddle," said she, in a graver tone. It was a pretty little chaplet, artfully fashioned on a twist of floss silk, in six flower stars ; each star made of five flowers round a rose : she had worn it in the morning, till cousin Stevie came with his far more welcome coronal of hyacinths ; and then she gladly dofl'ed the other, crumpling it into her boddice. Dearest Stevie's choice was as usual so much simpler and so much prettier ; but her chaplet, nevertheless, spake the language of flowers ; and c 2 20 STEPHAN LANGTON. it was destined afterwards (as we have seen from his grace of Norfolk's naanuscript) to live im- mortal in a great man's oddly-allegorical sermons still extant after seven centuries. There was set in every one of those six stars its central rose of Love ; atop the spring anemone of Patience ; next after was the pansy of Remembrance ; anon the violet of Faith- fulness ; then the drooping cowslip of Sor- row ; and last the vale-lily of Happiness to Come. " Need I arede it to thee, Stephan ? There be many more of tears than of smiles in life, I trow ; and we must expect our troubles, dearest." " Nay, nay, my pretty love, speak not so sadly ; this posy should be full of brighter thoughts, methinks ; and I shall wear it round my arm like this, love, some day when I'm thy knight i' the lists, Alice." " I feel very sad at heart, Stevie, very sad ; I STEPHAN LANGTON. 21 know not why, but 1 dread some coming evil. Hark ! hist ! wasn't that a hunter's horn ?" Unmistakeably it was, though at such a dis- tance. And the lovers, knit as one with twined arms, loitering affectionately together beneath the catkined hazels, listen with startled sidelong eyes ; — a pretty picture enough, if any limner had been nigh to sketch them. " Hark, Stevie ! that was another, and a nearer ; and look, look !" A hunted roebuck looms larger than life over the south shoulder of St. Martha's, soon flying past them like an arrow ; and here streaming along after a space come the swift deer-hounds wiry and brindled, and anon the staunch and heavily-flewed sleugh-hounds, — and over the ridge men on horseback hie this way down into the glen-like wooded hollow rapidly, — and the roe and the hounds have rushed by, with an eager mudded huntsman or two, and sundry fleet runners, leaping along 22 STEPHAN LANGTON. with poles like kangaroos : but now comes hitherward a statelier company gaily plumed and parti-vested ; and with one a little ahead of the rest, as if for rank's sake. So the habitually thoughtful Stephan bids Alice to get safely out of the horses' way, and drop into the coppice for more of those hya- cinths ; while he will step forth to speak with the gallants, in case they should enquire of him which way the chase went. " Hallo, churl, — Gad'steeth ! why should yon pretty maid run off so ? Hark her back, villein : there isn't a fairer roe i' the forest, I'll swear to it by King Harry's best blood- hound; and so here without more ado I've caught my pretty chase, ha ! — Hark her hither, churl." Stephan Langton crossed his arms, and looked upon the speaker. The pair were in- tellectually and physically gladiators not ill- matched ; and were destined, though they little STEPHAN LANGTON. 23 knew it then, to do battle with each other to life's end, and in their social life-influences far beyond it : Langton, now the simple forester, gazed with quiet and considering courage upon one evidently his royal Liege Lord, the famous wicked Prince : an equal in years, some twenty of them, black-browed, fierce-eyed, " of a soure and angry aspect ;" richer in garb and circumstance of course with his crimson velvet tunic on that sleek white charger, and more boastful and loud in his manner ; but natheless, by no means Stephan's equal as a man of courage and action, and doomed to be subdued by him the churl, albeit a King. "What, slave, haltest thou in thine obe- dience ? Look to him, Cantelupe." Attendants had by this time crowded round ; and an insolent courtier of the hunt spurring his horse at the word brutally up against young Stephan, with a cruel backhander from his heavy hunting whip smashed him on the face. 24 STEPHAN LANGTON. In an instant, Alice, with a shriek spring- ing from among the hazels, flung herself upon her cousin Stevie. " Aha ! by our sweet Pope's peacock-crown, — the very white doe o' the forest ! Hither, Fawkes, lift that pretty puppet to our knee, and so straight off for Tangley." The burly knight, leaping from his horse and flinging the reins to a runner, with both arms seized the maiden round the waist ; — but not before Stephan with his unsheathed knife had him in a moment at his mercy. " Hold, sirrah !" shouted Prince John ; then in a lower tone, " Quick upon the quarry, runners l" At the word, six shaggy fellows in tunics of red cow-skin, bare-legged bare-armed and bare- headed but for their unkempt shocks and a universal hide of hair like Caliban's, rushed forward in a circle round the arrested comba- tants whirling their quarter-staves overhead. STEPHAN LANGTON. 25 And a terrible weapon is your quarter-staff well handled ; yon heavy ashen pole, iron-shod at both ends, and equally of use for leaping over that rough hunting wilderness, and for stun- ning by a confusedly whizzing blow your wolf or your bear, or aught other foe at bay. For a minute, (but it seemed much longer) there was a dead pause. The fierce eyes of those rough kernes, glaring tlirough their matted locks upon their leader, awaited his signal ; Stephan's hunting knife flashed peri- lously before Fawkes's eyes as he helplessly held the fainting maiden ; and — sudden as a thunderbolt at a look from John — three of those whirHng quarter-staves dropping crack upon the brave young lover's cap felled him in a moment ! There was a roar of cruel laughter : for doubt not that the courtiers of a reprobate Prince are intensely of his own base nature : glorying in shames, and cowardly. 26 STEPHAN LANGTON. " And now, up with her, Fawkes de Breaute : we've saved thy knightly blood this bout from soilage with yon churl's weapon, and so be thankful, Sirrah: and now give our Grace more thanks for this, Sir, that we bid thee put thine hand under that pretty white foot, and spring this beauty to our pommel." The poor girl, w^ho had swooned dead away at sight of Stephan's blood, was tossed like a doll into that royal brigand's arms ; and in another minute the whole band of them, with shouts of hoarse laughter, were galloping away for Tangley. STEPHAN LANGTON. 27 CHAPTER III. ©£&an anti 3Bincoln antecetients. Now this was the early history of young Stephan. His father, a demilance or yeoman of an ancient Surrey family, had followed his feudal chief Sir Ralph de Camois the Knight of Wodetone, during the period of desultory adventure between the first and second crusades to the Holy Land, in the honourable capacity of that good Knight's head-esquire ; and bravely did he bear the Wodetone banner (a 28 STEPHAN LANGTON. griffon passant or) beside his liege lord in many a fierce onslaught of the Paynim. However, what might have been the exploits either of master or man none could truly tell ; for the palmers had popularly, and not without some reason, the credit of beating even the trou- badours and trouveres in their poetical versions of prose facts. The only thing quite certain is, that now for some fifteen or sixteen years neither have been heard of; and this would reasonably seem to argue a crusader's death, and his duteous esquire's as of course ; with the usual feats of gallantry and hardihood before they deceased severally. And poor Dame Langton with her brace of pretty baby-boys, so much alike you could barely tell them apart, was thus left a widow- bewitched in the fourth year of a somewhat comfortless specimen of holy matrimony ; for to say truth her scapegrace husband had been a very rolling stone from boyhood ; and so the STEPHAN LANGTON. 29 truant child, the reckless roystering youth, the roving man (to whom adventure of any sort from forestry to crusading had ever more attractions than a loving wife with her curly headed bairns and the cozy nest of home in that old Saxon hamlet of Friga-Street) this vagrant sort of husband, I say, dropped characteristically enough into the condition of an exile never heard of: and the broken- hearted affectionate wife wept and pined and prayed for him through five more years ; and then the light that long had blazed too brightly from her eyes and seemed to be burning more than skin deep beneath her thin flushed cheeks — w^ent out, went out gradually and utterly; and one cold March day they buried her in Abinger churchyard, nigh to the high mound and the archery butts ; and so her pretty twin-like boys of eight and nine were straightw^ay orphans. With respect to the younger, the then little 30 STEPHAN LANGTON. curly-pated Simon, we have small historic help to do more than guess at his career; which natheless, when it comes in our course, may be sketched hereafter : all we know is that (as in the strangely coincident case of the three brothers Abbott, other chief old Surrey worthies, an archbishop a bishop and a knight, though born no other than as the orphan sons of a James-time Gilford clothier) this Simon Langton turns up long afterward as about to be consecrated Archbishop of York, while his brother Stephan was then Cardinal Prelate of Canterbury : but it is with this same elder brother Stephan that now we have to do ; he forms our present thesis, and we are yetawhile only called upon to follow in detail the theme of his extraordinary fortunes. From the Friga-Street Farm (folks have since corrupted the old name of the hamlet into Friday Street, as in the case of its London name- sake; but the goddess Friga was its true STEPHAN LANGTON. 31 sponsor, even as King Thor primevally stood name-giver to Dorking) — from that snug old grange with its outbuildings, and arables, and pastures, in a lovely dell to the north of Leith Hill laced by trout-streams and clumped with timber, the poor little nine-year old Stephan was taken all in tears to the home of the good par- son-secular of Wodetone ; who kindly kept and taught the child awhile in a little room, over the church porch ; till he should find means of transporting him to far-distant Devonshire ; where the boy's mother's sister had somewhile intermarried with a Foyle, living near to Tamar- Monachorum. Within a year, the rare chance happened of a safer escort for the child than was usual in Eng- land's then evil condition of universal peril and brigandage ; for a posse of monks were to pass through Wodetone on their way from well- pilgrimaged Canterbury to the far west ; and so, the charitable parish priest confided 32 STEPHAN LANGTON. to those holy brethren this his orphan parishioner. It was a travel of many weary days ; and one of no small danger and adventure : but, not to be as tedious as the journey itself, what chiefly concerns us to know thereof for the fortunes of our hero is, that the good monks soon disco- vered the pretty child to have an exquisite taste for music, and the gift of a thrilling alto voice : for often to beguile the way had they chaunted their Gregorians (and not a few Anacreontics to boot) and ever they noted that the boy cut in with the sweetest of seconds in a treble, a very nightingale among those bass-throated rooks. So then it naturally enough came to pass, that Uncle Foyle, a hard man and a covetous, was easily persuaded to let the brotherhood of Tamar have the pretty orphan for their quire ; where for six years and more his piercing upper notes made High Mass at Monachorum espe- cially popular : those six years having little else STEPHAN LANGTON. 33 of incident to record, beyond that the boy got well set up in all manner of monastic literature the while, reading and writing, rare accomplish- ments both, and not a few insights into deeper lores ; and that he ever and anon managed to make out a pleasant holiday at Uncle Foyle's, in spite of his habitual grumpishness : for the aunt with her cakes and possets made amends for him ; and, if aught was lacking on her part too, for she could scold pretty sharply at times, be sure that blue-eyed Alice, Stephan's younger cousin by a couple of years or so, did without protest more than a compensatory service for her. The bright boy and the pretty little girl would at such times often get out secretly together, rambling and scrambling among those happy Devon tors and glens and gullies, — wondering what magic it was that could make them like each other so much better than all the world be- side: and many a time returning at nightfall VOL. I. D 34 STEPHAN LANGTON. (albeit with the presentable excuse of a basket- full of nuts or blackberries or naushrooms, very pacifying to the female powers) that churlish Uncle Foyle was wont to be right sharp upon the stripling chorister, and more than once had made his pretty daughter cry her eyes out be- cause he rated him so : " The lad should to his booking," he said, " and the lass to her wheel ; he liked not so much caterwauling at sundown, and couldn't see for his part what the cousins could have to talk about with one another so much ;'* so he scolded roundly the pair of them, " as an ill truant and an idle baggage." How much longer this sort of thing might have lasted, and whither it would have led, it boots not now to guess; for unluckily just about this time the famous young chorister's F in alt, in the middle of a more than usually crowded state of Monachorum, broke down right ludi- crously : and the irascible precentor with his chaunt^y monks worried the poor lad grievously STEPHIN LANGTON. 35 for a week or two, in striving by divers emollient messes, and sundry corporeal pains and penalties beside, to mend a cracked voice ; a perfectly hopeless matter, when the upper lip begins to grow downy. What was now to be done with the youth ? The holy fathers of Tamar Monachorum wanted nothing of him but his alto voice; and that was coming lower down the ladder of musical no- tation every day ; and old Farmer Foyle wouldn't be after keeping the hearty gluttonous young fellow at home, not he, (albeit Alice pleaded for this most affectionately) and he must go somewhither, — far away if possible, — to seek his fortunes. Now it happened that the prior of Tamar Monachorum was younger brother to the good knight of Lincoln, Sir Guy de Marez, whose blazon was three couped mermaids on a shield azure ; and the prior wotted not unwisely that a handsome page might propitiate the great Sir D 2 36 STEPHAN L\NGTON. Guy and his no less stately lady : besides that he wanted a cast or two of summed gyrfalcons from the fens, at that time quite the rage among all clerical lovers of hawking, a sport in the zenith of its popularity. So, the prior, having indited with some difficulty certain com- mendatory hieroglyphics on a fragment of parch- ment, duly tied with floss silk and sealed with the Monachorum crozier-boss in rosin and bees- wax, sent young Stephan on another far-off journey ; giving him for escort two stout lay- brothers ; for aid and companionship by the way, — and to bring the hawks back. How well for five gay years young Langton sped in Lincolnshire, how handsome he looked in my lady's green and gold, how greatly he ex- celled in all the cardinal virtues of that age, horsemanship tilting forest-craft and the dulcet luting of the troubadour, no chronicle exists to assure us : except indeed the present writing, which dares to assert authoritatively, that not STEPHAN LANGTON. 37 alone all the knightly excellences implied in the above were Stephan Langton's appanage, but that another special point of gallantry is fairly to be added to the list : to wit, that in spite of continual lustrous glances from bright eyes at banquet or in bower, in spite of many a lively Christmas dance with many a merry maiden, and sundry other and more perilous Mayings and Lady-dayings and free-hearted Michaelmasses with the comely lasses of Lincoln, — all willing enough to catch a trifle more of favour from his eyes than their constant mere cheerfulness and brotherly good-humour, — still he was perpetu- ally vexing himself to wonder whether little cousin Alice thought of him as he never could help to be thinking of her ? O, if he might but touch once more that precious little hand, and exchange a loving look with that pretty blue eye, — were it only for an instant ! Alice, the * bele Aliz ' of his life, in her blush- rose fleurie of maidenly bashfulness, was ever- 38 STEPHAN LANGTON. more in his mind's eye and on his heart's pulse, at board and afield, awake and asleep ; inspiring alike his much-praised troubadouring, his strong fling in the wrestling match, his manly daring in the chase, and his well-bred courtesy at all times to dame or demoiselle, high-born or lowly. Is it any wonder now, that love found out a way to touch once more that precious little hand, and look on the aforesaid pretty eye ? For surely I need not vex your patience by explaining how obviously the conscientious young man " felt it a duty " to fly to the help of poor Aunt Foyle in her now recent widowhood ; more especially as, at the instance of the good priest of Wodetone (his own foster-father, we may remember) widow Foyle had come recently v;ith Alice to spend the rest of her days in the neighbouring hamlet of Gomershal. As for her avaricious husband, he had some while since been rightly served out for a whole STEPHAN LANGTON. 39 lifetime of meanness, by being all at once robbed of his golden hoard ; losing, through a rash effort at reprisal, his worthless life itself into the bargain : the freebooting burglars of those times looked out habitually for such money- grubbing churls, and, after literally breaking their bank (a hedgerow) for its hidden crock of gold, made nothing of breaking their heads to boot, in revenge (if the case were so) for im- pertinent enquiries. There were no inquests in those days, though coroners appear to have had historic existence since the earliest of our Saxon Edwards ; but then, as sometimes afterwards, there was small connection between offices and duties : and so it habitually came to pass that men went out of life, honestly or otherwise, as little noticed as babies came into it. Thus, widow Foyle fallen into poverty and weak health was of course all the more legiti- mately her duteous nephew's care ; at all events she believed this, — and so perhaps did he : for 40 STEPHAN LANGTON. his missive, sent beforehand (by grace of heavy pre-payment and the promise of as much more on safe return through a wayfaring palmer known to Sir Guy) said almost nothing about Alice ; he only " hoped his fair cousin had held him in remembrance." And hadn't she, — didn't she ? O those long dark dreary years of utter absence and silence and despairing uncertainty ! hope itself was al- most dead within her heart, — and she never never ought to have wasted a thought about him! So, many times by daybreak after a night of weeping, did she resolve to banish his remem- brance for ever : and, with the brisk works of daylight all around her, and neighbours dropping in with news, and the multitude of matters to attend to (for even in the father's lifetime her mother drooped in health, and Alice had to see to everything) she did manage to get on with a cheerful seeming through the day, and her STEPHAN LANGTON. 41 crabbed old father fancied that worthless young chorister forgotten : but, with the quiet and the loneliness of night, there he came again, frank- faced loving-hearted and as dear as — O dearer far than ever ! awake or asleep, in her very orison at Vespers or Matins, there he was and is still, O how heartily indeed " held in remem- brance." That all these things have happened as I now record them, not a soul dare doubt : and least of all your blundering antiquarian biographer. How is it — except as elucidated clearly by the present writer — that Stephan Langton (they cannot even spell his name aright, for Stephanos is the Greek for crown and for the first-crowned martyr, neither durst any dialec- titian have ever written it Stephenos) how is it, I demand, that our Stephan, so famous in England's annals as the father of the Great Charter, is claimed by such impossible counties 42 STEPHAN LANGTON. as Lincolnshire plus Devonshire for a native born? Does not the one such impudent assertion answer the other? and have not I lucidly cleared up the respective pretensions of north and south, giving to each a portion of our hero's early training, but to neither the honour of his birth — claiaiing the oyster but liberal with the shell? And is not in chief your present annalist entirely justified in deciding the county Surrey as his native soil, with an unimpeachable right to the glories of a son so long withheld from her affec- tions ? The month or so of interval between Stephan's arrival out of Lincolnshire and the present Mayday, I must leave to be filled up in the young lovers' story as your own sympathetic shrewdness pleases ; no doubt this was not the first time by a score, that the twain of late had walked and talked together ; STEPHAN LANGTON. 43 it is evident they both well knew the way to yonder hazel coppice under St. Martha's, and they had managed to get to the old trysting- place cleverly unseen as usual. 44 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER IV. % ^Jort Cut tiiroucfj t^e fHarsj^es. Was it all a dreadful dream ? For the whole scene had flown by like a hurricane — where life was as the garden of Eden before it, but is a howling wilderness behind. And when Stephan, slowly waking from that bloody swoon, felt some kind hand bathing his battered temples with reviving water, he was sure it was the dream still ; some softer phase of it perhaps. STEPHAN LANGTON. 45 " Cheerily, man, — cheerily ; and be it speedily too, or worse will follow." And another copious dash upon his forehead from that cold Lud-spring woke Langton in a moment to the sense of where he was, and still more terribly to " where, where is Alice?" " Ay, ay — that's it ; you must be quick, Stephan, to save her ; look you, I've caught yon runaway horse of some thrown rider in the Hangers, and Fve tethered him handy ; what, Stevie, don't you know your old aunt's friendly neighbour, Hal the woodman ?" "Thank God and all His holy angels!" and with Hal's sturdy help he struggled into the saddle. '* I seen it all from the coppice where I was a-wooding, neighbour : and I heard them shout for old Tangley, after you were down upon your face ; but there's no time now for talk : I couldn't rouse you for an hour good : so, 46 STEPHAN LANGTON. away after her, quick, and St. Hubert speed you." " But which way, friend ? Tm a total stranger to these parts beyond the Hanger." " O ay, — take the horse track down the brooks, and you'll strike another anon due south, and that'll bring you to the cross tracks in the morass, and you must take the furder- raost, and so straight along Western Lan©, and jist beyond the gibbet there at the fifth turning to the left you'll sight old Tangley some two mile off." " Stop, stop, good Hal ! I never could find it, — I should miss it and lose her ; guide me, me, guide me friend, for mercy's sake and Alice's !" And thus the kindly woodman leading on that intricate way, (it was no slight point of country life in those days to be well up in woodcraft,) they went along slowly; though Stephan was in terrible suspense and urged STEPHAN LANGTON. 47 better speed : but, truth to tell, Hal had taken " a short cut," despising the regular horse route where the hunt itself went lengthily round the morass ; and of course they had got bogged and lost their way, and light failed, and altogether (as generally is the case somehow with short cuts) they made at least a treble distance of it. And so, while they are flounder- ing in the fen and getting extricated if possible from a wilderness of brambles, tussocks, and fallen timber, we have space for a little con- templation as to some social circumstances of a time when there were no way-wardens, no police, no order, no security. Norman misrule had substituted anarchy and misery for the old Alfredian or Saxon good government, a change for the worse that we may have to touch more at length anon; hereabouts it is sufficient to suggest that the very face of the country had been altered from a garden to a forest, and that the realm seemed relapsing into a pristine 48 STEPHAN LANGTON. barbarism. The selfishness of Royal Nimrods desolated cultivation for hunting purposes, and even good King Henry the Second was fonder of his hounds than of his people. STEPHAN LANGTON. 49 CHAPTER V. For it is by no means easy for us now to realize the hard conditions of existence in those evil days of Richard and John nearly seven hundred years ago. All the modern luxuries and conveniences of life, nay not a few of what we have long come to consider absolute necessaries, were then entirely lacking : for our meanest beggars nowadays are clad fed and housed far better than then were all, except the richest gentry and the nobles, VOL. I. E 50 STEPHAN LANGTON. Think of a day when, except in some few churches, windows had no glass, floors no carpeting, walls neither paper paint nor pictures, hearths no chinaney beyond a hole in the black-raftered roof, and rooms no chairs, nor indeed any furniture at all but a bin and a bencblike table. Imagine a total absence of *' tea coffee tobacco and snuff," of cloths and cotton goods and cutlery, of sugar and potatoes, oranges and lemons and rice and tapioca, and all the thousand-and-one articles of food or finery so easily now accessible to the humblest among us from the very ends of the earth. Conceive the state of country life without roads, and by consequence wheel-carriages : everywhere nothing but rough horse- tracks, girth-deep in mud, intersecting each other in all directions through the marshy jungles ; such marshy jungles themselves being due to what may be now some pretty trout-stream sparkling through its well-drained meadows ; but in that STEPHAN LANGTON. 51 day the pestilential cause of inundated valleys and swanap-covered plains, wherever fallen forest trees rotted as they fell, and dammed those flowing waters : and, instead of counties mapped and fielded out as now with exquisite cultivation covered with houses and gardens and flocks and herds, all around was to he seen nothing hut a desolate and tangled wilderness inhahited hy swarms of savage animals, wolves and foxes, venison and bear, wild cattle, wild hogs, bitterns and bustards and waterfowl innumerable. Fancy an existence without a printed book or a post letter or a newspaper ; deprived of every object in life beyond providing food for the body, and with nothing on earth to do when the meal has been secured but to digest it ! No arts, no sciences, no ornaments, no nicnacs, no hobbies, no professional gains or interests, no home-comforts, no indoor-pleasures, no outdoor security ; the sole interest consisting E 2 52 STEPHAN LANGTON. in constant peril of life, and the only stimulant to industry a fear of starvation. Verily, we ought to be right grateful that we live in a day so very much better than " the good old times." It is true, the magnate then had some coarse luxuries and lived in a barbaric splendour ; but he paid heavily for it all. Many a baron wore the market value of his castle on his back ; and if he quaffed of a foreign vintage from his ivory horn on high days and state occasions, Cleopatra's pearl-drink was not costlier to her than his posset of Chian or Cyprus was to him. The crowd of rude retainers, lustily quaffing sour mead, and voraciously devouring deer's flesh or the sodden boar, (hacking their junks from the carcase by the selfsame dirks that had stuck the beasts achase and haply had assisted at more serious murders) that feudal rabble consumed not in a month more money's-worth than their liege-lord STEPHAN LANGTON. 