lordship's command is law."
"And, Perwinkle"—Sir Robert stamped his left heel into it's receptacle—"and, Periwinkle, see that it be wide enough to hold not exceeding two!"
"Ye—ye—yes, my lord."
"And, Periwinkle—tell Father Fothergill I would fain speak with his
Reverence."
"Ye—ye—yes, my lord."
The Baron's beard was peaked; and his mustache, stiff and stumpy, projected horizontally like those of a Tom Cat; he twirled the one, he stroked the other, he drew the buckle of his surcingle a thought tighter, and strode down the great staircase three steps at a stride.
The vassals were assembled in the great hall of Shurland Castle; every cheek was pale, every tongue was mute, expectation and perplexity were visible on every brow. What would his lordship do? Were the recusant anybody else, gyves to the heels and hemp to the throat were but too good for him; but it was Father Fothergill who had said "I won't;" and though the Baron was a very great man, the Pope was a greater, and the Pope was Father Fothergill's great friend—some people said he was his uncle.
Father Fothergill was busy in the refectory trying conclusions with a venison pasty, when he received the summons of his patron to attend him in the chapel cemetery. Of course he lost no time in obeying it, for obedience was the general rule in Shurland Castle. If anybody ever said "I won't" it was the exception; and, like all other exceptions, only proved the rule the stronger. The Father was a friar of the Augustine persuasion; a brotherhood which, having been planted in Kent some few centuries earlier, had taken very kindly to the soil, and overspread the county much as hops did some few centuries later. He was plump and portly, a little thick-winded, especially after dinner, stood five feet four in his sandals, and weighed hard upon eighteen stone. He was, moreover, a personage of singular piety; and the iron girdle, which, he said, he wore under his cassock to mortify withal, might have been well mistaken for the tire of a cart-wheel. When he arrived, Sir Robert was pacing up and down by the side of a newly opened grave.
"Benedecite! fair son"—(the Baron was brown as a cigar)—"Benedecite!" said the Chaplain.
The Baron was too angry to stand upon compliment. "Bury me that grinning caitiff there!" he, pointing to the defunct.
"It may not be, fair son," said the friar, "he hath perished without absolution."
"Bury the body!" roared Sir Robert.
"Water and earth alike reject him," returned the Chaplain; "holy St.
Bridget herself—"
"Bridget me no Bridgets!—do me thine office quickly, Sir Shaveling! or by the Piper that played before Moses—" The oath was a fearful one; and whenever the Baron swore to do mischief, he was never known to perjure himself. He was playing with the hilt of his sword. "Do me thine office, I say. Give him his passport to heaven."
"He is already gone to Hell!" stammered the Friar.
"Then do you go after him!" thundered the Lord of Shurland.
His sword half leaped from its scabbard. No!—the trenchant blade, that had cut Suleiman Ben Malek Ben Buckskin from helmet to chin, disdained to daub itself with the cerebellum of a miserable monk;—it leaped back again;—and as the Chaplain, scared at its flash, turned him in terror, the Baron gave him a kick!—one kick!—it was but one!—but such a one! Despite its obesity, up flew his holy body in an angle of forty-five degrees; then having reached its highest point of elevation, sunk headlong into the open grave that yawned to receive it. If the reverend gentleman had possessed such a thing as a neck, he had infallibly broken it! as he did not, he only dislocated his vertebrae—but that did quite as well. He was as dead as ditch-water!
"In with the other rascal!" said the baron—and he was obeyed; for there he stood in his boots. Mattock and shovel made short work of it; twenty feet of superincumbent mould pressed down alike the saint and the sinner. "Now sing a requiem who list!" said the Baron, and his lordship went back to his oysters.
The vassals at Castle Shurland were astounded, or, as the Seneschal Hugh better expressed it, "perfectly conglomerated," by this event. What! murder a monk in the odor of sanctity—and on consecrated ground too! They trembled for the health of the Baron's soul. To the unsophisticated many, it seemed that matters could not have been much worse had he shot a bishop's coach-horse—all looked for some signal judgment. The melancholy catastrophe of their neighbors at Canterbury was yet rife in their memories; no two centuries had elapsed since those miserable sinners had cut off the tail of the blessed St. Thomas's mule. The tail of the mule, it was well known, had been forthwith affixed to that of the Mayor; and rumor said it had since been hereditary in the corporation. The least that could be expected was, that Sir Robert should have a friar tacked on to his for the term of his natural life! Some bolder spirits there were, 'tis true, who viewed the matter in various lights, according to their different temperaments and dispositions; for perfect unanimity existed not even in the good old time. The verderer, roistering Hob Roebuck, swore roundly, "'Twere as good a deed as to eat, to kick down the chapel as well as the monk." Hob had stood there in a white sheet for kissing Giles Miller's daughter. On the other hand, Simpkin Agnew, the bell- ringer, doubted if the devil's cellar, which runs under the bottomless abyss, were quite deep enough for the delinquent, and speculated on the probability of a hole being dug in it for his especial accommodation. The philosophers and economists thought, with Saunders McBullock, the Baron's bagpiper, that a 'feckless monk more or less was nae great subject for a clamjamphrey,' especially as 'the supply exceeded the demand;' while Malthouse, the tapster, was arguing to Dame Martin that a murder now and then was a seasonable check to population, without which the isle of Sheppey would in time be devoured, like a mouldy cheese, by inhabitants of its own producing. Meanwhile the Baron ate his oysters and thought no more of the matter.
But this tranquillity of his lordship was not to last. A couple of Saints had been seriously offended; and we have all of us read at school that celestial minds are by no means insensible to the provocations of anger. There were those who expected that St. Bridget would come in person, and have the friar up again, as she did the sailor; but perhaps her ladyship did not care to trust herself within the walls of Shurland Castle. To say the truth, it was scarcely a decent house for a female saint to be seen in. The Baron's gallantries, since he became a widower had been but too notorious; and her own reputation was a little blown upon in the earlier days of her earthly pilgrimage; then things were so apt to be misrepresented—in short, she would leave the whole affair to St. Austin, who being a gentleman, could interfere with propriety, avenge her affront as well as his own, and leave no loop-hole for scandal. St. Austin himself seems to have had his scruples, though of their precise nature it would be difficult to determine, for it were idle to suppose him at all afraid of the Baron's boots. Be this as it may, the mode which he adopted was at once prudent and efficacious. As an ecclesiastic, he could not well call the Baron out—had his boots been out of the question; so he resolved to have recourse to the law. Instead of Shurland Castle, therefore, he repaired forthwith to his own magnificent monastery, situate just without the walls of Canterbury, and presented himself in a vision to its abbot. No one who has ever visited that ancient city can fail to recollect the splendid gateway which terminates the vista of St. Paul's street, and stands there yet in all its pristine beauty. The tiny train of miniature artillery which now adorns its battlements is, it is true, an ornament of a later date; and is said to have been added some centuries after by a learned but jealous proprietor, for the purpose of shooting any wiser man than himself, who might chance to come that way. Tradition is silent as to any discharge having taken place, nor can the oldest inhabitant of modern days recollect any such occurrence. [Footnote: Since the appearance of the first edition of this