53 the baron in his single draught of wine which he ostentatiously " drank to Hamlet " on some high festival ; or, more unusually, when he thought proper to indulge in the private extravagance of drinking to himself. If gen- tlemen would wear Flemish silks or velvets, or a suit of Florentine armour they must mortgage their estates to Isaac for them ; and in a day before stockings were invented, they had to pay gold-digger's prices for the needful convenience of boots. And look aside at the poor man's lot. Probably a theow or slave to some tyrant of the neighbouring castle and therefore one of his marauders, he had a very Caffrarian filth- reeking kraal for his home, and utter idleness for his occupation : unless indeed his business might legitimately be regarded to quarrel with men, and his pleasure to make the coarsest kind of love to women ; and so he had to eke 54 STEPHAN LANGTON. out the dullnesses of savage life by dark fore- shadows of more civilized existence. Still, — for Providence is good to every state and age and abounds in compensations, — there may well be a brighter side to this black pic- ture. Not a few of those old barons were right good and shrewd fellows at heart, though a trifle rough in hand and rude of speech ; and their princely hospitality fed half the neighbour- hood, finding sport for them too by way of minstrelsy and venerie ; and the many rehgious houses in particular sent none empty away ; and the poor kerne had at all events his hovel to himself, an Englishman's castle even then, with its patch of oats or peas, and fowls and fish and the smaller game without stint, for far more savoury meals than Hodge can unpoach- ingly muster at present : and of wild honey was a plenty in the woods for mead and metheglin and hydromel and dilligrout and cakes and STEPHAN LANGTON. 55 puddings and possets ; and there was good stunning barley-brew enow too, though hops as yet were not ; and oats yielded an indifferent whiskey ; and the foaming frummerty was there, and the querned meal in abundance : and if no Chinese tea nor Arabian coffee smoked in the horns, there was no end of fragrant British substitutes at hand, for health or luxury, as ver- vains and mallows, centaury and tansy and tor- mentil, and a score more, as every good wife skilled in herbary well knew ; and mJlk and butter and cheese and eggs, and the coarse but satisfying hard and soft manchets (rude fore- fathers of the biscuit and the crumpet) and above all plenty of wild beef and mutton, — these the meanest serf might have for the trouble of taking it ; and the King's venison also, if he dared : and the otter and the beaver and the fox made comfortable fur-jacketing against hard winter ; and bulls and sheep and sometimes the shaggy bear too contributed their 56 STEPHAN LANGTON. warm hides as a substitute for blankets : and so altogether things were physically tolerable. Nay, intellectually also and spiritually, con- sider justly with what gentleness a merciful Providence could temper even that roughest phase of English society to both poor and rich alike. Though there were no newspapers nor any to read them, at all events the narrow ways were thronged with cheerful chatterers who for- warded " the news of the world " with strange swiftness and amusing variations : if no post- men scattered broadcast o'er the land the seeds of joy and sorrow, — at least one's nearest and dearest staid very much at home, — and where there is no travelling there can be httle need of correspondence ; ay and better far than as now- a-days, local attachments had both time and place to grow tap-rooted. If there were no books, — well. Sir Topas the parish priest was a rare Hbraiy in his own loquacious person, and taught folks finely all he knew or didn't know. STEPHAN LANGTON. 57 And the troubadours and harpers and palmers and friars talked famously too. And so, life flowed and ebbed by days and months and years pleasantly enough and profit- ably. One almost hankers after all for those plenty-fed neighbourly gossipping and true- believing " good old times." As for the Baron of the realm, a little king proud and happy in his feudal following, with his ceremonious court holdings, his daily hunt and banquet, his innumerable guests and the wayfaring minstrel or pilgrim astonishing the board with rare adventures, — all this was a very pleasant sort of life ; and much more so would it be, where the great man, not content alone with making his old hall the cynosure of half a county's beauty rank and fashion, was also a good man enough to gladden all the poor around ; as did that silver-haired old nobleman Sir Tristrem of Aldeburie: different, O how different — (for one continually verged Heaven- 58 STEPHAN LANGTON. ward and the other towards its dread Antipodes) from such a tyrannical old profligate as the bad Baron of Tangley ; a baser anticipation of fat FalstafF, an abettor of the wicked Prince and corruptor of the young courtiers round him, whose moated house was the riotous hunting home of John and his following of titled banditti. STEPHAN LANGTON. 59 CHAPTER VI. (Blti ^Tangles ^anor. Painfully, and perilously too (for the bog as we said was treacherous and night had somewhile darkened, and the w^ay even when found again was rough and tangled and jungly,) Stephan and his good guide Hal stood at length before the gate of old Tangley Manor-House at some three hours after sundown ; O terrible three hours of suspense and danger ! for how had gentle Alice meanwhile fared in that rough company ? 60 STEPHAN LANGTON. A clatter of rude revelry and a blaze of light from every casement, and shouted oaths, and snatches of song and chorussing and ribaldry startling the silent night, made Langton's heart sink within him as they neared the grange : his innocent delicate Alice, pretty moth, alas ! for her wings were like to be too surely singed in all that blinding torchlight; woe, woe, — what might not happen ? Langton with prompt generalship and deci- sion saw at once what was the only thing to be done at such a crisis ; and when, knocking at the wicket (for the old house of Tangley Manor is deeply moated and highly walled round, and entrance is none but by the great gate, or its child the wicket) he thought he heard amid the boisterous revelry of the chorussed — " Drink, drink, till the brain is on fire, Drink, till it blazes fiercer and higher — ^^ a feeble — " Stevie, save me, help, help !" be STEPHAN LANGTON. 61 sure a quick hot heart within him well seconded the cool wise head above it. "No entrance, Measters, — none I say; my Lord is at his revels ; back, I say," — and the brawny kerne, pine torch in hand, and not without a vigorous oath or two, slid home again the wicket's window. " Nay but, man, you must let in this horse to the court-yard, — you must, I tell you ; it's one of your master's by the trappings: we found him loose in the forest, and have brought him home to you." The red shock head glanced suspiciously through the pannel, and with an — " Ay, ay,— by St. Anthony and all his imps. Black Chris- topher sure enow," — he drew back the wooden bars, unhooked the chain, and flung the great gate open. On the instant, Stephan, of course afoot, with Hal and the horse in the gateway to keep it open, dashed in and seized the torch, knock- 62 STEPHAN LANGTON. ing over that astounded porter ; ran into the open porch of the grange, hurriedly set fire to some sheaves of dry rushes piled in a side room (a substitute for carpetting just then invented) and lighting swiftly as he flew up the like rushes strewed upon the stairs, — burst into the great upper room of the revels. At a glance he saw what w^e must be made to comprehend less immediately by description ; for with him action had wellnigh to outrun his apprehension. Those cow-skinned kernes standing round the room held each a blazing pine torch showing in strong lights and flickering shadows the bad young Prince and all his following, — the riotous hunting troop and their wenches, full of wine and meat, and loud with boiste- rous revelry. Next beside the Prince under his canopy, shrinking back and pale with terror, was our poor little hyacinthed May-queen Alice, with John eagerly trying to coax her STEPHAN LANGTON. 63 to drink the treacherous hot wine out of his golden tankard ; while the vivid concentration of all eyes upon the twain, proved that her time of uttermost peril was come. There was a quick glad scream, — " Ha ! Stevie, Stevie !" And she has leapt into his arms, while with his blazing torch he sweeps a clear circle round him. VOL. T. E 3 64 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER VII. SEfje Ji're. Flushed with wine, and emboldened as so many against one, the revellers rush upon young Stephan, who pale and weak from his bruised brow and with Alice clinging to him for safety, desperately but hardly fights his way clear to the door with that sweeping fire- brand through all the riot. But see ! there's a smouldering cloud of smoke streaming everywhere through the chinked floor, and a fierce tongue of flame STEPHAN LANGTON. 65 licking up the rushes flares all over the room, and a very furnace of fire blazes in at the doorway, and Stephan with Alice in his arms (poor, poor singed moth, for her garments are in a blaze) has leapt down the crackling stairs, and through that oven-like hall, and out into the cold quiet night and through the gate, and swiftly in the dark adown the lane, damp- ing out with scorched hands as he runs this cruelly clinging " martyr's shirt of fire " that enwraps his moaning Alice ! And now, thank Heaven for the friendly marsh ; for he has laid her, poor burnt child, tenderly and gratefully in that merciful water. There is a moment for reflection : and for- tunately no one pursues ; because all hands in the burning grange are confusedly striving to save themselves half-sobered, and then to ex- tinguish the fierce flames by buckets, and the convenient moat. In vain ; high up into the dark sky flared the avenging fire, and when VOL. I. F 66 STEPHAN LANGTON. the roof heavily fell in, there rushed forth a column of sparks and red hot smoke as if from a volcano. And by next morning nothing but a shell of smouldering hard oak timbers filled in with ancient brick-work stood there, — the bad old Baron's sepulchre ; for Richard de Bradestone of Tangley, heavy with drink and helpless from age had perished, hoary sinner, unsoilzied, unannealed, in that living tomb of fire! All else are thought to have escaped, — save some poor good horses in the stable that would not move, — and a stolid kerne or two (but their money value was less, poor slaves, so it mattered little) who dared not : those human candlesticks had nothing in Hfe to do but by day to run with the hounds, and by night to hold torches ; and thus, with dull dutiful ser- fishness they stood unmoved round the room till the very floor gave way, and so two or three of them perished. STEPHAN LANGTON. 67 As for Woodman Hal, he gave out when he got back to Aldeburie how that Stevie and Alice (and he told the gossips all the long sad story in words enough, I promise you) he gave out surely that they had both been burnt alive there with old Tangley ; and that tale was believed for many a day, making sorrowful hearts for friends and neighbours in the valley. What became of Prince John and his Comus crew of male and female revellers, I neither know nor care : they all turned up again some- where ; and doubtless, after seeing the last of Tangley Manor, — that's to say the last till its rebuilding, for it still exists an old curiously timbered and moated grange, — the Prince and his courtiers, most of them unhorsed, found their way to Gilford Castle, and treated the night's adventure as a glorious joke. F 2 68 STEPIIAN LANGTON. CHAPTER VIII. But what must Stephan Langton do ? Is Alice dead? his charming little May-queen, still crowned with a scorched and drooping coronal, and all her garments burnt and charred, — and alas, alas — her tender body too ! there she lies in the kind cold water, white, silent, motionless : is she quite dead ? O what a May-day's eve and night ! He prayed to Our Father earnestly in his great trouble, as every wise and good and STEPHAN LANGTON. 69 strong man does; and ever then is wiser, better, stronger : and helped on the instant by some ministering angel he considered calmly what was wisest to be done, — and what he resolved reasonably he did determinately. Old St. Martha's, of long years a sacred spot from some traditionary martyrdom upon that hill-top, had recently been made a special sanctuary by the Prior of Newark in honour of St. Thomas; the new chancel had been built barely a year ; and the dead — woe ! for it seems too surely his dead, dead AUce — should lie there in safe peace beside the altar. For how could he take her homeward again, dead to a dying mother ? or how bear all the terrible blame and shame of having — so the gossips would declare — been the root and cause of it all by his moonlight tryste and folly ? for as usual with lovers they had met clandes- tinely ; and, almost equally as of course, that old mother was against the match. And then 70 STEPHAN LANGTON. the sleugh hounds would be set upon his track long ere morning : Holy Church alone was his nearest and easiest refuge: he could see the hill-top chapel, not so very far off, outlined on the midnight sky. So then, carried in his loving arms, however unsteadily, — for he stumbled oft and well-nigh fainted many times, — and kissed through blind- ing tears for half the way, he struggled through the morass hour after hour with his precious burden, and at last crept weakly up the steep hill-side, — and just at morning's cold grey dawn fell down exhausted on the chapel's threshold. Poor Alice ! she must alas, alas ! be dead ; she had not spoken, nor moved, nor seemingly breathed for hours : so he lifted the latch and laid her tenderly down upon the matting of the altar steps. And there he prayed, kneeling beside her ; and vowed irrevocable vows ; and sternly resolved ; and, according to his charac- ter, acted on them promptly. STEPHAN LANGTON. 71 Reverently as before the altar of the Most High, he kissed her affianced forehead still coronalled with May-day hyacinths ; and he crossed those cold white hands upon her bosom so cruelly scorched ; and decently and orderly he arranged the burnt wet remnants of her clothing round the poor insensate body of what once — not five hours ago — was his own dear loving rescued Alice ! Imagine his bitter, bitter tears, his passion of deep grief ; and thereafter the strong man's calm after the storm, his tranquil resolution: he will leave her there alone with Death and God, love's consecrated martyr: he will live henceforth not for himself, but for her and for his country an avenger : he, he, Stephan Lang- ton, will stand that wicked Prince's cross and hindrance now, and if he comes to be a King, his stout antagonist hereafter. How to compass this? How can a poor man wrestle with a Prince ? There is but one 72 STEPHAN LANGTON. way : the Cross is the great co-equal with, nay conqueror of, the Crown : the Church, the Church is the sole power that dares he an opponent of the King. He will take the cowl, — he will improve his Tamar lessons and be a scholar, — he will add to that his Lincoln cour- tesies and be a prelate, he will wear Alice's chaplet on his arm, and be her true knight still, though in no lists but a Cathedral pulpit, — he will make Alice and her wrongs famous to the ends of the earth, to the end of time itself; he will free England for ever from the tyranny of Kings, and recover for the people their ancient liberties. All this did he vow, earnestly, solemnly, and sternly ; as in the heavenly Presence, and before the hovering spirit of his Alice ; whose fair cold corpse, scarce veiled by those scraps of tinder clothing, was laid out straight before the shrine, and served as the seal to his vows. He kissed that brow reverently after each strong STEPHAN LANGTON. 73 sentence : but the vow of eternal celibacy for Alice's sweet sake was the sternest and most passionate in its kiss-seal ; and he half imagined that she moved, as he pressed despairingly those pallid lips: no, no; it was all a reeling fancy ; the mere delusion of despairing love. 74 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER IX. Newark ^riarg. Before day had well broken, our sworn but calm avenger Stephan had taken his last leave of that dear body, left before the altar on that hill-top : why should he stay, and meet the dreaded curious comers? She was safe in heaven, — and the poor cold corpse here is safe too in sanctuary : let him away, away speedily, and act at once upon his vows. It is clear whither to go : Newark Priory only some nine miles off will take him in, and as a new foun- dation glad of converts will make small ques- STEPHAN LANGTON. 75 tioning: so by morning's earliest sunlight, he had left St. Martha's a mile behind him and was so far on his way to Woking. In the deep-worn track as he journeyed, he met with several wayfarers, coming hitherward or passed by rapidly, exchanging with them each a bare good-day ; but the only notable greeting was when he had to stand aside, and make lowly obeisance before a cavalcade of monks. Black Augustines, defiling singly by him in the gutter-like roadway upon their sleek mules, headed by some dignitary in a litter, and preceded by his cross-bearer. These he half guessed might be bound for St. Martha's, possibly to see about its newly built chancel, as recently added to the more ancient Saxon chapel; — and if so, certainly to find already consecrated there to Death and God his own most precious martyred AUce ! But he hurried on without a word, after due obeisance. 76 STEPHAN LANGTON. And thus, across by the old Druidical yew- circles, and along their connecting avenue, and over the broad low flat, a jungly marsh difficult to thread by many a devious foot-way through the quagmire, and often stopped by fallen trees he won his way at last to Newark Priory ; a smaller sort of Tintern Abbey facing a green well-rivuletted plain (monks naturally like fish as cats do) and the whole batch of buildings on three sides bounded by the dense high forest. He has entered by the outer porch, and is parleying with a fat old monk, — or truer to say a lay brother, — the porter. "May I have speech with the Prior, good brother ?" "Anon, perchance thou mayest, Sir Tra- veller, an his Reverence be up : but he's sore ailing — and what's thine errand, friend ? thou lookest white and way-worn/' " Let me say it to the Superior, good STEPHAN LANGTON. 77 brother; I am weak, and may not waste ray breath ; so take my name in as a wayfarer, if it please thee : a sore heart is chary of its speech." " As thou wilt, friend, as thou wilt. I'll go for thee and seek his holy Reverence's acolyte." And with a curious but compassionate long look at the applicant, the porter went his way, bidding Stephan rest on a settle the while. After a space, Stephan had his audience : he was in his forester's dress, remember, muddy and with his head bound-up : and the gout makes a man irascible, at least it did the Prior, — but only for a minute or two. " Well, young man, your errand: any mes- sage in haste from a knightly neighbour ? But what's that, a bloody wrapper round your brows ? Speak up quick, man." " Prior," he answered faintly, ** I pray to be one of thy monks; I will be dutiful and dili- 78 STEPHAN LANGTON. gent, and will do thy Reverence and the Priory good service." " Thou a monk, young man ? thou a monk ? canst read or write or sing ? and, and consider well what thou askest : the vow is irrevocable, — • and think again, think again, youth," said the old man kindly. " Prior, I can read, and write, and was once a chorister at Tamar-Monachorum in Devon- shire, so I am trained to singing : and I have vowed my life to Heaven, and that irrevo- cably." " Nonsense, sirrah ! — well, well, — but thou canst compass even transcribing ? and what's the cause, what's the cause ? A young fellow, beaten and bemudded in a brawl, would be of our order forsooth ;— natheless, he hath rare parts and gifts to bring us too ; but what's the cause, quick." ''My love is dead. Sir Prior, and T would STEPHAN LANGTON. 79 devote my soul and body to Heaven, if I may.'* " Bah, fool ! time will cure thy love-wound : — but thou canst read ey, and write, and sing ? well, well, — young man, the saints forbid that I should hinder good resolutions: but it is a choice for ever, recollect." " I do, holy Prior, and am well resolved : will thy fatherly kindness take poor Stephan Langton as a monk of Newark ?" " Yea, friend, if this be St. Thomas's will, and thine own ; but thou mayest go sleep upon it, my young brother, if thou wilt, and not hurry so ; thy wound's curable otherwise, I wot it well." " No, father, no : my vows are already re- corded before Heaven's throne at the shrine of St. Martha's." " Pheew !" — it was probably a twinge of gout that drew that irreverent and untimely whistle out of the Prior, but he immediately recovered 80 STEPHAN LANGTON. himself and the gravity of his position by adding solemnly, " It is not becoming in God's servant to loose those bonds which his Master may have ratified : so be it, young man : but stay, — first tell me thy story." Stephan Langton, in some ten minutes, had given his history in outline to the Prior of Newark. Now he, like most other Church dignitaries of the period had his own private reasons for hating or fearing Prince John ; so this outrage and its probable avenger were grist to his mill: therefore after a moment of re- flection he made answer, " Good : I like frankness : and thou shalt be with all fair speed one of our brotherhood : ay, and to compensate thy sorrows on the spot, thou shalt be the first monk of St. Martha's immediately after the chancel has been con- secrated." It was a true boon that to our heart-broken Stephan ; and affectionately did he thank the STEPHAN LANGTON. 81 good Prior for his thoughtful kindness : but it is fair also to suggest that the prospect of having to serve that cold hilltop was anything but popular at Newark : the monks didn't half like the intended lot-drawing for that office : so the Prior was probably glad enough of his new recruit. " Yet one word more, my father : I have told to thee and thee alone all my grief; may this sad tale be a sacred secret between thee and me ?" Human nature loves to be trusted, and con- fidence ever breeds sympathy : so very sincerely that good Prior answered, " Yea, my son, and Amen upon it ; thou and I alone, with God and St. Thomas and all saints and angels (here he crossed himself over and over again) shall know of thy dead lover left at yonder shrine : but thou must keep the secret for thyself among the brotherhood, my son." VOL. I. 82 STEPHAN LANGTON. " Father, a sorrowful heart will hide itself away in silent solitude, like a wounded bird : and I must heal it as I can with prayer and study and meditation. By Heaven's good help, I will prepare me for my mission." STEPHAN LANGTON. 83 CHAPTER X. ©ante iiKargerg's Hfsco&erg. That cavalcade of Black Augustines was bound for Tything, the rude little ironstone lodge dwelt in by the secular brother attached to the old Saxon chapel of St. Martha's. Down in the dinted glen north-westward, you may still see at the back of the modern thriving farm there a few original remnants of that old priest's dwelling ; to wit, a stone Gothic triplet window in an ancient wall, a crypt beneath now used for cellarage, and a deep little square walled garden dug out of the hillside, where the good G 2 84 STEPHAN LANGTON. pastor grew bis choicer herbs and simples. For he was a cunning man in herbcraft, was Father Peter, and he knew well the nature of each herb and flower, and their several virtues cura- tive, sedative, stimulative — said virtues very possibly all being quite the reverse : and the neighbours flocked to him in sickness for his physics and restoratives ; though it must be confessed that his spiritual ministrations were not half so well attended as his physical : he could help a body in ailment, all were agreed, but somehow his unmusical intoning and dullish sermonizing were not entirely so popular mth the commons as his peppermint and worm- wood. Well : but the good priest Peter did his duty in his day notwithstanding; and serving the unknown martyr on the hilltop (folks, learned ones too, doubted whether or not it could be the Arimatheean Joseph) he served the martyr's Master too, faithfully and sedulously : and now, STEPHAN LANGTON. 85 right early in the morning, we find him leaning on old Margery his housekeeper and making the best of his slow way to the chapel for matins. There possibly might be, or might not be, a stray pilgrim or wayfarer there to serve for congregation; but anyhow the good old priest says mass regularly, with Margery for clerk. And so, the painful uphill creep has got them to the chapel door, and the latch is lifted, and the spare old minister totters to the tran- sept for his canonicals hanging on a nail there, and he reverently makes ready to say his orisons at the martyr's side altar. But, why in the world is old Margery peering so curiously into the new chancel ? can anyone be lying there asleep before the altar under the new stained window ? or is it a corpse left there for sanctuary ? She hobbled up, and at her cry of wonder 86 STEPHAN LANGTON. the good priest follows in all haste ; for Mar- gery has found " a poor dead child, — burnt sorely, — look at her tinder petticoats I Ey, what was that ? — a sob ? Master, she moves, she moves !'' And there was another deep and stifled sob. The ancient couple stoop over her with eager and compassionate curiosity. And a writhing shudder quivers through those close-cHnging wet scorched clothes, and she opens her eyes for a moment vacantly, — and then drops off again. It had all been a trance ! The double treble quadruple shock of the seizure, the rescue, the fierce flame, and chiUing water, had blow by blow paralysed her nerves like death ; she could not speak, nor move, nor breathe; the life-blood froze at her heart, her pulses stopped, and her ear was dull and her STEPHAN LANGTON. 87 eye glassy ; but still throughout that terrible night, until a dimmer confusion came over her in the morning, she had been conscious, help- lessly hopelessly conscious of everything that had passed ; and had longed and striven to speak and comfort him ; and then had believed herself verily dead, or a living spirit in a dead body : it had been horror to her, all that bitter night ; in especial Stephan's agony and desper- ation, and worst his irrevocable vow. And then she must have utterly lost consciousness : for whither, O whither had he fled ? And how could he have left her so alone ? Was he dead ? This was the first unuttered thought of re- turning consciousness. Another gurgling sob, — and her eyelids tremble, and she sees, and strives to speak : and Margery and the good old priest are chafing those marble hands and temples, and touching tenderly the poor scorched feet ; and they come at once to a sudden wise resolve — 88 STEPHAN LANGTON. as Christians loving mercy before sacrifice — to put off mass this morning for a double one to- morrow, and to carry the sweet stranger for very life's sake instantly to Tything. STEPHAN LANGTON. 89 CHAPTER XL lJis{t0r0 at ^rgtjmif. By help of a cassock from the vestry, that spare old priest and stout Margery his house- keeper convey their burden gently and carefully down the hill, one at the head and the other at the feet : speculating all the way as to " who it could be, and how did she come there ?" Well, it might easily be guessed, they thought : for be certain they had seen over- night the lurid glare upon the southern sky from the burning of Old Tangley, — and this poor burnt flutterer with her pretty face and 90 STEPHAN LANGTON. wreaths of scorched flowers, what could she be but one of the bad old Baron's dancing queans, poor lass ? — Yet was there consecration in her end ; Heaven bless her ! — How strangely wet she is too, half drowned as well as half burnt ; and see, her smock and boddice are singed black and tindery everywhere, — and look at the poor scorched skin beneath : naany a weary and difficult mile through the morass must she have toiled (sweet child, the Blessed Virgin show all grace to thee !) to die thus before the martyr's altar. It was fair enough and true enough in chief that guess. And now at the Lodge they have laid her on Dame Margery's couch, and dressed her fiery wounds with soothing unguents ; and by help of divers simple stimulants and herbs, and inward and outward cordials are rejoicing (good old souls) to see a little more gleam of life in the glassy eye, to feel at last a little warmth about the fluttering heart. STEPHAN LANGTON. 91 Startlingly all of a sudden, she wakes and sits up straight ; and then with a faint scream as suddenly falls dead again ! But the good Samaritans continue still their care, — and that for a long hour ; is she quite gone, quite? " No : the steel mirror dims yet, Margery ; and I'm sure there's a little fluttering of the heart under this blistered skin : softly, Mar- gery, softly, — for to rub it must be agony." Aha 1 that touch of sudden torture has waked her up once more. And so the strong spell was broken : from the deathlike yet conscious and merciful trance the poor girl entered into life again, with her first breath blessing and praising " some kind angels/' as she dreamingly whispered, " who were helping her :" for the good priest's ointments and restoratives had lulled away all pain, and for the time the hideousness of earth was clean forgotten ; she felt as if in Heaven. 92 STEPHAN LANGTON. " Listen, Margery ; yon fair dove can be none of the Tangley rookery." " Nay, surely none but a true saint : — but listen you too, my Master, and look ! — why, here be the holy fathers all acome from New- ark : it must be ten by the dial, surely." The very cavalcade met hours ago by Stephan is now in the httle court-yard before the Lodge : some half dozen black- stoled monks on mule-back with their Subprior in his easy litter, (a sort of hammock between two mules), and his cross-bearer on a palfrey preceding. The deputation has come, as Stephan guessed rightly, to see about the new chancel, and fix a day for its consecration : intending, after due halt and provender, to go onward for a brotherly visit to the Abbess of St. Catherine's ; and thence, after like due halt and provender with the sisterhood there, to repose for the night at the hostelrie in Gilford. While some rough country kernes (who, as STEPHAN LANGTON. 93 their wont was, had followed that procession ; for no monk ever travelled without plenty of creature comforts in his wallet as a viaticum, and there might well be some rich droppings by the way,) while these held the mules and rubbed them down, and brought pulled-grass and pease-haulm for them, the weary fathers crowded into Peter's little ground-floor parlour ; and their friend the parish priest of St. Martha's hastening down the crazy stair proceeds to act host to so many, as well as the poor man could at a push. His hospitality however was not taxed; Heaven had sent meat with the mouths, as usual; the good monks produced so many venison pasties and barley-bannocks, and such store of sack and ale, that their host clearly couldn't do better than himself help off the cheer heartily with them: and that all the welcomer, seeing he had to tell them the great local news of Old Tangley's fire, last night; 94 STEPHAN LANGTON. and in chief all about the mysterious stranger, that brand plucked from the burning, miracu- lously found by himself apd Margery this very morn before St. Becket's shrine. Then must every one of the holy fathers kind-heartedly creep up the stairs and peep in, singly and on tiptoe, just to have ocular assu- rance of the marvel, and to commend Margery for being so tender of the poor burnt sister ; and altogether so much absorbing talk and interest were there about this interesting case (such a sweetly pretty face too, and so softly sleeping) — that the business as to the approach- ing consecration, for which alone they had come so far, appeared to be wholly for- gotten. " Brother Peter," said the Subprior with a paternal glance at Alice, "take my help and counsel, — brother : — we are on our way — to St. Catherine's, — you know, — and this fair young girl — were better with the sisterhood — STEPHAN LANGTON. 95 you see ; to tend and cure her — if haply she may recover, and " — the Suhprior had a trou- blesome chronic cough. " Yes, your Reverence," chimed in the good- natured cross-bearer, " and mightn't she ride thither in the litter? I'll go afoot with the cross, while your Reverence bestrides my pal- frey." " Well thought, Ralph : — what sayst thou to this, — my worthy brother Peter ?" " If Dame Margery opines she may be moved, I might say yea to it; but you see, Suhprior, this is a case of sore burning and blistering, and my simples — " "Well, well, Peter: — but we bide with you — some three hours yet — to refresh the mules, — and shall see anon — how your patient fares ; meanwhile — *' " Perhaps your Reverence had best come and see the chapel ?" ''By St. Becket himself !— but all had well- 96 STEPHAN LANGTON. nigh been forgotten : we'll attend you, Brother Peter — when the beasts have finished their provender ; — yon hill-top keeps you spare enow, I see, — but we of Newark are wont to be wider in the waist, brother, and — " the stout Sub- prior coughed so, that the end of the sentence is lost to literature. STEPHAN LANGTON. 97 CHAPTER XII. Faintly awaking from sleep, — for she had slept — poor Alice with an almost first con- scious word of wonder, naturally enough asked old Margery — " Where am I ?" She was answered gently and truly. " And where," she gasped, " where is — " A sudden thought stopped her ; she would not, she could not just then, so nigh the faint- ing point of death, ask this strange but kind old nurse about dear, dear Stephan: so the VOL. I. H 9.8 STEPHAN LANGTON. second question failed upon her lip. Moreover she dreaded hearing that he was dead : she suspected it, — and in her terror half gasped again, " Where is — '' " Hush, darling ; don't vex thee : let me touch the sores with this green ointment again — so ; I wot well the pounded water-betony and groundsel and ground ivy treated with lard is sovereign for a fresh burn or a scald, — so : and taste this sleep draught once more, pretty dear, — so: Holy Mary and all good angels bless thee ! there now, quietly — so." And again poor Alice dropped asleep. Meanwhile the black procession had duly wound its way to the top of St. Martha's; that heaven-kissing hill which centres the most beauteous panorama in all South Britain ; now so rich with cultivation, and dotted with seats and villages, but in those days a tumbled un- dulating forest-tract ,with vast bare heaths between, and our now Arcadian valleys each STEPHAN LANGTON. 99 a wide and glistering morass : and there the deputation inspected with most critical eyes the bricklaying and the carpentering, and in chief that rarest piece of window-work then for the first time seen in Surrey, the quaint and priceless stained glass : and they accorded fainter praise, (as lacking in colour after those azures, ambers, and rubies that so dazzled them), to the plain stone piscina, and sedilia, and reredos : and the altar was not half elabo- rated enough, — which item should be seen to : but especially had they all taken most curious note of the exact spot where the pretty stranger had been found, so mysteriously laid out be- fore the shrine in a coronal of hyacinths and a shroud of tinder : there were some bits of singed homespun, and a flower or two still on the matting, — and the holy fathers eagerly picked them up as relics : the Becket question was fairly beaten out of the field of every body's vision. H 2 100 STEPHAN LANGTON. However, in a fortunate moment of right hallucination, the Subprior had presence of mind to cough out, "This day month, Brother Peter, — when the most Reverend our Prior may fairly — by the blessing of St. Thomas — be hoped well again — (a grievous burning and swelling of his feet. Brother Peter, and sore tweaks and twinges, he avouches) — this day month, if the sisterhood be willing — to assist at — " again that damaging cough — (you will have noticed how staccato was the good man's oratory) — deprives a nominative of its verbum subaudi- tum. And down again in like order, though with more difficulty, (for the way was steep, and it isn't easy for corpulence on mule-back to keep equipoise down hill) the pious procession wound its way through the glen to Tything: where rest and refection for man and mule were again a positive necessity. STEPHAN LANGTON. 101 "And how now, Brother Peter, fares our sweet young sister ? What saith nurse Mar- gery ?" ** The child is better, your Reverence ; and please the saints may yet recover : but, poor thing, she is blistered sorely, and maun't stir these three days at earliest : might it please your Reverence to send over the litter anon ; — let me see, yestreen was St. Philip and St. James, and to-morrow is Invention day, so be it on Thorsday the fourth, an it please your Reverence." " The dame says well," urged Brother Peter, — " only, but for it being a Friday, I'd say the fifth : and then the sixth is the feast of Holy John-before-the-Port, — and then comes Sun- day ; so be it on the fourth, if my simples bring a blessing." The Subprior and his monks would so gladly have convoyed that most interesting stranger to St. Catherine's, that they were sadly dis- 102 STEPHAN LANGTON. appointed to lose such a chance ; for the naatter approached the miraculous, to say less of the sublime and beautiful : but to move her was manifestly impossible just then, and they must give it up with a good grace. And so, with just one more paternal creep, silently and individually, up those creaking stairs, and a peep through the open door at our sleeping beauty ; and after much praising of Dame Margery, and a cordial leave-taking with Brother Peter ; the cavalcade w^ound away from Tything at two or thereabouts towards St. Catherine's ; where, going by the deep lanes through the forest, and crossing the ferry- under-hill, and thus to the Virgin's Well before four, they were all soon after bid glad welcome by the Abbess and sisterhood in the nunnery ; and so much the more from having fortunately to recount to them the romantic incident of Brother Peter's charming guest; whose sojourn anon with the sisters was thereby fixed, and STEPHAN LANGTON. 103 looked for with no small excitement in the dullness of their vacant existence. Thereafter, at eventide, those black-stoled monks of Newark went solemnly as ravens to roost at the Gilford hostelrie. 104 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XIll. (Bnx Nunnerg, antJ tje JHonlfts of oltj. St. Catherine's nunnery was then, as its present Tudor representative Brabceuf still is, one of the prettiest things in England. Posted on a landslip outlier of the Hog's Back, and running forward as if to greet our other ancient chapel that sentinels the Vale of St. Martha, may still be seen the ruin of its Gothic outer or public chapel ; it overlooks Shalford Meadows so often flooded by their sinuous water-courses, like silver eels gliding through the grass, and has close at foot the ancient Pilgrim's Ferry STEPHAN LANGTON. 105 with a mineral (once called miraculous) spring hard by. Some three hundred yards behind this chapel, (not in those ancient days, as now, divorced from it by a deep cut turnpike-road), lay nestled in a green dinted valley, backed with elms, the Nunnery, many gabled, long and straggling ; built most picturesquely of chalk in panels of quaintly carved oak-timbers, with perforated verge-boards, and colossal acorn finials: behind it right and left, two higher gabled roofs with belfries atop serving to desig- nate the great hall or refectory, and the private or inner chapel ; the public one, whereof alone the ruin as I said still survives, being too far off for any than ascetics, or as in Alice's case a lover, in rainy weather. Within doors, some forty nuns, old and young, lowly and well conditioned, lived on equal sisterly terms in little separate chambers on the ground-floor, — the whole batch of build- 106 STEPHAN LA.NGTON. ing being single storied, — much as pensioners in our alms-houses do now; they only met together at meals and prayers ; received visitors behind a sort of wild-beast cage ; lived a charitable meditative life ; and obeyed implicitly the Superior of their own election, a motherly good soul enough. And hereabout, as in charity bound and justice, is the place to drop a few true words of apology on behalf of those mediaeval monks and nuns. In contradiction to popular prejudice, and despite of numerous exceptional cases in a dissolute and barbarous age, when morals and religion throughout society were at their lowest, the monastery and still less the nunnery, as a rule, was not at first as of any necessity nor even probability the sink of lazy luxury we suppose it. Afterwards indeed, and possibly too in pretty early times, corruption and degeneracy crept STEPHAN LANGTON. 107 in ; and, as we all know, such evils came to their head in the age just anterior to Martin Luther's Reformation : but in the ages long before it things were relatively much better, if not to be regarded in the positive as very good. A nunnery or a monastery primaeval was rather to be regarded as a peaceful refuge for the oppressed, a green oasis in the wide waste social desert, a lamp of learning to cheer the night of ignorance around, a happy home where childhood in a troublous time might sing its sweet psalms, or learn crafts, or more rarely pore over its hornbook securely ; and where old age, having battled through the stern vicissitudes of life, might at length find its hour of quiet to make ready for the world to come. There, around the great Religious House, the wretched multitude of kernes and theows and serfs, our common poor ascripti glebse, were liberally fed in their many seasons of scarcity, and at all times consoled in afflic- 108 STEPHAN LANGTON. tion, medicined and nursed in sickness, taught and helped and blest ; the student found there his only literature, the pious his best chance both for closet-prayer and for cathedral ser- vices, the outraged innocent a safe and sure retreat; and if even crime for awhile found sanctuary within the same hallowed precincts, it could only do so in its character of assumed, or let us hope sometimes real penitence. We do wrong to our shrewd ancestors and injuriously misjudge them, if we regard old Tintern or Fountains, — or nearer home our own Surrey's Waverley or Chertsey or New- ark in their best and earliest days as other than splendid Gothic lanterns in the darkness of a desolate wilderness, on which in silver streams they shed liberally the rays of civili- zation and religion. Who but those much calumniated monks, in an age devoted to bloodshed and barbarism, taught the dull boors all round them not alone STEPHAN LANGTON. 109 monastic legends, and at all events amusing fables about saints, but also something at least of true religion, and besides, husbandry and medicine, music and painting and sculpture ? Nay, if haply higher students came within their sphere, the profundities of science and the elegancies of literature ? Let us be just, — nay more, be gratefully generous to a now ob- solete class of men and women, however in their latter day corrupted, and for that cause in their earlier maligned, who (in the Ages haply misnamed Dark, only because we ourselves know little about them) were yet undeniably the foster-nurses of learning, the gentle but not weak antagonists to tyranny, the then only real working philosophers and philanthropists doing good practically everywhere in the world. Without those useless " monks of old " we should have now next to nothing of our rich store of classical and ecclesiastical literature, 110 STEPHAN LANGTON. seeing that to their patient idlesse, say rather diligence, in copying, we are indebted for well nigh every manuscript in our libraries; nay, but for the labours in transcription of those often wise and good old monks, the very text of Holy Writ might have been to us an uncer- tain oral tradition, and, without such a special providence, perhaps had now been barely extant. Verily in the bad old times when the world was overrun by rapine, it was the mercy as the wisdom of God that sowed our land so thickly with Religious Houses, which in their earlier purity shone like stars on the firmament of dark around them. And if in a later age, when no longer needed as a scaffolding by the great Designer and Architect of human pro- gress, they fell into a luxurious degeneracy, — well, let them thus have died out after they had lived out their duties, and, as quite un~ suited to our times and manners, never let STEPHAN LANGTON. Ill them hope to rise and live again on English soil. We are too independent, too individual, for the gregarious thraldom of the coenobitic and conventual system ; neither can we nationally tolerate any resuscitation thereof, however masqued by pious pretext, or excused by the rage for ecclesiastical antiquities. However, while we deprecate as injurious, nay impossi- ble and contrary to the spirit of the age any such monastic retrogression, let us acknowledge the past utilities of such a state ; and, in com- mon honesty and justice, when we think of those old nunneries and monasteries, (haply spending a pleasant holiday with summer friends among the ruinous picturesqueness of their whilom e sacred precincts), let us reve- rently vindicate the beneficence of Heaven for the good they did in their day, for the good still extant up to our day even from a single monk, such as erst was our Johntime patriot, Stephan Langton. 112 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XIV. A FULL week sped by before the Subprior and his company got back to Newark ; for they extemporized a brotherly visit to Waver- ley, and by a wide unnecessary roundabout took Chertsey also on their way home. So, Alice had all the longer chance for convalescence before the promised litter ; and she could not meanwhile have been left to a more skilful leech than Peter, or a gentler nurse than the motherly old Mar- gery. STEPHAN LANGTON. 113 And with Stephan likewise this was a week of deep and curative calm. She — he had not a doubt about it — was in Mary's bosom, a free and blessed spirit rescued from all earth's troubles, and to be envied if not worshipped as a saint, his own special guardian saint, in Heaven; while her poor burnt body would have been buried, as of course, in the sacred precincts at St. Martha's, where it was his sweetest consolation to anticipate a long sojourn of prayer and study and pious meditation. Day and night in his quiet cell he only thought of her as having entered, happily for her if not for him, into everlasting rest ; and in ecstatic reveries upon her blessedness he could almost, though with brimming eyes and a breaking heart, thank God for having taken so soon from the evil to come his own most precious Alice. His love-wound was healing up indeed speedily and surely ; though not in the coarse and common way the Prior guessed it would; VOL. I. I 114 STEPHAN LANGTON. by some new love extinguishing the old ; — no, — rather by those calming influences of religion that alone have potency to charm away sorrow, and to consecrate affliction. The old Prior had been kind, very kind; had enjoined upon his monks no curiosity about their new brother -y — and albeit this no doubt made them doubly curious within, the injunction, at all events, operated usefully in restraining perpetual questions from with- out. Stephan had his ow-n separate cell wuth its pallet, was devout at chapel, staidly cheerful at refections, and very diligent over manuscripts in the library. He was anxious not only to prove to the Prior the extent of his unusual knowledge, but also and further to be fitting himself for that higher mission traced dimly, but determinedly in his vow. How^beit, that blessed w^eek of peace has past : for, here are the Subprior and his follow- STEPHAN LANGTON. 115 ing, — a noisy arrival enough i who, after other greetings all round the refectory, kindly salute their new brother. "A good young man, Mr. Subprior ; and let me tell you, brethren, a learned; he hath strange skill in reading, nay, but he can write too, and that clearly ; ay, and his notes in the De Profundis, and the Dies Ilia are deeper than ever I heard : these be rare gifts, Mr. Subprior; a good young man is Brother Stephan." So they greeted him all the more heartily ; and if some envied his acquirements, the rest who marvelled at them were clearly in a majority. And then came the clatter of talking, every one at once ; all the pent-up news of an unpre- cedented week to be poured out in a Babel gabble from eight eager informers to thirty- two more eager enquirers : it was an avalanche, or rather a hailstorm of words. I 2 116 STEPHAN LANGTON. Stephan stood aloof at first, and heard but little ; afterwards, for he recognized at a glance the naonastic party he had met a week agone, he drew near, curious to hear with however sore a heart of a certain very possible discovery in the chancel of St. Martha's. In half a minute he had gathered from the confused clatter of gossip startling news indeed : one Peter, a priest, had found a dying girl on the hill-top, a dancing girl or one who might have been a-maying, for she had flowers in her hair ; and he had nursed her into life again, and all the fathers had seen her; so prettily asleep ! And they had some flowrets to show in proof, hyacinth bells. Could this be any other than Alice? — and yet she was dead, stone dead for hours, — he knew it. He pressed nearer, and gathered more : the young woman had been seemingly half burnt, and was lying on the altar steps ! STEPHAN LANGTON. 117 And they showed him some bits of tinder ; — to him, could any relics be more pre- cious ? It was inevitably Alice, — yet how impossi- bly. Further of her the monks knew nothing, could tell nothing; for she hadn't spoken to their knowledge — no, nor even moved ; they'd only seen her fast asleep ; and nobody knew her name : she was very pretty though ; and her hair, where it had escaped the fire, seemed to be flaxen. How sweet, yet how terrible a hope now filled poor Stephan's heart as he rushed away to his solitary cell ! If still alive, if by some miracle of resurrection recovering, how intoler- able the thought that she should find he had deserted her ; — how still more fearful the remembrance of his now quite irrevocable vow. On the holiest relics of Newark Priory the new Augustine had just sworn celibacy for 1]8 STEPHAN LANGTON. life, eternal dedication of himself to God and mother church. Never more durst Stephan Langton hope for Alice as a loved and loving wife ; never again have one warm human thought about her ! The remembrance of her now was agony, — if indeed she could be living : but no, no ; it was impossible ; — she had died, he knew it, in the cold water that so mercifully had hissed out her blazing clothes ; he knew it only too well, — for hadn't he striven for long hours of that dark hideous night to find one pulse, one breath, one symptom of life in that dear dead cold waxen figure wherefrom the spirit of his Alice had most manifestly departed ? Those gossiping monks certainly must have added to the very probable — nay sure — fact of Peter's discovery of her poor body, the impossible one of her life ; they had all seen her — true, — but it was only as lying fast asleep ; — no doubt at all in that sweetest sleep of death. STEPHAN LANGTON. 119 And calmness canae once more to Stephan Langton, as he reasonably thought out all this within himself; extinguishing resolutely that earthly hope indeed, but recovering his former heavenly peace. And he kept his cell for full three days, fasting and praying : thus inevitably escaping the additional evidence that might have been supplied to him on the subject by the loan of that litter, its going and returning, and all the subsequent gossip about its adventures. Ste- phan was on the sick list and kept quite close ; and when he did emerge, was only more taci- turn, and studious, and meditative than ever. 120 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XV. SEJe Nun of ^t. Catfjerine's. Meanwhile had the Prior's litter, escorted by some of those six sympathizing monks you may be sure, as well as by Peter and Dame Margery, duly conveyed poor Alice to St. Catherine's, where the gentle sisterhood re- ceived her with eager kindness. She was a mystery, a miracle; so pretty withal, and except that sweet face above, every- where else so terribly burnt and blistered. Greedily the cruel flame had fed upon her tender skin ; and it seemed but too evident that STEPHAN LANGTON. 121 in spite of all helps, ointments and fomenta- tions, the poor girl's limbs would be more or less crippled for life. As for anything special for me to record in the nunnery, beyond the nursing, and the watching of kind sisters often beside her deli- rious couch, beyond the regular devotions and refections, beyond the alternations of days and nights, there could be little of incident for Alice ; but all the more of leisure for her, where- in to lie and muse over the past, and mourn for the future. She lay usually very still, and revealed but scantily of her history to the curious sisters; all her speech amounting to little more than thanks to them, fervent and profuse, for their gentle help, and such pas- sionate outpourings of prayer and praise, and intercession to a Better Helper in all trouble, as well nigh convinced the good Abbess that the mysterious stranger was no other than a calendared saint. 122 STEPHAN LANGTON. But, as I said, she lay there tranquil only outwardly, for she thought and thought and thought ; continually reacting that sweet May- day, its terrible eve, and above all its hideous night ; when, tranced in stony consciousness she lay a living statue. Ah ! it was sweet madness to remember how tenderly, and with what veneration in his ten- derness, her noble Stephan had watched over her ; how reverently, and with what pure and gentle care in the midst of his fierce sorrow had he laid her out dead (as he supposed) before the altar ; what a paroxysm of manly grief had wrestled him down to the dust ; with what devo- tional delicacy he had disposed the tinder rem- nants of her clothing to veil her poor scorched bosom, and how thoughtfully had he covered it with her cold crossed hands. And then with how strong and sweet a passion had he kissed — as if in some despairing hope of waking them again to life — her dim STEPHAN LANGTON. 123 glazed eyes staring, as she knew they must, sightlessly, — and how sadly for a long dusk hour had the sohtary chapel echoed to his sobs and groans and vows and earnest prayers ; — and how like a brother or a mother he had knelt beside her ; and had sworn to Heaven a threefold and irrevocable vow, — that for her sake he would live on, but only in monastic solitude, — for her sake he would be that evil John's antagonist through life, — for her sake he would free his bleeding country from the galling tyrannies that now enchained it. And then — up to that moment miserably conscious although immoveable — she must have slept or swooned until Margery awoke her in the chancel that next morning ; — for she knew not what had become of Stephan, — he was gone, gone ; and could he have left her alone there in the chapel if alive ? surely not : some fell chance must have come that way, and caught him : the wicked Prince's followers 124 STEPHAN LANGTON. belike : yes, they had certainly hurried her dear Stephan to that death his own poor Alice now so longed for. Where else could he be ? and, when she re- membered his vow, if yet in life — to take the cowl and turn monk ! What a sudden crush to young love's longings : — but again, — how could she too, the scorched and shrivelled crip- ple, ever hope to be his w^fe, a forester's hale glad buxom wife? O doubly wretched, — O bitter evening to that sweet May morn. Thus, all these musings, — three weeks of them by night and by day, tended (and with reason) to one only wise conclusion : Alice would implore the good Lady Superior for leave to take the veil as speedily as possible. There was small delay or difficulty in those early times about so common a matter : tyranny was used to force it extemporaneously on inconvenient aunts and daughters, and misery in the shape of persecuted maidens often claimed that refuge STEPHAN LANGTON. 125 as an instant boon. Whatever naight have happened afterwards, as ordained for the inte- rests of society, a man or a woman in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries might respec- tively assume the cowl or the veil with as little previous trouble, as only a century ago stray passengers along a London street w^ere able withal to get themselves married out of hand at Fleet Prison : monastic fetters for life, with or without the ten minutes notice alluded to by Sydney Smith, ought not to be entirely incom- prehensible to us, when our great grandfathers might, in a moment of intoxication or weak- ness, have destroyed the family tree in its twenty generations of honour by the folly of an extempore Fleet marriage. So then did it naturally come about, that just a fortnight after Stephan took the tonsure, Alice had become a nun professed ; each be- lieving the other dead ! A dreadful mistake, — but so circumstantially corroborated to look like 126 STEPHAN LANGTON. truth, that neither could suppose it any other- wise. As for Alice's bedridden mother, who could not come to St. Catherine's, just as by no pos- sibility could the crippled nun have called at Goraershal, the constant comers and goers from Aldeburie to Gilford had made known to Alice long since how that the good Sir Tristrem cared kindly for the poor old soul so left alone in the world after the terrible reported death of her only daughter : and, that one anxiety so settled and provided for, there was not a soul in life that Alice cared a straw for in compa- rison with Stevie ; all other friendships or likings were dead in her ; for he — he must be dead ! caught and carried off by that wicked Prince's followers; — how could he have left her otherwise ? Or if, as he had seemed to threaten in that awful prayer and vow, a monk, — he was still equally dead to her: — and yet, and yet, how STEPHAN LANGTON. 127 much more dead to him was she, miraculously still alive though a mere wreck, the scarred victim of that cruel fire ! Physically, no less than socially, a predestined nun, nothing remained to her of love's life but to hide up blighted feelings in a seamed body. 128 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XVI. Conseaatton. In due time, it couldn't as we know be long, the set day came when the convalescent Prior and his Austin monks cf Newark were to consecrate, according to programme made and provided, the new chancel of St. Thomas h Becket at St. Martha's. We must remember in all antiquarian and local strictness that what we now call the nave (or rather its antecedent ruin before restora- tion) was once the only and original Martyr's Chapel, of a date long antecedent to Becket; STEPHAN LANGTON. 129 and that it was used as a parish church with its independent secular priest (now as we know hight Peter) from the most primitive era of Christianity in this kingdom ; a time probably synchronical with Egbert and St. Bertha. The chancel however is of less primaeval date: and to its consecration in June 1186 we are now invited. There was a goodly gathering on that glorious hill-top from all the country round : barons and their feudal retinue, with my lord's silken dame and her hand-maidens ; knights and their esquires ; ladies and their pages ; many a sturdy yeoman and his pillioned goodwife ; and, crowding outside, scores of rude theows and kernes with their squawlike female appendages and hundreds of children. Then of course there were all the holy fathers in their black cassocks, and Peter and Dame Margery acting on the spot as local hosts and VOL. I. K 130 STEPHAN LANGTON. ciceroni; and in chief the lady Abbess of St. Catherine and all her white-veiled nun- nery. These had been especially invited ; and for this cause. The new mysterious sister, re- deemed from very death as she with gratefulness acknowledged, at the altar and by the inter- cession of St. Thomas, wished on this solemn occasion publicly to record her vows there, and so to be consecrate more especially thenceforth to heaven : and, though still a cripple and unhealed of those terrible burnings, she had been painfully brought thither in a litter, in order to be present at the solemn service, and to add by her self-devotion to its imposing character. Another soul, unknown to her, had also vowed his presence and his whole self-dedication at that same spot and time : and thus all un- suspected by both — they are to meet, that hapless pair — and to recognize each other, the two STEPHAN LANGTON. 131 affianced lovers, now a monk and a nun, irrevocably divorced, at the altar ! For, after the formal consecration was all over, the " Lift up your everlasting doers," and the mass and the procession and all the rest of it — that white sisterhood picturtsnuely Uiing before the shrine a veiled form lying on a litter ; no slight cause for curiosity to the uncowled brothers of Newark, and in especial (from som.e fearful intuition) of the last sworn Father Stephan. He dreaded the hfting of the veil, as that bier-like litter lay before the altar. A sister had come to thank the good God and Saint Thomas for wonderful preservation and seeming convalescence. The veil was raised ; and there, in all her sweetly pretty face's bloom of youth and beauty, was his own loved Alice, not dead, — yet dead indeed to him, — a vowed nun ! With an involuntary groan poor Stephan K 2 132 STEPHAN LANGTON. uncowled as he was, drew her eyes, those precious bright blue eyes, instantly upon him, — and with a similar startled glance she also saw in that blackstoled brother her own dear Stevie, — her own ? — for ever put away from her, a professed monk ! If she swooned at sight of him, the kind sisterhood around religiously attributed it all to memory and gratitude and deep ecstatic love of St. Becket, and so were not very wrong in their reckoning except as to the saint ; albeit neither they nor, saving the Prior alone, the brotherhood of Newark either, gathered the slightest suspicion that Stephan's presence had anything to do with her swoon ; or that it was sister Alice in the litter, who had made the pious young monk groan with such evident devotion at the solemn ceremonial. The pageants and the holy rites were over ; all diverged to their homes like lava streams adown the hill. STEPHAN LANGTON. 133 Alice and the sisterhood I follow not just now : they had no doubt their thoughts and feehngs, — at all events she had ; secret, deep, and at the heart ; but 1 first follow as of natural right, seeing I am selfconstituted his biographer, one of mine own sex, and as then the very master mind of mine own country, Stephan Langton. He went staidly as the rest of the brethren homeward to fair Newark on his mule ; quietly he took his part at Vespers ; and quietly retired to his solitary cell. But there, once there alone with the Allseeing and himself, alone as for judgment with self and God, and no sweet Alice ever, ever, to be with him, — he flung his wretched widowed carcase on the pallet-bed, and wept all night in sheer despair : could he hnve imagined her alive, — and so have been the fool to vow irrevocable celibacy? Her death might have made all easy to him, — but her life her 134 STEPHAN LANGTON. fair sweet tender beauteous life, — so near him too and so tempting, — oh, how hard, how hard ! And he wept upon that wretched straw pallet miserably till the morning. There was but one great help that came to him in his affliction, and one great thought to bid him live. He was a Religious, and could draw comfort from Heaven ; he was an Englishman, and had vowed to free his country. Let the life, — the holy life of sister Alice, — stimulate him yet more resolutely to the great achievement of Hberty for his downtrodden people. Let him gain power through knowledge, for his nation; let him learn with all diligence; and thereby not alone combat those impossible lovings and longings in himself: but also, by sheer force of intellect and its attainments, be enabled to stand up strong as a churchman STEPHAN LANGTON. 135 against kingly encroachment, and definitely over all be able as a man to curb the utter tyranny of an inevitably soon succeeding bad King John. 136 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XVII. Early next morning, to get away at once from all spies upon his misery, the monk of St. Martha's announced his readiness to go and serve the hill-top altar forthwith, with his Prior's good leave. The brotherhood one and all wondered at the zeal that could induce a man to forego their own jovial company and all the other pleasures of Newark so immediately for that cold and cheerless shrine upon the hill- top : however, as Stephan had never been over communicative, and though noways unpopular STEPHAN LANGTON. 137 was as certainly not a general favourite, (for the few envied him his parts and the many were little complimented by his absence from their pastimes) they had not much openly to object in his departure : and the Prior, who knew all and kept counsel faithfully, gave full permission to take on loan any manuscripts or tomes that Stephan wished, with promise of more in succession if required : and so the solitary monk bade adieu to Nev/ark. Short as his sojourn was, it had prisoned him to celibacy for life. It was easy to find a lodging with that kind- hearted secular priest, our friend Peter at Tything : for the Augustine monk had enough allowed him by the Priory wherewith to pay liberally, and all he asked was a little quiet room, a prophet's chamber, where he might study in the intervals of service on the hill- top. But the lodging once found, it was not so easy for him to study there as he had hoped ; 138 STEPHAN LANGTON. for in that selfsame little chamber up the creaking stairs, and on that selfsame couch, had lain his martyred love, his dead, yet living Alice ! Ah ! when in casual talk with Peter and Dame Margery he first made that touching discovery, the strong man well nigh fainted : and when, leaving their small but hospitable parlour, he went up to that room to bed, how exquisite an aggravation to the tempting tor- ments of his soul worried him there throughout the long dark night, haunting him and hunting him with fierce despairing thoughts of racked hopes and starved affections. He had calmly attained to resignation at her death, for he himself had died with her, for her ! — as his deep love had felt and meant when he ex- tinguished all human desires under the irre- vocable cowl : but now that he finds her alive, and that so near him, — not in the celestial peacefulness of disembodied Spirit, but in the earthly distraction of that loved and longed-for STEPHAN LANGTON. 139 beautiful Body wherein she still lives though dead to him, — now indeed his mind had need to get help from somewhither to wrestle down its agonizing disappointment. He dared not think : he only prayed in- tensely, and grew calmer; he reasoned, and went sternly to his books, determined to spend all the energy of a hopeless passion on laborious, on gigantic, study. 1 am speaking not alone of that first dreadful night when the strife was most terrible within him ; but of many like nights and days, through many long months : wherein he not only began to lay up that extra- ordinary fund of learning for which after- wards he became world-famous, but also and in chief laid up power within himself, by a stern but wise ascetism : and thus in the order of Providence, he grew^ to be his country's trained athlete, her tough-thewed champion for good against abounding evil. 140 STEPHAN LANGTON. How many times on St. Martha's sum- mit, as he gazed yearningly at St. Cathe- rine's, a mere ten minutes' pigeon-flight off, had he rivetted and corroborated his deep vow — not of private vengeance, he had somewhile prayed down that, but — of pa- triotic help to wretched England. How often, providentially posted as he was upon the Pilgrim's Way, had he with this view spoken with all manner of men, from the baron to the serf, as to their oppressed condition and the miseries brought in by Norman kings : how widely by these his emissaries, for he was eloquent enough and zealous and knew shrewdly where and how to scatter seeds of thought about, did this simple hill-top monk sow the whole land with hopes and strivings after freedom ! And yet, all the while, poor love- thralled man, what freedom could there be for him ? He felt himself, often too often in STEPHAN LANGTON. 141 his weaker hours, a very slave to the strength of his own monastic vow; and he gnawed and gnashed in secret many times (spite of reason and study and resolution and religion and all) against the galling chains that held him ; that held him so cruelly back, there in her very sight, from the love he could not reach, — yet strove for, and strove against, till in his solitary woe he felt half maddened. But Stephan Langton was destined for greater things than to be a mere heart- starved monk on our Surrey hill-top : it was in his destiny to stir up thrones and dominions, and eliminate from the conflicting antagonisms of France and Rome and Eng- land our constitutional treasure of Popular Liberty. So, he was not to be left in peace, he must not settle on his lees, he must up and be doing. Providence would wake him from his calm book-labours even 142 STEPHAN LANGTON. by the sting of craving love ; and having tried and found him faithful, having refined him in the furnace of affliction, and har- dened his muscles in the Spartan gymnasium of self-conquest, now ordains to give him soon a wider sphere, and to set him forward on his course of greatness. STEPHAN LANGTON. 143 CHAPTER XVIII. ?^al antr j^i'g Jantilg. For, just as our monk could no longer endure, and the nearness of St. Catherine's had grown to be a tormenting nightmare to him, a most tragic incident that befell about this time in Aldeburie and soon got bruited all over the country, helped not a little to ripen the people's hatred of Prince John, and exercised a life-long influence upon the for- tunes of Stephan Langton. In this view, as well as in that of being by itself of a deep and touching interest, it deserves to be drawn in detail. VOL. r. K 3 144 STEPHAN LANGTON. Hal, the woodman, had a little osier- wattled hut, his Home, at the north entrance of old Westone Wood on the Pilgrim's Way. There the honest fellow through naany a bitter winter and many a summer's pestilence (for the marshes, be sure, bred fevers rarely) had dragged up, rather than brought up, a fine hardy family of sons and daughters ; the eldest of whom, Tetbert and Emma, were the comeliest brother and sister in all that country side. However, we have not time nor patience now to describe the whole home-circle of our humble Hal's belongings; suffice it to say, that there were curly-headed boys and girls of all sizes, and at present no goodwife to look after them, for she had sickened and died two winters agone ; so Emma did a mother's part to the young ones at home, while the sturdy Tetbert helped his father in the forest. STEPHAN LANGTON. 145 Emma, a nut-brown maid, with ruddy cheeks and coal-black eyes and hair, was known for the merriest and handsomest lassie for many a long mile of the Pilgrim's Way ; and her father's hovel hid in ha- zels at the edge of the silver-barked beechwood was often made gay by the song of the wayfaring minstrel, the gossip of the lingering pedlar, and the strings of pack- horses whose human accompaniments somehow found it pleasant and convenient to water their weary beasts at Hal the w^oodman's well : that sunny-faced little gypsey Emma was so cheerful, so pretty, and so good- natured to all wayfarers. Rest assured, the rumour of this young wood-nymph's beauty was not long a-reach- ing the greedy ears of Vipont and De WatteviUe, Prince John's well-matched pair of parasitical panderers : and more than once had they led the hunt that way, and their VOL. I. L 146 STEPHAN LANGTON. precious royal master had pretended to taste a cup of innocent cold water at the hands of the forest Diana. Be certain, also, that the leash of titled caitiffs had deeper and darker thoughts of burglary as regarded the poor woodman's chief domestic treasure. Now, within a mile of Hal's hovel, there is a still clear lakelet buried in a thick jungle of box hollies and other evergreens, oversha- dowed by old beeches : it appears to be a deep indentation or chasm in the chalk-hill- side, possibly dug out by our troglodytic ancestors, or later, in the Beauclerc's time, when chalk and stone began to be used for building purposes ; many an ancient wall hereabouts having been reared of alternate layers of hard chalk and burnt bricks. Whatever then be its origin, there still exists in wonderful calm beauty our * Silent Pool ;' where in the deep clear water, a mirror to the speck of blue heaven above, and the spreading trees that STEPHAN LANGTON. 147 almost arch it over, you may even now see the large trout, moving more like lazy tench than any swifter fish among the groves of tall green reeds helow ; and you may note how suddenly, after shelving sides, the middle be- comes some twenty feet deep, like a chalk-pit, however little you may guess that depth for the exquisite clearness of the water : perhaps in those troglodytic times, our mole-like an- cestors unexpectedly tapped a strong spring which overwhelmed them and inundated all their little world. Well, — to this retired spot, hidden deep in the forest, it is small wonder that, in summer time especially, our wood nymph often steals away to bathe ; a picturesque fact, as well as the probable time whereof, which was unluckily made known to the curiously enquiring Vipont by a poor unconscious little sister who told him of it ; and kissed with all a child's gratitude the nice fine gentleman heartily for his comfits. L 2 148 STEPHAN LANGTON. And this very ninth of August, 1193, at four after noon by the sun, it is small wonder that three brave gallants well mounted and apparently of high degree have found their way to the woodman's hovel, and are making them- selves very popular among the children ; ay, and with father Hal too, just home from trimming a thicket, — whom Vipont and De Watteville are disposing most favourably towards them- selves by the deep interest they appear to take in divers local matters of forestry and wood- craft; and they actually give themselves the trouble to accompany the good man to see ihe famous oak of Westone, ten Beauclerc ells in girth ; and — meanwhile, the third, a tall dark man in crimson and gold, canters away on his powerful white charger. Tetbert, a shrewd young fellow enough, and not half so simple-minded as his father, did not at all like this needless condescension of such noble wayfarers ; more particularly as on a STEPHAN LANGTON. 149 former occasion he had seen one of them attempting to be somewhat too affectionate with his buxom sister as she handed him a cup of buttermilk ; but the attempted kiss issued in nothing but a smart slap on the face. So Tet- bert, guessing at human possibilities, secretly betook himself to the Silent Pool, threading the bye-paths : the stranger had cantered that way ; — and in fact he saw his sister's peril at a glance. Meanwhile, with happily no Damon meanly prying in the thicket, our rustic Musidora had doffed her scanty homespun, and holding by a friendly beech-bough was swinging in the clear half-depth shallow at side ; for well had she been often warned by Tetbert, and by more than one sad legend of drownings in past days, not to trust the crystal treachery of Shire- bourne Pond anywhere out of bough-reach. So then lazily swinging half in the water and half out, a dripping Naiad with her dark tresses 150 STEPHAN LANGTON. all afloat, our wood nymph lay twining them with water-lilies. There was a sudden rush along the narrow path of evergreens, — a splendidly apparelled rider on a white steed, — a quick scream, and a loud laugh. " Soho, my beauty, — 'fore Gad and the saints, — but I've caught you, my pretty swan !" The startled girl made a rush through the shelving shallow for her scanty gear upon the bank, — but that dark rider had leapt from his horse, and stood over them ; and she splashed back into the deeper water as far as the beech bough would let her. " Aha, my blushing gypsey, — what, you foil me thus, do you ?" And that cruel rider leaping to the saddle again, forced his horse after her into the shallow. Frightened and screaming, poor Emma loosed her hold of that friendly branch and STEPHAN LANGTON. 151 waded as fast as she could chin-deep into the pool, followed now over the very saddle-bow by that prancing white horse and his furious rider. " Curse her, — the girl escapes me, — " He made a dash at her head, — but the poor despairing child took a further step or two quickly through the blinding water, and — with another had fallen over that subaqueous preci- pice, and was struggling in the clear still deep, twenty feet below ! The baffled John, uttering a blasphemous ex- ecration against his noble charger for having failed to reach " the chase," with cowardly cau- tion backed to the bank again, — and was coolly wringing his doublet, when, glancing at the fatal pool, he saw two clasped hands leap for a moment above the water ; — and was as sudden- ly made aware of a country kerne, running up the path. " Where, where is she, — where's Emma ?" 152 STEPHAN LANGTON. shouted Tetbert with a quick glance at the clothes. " There, churl !" said the Prince, — quietly pointing to the middle of Shirebourne Pond, and, as he pointed, those poor clenched hands came up again solemnly for the last time ! It looked like the appeal of innocence to Heaven against profligacy. In a moment, the brother had rushed in, and the shallow shelf past, had instantly dived to where he could see his sister, stark and still, lying on a bed of green weed in the bottom of that crystal chalk pit. He dived plumb-down, and had not stopped to fling away his heavy cow-skin tunic ; he dived eager to save, and the water rushed in at his open mouth: he dived with all his strength, and caught and clung to the heavy corpse, and tried and tried in vain to hft the precious burden with one brawny arm while he strove to battle up again with the other : and STEPHAN LANGTON. 153 his struggles grew fainter, but he would not let her go, — and, one more despairing effort, and then — a conscious calmness (such as those who die by drowning know) came over him ; and the brother and sister are locked in each other's arms in the tranquil crystal depth of Shire- bourne Pond ; and the rippled surface is all smooth once more ; and you may see the trout shoaling among the still green weeds around that naked raven-haired Sabrina, and her poor drowned brother in his cow-skin tunic. 154 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XIX. Wijt Sleepers in tjje Silent Pool. " Well, Prince, what cheer ? but your High- ness has taken a bath as well as the damsel, I see." " Tush, Vipont," — said the dark rider meet- ing his well-matched mates in the forest path close beside Hal's hovel, — " Gadsteeth, man, I was like to have been drowned, as the girl is ; and the boy too by this time — " " Drowned ?" — it was Hal's voice, still dodg- ing the gallants. " You'll be raising the devil, Vipont ; silence. STEPHAN LANGTON. 155 — I say : and let us to Gilford Castle at once, before the country's up : ill news will be sure to travel quickly." " Drowned ?" again asked Hal the woodman, " what said you, my masters, drowned ? the girl and tbe boy, — whose girl and boy ? — and there's no deep water to drown in hereabouts, but Shirebourne Pond, — one can't adrown in a trout stream or a marsh." But the gallants had put spurs to their horses, and had left the woodman wondering. He didn't wonder long. '* Tetbert !" where was Tetbert ? " Emma 1" — and the little ones all knew where Emma was : so oif he strode to the Silent Pool. It was smiling in its usual placid loveliness : great silver beeches stretching as to shake hands across the clear deep water edged with green- erie all round, but in a pure white shelving bason of chalk : every object was reflected as clearly on the water as it stood above, and the 156 STEPHAN LANGTON. very swallows as they dipt for insects might see themselves there mirrored as in crystal. Poor Hal saw nothing, — not even the tell- tale garments lying at the root of a beech : — but he did pick up a notable prize, — a red feather with a jewelled coronet clasp, — and he remembered the dark horseman in crimson to have had exactly such a feather in his cap. So he picked it up and stuck it in his own, — just to prove (if he met his lordship) he wasn't agoing to steal it, but intended honestly to give it back to the owner. And poor father Hal went peering and poking round the pond, — it had then as now many winding paths with indigenous box and holly and beech and yew^ all true chalk lovers, round it — thinking of and seeking for somebody's drowned girl and boy somewhere ; it must be in the water, surely : so he looked, and looked everywhere but in the right place,— for he walked round the pond and examined its edges. STEPHAN LANGTON. 157 At once, he saw a great crowd of fish all steering one way ; — and there deep down in the middle and half-hidden by green weeds lay — he knew them at a glance, — his Emma and his Tetbert ! Ay, — and he knew the whole horror at a glance, — his naked girl, — his noble boy that would have rescued her — this feather-bauble of that dark rider (he had wondered to see the gallant gentleman so wringing wet) those flat- tering parasites, — his own duped folly, and his darling, only saved from dishonour by death. He knew and saw it all in an instant, — and vowed vengeance ! What vengeance of a churl could reach a noble ? — with a sickening sense of impotence, — and yet another thought of an Englishman's habitual self-reHance, he stays his righteous hope of vengeance for awhile, to consider what's to be done now, on the moment, for the best. 158 STEPHAN LANGTON. Without one outward token of excitement, the woodnaan first blew a blast upon his cow- horn, in case any forester or other friend might be somewhere within hail to help ; and then with his billhook he set to cutting down a tall oak sapling with a hook near the root: and then, wading carefully to the edge of the deep water, he managed to get a grip of poor Tet- bert's cow-hide girdle with the hook, and thus to bring the bodies up, — both bodies, I say, — for the one corpse held the other in death with a grasp like that of life: Hal moved them nigher to him, — but could not lift them over the ledge; without help all was useless, — so again he plied the cow-horn ; and, — at last help came. " Hi, neighbour Hal, — what is it ?" quoth Wulf the cowherd, and with him a theow of good Sir Tristrem's. " Hither, mates," said the solemn voice of grief. STEPHAN LANGTON. 159 " Hither 1 help a father to bring up his dead children from the grave." The good men got into the water, and gave their sturdy help ; and within two minutes Tet- bert and Emma, both dead, were laid upon the green sward at the end of the Silent Pool, where those poor garments lay under the beech ; with reverent haste they wrapped them round her ; and so the two theows carried home upon their shoulders those comely corpses, poor Hal following sorrowfully but sternly. 160 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XX. losing in .State. When Stephan Langton on his solitary hill- top heard of this fearful tragedy, its details affected him strangely. This was the ordeal of persecuted innocence by water, even as his own had been by lire. It was another victim of that same bad Prince, who virtually Regent now, anon was to be demonstrated the very King-curse of England. It was a new call for him to be up and doing, and working for his poor down-trodden country, that at some time it haply might be free. It STEPHAN LANGTON. 161 demonstrated again as oftentimes before, how feudal tyrannies had chained down English liberty, and how much need there was of a champion in the Church as the only probable antagonist to the overwhelming and unhmited power of the despotic Crown. Long had Father Stephan, from his out- spoken counsels to the travelHng thousands on the Pilgrim's Way, become personally obnoxious to John ; if indeed the Prince guessed not that the forester-incendiary of Tangley Manor was now in truth the monk-incendiary of St. Mar- tha's. Long had he been known, even in that comparatively contracted sphere, to be the teacher of thoughts that ran like wildfire through the kingdom, till they culminated years after- ward in that volcano for mere Norman feuda- lism and high kingcraft, the Great Charter. And now, it seemed his wisdom to be up and stirring; here was another special call, — and everyway the nearer and louder to him, VOL. I. M 162 STEPHAN LANGTON. because of all men kind good Hal the woodman, his helper and abettor on that sad May-day, was now the tyrant's victim ; and Stephan Langton had herein to pay a debt of gratitude as well as one of patriotism and of justice. Down from St. Martha's with his cross- bearer and his pair of incense boys came Ste- phan solemnly to the w^oodman's hovel : and there, beside the Pilgrim's Way, on a spot marked even to this hour by a large erratic boulder of conglomerate stone, he laid out decently beneath the Cross those two poor dead corpses; the handsome youth and the beautiful girl, who heretofore had made poor Hal the richest and proudest of fathers. For three full days stood the good monk of St. Martha's at their head, and a chorister swung incense at their feet, — and all the many passers-by clustering round whispered about it ; — and especially noted, with many a muttered look of hate and rage, the Prince's jewelled STEPHAN LANGTON. 163 feather still in Hal's cap, set on a staff beside these silent yet eloquent victims. Be sure, though Stephan said nothing but the requiem, and though these dead were res- ters rather than actors, a continual sermon was being preached to all that passed by, of human oppression as well as of divine ordinance. They spoke to each other, those multitudi- nous wayfarers, not alone of death and judg- ment to come, and the sorrows of this evil world and the comforts of that better one ; but also, nigher home, of poor England and her prospects. O that good King Henry, now three years in the grave, had been more blessed in his children ! Woe, that his sons turn out so ill : there was Harry the eldest an open rebel, though his too kind father made him partner of his throne, — and Ri(;hard, our present king, where is he after all his undutiful conspiracies ? away from his people fighting other folks' battles in the East, — or rather as we think a M 2 164 STEPHAN LANGTON. prisoner somewhere: and he leaves us this wicked brother John to be our tyrant, as a State counterpart to that foreign Churchman the notorious Longchamp. Then they pointed to the Prince's feather, and without controversy every gossip added something still more dreadful to this hinted tragedy; and the hundreds of pilgrims con- stantly oscillating between Canterbury and Winchester carried on the exaggerated story and wafted it throughout the length and breadth of the land by means of other pilgrimages : and so it came to pass that our woodman's son and daughter, drowned at Shirebourne Pond, attain to the historic dignity of an aid in the develop- ment of English liberties. For, as I have said above, and as we soon shall set before you in detail — besides and be- yond these popular influences, — this whole tragic incident of Tetbert and Emma occasioned a most important change in the career of Ste- STEPHAN LANGTON. 165 phan Langton; and mightily advanced the cause he lived for. And it came about in this way. The Prior of Newark received soon after these events, by express command of Prince John, a summons from the sheriff of the county to give up the incendiary monk who was ex- citing " our good lieges" to rebellion on the highway between Winchester and Canterbury. It was an imperative command, and the Prior must obey it, on pain of probable destruction to his monastery; and therefore, to save his friends from their dilemma, as well as himself for future efforts in the cause of liberty, Stephan must hide away as he best could : he was a shrewd man, and managed it wisely. We shall hear of him anon no doubt. 166 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXI. ^iz ^xintz'Q jFeatJEt at ^flforU. In another way however, and a truly momen- tous one, the tragedy of Shirebourne Pond and its episode of the Prince's feather became inci- dents inwoven with the history of England : as your patience shall immediately discern. The funeral of John's last victims, with that tell-tale badge laid upon their bier, duly took place in the old churchyard of Aldeburie ; it was followed by wellnigh all the county ; and the two comely corpses, covered by one large white pall well sprinkled with flowers, the STEPHAN LANGTON. 167 heads and feet being exposed, were lowered together into a deep wide grave among the groans and cries of an excited multitude : they lie a little northward of the great yew in the south-west corner. Good old Sir Tristrem lent his venerable pre- sence to the scene, and with his wimpled dame and their daughteis comforted by many kindly words poor broken-hearted Hal and his won- dering little ones : who were all, father and children, forthwith after the sad ceremony adopted for one office or another into the ser- vice of the good knight's household. Hal put off his cow-skin, combed his elf-locks, and donned with his forester's leathern frock man- ners more suited to his new position than the rudeness of his former self the kerne ; while as for the little ones, room enough was found for their pretty faces in the banquctting hall at those happiest hours of the day the meals, while at other times they made themselves 168 STEPHAN LANGTON. severally busy or useful in the dairy, or about the stables, or by the spinning-wheel, or learn- ing the mysteries of laundressing or pagery. But Hal had a constant sorrow at his heart, and a weight upon his brow : so one convenient day as soon as might be, he sought out the good old knight, and craved leave to speak with his worship: he brought with him the feather. "Well, true-man Hal, and what wouldst thou of the master ?" "If it might please thy reverend worship, I made a vow at yon full grave before God and his saints ; and I must keep it." " Justly, true-man, and thou shalt too. What might it be ?" " To give this feather to its owner, face to face." " Hal, I should know that badge, the cluster of five arrows, — it is the Prince's ; nay, we may all but say the King's ; for Richard the Lion STEPHAN LANGTON. 169 IS away among the Saracens, and his brother John protects the realm meanwhile." " Protects, Master ? — ay, as the kite pro- tects a dovecote." *' Natheless, good Hal, he is both mighty in strength and terrible in the using it : and wouldst thou tax him to his face with — " " Ay, ay, my Master ; with thy good wall and Heaven's blessing ; for that was in my vow." " And it shall be kept, Hal : leave me, and ril speed your errand by the morrow." The arts of reading and writing w^ere not quite such uncommon accomplishments in the end of the twelfth century, as our modern complacency is willing to suppose : in fact, there were then in existence probably many more waggon-loads of manuscript than could be found now, if we except only the daily avalanche of letters ; and so Sir Tristrem wrote, for he could write, though slowly belike and painstakingly 170 STEPHAN LANGTON. enough, a commendation of his faithful theow Hal, the forester, to the Baron Fitz- Walter at the court of Prince John in Gilford Castle, praying his friend and loving cousin, the good lord aforesaid, to speed his servant's errand; to wit a public audience of the Prince. And so with next day's dawn Hal set off on horseback on his mission to Gilford. Though the distance was no doubt geographi- cally no further in those days than at present, and actually the same for crows, still the total absence of what we should now consider a prac- ticable road, and the roundabout methods of overcoming swamps and fens, made a few miles a good day's journey ; and so it might well be nightfall ere Hal and Gilford town became acquainted. Gilford Castle is now reduced to little more than the shell of its Keep : a plain square tower, some seventy feet in height, with walls three yards thick ; roofless, grey and crumbling ; STEPHAN LANGTON. 171 built of chalk ragstone and flints, varied by Roman herring-bone masonry ; some of the chalk lumps in the recesses being carved with rude figures of a king and a bishop, a saint and the crucifixion, possibly the work of some an- cient prisoner, possibly also of some more modern puzzler of pundits and archaeologists. For all else, as we have it now, there is extant little but a ruined porch or two, certain arched and vaulted crypts under houses in the town, some fragments of walls above ground, and much more extended foundations beneath. But in the day of which I write Gilford Castle was a vast and populous place of strength and habitation, running far over what is now the chief county town of Surrey, and compris- ing within its wide enclosure of mounds and bastions a labyrinth of single- storied wooden dwellings, guard-rooms and kitchens and dor- mitories by scores, and in chief the principal hall of audience, lofty and insulated, surrounded 172 STEPHAN LANGTON. by its court-yards, and with a plentiful sprinkling of cabins honeycombed against the inner walls. Furthermore ; for escape to beleaguered friends within, or surprise to besiegers without, there were (and are still, though walled up by our magistracy as perilous) several subterranean gangways cut in the chalk hills whereon the Castle stands leading to five vast cavernous excavations ; one of them fifty feet by twenty and ten high, another a hundred and twenty feet long by thirty broad; — and so on; the passages leading thence by several ways into the open country. The Castle had its usual history of cruelties and crimes ; but the most noted of its bloody records was the massacre, with previous terrible torture worthy of Spanish Inquisitors or our Sepoy mutineers, of Prince Alfred the son of Ethelred and six hundred of his followers, treacherously invited to taste what then was called Gilford hospitality, by Godwin, Earl of STEPHAN LANGTON. 173 Kent. And now in the days of John, — vir- tually King, and in a few years hence actually so on the death of his brother Richard the Lion in 1199, — many were the hideous deeds where- of those walls were conversant ; principally against unhappy Jews, whose riches tempted extortion, while their then most hated creed provoked extermination everywhere. Hal the woodman, — now dressed more court- ly as an esquire, — soon made himself known to the retainers of Baron Fitz- Walter, then doino; suit and service to his suzerain the Prince at Gilford for sundry demesnes, lordships and manors in the neighbourhood. I need not detail our humble friend's audience with that great lord; nor how entirely the whole story the poor man had to tell went to the heart of one, who was his outraged nation's most valiant helper in those evil days. Let it suffice to say that Hal met with all encouragement, not only from Fitz-Walter, 174 STEPHAN LANGTON. but also from many other Barons and Knights, who (very much by Stephan Langton's influ- ence) had long been ripening fast into rebel- lion against tyranny, and nearing the lists of deadly contest with the King for the People's rights. Accordingly, next morning he followed in the throng to the great hall where John was hold- ing his court ; and took his station among the well-armed retainers of Fitz- Walter. Rest assured, no Baron trusted himself to John out of his own steel coat, nor ungirt by a few score faithful villanes by way of body guard. It was a scene of feudal pomp, circumstance and ceremony. At the further end of the hall sat Prince John, robed in royal splendour ; and elated even to usurpation of the sceptre of England from the issue of that recent conference of all the realm's estates at Reading, which had degraded from his office as Protector King Richard's STEPHAN LANGTON. 175 favourite, Longchamp. He wore, as Lord of Ireland, the celebrated present sarcastically sent to him by Pope Urban III, a coronet of gold fillagree plumed with peacock's feathers : and he was throned in a gilt Gothic chair on a dais, under its gorgeous canopy ablaze with heraldic emblems ; but his own black brow and truculent countenance contrasted only the more darkly with the gay colours and dazzling cloth of gold all round him. Close behind in a gaily-vested crowd stood the gallants whom he counted friends ; chiefly, a loose lot of the courtier extra vagants who usually encircle a bad king ; but among them some few good barons and gentlemen, such as Hubert de Burgh, Erdington, Ferrers, Lucie, and others ; whose high sense of honour and duty ever bound them to the Crown, however worthless might be the head that w^ore it. Beyond these, ranging right and left in that half-circle, in their accustomed armours and 176 STEPHAN LANGTON. heraldries stood many a neighbouring Baron and Knight with their liveried esquires and men-at-arms; chief amongst whom for bold front and princely retinue were Hamon Creve- coeur, Roger de Loseley, Hugh Poyntz, Ra- nulph de Vaux, and Robert Fitz- Walter, Baron of Baynard's. The hall itself, long and wide and lofty, rudely arched, and heavily cross- beamed and timbered overhead, was hung with banners and escutcheons: a few files of strangely accoutred halberdiers and foreign mer- cenaries interposed between the courtly upper end of the hall and the popular lower end; where a multitude of the commons from the portly merchant to the shaggy serf watched the proceedings as well as they could over or between "the blunt monster's own uncounted heads." Something was going on in the middle, — what could it be ? Half-a-dozen wretched men with unmistake- STEPHAN LANGTON. 177 able Hebrew faces, bearded to the waist and in long brown gaberdines, stood tied together in a string like packhorses at one side, with a guard of the royal mercenaries jeering them. But what is going on in the middle ? Two figures in red, hooded and hideous with eyeholes, are bending over a wretched Israelite, who groans feebly on the floor as they twist the sticks tighter. " Again, minions, — harder ! there's yet another turn to the screw : Ha ! 'fore Gad, but this obstinate Jew should be worth a thousand marks to us !" The Prince's harsh voice grated hatefully on the ear ; and there were murmurs of commise- ration all over the hall, — and a sound as of swords thrust back into their scabbards. For, hateful as the Jews were then to all Christen- dom, and much as all classes coveted their wealth and were vengeful of their usuries in getting it, still no Englishman in any age ever VOL. I. N 178 STEPHAN LANGTON. could endure to see a fellow-creature tortured, and the very Barons who had the most monied interest in getting rid at once of the Jewish mortgagees and their bonds and judgments, could ill brook to gaze upon human agony extorted by rack, faggot, or screw. So, Fitz- Walter took occasion of that omi- nous rustle in the crowd to step forth with a petition : would his Highness deign to hear a message to be delivered by one of the good villanes of Sir Tristrem de Braiose ? The Prince, perhaps not sorry at the inter- ruption, for he wotted shrewdly how ill he could afford to gain any more unpopularity, — waved his hand to those scarlet hooded myrmi- dons, and commanded, "Away with the Jew, and all his cursed brethren ; and look you, Merlebois, and let your Brabant halberdiers too see to it, that three thousand golden marks at the least be screwed out of yonder tribe of Naphthali." STEPHAN LANGTON. 179 With that, the insolent array of mercena- ries marched with their prisoners out of the hall. " How, now, fellow ! — what would you of our Grace ?" For Hal, the woodman-squire, after that noisy exit of the Prince's guard and those un- happy Jews, had stepped forth, and was walk- ing firmly up to the presence with the compo- sure of a free frank Enghshman. " How now, again ! speak, churl, — your er- rand quick, or hy — " *' Sir Tristrem de Braiose greets your High- ness, and has bade me come and plead before the throne. I claim justice at thy hands, Royal Prince." It was a key-note that struck upon the uni- versal heart of that dense throng ; there was a hum of applause, and then all were hushed and leaning forward. " How, sirrah ? speak out : justice, — are we not just, Gadsteeth?" N 2 180 STEPHAN LANGTON. And there was another whispered rustle of flattering speech among the courtiers. But Hal spoke, when it had subsided, solemnly and quietly ; " I am the father of two murdered children ; and their murderer is in this hall: — before God and all his saints I claim justice on the culprit of your Highness !" It was a golden chance for popularity : so the Prince said aloud, and well the crowd ap- plauded it, — " Justice you shall have, man. Show me the murderer." The metamorphosed woodman (for none could have recognized rough Hal in the splendid Braiose livery) folding his arms calmly looked round that great assembly ; with steady eye he slowly swept the circle once and again, and then returned his glance upon the gilded dais. And he said almost in a whisper, but the hall was still as midnight, — STEPHAN LANGTON. 181 " The murderer left his gage upon the fatal scene, and I have vowed to return it to him face to face." With that the woodman drew from his vest a feather with a golden badge at foot, and stepping forth flung it at the Prince ! Pale as death, and trembling with rage and shame and terror, John cowered on his throne, and the whole hall rang with clattering arms and shouts and execrations. Vipont at his elbow whispered to him earnestly. " True, — Sir Knight ! thou hast counselled us well. Ha ! fellow, remember the Jew : hark back ray minions. Chamberlain Hubert ! — this is treason, and shall have bloody punishment upon the spot." There was an uneasy shudder through the hall, and a dead silence. Then, after a whisper with his nearer neigh- bours right and left, Fitz-W alter strode forth, 182 STEPHAN LANGTON. drew his sword, and lifted it on high, not as if to strike, hut in the act of adjuration : in a moment, by an instinctive impulse, every Knight and Baron there had done the same, — and thus they stood protesting against wrong with drawn uplifted swords in eloquent silence. John was thoroughly appalled : haggard and wild with fear he turned him right and left, like a craven as he was, to those silken flatterers, who felt the crisis come : his very bodyguard, the Brabant mercenaries, were all gone off to torture those vile Jews, and John was at the mercy of his injured people. But Fitz- Walter broke up the scene, — " Let all who love England follow me !" There was a mighty moving, — for no one seemed to wish to be left behind ; yet each man went out orderly and sternly as one marching to duty, and its place of peril. In a few mo- ments that great hall was cleared, saving for STEPHAN LANGTON. 183 the humiliated abject John, and his few parti- zans and parasites. "Nunkey," then squealed a parti-coloured dwarf junaping from the footstool of the dais, — " why do you send away all your guests so soon ? Lackland is Lackfolk too, quoth the fool : — eugh ! — it'll be cold quarters here anon for the Gilford Christmassing." But Cantelupe kicked him down the steps, whence the damaged mannikin looked up rue- fully. 184 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXII. ^0 to 0ut ^tit]&0rittt0. It is not my plan, nor wish, nor will, to be the tedious chronicler of English history year by year in this disastrous time, nor indeed, let me confess it, at any other. Nothing could be easier, nor more wearisome, than to transcribe, with vast appearance of antiquarian research, morsels *' inne ye choyceste offe spellynges" out of lusty old Holinshed Rapin and Speed and gos- siping Sir WiUiam Dugdale ; nothing would be more expeditious as to the craft of mere book- making, nor of less toil in the way of pains- STEPHAN LANGTON. 185 taking independent authorship than, by such piecenaeal plagiarism, to naake up a miserable historic patchwork of the troublous times of John, equally complicated with those contending chronicles themselves, and to boot as utterly unreadable. But all this sort of thing for its easy dis- honesty your present historical romancer can afiFord to despise, and for its dreary but un- thankful labour to abjure : his business is to paint up scenes and develope characters, bearing in mind, but without any overt intrusion of such lore, all true dates incidents and circum- stances : content, and trusting for like content- ment in his discriminative reader, with calling up generally true and distinct pictures of that fierce transition era in our social geology ; and with touching, sketchily but according to real facts, the manners and character of our fore- fathers, so vindicatory of their fitness for the work, unto which Providence ordained them. 186 STEPHAN LANGTON. If I stay not to dot these pages with asterisks and references, nor make a parade of learning by dull detached notes and ever-skipped appendices, it is not because the toil which they imply has been altogether prsetermitted : it w^ere easy to give pictorially an erudite reason for almost every epithet in a scene or a dress ; I might quote some obscurest chronicler for each phy- sical incident as it occurs ; and might demon- strate to the satisfaction of the deepest meta- physician how truly through circumstances we are gradually exhibiting and accounting for the time-honoured character of Stephan Langton. He is to be the princely priest, the patriotic baron, the firm controller alike of kingly tyranny and of the counterpoise usurpation of popes ; the purifyer of a corrupted clergy, and the restorer of freedom to an oppressed laity : therefore it must be that only through much change and trial, tribulation and self-sacrifice, we can build up so forcible and fine a cha- racter. STEPHAN LANGTON. 187 The boy's early forest-life and love, the Devon abbey's chorister and the Lincoln baron's page, the hero of that frightful catastrophe at Tangley Manor, the despairing monk of Newark, the meditative priest of St. Martha's ; and through all a man waging a personal heart- conflict with his own passions and afl^ections and with that evil Prince beside, all these hitherto have fashioned Langton in our view for his life's great future and his country's present good : and we shall yet see throughout and even to the end, that the fashioning of character is providentially accounted for, and runs through the tissue of this tale as a thread of silver in the serge cloth. Consider, that we are concocting a twelfth- century man's biography ; the history, actual as to its telescopic broad facts and probable as to its now undiscoverable microscopic details, of an old-time great man's almost untold life : and in following his career, we can touch incidentally 188 STEPHAN LANGTON. only the records of the time in which he lived. You shall have all things true, or very like the truth ; no known fact of the great Prelate's life omitted, no legend overlooked, and very few contemporary historic incidents unwoven into our story ; but nobody's patience need be tor- mented with elaborate extracts from the chron- iclers ; though everyone's faith may safely trust our honest diligence for due (even if unquoted) authorities, all along the pictured paths by which as hitherto we hope to lead you. In one thing however, it is only fair to suggest, a modern writer must be continually at fault in an attempted reproduction of old times and men and manners. It is impossible altogether to steer clear of petty anachronisms whereby the merest smatterer in word-criticism may prove me or any other such romancer oftentimes in a trifle wrong; for without the use of new words and new ideas one cannot convey forcibly to a reader of the present time STEPHAN LANGTON. 189 any just impressions of the past : the old names and archaic thoughts of things gone by have utterly perished with the things themselves, and a man must dig deep indeed into antiquarian obscurities to be able to produce with severe and chronical accuracy those details which involve infinite toil in their discovery, and after all said would be only incomprehensible in themselves tedious and misleading. But enough, — and more than enough ; understand me as stringing scenes of history on a thread of biography ; and as being tolerably accurate in antiquarianism so far as one can well afford to be without seeming pedantic. A general idea then of the condition of England at the close of the twelfth and the opening of the thirteenth centuries is in mourn- ful truthfulness much as follows. The realm, rent miserably by factions and internecine battlings between a vicious king and his contentious nobles, was made yet more 190 STEPHAN LANGTON. intolerable to the bulk of its inhabitants by mercenary freelances and freebooters, ravaging and destroying everywhere. The king himself had imported tens of thousands of those licensed robbers, the Brabancois, Poictevins, Flamands and Gascons ; and every baron had in his pay for similar purposes of body and castleguard other like ruffians ; and as usual the people all over the land were in chief the sufferers, (quicquid delirant reges &c.,) cruelly ground down by enforced contributions ; agri- culture was then impossible, for none would sow a harvest he little hoped to reap ; trade, beyond the rudest barter, was not yet invented, for the idea of credit entered not the mercantile mind ; and altogether there was little chance for a man's livelihood in any way, short of poaching in the royal forests or attaching him- self as another armed marauder to some fierce baronial chief. King John went about destroy- ing the castles and domains of his rebellious STEPHAN LANGTON. 191 feudatories ; and they again took out their revenge against the castles and domains of himself and his parasitical adherents : the whole land was full of ruins, misery, brigandage, and desolation — and its sole history for many years was like the burden of the prophet's scroll, lamentation and mourning and woe : now the barons were in the ascendant, and now the king ; but anyhow and at all times the people and their wretched homes were only made more wretched; and it mattered little to them whether monarchy or aristocracy was upper- most ; in either event they w^ere trodden down. 192 STEPHAN LANGTONJ CHAPTER XXIII. iFit^^Ootij anti fHatilKa. Now about the day of which we write, there flourished a famous English hero, of noble origin but broken fortunes, who is destined to figure in this tale as a very friend in need to Stephan Langton. Robert Fitz-Otho, or Fitz-Ooth, Earl of Huntingdon, had been a wild and extravagant young fellow enough, and had easily managed by his prodigal hospitalities to dissipate an ample patrimony; that, castle by castle and knight's fee by knight's fee, had melted in the STEPHAN LANGTON. 193 usurious crucible of the Hebrew moneylender. He, a baron born, had fallen into ignoble poverty ; and then, as now, the full coronet must pay penalty for the empty purse ; fallen from his high estate, and shunned by his^monied meaner- hearted brother knights and barons, Fitz-Ooth in a generous rage abjured his birthright titles and mortgaged estates, and as an outlawed man stood for some forty or fifty years recognised King of the Forests, — that is virtually of half England — under the plebeian name of Robin Hood. Gathering about him a band of kindred spirits, and inspiring into them his own heroic nature, he became in those troublous times quite an Estate of the Realm, a free independent link between an oppressed people and their tyrannical misrulers: always befriending the poor, helping the wronged to his right, and, from the influences of a picturesque true cir- cumstance soon to be recorded, the constant VOL. I. o 194 STEPHAN LANGTON. rescuer and refuge of imperilled womanhood, whether maid wife or widow ; so this best and most gallant of knights-errant did no small good and filled no unworthy niche in his generation : a pretty long one too, for he died at the respectable age of eighty-seven. And Robin had for coworkers with him sundry rough and right-good fellows whose acquaintance we may slightly make anon ; but I will mention first of all as courteously bound, among them though not of them, Robin's truest mate and best ally. Maid Marian. Her story, so far as sundry conflicting anna- lists and poets have recorded it, may be gathered very nearly to be this. Matilda, daughter of Fitz-Walter, Baron of Baynard's and Dunmow, was too beautiful not to have attracted early the roving attentions of young Robert Fitz-Ooth, — too beautiful also not to have secured a like questionable compliment from the bad Prince John. Our chroniclers STEPHAN LANGTON. 195 have a terrible story (fortunately not quite true) against the latter-named of Maude's admirers : as how, after having made divers rude attempts to steal forcibly or by fraud the maiden's favour, the baffled royal profligate graciously conde- scended to destroy her, out of mere revenge, by the present of a pair of poisoned gloves : poor Maude, — if true, that pair of gloves had been cruel payment for a kiss : and they even show you now-a-days her tomb at Little Dunmow, in the church, on the south side of the quire, between the two pillars there ; where may be seen a sculptured effigy, painted as pronouncedly as some in the Crystal Palace ; but in this case the flesh-coloured fingers are popularly sup- posed to have reference to the quite impossible tragic circumstance of aforesaid poisoned gloves having compassed her murder. This however is all clear fable, due to the general appreciation of that detested John ; who, as in all such cases, though black enough, has o 2 196 STEPHAN LANGTON. very carefully been painted by every limner (the present scribe perhaps included) much blacker than nature's dark original. The fact seems to be, that to escape John's unpleasant importunity, and with a strong leaning towards the like importunity in its pleasanter phase of noble-hearted, though im- poverished Fitz-Ooth, the fair Matilda inconti- nently eloped with the latter from Dunmow Castle; and, to the consternation of all her courtly circle, became the outlaw's forest wife. Whether or not Friar Tuck was called in to perform a church ritual on the occasion, there is now no chronicler to say ; but it is more than a charity — it is a justice both to Robert and Matilda to credit such a respectable probability ; for strangely enough we find that this cele- brated friar, though popularly believed to be a mere cudgeller and rollicking jovial free-liver, was actually for many years retained about STEPHAN LANGTON. 197 Robin Hood as his daily religious mass- man and confessor; he appears to have lived out a long life as regular chaplain to the band of bold spirits, who in the article of death at all events, if not in life, needed ghostly consola- tion. That Friar Tuck could not have been the dissolute or gluttonous professor of monkery we irrationally suppose him, is self-evident ; for Robin and his mates always deservedly made scarecrows of such hypocritical cormo- rants, and could never have tolerated in honour any such specimen among their band. For my part, I believe well of Friar Tuck ; and looking to the good influences of Maid Marion (always honouring and often rescuing young womankind especially), I take it to be an historical fact that Robert Fitz-Ooth and Matilda Fitz- Walter duly became *' baron and feme " under the clerical — though most likely "unassisted" — efficacy of the very Reverend Friar Tuck. 198 STEPHAN LANGTON. This mesalliance however was doubtless so displeasing to the proud circle aforesaid, that they devised the royal poisoning legend as a finale more creditable to their caste; the de- stroyer is at all events a king ; and the pater- nal Fitz- Walter was easily persuaded, for the glory of his race, to forge a family tombstone confirmatory. Moreover, in aid of the com- promised honour of two aristocratic houses, it seems to have been tacitly agreed by all par- ties concerned, that there should be a change of name and station forthwith : and the plebeian Robin Hood mated with a simple Marian as his forest-queen was thus destined to outfame the noble but obscure Fitz-Ooth, and the Lady Maude Fitz- Walter. It is a mistake also to suppose that Robin Hood and his merry men were permanently attached to Barnsdale in Yorkshire, Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, or indeed to any other one fixt place. Wherever was a royal demesne, STEPHAN LANGTON. 199 thither the noble outlaw went and conquered ; he was the Nimrod of the whole realm, com- manding justice to the poor, and taking largesse of the rich wherever he went: fat abbeys dreaded him, for heavy contributions levied he continually upon their stores of old sack and good canary, to say less of needful gold and garments, and all the other helps and comforts of life, whereof these drone's homes were to Robin and his men full hives ; ay, and even strong castles, if they loved him not, and so were insufficiently hospitable, soon had cause to fear his presence ; for Robin had the knack of winning away to him every best man round ; and thus enrolled among his merry men the choicest and bravest spirits in England. Major tells us in the most indifferent Latin that any one of the men of " Robertus Hudus latronum omnium humanissimus," was a match for any other four wdthin the realm. It is httle wonder then, that among that 200 STEPHAN LAKGTON. mixed multitude in the audience hall of Gilford Castle stood Robin Hood and Maid Marian, duly disguised : he with a Palmer's cloak and cowl on — (some derive the outlaw's alias from the hood he was at such times wont to wear) — she, with her pretty hunting-gear (as we shall see her anon), muffled up in the trailing and large sleeved town woman's dress of the period. She might like to have a chance of looking on her father once again, poor girl; — and, for aught I can tell, might have spoken with him too, under the rose ; and so have assured him of her happiness with the noble though be- clouded Fitz-Ooth: at all events, when Fitz- Walter led the way to clear that cruel audience hall of England's lovers, and it gradually became as empty of men as an ebbed sea beach is of water, I noticed Maude and Robin early in the throng sidling up to the great baron, and seem- ing to be right welcome to his lordship's pre- sence : though doubtless he said nothing about STEPHAN LANGTON. 201 this greeting to her ladyship's lofty circle at Dunmow ; nor to the. churchwardens who so recently had made space, before the chancel, for that lying filial tomb. Furthermore, of this last (be assured) he whispered nothing to his daughter ; and I doubt whether bold Robin too ever heard of the afore- said royal slanderings; or, depend on it, his spirit would have spoken out at that Gilford gathering ere this. That Fitz- Walter didn't credit it himself, is evident from his feudal following of John to Gilford, as Master of Baynard's by Vachery in the neighbourhood, an offset of the other Bay- nard's Castle in Essex. 202 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXIV. We left Stephan Langton hiding away for safety as best he could from the myrmidons and mercenaries of John: and by an author's pri- vileged omniscience, combined with confidence in his reader's discretion, (for you will not un- timely divulge matters) I can tell you both the secret of his whereabouts and all that fol- lowed. The helpless old Prior and good brotherhood of Newark (all pretty well personal friends of Stephan, and at all events foes of John) were in STEPHAN LANGTON. 203 no small fear and peril for not giving him up at once to the vindictive Prince : but it is due to Stephan's wisdom as well as to their own after- sincerity to assure the public that, the first hour of warning past, they could not give him up, had they wished it ; seeing they didn't know where to find him. Right sure was Langton that by no common path or well-used highway (as highways then were, narrow deep channels of mud and stones and tree-logs) could he, a lone and persecuted priest, escape safely from St. Martha's and get to the coast: horsemen of the Prince's Bra- bancois infested every route and kept sentinel upon him by every recognized footway. But with characteristic prudence and secrecy he made his own shrewd plan and acted on it instantly. First, — to give him time to turn round and save his friends of Newark the vexation of knowing where to find him if obliged, having 204 STEPHAN LANGTON. duly consigned to Peter for safe custody to the Prior his invaluable manuscripts, Stephan se- cretly re-assumed his forester's dress, and, with his clerical garb and other matters in a bundle, sped across country straight over to the hundred of Blachefelde, — now Blackheath ; where there existed a primaeval Saxon settlement called Farlee. This largish hamlet and clearing on the Ikenild or Icenian way had possibly been an Attrebate village in oldest times : thereafter the Romans had certainly possessed it, for your present confessor and his friends have found Imperial money there of some forty-five Caesars and others, several hundreds in number, ranging from Nero to Honorius : and when the Romans were obliged to go home to save their central city from the Goths and Huns, the earliest Saxons mingled with the Britons (we speak cer- tainly, for of all these have coins been found there, and pottery, and ancient weapons and even STEPHAN LANGTON. 205 gems, inlaid brooches, and fibulae, as the British Museuni and ourself will testify) these Saxons plus Britons, I say, lived there in intermarrying harmony ; and to this day we have relics of both races in the characters and names of our local rustics. Stephan then, as a wandering stranger capable of a song and good at woodcraft, found himself welcome among the villanes of Farlee (on due payment) for a week or so : we must remember that five miles off in those days amounted to as good as fifty now : and so for distance he was well out of reach. However, he must think and scheme quickly as possible for some refuge further : and, upon reflection, he hit upon this. More than once, during those few sad years of his service at the shrine of St. Martha's, Langton had fallen in with sundry of Fitz-Ooth's followers, no doubt looking out for the spoil of wealthy travellers on the Pilgrim's Way: and 206 STEPHAN LANGTON. very lately one of them had told him that " King Robin himself would be at Gilford before the other king made Christmassing there," and the man cheerily and fearlessly had said to Stephan " Come to us anon among the Druids' yews, and I'll give thee good thanks there for thy prayers, good priest." For the man, in some sudden fit of conscientiousness not very un- common with runagates of his kidney, had (I should have told you before) come to Stephan to confess many a wretched piece of wickedness and wantonness, and with tears and sobs had got what he came for, absolution from them at the good priest's hands. Stephan therefore, by one of the deep lanes hereabouts which may well have been covert- ways of old for British or Roman strategies, . passed hastily from Blachefelde down into the well-remembered vale of Aldeburie ; and thence by the wild woods (infested, as was known, by wolves, and so fortunately free from those worse STEPHAN LANGTON. 207 than wolves, common brigands or the bloody soldiers of John) carefully and quietly sped the three or four miles northward of the Farlee settlements, and duly found himself, after long struggling through the tangled forest of the Downs, in its nucleus the Druid's Grove. Down in a hollow between the two great waves of the Downs, — then in every direction for miles and miles aw^ay covered thick with trees and underwood • — appeared a partial clearance of the surrounding jungle, due to the weed-killing presence of hundreds of gigantic yews : they seemed to be set as a serpentine avenue uniting circles ; but withal so many wild ones had sprung up spontaneously, and so many hollow old ones had died away and gapped out, that it nowhere was absolutely clear which might be the avenue and which the circle. All round about and like a wall of verdure, impene- trable to men not skilled in woodcraft and the sturdy use of the bill, stood a thicket a mile deep 208 STEPHAN LANGTON. of hawthorn and holly tangled up with wild- briar and high furze, and overrun by the most luxuriant ivy. To this sequestered spot, by fol- lowing first a water-course and then a bear's track had Langton gradually come. And, as expected, he found company enough to greet him. From the Down's hill-top, now Newland's Corner, mounting a tree to take his bearings as often needs must in threading such a jungle, he had noted a column of blue smoke in one of those old yew circles, — and he made for it warily, — so as not to expose himself to robbers or marauding gypsies, if probably enough encamp- ing there. Warily too, he continued to creep on ; until, just before emerging from the thicket, he saw — what you shall see if I can show it you. Lying in all attitudes under a black old yew, or dotted about upon the middle sward as amusing themselves with one device or another, STEPHAN LANGTON. 209 were some two or three score of stout-looking fellows in a uniform livery of buckskin with green appointments : several of them were stripping boughs of yew, for the bowyer ; sundry more splitting up ashen staves, for the fletcher ; a few, idling round a huge bon-fire, seemed to be anticipating a right savoury feast, as some lumps of rich venison, hung by chains from iron tripods set around, were twisting and hissing in the clear fat-fed flames : some other of the men were shooting at a mark — a dead leveret tied to a bending wand as in a moletrap, and already made a hedgehog of arrows : and divers others were listening and laughing round a goodhumoured friar who appeared to be the intellectual life of the party. There were also plenty of w^omen and children, and a kraal-hke encampment of skin huts. Not a doubt of it, this was Robin's band, and here was Friar Tuck. Stephan was just springing from his covert, VOL. I. p 210 STEPHAN LANGTON. when three distant scarce- heard notes of a bugle acted Uke a charm upon the scene and stopped him, so as still to be his own and our spectator. The merrymen all, evidently in their holiday trim and expecting some such summons, fell at once into a wide circle, whereof the friar and the fire served nearabout for centre : a very tall frank-faced fellow standing a little in advance answered the distant bugle by three sharp blasts ; there was a nearer blaring, — and another answer, — and a louder, and then another, and another, — and two yeomen prickers on wild rough ponies are galloping up the avenue ; and after a space, more slowly advancing in a canter, is seen a splendid Flemish black stallion, proudly prancing and curvetting under the double burden of the Forest King and Queen. Look at this comely pair, — before she leaps from the pillion, and he springing from the saddle after her, salutes her on the willing rosy STEPHAN LANGTON. 211 cheek, and th^n on one knee kisses her hand for homage. Look at them both, — he in Lin- coln green with golden baldric bugle and hunting knife, and a bunch of flowering heath by way of tassel feather to his cap ; she, kilted to the knee in Coventry blue with pale yellow Greek trews of undyed silk, a mottled deerskin over her shoulder, bow and arrows at her back, highlaced fur sandals on her feet, and the fanciful garniture of a pair of roebuck's horns upon her head. Look at his bold, happy, healthy face, with its curly black beard, and activity and masculine vigour stamped on every muscle of his body, — and look once and again at that bright-eyed sunny-cheeked merry-hearted graceful and cheerful and happy and delighted Queen of the Forest. What a shout of welcome, — and another, and another ! till those grave old yews waved again as in a storm ; and the startled black stallion p 2 212 STEPHAN LANGTON. almost reared away from the grasp of that herculean henchman who now held him. " Good den to thee, John, — good den, merrymen all." It was Marian's silver greeting that, — and how lustily they cheered her again and again. " Messmates, a hearty welcome to you all ; how goes it in the forest, Little John ? and how fares my curtail friar too ?" " Cheerily, Robin, and thank ye," sang out Tuck rotundo ore, for no one ever dared to say your lordship, nor show him more of awsome reverence than of rough forest love; it was against the rules of Grene-shaw. "Ay, and here's a plenty of good cheer too ready roasted for our 'Polios and Dina," — gruffly added henchman John; it was Friar Tuck's latest lesson that in classical mythology, though so nearly lost upon our honest John-a- Naylor. And to say but truth the good friar habitually did his best to wile away the tedium STEPHAN LANGTON. 213 of nights and bad weather by a wholesome in- fusion of ingenuous literature, " that softens manners " (we may remember) " and forbids men to become wild beasts.'* " What, my true cowled friar ? — So youVe been booking up our stripling lieutenant here to butter us with flattery, ey ? now, this shall be a full bowl of salt and water to you, Master Tuck, unless you've loyally taught meanwhile our merrymen a new stave to greet Maid Marian withal." In a minute, the friar's hand giving the time, the following greenwood jingle from the throats of fifty foresters rang for a good mile circle through the bush : A welcome, a welcome ! huzzah for the Queen ! Huzzah for the King in his surcoat of green ! Huzzah for Maid Marian, so gay and so good ! Huzzah for the forester's friend — Robin Hood ! A welcome ! a welcome ! — up, up with the shout. Let listening hills and the woods ring it out. Glad welcome ! — huzzah ! 214 STEPHAN LANGTON. A welcome to warn all the red-deer around. And the wolf in his lair, and the foxes aground, And the bears and the badgers — and barons and priests, That Robin is come for his sports and his feasts. That Robin is here with his Queen by his side. To gladden the poor, and to trample on pride — Glad welcome ! — huzzah ! Meanwhile John-a-Naylor's quick eye had caught sight of a pryer in the thicket ; — and if Langton hadn't instantly leapt forth, a feathered arrow had been rustling in his heart by this time. " How now, sirrah," — roared Robin Hood, — " a king's forester too ! quick, what's your er- rand, man : mark you, we are out of the law here." " I claim of Robin Hood protection from King John : no forester am I, though J seem so for disguise sake ; I am Stephan Langton, monk of St, " " Robin, that is a true man and a good," STEPHAN LANGTON. 215 hastily interposed Maid Marian, — " I mind me now that the abbess of St. Catherine's has given refuge to a poor child whom he saved out of Tangley fire." " That poor child, — hast thou any tidings of her then, lady ?" " Nay, friend ! be not so eager : she is safe and well in the nunnery, I trow." Stephan's inmost heart groaned within him like a death knell. " And wilt thou, lady, if ever thou hast speech with her, say the poor monk, her own true knight Stephan, wears her chaplet even round his heart. She will know the symbol." Turning then to Robin Hood, he said, *' May I have safe escort to the coast ? all the highways and bye-ways are watched against me, and other way is none save through your forests." "I'll take you myself," quoth Robin; "1 owe a call of grace to the abbot of Canterbury : 216 STEPHAN LANGTON. methinks, merrymen, there be harts of grease awaiting our fleches in his right reverence's park, and some good wine still mellowing for us among the cobwebs of his cellars." It w^as a commonish jest that, and an ancient, but it always told ; for it went home to that heart of hearts, the stomach : and it would have done the most sneaking casuist some frank open good could he have heard the gruff but boisterous laughter confirmatory of a meditated raid against the archiepiscopal refectory. Arrangements were soon made : for, not to be tedious, I leave to your imagination the savoury feast of venison washed down by good monas- terial canary, and the buttered bannocks and honey and cheese and curds and frummerty, and the after piles of pears and grapes and medlars, — all soon and in their turn discussed by that melodious and voracious company; for in verity they sang as heartily as they feasted. STEPHAN LANGTON. 217 1 leave you also to conceive the journey preparations ; and how with a numerous follow- ing on shaggy ponies and well armed they took the hill country way, and ever over the heights as closely as they could : and so for four days of weary and perilous wayfaring, till at length they neared Canterbury; where Robin leaving his men well ambushed and cared-for in the deer-teeming parkforest went on alone with Stephan to the coast. On the whole journey no doubt, the heart of Langton (who had previously confided his sorrowful story to Maid Marian, finding she was to remain behind,) was too full of his own and his country's wrongs not to have out-poured them all at lengt^ into the sympathizing ears of Robin Hood : for in him Langton's keenness could discern a very useful link between the nobles and the people ; if ever (as was likely) they made common cause against the king. Langton was the one superior intelligence to 218 STEPHAN LANGTON. inform and direct all the combined brute forces baronial secular clerical and popular, that opposed the tyrant John ; those forces being destined through the influence of his master mind to issue, after many struggles and with various fortune, in the reasonable liberties of England, subjective only to a constitutional monarch. STEPHAN LANGTON. 219 CHAPTER XXV. ^ STeUsratn of ^nQlis^ J^fstorg. For, one-ideaed as it may seem to own as much, to my thinking the whole history of England is little more than a developement of the Great Charter. Anterior to its actual expression in set words, the principles of Magna Charta are those of our primitive common-law, the unwritten but universally accepted rights of indigenous free- men. That representative constitution, that limited monarchy, that liberty of conscience speech and conduct within due and reasonable 220 STEPHAN LANGTON. bounds, that rational self-government of the people by the people through their own elected officers, was only an improvennent and an ex- pansion by our early Saxon kings frona the still earlier rights and customs of our so-called savage ancestry, the Britons : a people aborigi- nally free. And when the Conqueror, introducing a strict feudalism, trod too heavily on a fierce and oppressed nation, England heaved up under the dynasty of his successor like a living earth- quake, and even from the first Henry extorted a bill of rights : Stephen of Boulogne renewed it under like compulsion: while Henry the Second confirmed it with equal duresse felt and insincerity shown. But each king in succession, not unaided by the cotyrannic church when her crowned son was only obedient, strove hard to retain or recover those absolute powers which he dared then to claim over the people as his divine right, his royal prerogative. STEPHAN LANGTON. 221 It was destined to be a perpetual struggle, though one that came so early to a head under the intolerable yoke of John; for with him occurs the crisis of the Charter; and thence- forth throughout long ages those continuous contentions between king and people, wherein British freedom was perpetually alternating be- tween wounds and healing. Confirmed by the Third Henry, and with now, for the first time, the People in Parliament as an equal estate with King and Nobles, tyranny was checked, rational liberty vindicated, trade and commerce created and protected : and so with various fortune did the wrestling match hold on through many a reign between popular rights and tyranny ; till the Wars of the Roses crushing the intermediate power of the Nobles by their own suicidal in- strumentality, left alone to contend against each other the almost absolute monarch and his strong though down-trodden people. Harry the Eighth and that capricious tyrant 222 STEPHAN LANGTON. our " good Queen Bess " illustrate exactly such an era ; courtiers idolatrously fawning on the crown, and the crown by every device doing its utmost to act as an extinguisher to the lamp of popular liberty. But anon, when the House of Stuart would tyrannize over England, uprose Cromwell and hurled that rough-rider from the saddle ; all too rudely and cruelly, it is true, so that by re-action the dissolute Charles, welcomed as a gay and gallant foil to all that puritan hypocrisy, aaain had the reins well in hand : until James once more too rigorously daring, gave back to us by his expulsion our constitutional Hmited monarchy, virtually elective as of ancient times. And from William of Orange's day to this, with various fortune in the detail but reign after reign ever issuing in the people's triumph, that wrestling match of national freedom against ir- responsible authority has gone on as a living STEPHAN LANGTON. 223 Laocoon : until we are well-nigh come to the day not only when kings theoretically can not, but also practically dare not, do illegal wrong ; and when the people, now having in them merged the nobles too, have secured by much effort their almost every right. Happily for us, the most virtuous court ever known in the annals of mankind, and the prevalence of knowledge good feeling and good sense amongst our people makes a beautiful balance of Power and Liberty in this our day : but if ever the evil possibility should hereafter arise of a bad king, such as a tyrannical John, a cruel Harry, an obstinate Charles, or a bigoted James, the issue of the next great popular wrestle would be Sampson broken clear away from his bonds, the writhing Laocoon at last emerged a freeman. But, let no true patriot desire to see that day, —a day (let us hope) impossible for sundry generations : seeing that the root of British 224 STEPHAN LANGTON. royalty hath so terrible a fixed foot in the foundations of our Insular imperial England, that it could not be torn up to make that em- pire a republic without more blood and woe and devastation than have cursed any land since the desolation of Jerusalem. Not all the ravagings of Hun or Goth, not all the waste of life in the Crusades, not all the horrors of the John-time Baronial struggles, or of the after Wars of the Roses, or of Napoleon at Moscow, or of Robespierre in Paris, would amount collectively to a true picture of our now so blest and prosperous land, after it had miserably passed through the furnace of po- pular insurrection to find itself kingless ! We are freemen each and all, as all our fathers were or strove to be, God strengthening them; but freemen as of old to obey our chosen leader; and we wisely choose that leader to be an hereditary king : but woe to him and to us, if ever vice or folly force this STEPHAN LANGTON. 225 docile giant, the Great People, to hurl him down from a throne he has disgraced, and drive our great Charter of Rights to its ex- treme interpretation of absolute and therefore tyrannous liberty. VOL. I. Q 226 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXVI. Calafg. I DID not stop my undesigned historical afflatus to tell of adventures by the way. No doubt, in such a time of peril, a week's travel must have been full of them. When an ever hungry company have to kill cook and eat their venison daily, and are perpetually coming across bears and brigands, be sure their archery is kept in constant practice, and their woodcraft must equal that of the Red Indian. One matter however is worthy of some detail, seeing that the same incident (though probably unknown STEPHAN LANGTON. 227 to Robin Hood) is recorded by HoUingshed of that third coequal with Becket and Wolsey the proud archprelate Longchamp ; and that great clerical dignitaries in more modern days have escaped in like vulgar guises, let Farini tell of Pio Nono on his hammercloth in the livery of his own footman. On leaving Canterbury some special secresy was needful for our fugitive, and Robin hit upon a good disguise enough. Who could have discerned our priest and the forester-king in yonder fisherwoman and her dirty husband travelHng towards Dover with a donkey and panniers smelling most anciently and fishlike of herrings? Robin w^as sow- westered and tarpaulined and be-buskined with fresh hide by way of boots : Langton's shaven face was haloed with a dingy red kerchief, and his frock enveloped in the blue coarse canvas petticoat and accessories of the genuine fishfag ; then the ass and her pair of panniers were Q 2 228 STEPHAN LANGTON. equally genuine, — and so the whole get up was indisputably a good one. Once at the sea-side, all was safe and easy ; Robin knew enough of watercraft to haggle out a good bargain with the skipper of a French herring-boat, and to arrange his seeming fish- wife's voyage home to Calais as part payment for sundry inshore goods, — skins chiefly, — brought as for barter in those savoury pan- niers. Langton was of course well spoken in French : at those times, even more than in these of the entente cordiale, let us recollect that France and England were intimately connected, and all but as one nation : our second Henry and some of his successors ruled over a fair third part of France ; and (we may add) it is barely "sixty years since" the fleur-de-lis covered a good quarter of our third George's shillings. That the language of our courts whether royal or legal was then and thereafter for many ages STEPHAN LANGTON. 229 French, we are popularly well aware ; for exam- ple, to this day our Queen is pleased to say " Yea " in Parliament by " La Reine le veut ;" and even beadles call the lieges to silence with an " Oyez ; " but in the era of our tale the noblest gentry almost as a rule disused and scorned their mother tongue, which was left as a vulgarism to the Saxon commonalty : there- fore it need be small wonder to us that the high-born Fitz-Ooth and the deep-read monk of Newark were quite at home with France and Frenchmen. At Calais, is it necessary to detail how mys- teriously an old fish-wife with a bundle went into a chamber of the Couronne d'Or, and came thereout again a young monk with a bundle ? no doubt Langton managed the meta- morphosis cleverly and unobserved. An hos- telrie in those days was so thronged with many comers and goers, and fish-wives and monks were commodities so multitudinous in Calais, 230 STEPHAN LANGTON. that nobody took note of the disappearance of the one or the apparition of the other : while both fish-wife and monk having been discreetly liberal to the host so far as payment went, he at least had no cause to complain of his double customer. And thus we may leave Stephan awhile safe because unknown, as a monastic sojourner at English Calais. STEPHAN LANGTON. 231 CHAPTER XXVII. ^lice tje Hun. Meanwhile, a long meanwhile too, how had it fared with sister Alice ? We left her after that swoon of recognition in St. Martha's chancel, the meek convalescent of St. Cathe- rine's nunnery. Ah ! what a difference to her was now the bitter-sweet assurance that Stephan was alive, — still her loving noble-hearted frank-faced affianced Stephan, — but dead, stone-dead to her — a monk ; while she was equally dead to him (she felt it) — a nun. 232 STEPHAN LANGTON. She could have borne anything but this, she thought : and, as in his case, her trial was aggravated by proximity. From St. Cathe- rine's chapel she could see upon St. Martha's, clear against the sky, oftentimes a certain moving speck conjectured too surely for Ste- phan. He it undoubtedly was, that frequent watcher on yon hill-top ; " the last brother of Newark and first monk of St. Martha's," as the sisters tormentingly but innocently told her, "one Father Langton, a handsome man, but a melancholy." Well she knew his eye had seen her there, the nun in her litter : and truly enough did she calculate on his yearning watch- fulness continually towards St. Catherine's ; even as in a like eager sympathy her eyes and heart were ever yearning on St. Martha's. And in her case, the strife might well be even less endurable than in his ; because a man has to do battle otherwise a thousandfold with the bustling world, and is full of avocations, STEPHAN LANGTON. 233 occupations, incidents and interests ; but for a woman, — and that woman a recluse in her lonely cell, what else can she have to wear away her heart upon day and night continually, but the one distracting thought of hopeless, hapless love ? Destitute of the masculine heroism, the strong well-balanced mind so conspicuous in Stephan, poor Alice's gentler nature wellnigh sank to death in the struggle. And the busy curious sisterhood with their potions and fomentings would have it that their patient had relapsed ; some internal burn there must be — [how truly so !] that determinately resisted all their remedial simples ; even though strangely enough for the outside all was healed ; and the sister doing well, and getting about, and not like to be a cripple after all. But for Alice there was one only remedy ; and in her sore trial and distress of heart she clung to it devoutly, the Cross. In no super- stitious though a truly human feeling, she set 234 STEPHAN LANGTON. her affections on One above, the only Lover of the Soul, the Virgin-born, the true Husband of the heart-Affections, the Saviour who loved her with an everlasting love, and loved Stephan too ; and thus suppliantly to Him, (and let our better light excuse the poor lorn maiden if to Holy Mary too, as her heavenly mother,) she poured out incessantly her sorrows and her prayers and her intercessions ; and was com- forted, as other saints and virgins have been comforted before her. And now, would it not be truly a gain if that pious memory of Mary-Mother, and those admiring meditations on the character of Him who, ever mindful of His Mother through life, remembered her also on the Cross, brought intensely to the conscience and affections of Alice the nun her own parent, half forgotten belike in all this maze of trouble, but still no doubt our heart-martyr's bedridden old mother at Gomershal? STEPHAN LANGTON. 235 Indeed, the wish had oftentimes come over her to go home once again, if only for a day, and see her there, and comfort her ahout her- self, the daughter lost and found ; if haply any comfort could be drawn from the very well of her despair; but that frequent filial wish, a mere wish not a will, had so usually been overwhelmed by more enthralling because more hopeless yearnings, as not to have reached the energy of action. Until that hour of true self- dedication to Jesus and Mary, our nun had made no definite effort to seek out yet once more in life her haply dying mother. Now however, in the calm of other earthly feelings through the still small voice of religion, the speedy fulfilment of this new longing occu- pied her whole heart, and became an impulse not to be resisted. As soon as ever her now wellnigh valid state of health might admit, not without the Abbess's kind leave and the loan of her litter, Alice's one great 236 STEPHAN LANGTON. present hope was to show her mother that she still had a child who lived, and could love her. It was probably all unknown to the duteous daughter's own seared heart, unsuspected by that love-stricken conscience, but there might well have been also many other reasons, in which thoughts of Stephan mingled, to urge her to that filial expedition. She must go by the Pilgrim's Way, — must pass within sight of his dwelling place, — might even see him minis- tering at St. Martha's, if she stopped awhile to pray there, — how sweet, how sad, how perilous, how blest an interview ! And then again the natural longing for old scenes ; she might manage to pass adown the very Lover's Walk under those fatal hazels, and so on to Aldeburie, and through the beau- tiful Park where she had been Queen o' the May, and thence by the dearly-remembered avenue of sycamores at Shire where Stevie first had whispered marriage to her, and close along STEPHAN LANGTON. 237 by the dear old church where her bridal was to have been, and so on to the well-remembered Tower of Gomershal : whereby in a cottage up the lane was the widow's humble home. How far any or all of these superfluous reasons influenced the poor nun, now recovered of her burns, to visit her mother, it might be small charity to calculate : but at all events she herself knew nothing of such possible influences ; and, to her thinking, in all that happy mournful journey she had but to do the duty long-delayed of an affectionate daughter. Now it is only justice to bear in mind that Widow Foyle was (to any apprehension but that of the newly awakened Alice) by no means an interesting person. The fussy housewife for a large cantle of married misery, the querulous invalid of many later years, had degenerated utterly at last into the phase of bedridden selfish- ness and peevish imbecility. Merely because such matters interfered with her wretched little 238 STEPHAN LANGTON. comforts, she had set her face rigidly against the entrance of Love into her domicile: the visits of Nephew Stephan, though tolerated at first for the sake of his many liberal presents, became hateful to the old woman because it took away her daughter for awhile, — " and she'd stay away, the hussey, for a good hour at a time, that she would, to chatter with Master Langton ; ay, — and more than once when she had been dozing for weariness, or had been sung asleep by Alice, had that unnatural daughter left her to walk with him under the sycamores," and, as to Mayday, Alice's presence at Aldeburie and her Queendom and all had been wormwood to old Widow Foyle; whose last words to her enduring daughter that morning had been poured out in a torrent of the meanest illnature. Whether or not a casuistical moralist can discern aught of a discriminative judgement on our loving couple for their disobedience to that STEPHAN LANGTON. 239 inconvenient old mother, I need not stop to enquire : at all events her own utter want of consideration and amiability earned for itself the fitting punishment of a long unavoidable desertion. For months and months did the old woman have no one whereupon to vent her grumblings but a hired nurse ; who, a vixen like herself, gave as much as she took, and so kept Mrs. Foyle well under. This was no more than justice anyhow ; although the other punish- ments of our martyr pair, the burning and the misery, and their mutual despair in nunship and monkhood, may well be thought greatly in excess of the case's equity. Let us consider that when Providence raises up a man for great events, the same Providence has to train him in the school of adversity : and if Langton must " suffer to be strong " the sentence must needs go forth somehow against his Alice also. 240 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXVIII. El}z Pilgrimage to ffiomergjal. On a certain set day then, long looked for and thought of anxiously, sister Alice and a bevy of nuns, littered and palfreyed and in a great flutter of excitement, set out on their Aldeburie pilgrimage : to them a long one and a delightsome. The first halt of interest (to Alice indeed superlatively so, but she kept her soul's secret by word and deed most sacredly) was Tything Lodge ; where all the sisters were eager to see Father Peter and the kind Dame Margery and STEPHAN LANGTON. 241 the little room where Alice lay so long, and all about it ; that same little room being everything to her for a far better and a present cause, his usual abiding there : she had heard often how that the zealous good monk of St. Martha's lodged with Father Peter ; and there was no other guest chamber she well knew. Many times had she been told of his kindness in almsgiving (the pilgrims said he was quite a saint, that monk) of his wonderful book-learning, and enthusiastic piety : many times had she yearned to send him by a wayfarer some message of kindness ; but in exquisite generosity she would not selfishly disturb his peace of mind: how could the poor girl guess he was not, as she thought him, peaceful pious and content ? And often (you be equally sure) he too had asked of many a like pilgrim how the poor burnt sister fared, to whom Peter and Margery had been so kind and the Lady Abbess of St. Catherine's had so liberally given refuge : and VOL. I. R 242 STEPHAN LANGTON. he had heard of her devotional ecstasies with the same sort of hopeless consolation : only so, could Alice be at peace, — only by rehgion be comforted, — should he venture to disturb her by a selfish word of kindness ? No, — no I And therefore it was wise and kind in him too to send no messages. Both lived on sadly and sternly in a silent heart-martyrdom, the chill and the gloom of checked affections ; a gloom hopeless indeed for both, and rayless except for the living light of religion. But — alas for Alice's eager disappointed glance ! — that well remembered room was empty; even bookless, robeless — without one trace of him there : what a blank ! No doubt he is on the hill-top serving by the altar ; it's certain he must be there. So Alice, of course anxious to pay her vows on the matting again as she did at the con- secration, longs to be going. ^ But the "Sisters have brought quantities of STEPHAN LANGTON. 243 needlework as gifts to Margery and stores of confectionery for Peter ; (all at the instigation of the grateful Alice, rest assured, but just now she was strangely forgetting such matters ;) and everything has to be opened and tasted, praised and wondered at. So Alice is obliged to hurry them ; and, promising a call some other day (O precious hope repeated !) the cavalcade ascend to the chapel. All silent, — bare, — empty ! neither can he have been there within some hours ; for there- was not even the sweet smell of incense. Where then could he be ? Alas, for thee, dear Alice, — and for thy blighted yearning heart ! Weep, yea weep and pray as thou dost at that most holy shrine,—' not Becket's shrine but his — weep on, and let thy pent affections loose there like a flood-gate ! How wonderingly the other sisters praised her piety : no virgin in the calendar could have felt intenser fervours. R 2 244 STEPHAN LANGTON. Yet let the disappointing truth be simply told ; Stephan had left early this morning for his hiding-place at Farlee: and so she missed him by half a day: — is it to be for ever? After this heart-blow, she seemed to care little by which path they went on their journey to Aldeburie and Gomershal: all was blank, dark, full of sad thoughts, dreadful memories, dead hopes : and the kind sisters thought her religious ecstacies had been too much for her, and so they tried to cheer her : — to cheer her ? Well ; they travelled by the Bloudie Hedges, and past Hal's deserted hut at Westone, and then they skirt the Silent Pool, and the Silver- wode, and thereafter painfully through the tangled jungle wherein Shire is lapped, (she was to have been married there, under that flamboyant east window !) and at last late in the summer's evening they have come to Gomershal. STEPHAN LANGTON. 245 The sisters and their palfreys are cared for at the Tower, where a good esquire of Sir Tristrem's is glad enough to enact host to such a bevy of fair guests. And again is love doomed to be disappointed ; the poor nun's filial love too, that purest of all, now just alight again, when the other is blown out. Her hand is on the cottage latch. Listening outside with tremulous fear, there is a sound of altercation : some cruel hireling seems to be scolding her mother ; who answers, it is not pleasant this, — pretty sharply too, but how feeble in her rage, — can she be dying ? The veiled white nun softly stole in like a ghost, forgetful of the seeming terror of her presence in the twilight, — and silently stood beside the bed. On the opposite side, that vixen nurse with a scream of fright rushed away to alarm the neighbours : but her mother (too near death to fear a disembodied spirit probably, or as often 246 STEPHAN LANGTON. happens supernaturally enlightened to see truths, and yet shocked in her then weak state by this sudden apparition,) intuitively recognizing Alice, had only time to gasp out " God bless you — bless you — both l" when she fell back on the bed and expired ! So the nurse and her posse of neighbours returned just in time to take the fainting nun to her sisters at the Tower: and to pay the last rites to Widow Foyle. On the return journey, after a sad day of scenes and friends revisited, and another equally sad, and another, — for the sisters had nearly a week's leave of absence and would not be mulcted of an hour in their pleasant holiday, — Alice learnt the truth of Stephan's absence and the whole story of Shirebourne Pond ; and then she bowed her head in patience to the will of Providence, and knew it had been best they should not meet. And since he was no longer on St. Martha's, STEPHAN LANGTON. 247 watching her within sight as she felt (and that more than answeringly too, for how had she not yearned towards him day and night from St. Catherine's ?) she could breathe more freely, went about her daily life of prayer and good- doing more cheerfully ; and when, some while after his escape, Alice received Stephan's parting message from some emissary of the Forest- Queen, her spirit felt indeed consoled, if not rejoiced : and for many days and nights did she reverie about that symbol chaplet, mutually their lifelong allegory; Love and Patience, Remembrance and Faithfulness, Sorrow and Happiness to come, — all bound up as in one, though with the five-fold repetition of life's un- sabbattic days, on that single circle of imperish- able silk. Eternity. 248 STEPHAN LANGTON. % CHAPTER XXIX. STJe lEetterg mti a JE^atk of J^afr. Now it was in this way that Alice heard of Stephan. Hal, hovering as his wont was about Silver- wode and the Silent Pool, happened to catch sight of that white pilgrimage on its return from Gomershal : and, following for curiosity or perchance in courteous hope of usefulness, caught sight also of Alice's sweet face set in fair white linen, like a Greek Madonna in its silver frame. He was utterly astounded ; and at first STEPHAN LANGTON. 249 imagined the vision all a fancy ; some other pretty nun it must be surely, just like her so long dead ; but when she also recognized him, though elevated into a gentleman from a cow- herd, and spoke to him and called him " Hal," doubt was at an end ; and their greeting was as glad as mutual griefs admitted. From him then she learnt in quiet parley by the way all that he could tell her about Stephan ; but that was only to the effect that he had es- caped the myrmidons of John sent to seize him at St. Martha's ; though whither he had fled he knew not : and this naturally induced Alice to ask the good man to be so charitable as to let her know of his safety, if and when he should hear of it. Moreover, as he alone thus from circumstances, both past and present, had dis- covered this poor nun's love for Stephan, as well as of old had known that poor monk's love for Alice, she prayed him to be secret and faithful, — confiding to him how little any at 250 STEPHAN LANGTON. St. Catherine's suspected it: and the honest- hearted Hal was worthy of her confidence, doing good service to both of those divorced-affianced ones, as we shall forthwith see. Hal, from his occupation and sympathies, had of course more than one friend among the roving bands of Robin Hood : and Langton had no sooner got away with them on his route towards the sea (which journey might have commenced much about the same day that Alice left Gomershal) than Hal received confidential in- telligence of his safe whereabout ; which glad piece of news he forthwith resolved to convey himself, for safety's sake and delicacy, to the nun of St. Catherine's. So, craving leave of absence as before (and Hal as a favoured supernumerary in the Braiose family had pretty much his own way) he set off one fine morning, and taking the line of hills for better speed, duly found himself at the nunnery. Curiously enough for coincidence there was STEPHAN LANGTON. 251 just then waiting before the wicket a reverend man asking permission to speak with the holy sister Alice at the visitor's grating, seeing he had a special message to deliver to her from a certain great personage the Lady Maude. Hal at the first thought he knew that voice, and after a second detected the man's disguise, but shrewdly said nothing ; the palmer also discerned him, and they exchanged a meaning glance : it was one of Robin's prickers and his own good friend Will Fern, just come to give the Forest Queen's letter to Alice. Matilda Fitz- Walter could write, be sure ; and she even better knew what love was ; — and so her note to the poor sad sister was as full of Stephan's praises and his affectionate sohcitude and kind messages as even Alice could desire : it was a woman's amphfication of the self-denying monk's stern vow of faithfulness ; and therefore all the more delightful in its sympathy, all the truer because in terms more tender. 252 STEPHAN LANGTON. How Alice loved that letter, — and if she put restraint upon her feelings before the palmer at the grating, — how tearfully and passionately did she kiss it afterwards. Meanwhile, '' sister Alice returns her best gratitude to the Lady Maude for a true charity :" and so the palmer is dismissed to the traveller's buttery-hatch near the gate, there to refresh himself, and wait for Hal. His message as we see had been anticipated by a minute : but not the less was he accept- able. Here was an angel's visit indeed, just the right messenger at the right time. For now that she knew certainly how he still loved her and thought of her and was her own true knight still, (Marian had deeply guaged poor Stephan's heart in talking with him about Alice, and had told her of his love in that letter,) now also that he was far enough away from her, and likely to be expatriated for years, — she felt free to com- fort him also in exile — and to relieve thereby STEPHAN LANGTON. 253 her own pent heart by telling him how she too loved him, and would love him to the end as faithfully and hopelessly as he. And here was her old-time honest neighbour and humble friend ready at hand to be love's messenger, — ay, and perhaps to watch over dearest Stevie's safety, and wait upon his wants, and be his English friend among that wilderness of foreign faces: what a blessed Providence it seemed, and was. By a few cautious whispers through the grating Alice easily made shrewd Hal compre- hend her wishes ; and how grateful she felt and ever would feel for his zealous help, especially in taking to poor Stephan the expression of her love. Could not Hal leave Surrey for awhile, and follow him to France? And that clever palmer below (for Maid Marian in her note spoke of her messenger as a " trusty forester") waits ready to work out the plan. So then Hal is sent down to get something for himself at the 254 STEPHAN LANGTON. buttery-hatch with the palmer; while Alice writes a few heart-uttered words of " love pa- tience remembrance and faithfulness " for Stevie's comfort. What those words were, hke the cunning augur in the ballad of the Lake Regillus " I know but may not tell:" it would be every way a breach of confidence, a desecration of things holy to reveal them. Let it suffice for your sympathy to remember that, though hope- lessly separated for ever in body, two of the truest lovers Nature ever meant to be a pair were hopefully and even happily one evermore in spirit : happily, I say, and hopefully, through the calm and cheering influences of religion on their twin-born souls. Hand in hand as brother and sister these divorced love-martyrs were henceforward to walk together towards Heaven through " Sorrow for the Happiness to come." If in that sweetest letter, that record of deep feelings and high thoughts, Alice hid one STEPHAN LANGTON. 255 golden lock of hair, as a little keepsake for Stevie, — sure I am we shall love her all the dearer for it; — as he did, ay and his Good Master too. 256 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXX. iHaiti iHarian. That precious missive safely confided to Hal, the palmer-pricker and he, well refreshed at the buttery and staidly thanked by our holy sister " for their trusty services," depart together for Aldeburie; concerting as they go a tryste at the Combe (where Robin's half band now lie) by to-morrow forenoon. For Hal must needs get leave of the worship- ful my Lady de Braiose, before going on such a travel; though he cares not to reveal — as truly in honour he ought not — the love part of STEPHAN LANGTON. 257 his errand : his especial commission is to convey with his own hands a sealed packet to the Monk of St. Martha's, now abroad ; the packet has the effigy of St. Catherine and her racking- wheel on its rosin, and was consigned to the bearer as " most important." So Hal makes a few preparations, kisses his children, thanks Sir Tristrem heartily for much largesse, and with a full heart and brimming eyes takes one last look at that rosemaried grave by the south-west yew. And then by next morning at an hour before noon we find him at the Combe. Here, in a beautiful deep and dimpled hollow of velvetty turf, a very nest of Arcady among the tumbled downs, (then a roadless wilderness of junipers and hollies, box and beech and fir, tangled with briars and high with fern,) lay the Forest-Queen, encamped, with all her court; hight Little John being her Great Chamberlain and Friar Tuck installed Lord Chancellor. Robin is away, we know, with Stephan ; and VOL. I. S 258 STEPHAN LANGTON. some three score of the Shirewood merrymen are winning venison-flitches at Canterbury to be smoked for winter-store, with a canary butt or two out of the abbott's cellars : and so we find Maid Marian, circled by her bodyguard of some sixty strapping fellows ; the weakest arm amongst whom could speed a beauclerc's-ell shaft through an inch board stripping its feathers, the slowest marksman kill a flying woodpigeon or overtake a jack-hare with his post-script fleche. And in the midst of the encampment, Maid Marian, though Robin's absence always washed her pretty eyes with tear-dew, looked verily the Queen there, and had her forest luxuries. Her deerskin tent or pavilion, carrying a eoloured streamer atop, was pitched in the bottom of the Combe, with some grand old beeches near it, and all around steep wooded hills. For sentinels, a dozen booted and bowed foresters paced backward and forward each his twenty yards ; and beyond their wide circle STEPHAN LANGTON. 259 were dotted about in the surrounding bush the withy-wattled extemporaneous huts of the merrymen, populous with wives and little ones. The tent's front opened with an awning of striped canvas set on a pair of slanting poles, fancifully ribboned with colour : a multitude of dogs were lazily lying about, and some tethered ponies here and there stood at ease under the beeches with fodder beside them, and a cow- skinned lad or two tending them. The usual number of independent gypsey -hearths sent each its wire of sweet grey smoke straight up ; and one enormous bonfire with its circuit of roasting venison and attendant messmen flared at the end of the valley, far to leeward of the royal tent. As Hal, with his friend Will Fern, gazed on this enchanted hunter's-home from the junipered hill-side, he dreamily said half out loud, " What witchery's here, man, — magic music ?" " It's our lasses singing Maid Marian to sleep, s 2 260 STEPHAN LANGTON. Hal : she's had her morning forest-chase afoot, and will now be anooning in the tent." " Let's listen to the music, Will ; and haste to get nearer." Hal's hard life of mere rude wooding and coarse forestry had no idea of woodland joys like these : he was Hke a man bewitched. They got near, — for all the dogs and men knew Will ; and they stood by the circle of the sentinels listening to the music : it was sung as a slow glee or chaunt in parts, but in a subdued key by softest female voices, and died off charmingly in the lullaby : here is one of the stanzas, as well as Hal could catch it ; O sweet be the sleep of the Forest Queen, As she Ues on her ferny couch of green — Lullaby! All soothing thoughts of beautiful things Hover around her on ring-dove's wings — LuUaby ! Gently, gently, sisters all — And cease the song with a dying fall, — Lullaby! STEPHAN LANGTON. 261 As the music ceased, some half-dozen buxom lasses, looking like Diana's nymphs, bowed and buskined and kirtled, quietly came out of the tent one after another, and dropped the awning : and while they chatted with the young foresters outside. Maid Marian slept like Titania, dream- ing of her Robin Goodfellow. Will Fern soon joined those pretty huntresses, one of them his own coy lover Bertha : and, as Hal must have especial audience of Queen Marian for leave of escort on his way, the hour of siesta was consumed by these three beside a savoury pasty with its salletting: yes, and with plenty of your sparkling looks and laughs, Bertha, to season it. And now by high noon the whole camp is astir and feasting. Marian's pretty Amazons have found her awake again, and raise the awning. Then Hal and his friend Will Fern, no longer the palmer but one of Robin's select yeomen- prickers, crave speech of Marian, 262 STEPHAN LANGTON. Bertha takes in the message acceptably; and Hal, suitably introduced by yeoman Will as an honest man and a true, was left alone to speed his errand with the Queen. He exercised the shrewd discretion of making her the confidante of all he knew : in fact, as he had gathered, she knew very much already; for Stephan's self had confessed to her, — and she had sent to Alice words of comfort. But Hal could interest her further by the detail of that cruel Prince's seizure of the poor girl in the Hangers, and all about Old Tangley ; and then by the romantic story of St. Martha's with its monk of Newark and nun of St. Cathe- rine's — so hopelessly joined in spirit, though in body sundered; — until the sun-tanned Maid, champion of her sex's wrongs, hated Prince John and loved Alice and Stephan almost as well as Hal did himself : furthermore, when he told her of his own tragic episode and the Silent Pool (a favourite haunt and bath of Marian's) STEPHAN LANGTON. 263 with him too and his sorrows she felt the strongest sympathy, indignant and deter- mined. All this confidence was wise and well ; for it ensured another link between those severed lovers : and meanwhile it promoted generous good feeling and right help one of another. So, all the readier Hal was speeded on his way. For, next morning, after the good curtail Friar's matin prayer, (a custom absolute with Robin and his followers, therefore let us be just to the respectable outlaws), a detachment of four sturdy archers on ponies, with Hal also roughly mounted, make their obeisance to Queen Marian, and are off for the coast. King Robin and his troop, well met at Can- terbury, of course can give tidings of Stephan : and honest hearted Hal, who had won golden opinions from every body on the way by his woodcraft, his Johnian wrongs, his mysterious embassy, and his general independent Red- 264 STEPHAN LANGTON. Indian — say rather English — bearing, was helped by one or another to Calais; where, though an indifferent linguist, a certain polyglot countryman helped him at length to discover Stephan Langton at Rouen. STEPHAN LANGTON. 265 CHAPTER XXXI. Step]&an*0 Falet. Who can guage the depth and strength of Stephan's manly joy, when he read that pre- cious letter ? More than a wife to him, dearer than a merely mortal lover was the noble gra- cious Alice now, etherialized by distance and sublimed by heroic disinterestedness both in what she had concealed and what she now revealed : and deep indeed was this new well- spring of joy opened to them both, by these avowals, mutual yet so generous and self- denying. 266 STEPHAN LANGTON. Then that blessed little lock of golden hair, shorter than a ringlet as became a nun, but O how rich a relic, so suggestive, so affectionate in the very curl clinging to his finger, so truly bar's and part of her : night and day would he wear it next his heart, beating there against it always ; even as that withered chaplet was her badge upon his naked arm under the black monastic sleeve. How gladly too did Stephan welcome Hal. When we are alone among strange faces, living the constrained life of silent self-imprisonment, with no one near to speak of the past, to sympa- thize with any present feeling, or to join in hope about the future, how sweet it is to come upon a sudden friend, the friend of old days, who is verily a part of your past and is come so op- portunely to take his share with you side by side in the battle of the present and the victory of the future 1 Yes : that dear familiar face, though rough and wrinkled as honest Hal's, STEPHAN LANGTON. 267 ever shines on your darkness like a sunbeam ; that pleasant voice, however little rhythmic qr melodious, brings back in a flood all those heart-associations; that squeeze of the horny hand, that starting tear in the glad grey eye, that frank and cordial greeting, — these indeed out-value all common gold and gems ; and make the solitary exile feel, in the presence of his ancient hearty friend, once more a rich be- cause a happy man. Hal was everything to him : catering for the close student, who seldom joined his brother monks in the refectory ; caring for all his sim- ple wants ; and acting as the needful link between this sternly diligent recluse and the noisy world of Rouen round him. A general commendatory letter from the prior of Newark consigning '* our good brother the bearer " to all faithful Augustines, had easily gained Stephan admission to the college : for in the first outbreak of John's wrath against 268 STEPHAN LANGTON. him after the Silent Pool tragedy, Langton had prudently bethought himself of this, to wit a testimonial wisely nameless: in English Calais and Boulogne, and in still more English Nor- mandy he could not hope to escape or exist under a name which John's emissaries would hunt down to the uttermost. So he dropt it for a while, and thus his pursuers lost the scent : to everyone but Hal, since Robin left the fish-wife at Dover (or rather since that notable change into a monk at the Couronne) Stephan Langton was now Le Frere Antoine. And his diligence, his parts, his gifts, his universal character outvied the Newark testi- monial. The whole college was proud .of him ; yes, and the whole city too : for in ad- dition to deep studies and learned disputations with the great and wise, Antoine was loved among the poor for his unceasing charities. Seldom a death-bed but he was there to com- fort, never an applicant for help of any kind, STEPHAN LANGTON. 269 but our good monk did for him his brotherly utmost. He was nobly doing his daily duty, and thereby being built up surely as a tower of strength for his country and his kind. 270 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXXII. ILearnmg, ILo&e anb '^utxiaii&m. It would be small wisdom in a tale like this to follow year by year the life of a hero who lived to be sixty-two : a writer must eschew tediousness by all means, and make jumps dis- creetly from one picturesque incident to another. Stephan's life at Rouen was simply one of study, devotion, and good-doing : but the profound Aristotelian (for even to this excellence our learned monk had gradually come) the eloquent divine, the enlightened practical philanthropist, was still throughout (let human sympathies re- STEPHAN LANGTON. 271 joice thereat !) the hearty affectionate spiritually- minded lover. Twelve times within six years did that honest Hal oscillate between the Austin college at Rouen and the nunnery of St. Catherine's, and each time he was each way the faithful Mer- cury of precious missives and messages. Alice, a wonder to all the nuns for piety and secresy and a remaining spice of mystery, and their further admiration for her sweet temper (perhaps a scarcity in nunneries) and her uni- versal charitv, had come to be the most-loved sister of their little commonwealth ; and the very abbess had expressed a hope that her youngest daughter might succeed her : but Alice's heart seemed to be set on better things, — as (let us hope) Heaven itself, or its step thereto St. Becket's shrine on the hill-top, — or well well we know it all — cousin Stevie : displaying as to any wish for honour or high place a disinter- 272 STEPHAN LANGTON. estedness and want of ambition marvellous in- deed to the admiring sisterhood. Meanwhile those precious occasional messages were just everything to her, balm- drops of elixir ^dt^e shed from season to season : and I leave you to judge whether or not the answering notes to her happy though unwedded lover equalled his in fervour and in faithfulness. A nobler Abelaird and Heloise, they truly lived together yet apart : and their one pure hope was to be bodily united in the grave on the top of dear St. Martha's, — spiritually united for ever in the better Happiness to Come. But, not alone for love, not as a chief end for learning only was Stephan Langton de- terminately living : neither was the shrewd and faithful Hal merely Cupid's postman. The characteristic of our great mediaeval English- man, who quite as truly as Luther, and nearly half a millenary before him, stood STEPHAN LANGTON. 273 " The solitary monk who shook the world,'* was Patriotism ; his grand errand in life and all its providential preparings, the downfall of tyranny and the setting-up of freedom. Therefore, did he toil mentally over his mid- night lamp and live laborious days, that he might make himself a champion sure of victory ; therefore did he spread his nets of influence, and scatter abroad his baits to catch men ; therefore was Hal's wallet perpetually crammed with missives to Fitz- Walter, Crevecoeur, De Toupart, Hugh Bigod, Pembroke, De Vis, De Ros and other patriots ; of course addressed under feigned styles and titles, as needful security in case such telltale letters should be by misfortune intercepted. Our humble woodman squire therefore may still legitimately appear as a link in this true story ; not merely as between the severed lovers for their mutual consolation, but more im- VOL. I. T 274 STEPHAN LANGTON. portantly to the universe as between the now celebrated monastic scholar and the Barons disaffected to King John : King John, not Prince John ; for the years have crept by, and just as the twelfth century was at its last gasp, Richard had succumbed to De Gourdon's arrow. Until this same period, the biographer of Stephan Langton has had small excuse for mixing up his hero in public affairs : the gay young forester, the lovelorn monk, the hunted exile demanded of us no historic notice, but merely a domestic interest : now however that his character has matured, his aims become more vigorous, and his influences have increased with his attainments, he must emerge into broader daylight and become to our ken, as he was in verity, interwoven with the history of his times. STEPHAN LANGTON. 275 CHAPTER XXXIII. STJe ©ItJ iSsqnire j^ears a German. And it was a very remarkable incident of the domestic sort which first gave Stephan the longwished-for opportunity of winning a high position, and so finding a fulcrum for his patriotic zeal. One day, when Hal was loitering in the marketplace of Rouen (who can imagine Rouen a century before its cathedral existed, and nearly three before Joan of Arc ?) when I say our friend Hal was cheapening a melon there and T 2 276 STEPHAN LANGTON. some kidneys in an English woodman's un- mistakeable French, he was nodded to by a poor old cripple, who had somewhile been watching him narrowly. Of course, Hal thought as you do, that the man would be asking alms of him; as he certainly had of sundry others, — and he prepared himself therefore to resist an attack of men- dicity. Not but that, when he inspected further, the unfortunate seemed worthy of his minutest coin, if not even of a shce of his melon that hot noontide : for he seemed some tattered old soldier, from the remnants of a coloured livery under his pilgrim's cloak ; and his weatherbeaten face, shaded above by a scalloped felt, was hidden over cheeks and mouth and chin by a white beard descending to the waist : he was maimed too in almost every limb, hobbling upon crutches and with one arm bandaged ; but he did not whine for charity hke your common beggar, and his manners were STEPHAN LANGTON. 277 those of the well known applicant " who has seen better days." He sidled up to Hal, looked keenly into his face from under those bushy white eyebrows ; and then, somewhat to our woodman's astonish- ment, uttered simply the startling monosyllable " Hal !" Some maniac perhaps who had heard his name somewhere ; for Hal had not his master's good reason for an alias ; and everywhere answered to the name, Hal o' the wood, — or Harry Wood, as some would say. The strange and battered palmer, evidently by his scallop a wanderer from the East, laid his only practicable hand on Hal's arm, just as he was turning heel upon him, and arrested his escape by two magical words of very local geography : " Westone and Wodetone ! how now, neigh- bour Hal ?" Those wondrous words ! His curiosity tho- 278 STEPHAN LANGTON. roughly aroused, Hal too made in turn a keen inspection, but the face entirely baffled him ; perhaps not only from its redundant hair, but also from a great red scar carved by somebody's scimetar right across it. He was just giving the case up, and humbling himself to ask solution of the mystery, when his eye caught on the bandaged arm the remains of a badge, a con- siderably " couped " Griffon. " What ? old Hugh Langton turned up at last r " Yes, — whilom e young neighbour mine, what little remains of him is creeping like a caterpillar towards Friga Street again ; and has been at it for these five years past. The world is pretty broad I can tell you : and a cripple like me can't beg his way across the breadth of it faster than a mile a day. But Hal, Hal, tell me, — is there any one alive ?" " One : only one, so far as I know ; and you needn't go as far away as Friga Street for him." STEPHAN LANGTON. 279 " And Janet's dead then, my poor dear Janet so cruelly left ; — ah well but she's gone to a better home than ever I made her. How said you, neighbour, one left ? which of my rosy curly ones ?" " It's thirty year agone, Hugh ; and you'd be puzzled now to find either of 'em by the token of roses or curls : as to Simon, I wot nothing of the lad or man these score years. But Stephan's here !" The poor old palmer trembled as he stood, at Hal's simple * here ;' and eagerly clutching his hand asked rapidly as if half insane, " Where ? where ? if I die first, he'll never get it, ha ! and it's as good as salvation." " I'll take you to him," said Hal quietly. Out of the clattering market, and at snail's pace along three or four winding narrow streets overhung with nodding gables, and so the cripple hobbled under Hal's guidance to a great sombre quadrangle of low stone cloisters. Hal 280 STEPHAN LANGTON. tapped at an ironbound wicket : Hal was seemingly well known there, and they entered. " Ye'll not find brother Antoine in his cell, good servitor : they've chosen him public Prselector; ay and for his parts and booklore couldn't ha' found a worthier. All the college is gone to hear his first oration : Chapel's open ; go you in if you will : yes — and the palmer's welcome too, an he'll keep his crutch quieter. It's all in the nave, — and ye'll find a crowd there, I'll warrant ye : he's a wonder sure." To the chapel they crept, and squeezed in at the thronged portal, and worked themselves as near to the pulpit as they could : for Hal was proud of his master, and an earnest longing seized the poor maimed esquire to see his son in what he guessed to be his glory. And there then stood his son, his long- remembered little Stevie, the admired of all beholders for learned eloquence; and that all the more because that none but pundits under- STEPHAN LANGTON. 281 stood him ; for the oration was in Latin, a wholesome hard-headed commixture of Aristotle and Augustine, not entirely to be understanded of the Norman vulgar. But there he stood, a tall dark commanding figure, with fire in his eye, fluency on his lip, and native dignity in every gesture ; around, an upturned sea of faces, wondering ; and overhead, the lofty arches and the fretted roof; rare stained windows on every side ; and up the centre, installed or humbler seated, all the dig nitaries of Rouen, besides every member of its famous Augustine College. It was no doubt a day of triumph, of Stephan Langton's first great pubhc triumph : and here, by a miracle unknown to him, was his long lost father come to witness it. What a contrast too ; and how just is Providence in the law of cause and effect ! That runagate old wanderer, a wrecked hulk everyway ; this dihgent, devout and noble master-mind, a golden galley on its 282 STEPHAN LANGTON. festal way to victory and glory : what a contrast, — and these are father and son ! But Hugh Langton never felt it. Battered about as he had been throughout life and half over the world, brimfuU of hardship and adven- ture these thirty years, he counted lightly of any outer accidents of this world, and had even less sympathy with its sentimentalities. One strangely morbid feeling alone seemed to possess him : for often in the midst of all that florid Latinity, the old man would pluck Hal's sleeve and whisper hoarsely — "He shall have it, I tell you ; he shall have it all ; except the least bit for myself no bigger than a needle. He shall have it, I say." Hal thought the poor fellow deranged : so, drawing himself and the old man out of the throng before the oration was over, he got into Antoine's, that is Stephan's cell ; and in a dark recess of it quietly awaited the master's coming. STEPHAN LANGTON. 283 Anon, that master came in hurriedly ; as anxious to escape the crowd of flatterers and be alone : and as coming out of the blinding light into that dim cell, and seeing no one (ex- pecting to see none, and being preoccupied in thought) he straightway flung himself on his knees beside his pallet, and poured out a torrent of prayers and tears: then, drawing up the sleeve of his left arm, kissed thrice, crossing himself each time, a yellow band of silk there, with a few dried leaves set in it. 284 STEPHAN LANGTON. CHAPTER XXXIV. ^ iFat!jer*0 Blessing. Hal coughed once and again ; for he felt the delicacy of his position : but it was all in vain. Stephan's passion absorbed his every sense; but anon he dropt the sleeve again, rose from his knees ; and was suddenly aware of Hal and a stranger. " -—You shall have it, you shall have it ! all but a needle bit for my own poor soul." " Hal, what is all this ? Why are you here, and this unfortunate ?" " — 'Twas in '91, and we battled stoutly at STEPHAN LANGTON. 285 Tiberias to save it: thousands fell there, and mine own dear knight, Sir Ralph, among them. Ah ! but we fought on fiercely, though the arrows flew like hail amongst us, and their scimetars flashed in our eyes as the tropical lightnings. And I caught a cut or two, but I clung and clung upon it to the last : ay, and when the very WTCck you see me, hewed and bleeding as I was, I managed to bite off a fragment with my teeth (God forgive me !) before they could tear me away. And I lay for dead there, with the blessed morsel in my mouth ; and here it is, here it is, here it is." The excited old Crusader fumbled at a little sacket of leather tied by a thong round his neck and worn next the skin. " Explain, Hal," quietly said Stephan : " is the poor man mad ?" " Mad ? son, thou shalt say so. The holy Empress found it in the rent where earth had quaked beneath that blest tremendous bur- 286 STEPHAN LANGTON. den, and drew it into her yearning bosom there to be miraculously buried. She set it up, and all men worshipped it ; until for our sins God gave it to the Paynim awhile, that by the deed of rescue, we might flood it in blood, theirs and ours : and we won it, and made it our standard at the battle of Tiberias ; till once again for sin there we lost it for ever ! but here, here is the only true morsel of it ; hush, and look ye reve- rently and kneel." The Palmer, on his knees, held above his head, devotionally as a priest would raise the sacrament, a ragged bit of black wood; and, with the venial superstition of the time, Stephan likewise deeply moved knelt in mental prayer, and Hal knelt too in a most unreasoning vene- ration. "Son, this precious treasure, which Kings and Popes might covet, is for thee : not all, not quite all, one little crumb of Heaven's seed, one needle-bit for your poor old father." STEPHAN LANGTON. 287 "What, Hal,— is this, is this— ?" " Yea, my master ; he was on his way to Friga Street !" A strange tumult of feeling filled the great and good son's heart, and yet outwardly he was quite calm. Stephanas only memory of his hither was as of a good-looking jovial young man, who made his gentle mother sit up for him frequently at nights, and sometimes didn't come hack until deep in next day. However he was always very indulgent ; and made for him and Simon (he recollected) a pretty pair of bows and lots of arrows ; and used to call them his double little wizards, for he couldn't tell which was which ; and let them eat honeycomb to the full ; and taught them how to play marbles, and to fly a kite : they knew nothing worse of their runagate father ; and so far no doubt all the better. But — here was this aged pilgrim in present fact, the thirty years exile now at length returned 288 STEPHAN LANGTON. who could truly claim Stepban for a son, and was almost more to him than even a recovered parent in being likewise the possessor of a genuine fragment of the Holy Rood : in those days accounted surely for an ounce or two more precious than rubies, of gross Salvation, material Everlasting Life : and I suspect there may still be extant in our nineteenth century a few believers in that foolish falsehood. Stephan Langton had better tokens in him- self and the Grace above him of that blessed Hope of Immortality ; but, in the spirit of the times, this morsel of decayed old apple-tree timber was a priceless treasure, a relic worthier than the ransom of kings. His mind's awe, his heart's affection could fall down and worship that bitten mouthful of wood. And who was the biter ? — His own long-lost father ; this poor and aged broken soldier, the outcast of whom he remembered his mother to have prayed such earnest and terrible things. STEPHAN LANGTON. 289 Yes: the proofs of it were enough. And Stephan, who when the old man had called him " Son," supposed it a mere expletive of age which the whitebeard well might use to any man, now spoke reverently, sinking to his knee, " My father, — I have not known the blessing of a father for these thirty years, nearabout all my memory ; will it please your venerable pre- sence even now to bless me ?" Quite astonished, the old man humbly held back ; but Hal said, while Stephan quietly knelt in expectation, " Hugh Langton, he asks it of thee : if God sends any blessing through a father, give it simply to thy good son Stephan !" And the old man arose, like a patriarch or one inspired, and giving him the leathern sacket, said, " The good Lord bless thee, my son, and any VOL. I. u 290 STEPHAN LANGTON. that be thine; and send thee to be famous among men, and one of His in blessedness for ever ! I trow, that blessing found fulfilment. END OF VOL. I. LONDON : Printed by A. Schulze, 13, Poland Street. y^ >'^:iV^^ . ^ UNIVERSmrOFILUNOIS-URBANA ■mmd s^. ^ji^' ^ ymk ■1. •^ k^Mil .-?§!: •i:. ' i:ife 1 K % ■!-y ajMri J..-.-V.' ,-^>j ".;-• ^ -/ :, .« !•.«. ■. ■4. ■*• ..^ m E^..^ii^ ^^-?;'|^ ■f