The Monastery (1912)/Chapter 11
Chapter XI
You call this education, do you not?
Why, 'tis the forced march of a herd of bullocks
Before a shouting drover. The glad van
Move on at ease, and pause a while to snatch
A passing morsel from the dewy greensward,
While all the blows, the oaths, the indignation,
Fall on the croupe of the ill-fated laggard
That cripples in the rear.
Old Play.
Two or three years glided on, during which the storm of the approaching alteration in church government became each day louder and more perilous. Owing to the circumstances which we have intimated in the end of the last chapter, the Sub-Prior Eustace appeared to have altered considerably his habits of life. He afforded, on all extraordinary occasions, to the abbot, whether privately or in the assembled chapter, the support of his wisdom and experience; but in his ordinary habits he seemed now to live more for himself, and less for the community, than had been his former practice.
He often absented himself for whole days from the convent; and as the adventure of Glendearg dwelt deeply on his memory, he was repeatedly induced to visit that lonely tower and to take an interest in the orphans who had their shelter under its roof. Besides, he felt a deep anxiety to know whether the volume which he had lost, when so strangely preserved from the lance of the murderer, had again found its way back to the Tower of Glendearg. 'It was strange,' he thought, 'that a spirit,' for such he could not help judging the being whose voice he had heal'd, 'should, on the one side, seek the advancement of heresy, and, on the other, interpose to save the life of a zealous Catholic priest.'
But from no inquiry which he made of the various inhabitants of the Tower of Glendearg could he learn that the copy of the translated Scriptures, for which he made such diligent inquiry, had again been seen by any of them.
In the meanwhile the good father's occasional visits were of no small consequence to Edward Glendinning and to Mary Avenel. The former displayed a power of apprehending and retaining whatever was taught him, which filled Father Eustace with admiration. He was at once acute and industrious, alert and accurate; one of those rare combinations of talent and industry which are seldom united.
It was the earnest desire of Father Eustace that the excellent qualities thus early displayed by Edward should be dedicated to the service of the church, to which he thought the youth's own consent might be easily obtained, as he was of a calm, contemplative, retired habit, and seemed to consider knowledge as the principal object, and its enlargement as the greatest pleasure, in life. As to the mother, the sub-prior had little doubt that, trained as she was to view the monks of Saint Mary's with such profound reverence, she would be but too happy in an opportunity of enrolling one of her sons in its honoured community. But the good father proved to be mistaken in both these particulars.
When he spoke to Elspeth Glendinning of that which a mother best loves to hear—the proficiency and abilities of her son—she listened with a delighted ear. But when Father Eustace hinted at the duty of dedicating to the service of the church talents which seemed fitted to defend and adorn it, the dame endeavoured always to shift the subject; and when pressed further, enlarged on her own incapacity, as a lone woman, to manage the feu; on the advantage which her neighbours of the township were often taking of her unprotected state, and on the wish she had that Edward might fill his father's place, remain in the tower, and close her eyes.
On such occasions the sub-prior would answer, that even in a worldly point of view the welfare of the family would be best consulted by one of the sons entering into the community of Saint Mary's, as it was not to be supposed that he would fail to afford his family the important protection which he could then easily extend towards them. What could be a more pleasing prospect than to see him high in honour? or what more sweet than to have the last duties rendered to her by a son revered for his holiness of life and exemplary manners? Besides, he endeavoured to impress upon the dame that her eldest son, Halbert, whose bold temper and headstrong indulgence of a wandering humour rendered him incapable of learning, was, for that reason, as well as that he was her eldest born, fittest to bustle through the affairs of the world and manage the little fief.
Elspeth durst not directly dissent from what was proposed, for fear of giving displeasure, and yet she always had something to say against it. Halbert, she said, was not like any of the neighbour boys: he was taller by the head, and stronger by the half, than any boy of his years within the halidome. But he was fit for no peaceful work that could be devised. If he liked a book ill, he liked a plough or a pattie worse. He had scoured his father's old broadsword—suspended it by a belt round his waist, and seldom stirred without it. He was a sweet boy and a gentle if spoken fair, but cross him and he was a born devil. 'In a word,' she said, bursting into tears, 'deprive me of Edward, good father, and ye bereave my house of prop and pillar; for my heart tells me that Halbert will take to his father's gates, and die his father's death.'
When the conversation came to this crisis, the good-humoured monk was always content to drop the discussion for the time, trusting some opportunity would occur of removing her prejudices, for such he thought them, against Edward's proposed destination.
When, leaving the mother, the sub-prior addressed himself to the son, animating his zeal for knowledge and pointing out how amply it might be gratified should he agree to take holy orders, he found the same repugnance which Dame Elspeth had exhibited. Edward pleaded a want of sufficient vocation to so serious a profession, his reluctance to leave his mother, and other objections which the sub-prior treated as evasive.
'I plainly perceive,' he said one day in answer to them, 'that the devil has his factors as well as Heaven, and that they are equally, or alas! the former are perhaps more active, in bespeaking for their master the first of the market. I trust, young man, that neither idleness, nor licentious pleasure, nor the love of worldly gain and worldly grandeur, the chief baits with which the great Fisher of souls conceals his hook, are the causes of your declining the career to which I would incite you. But above all I trust—above all I hope—that the vanity of superior knowledge, a sin with which those who have made proficiency in learning are most frequently beset, has not led you into the awful hazard of listening to the dangerous doctrines which aie now afloat concerning religion. Better for you that you were as grossly ignorant as the beasts which perish, than that the pride of knowledge should induce you to lend an ear to the voice of heretics.' Edward Glendinning listened to the rebuke with a downcast look, and failed not, when it was concluded, earnestly to vindicate himself from the charge of having pushed his studies into any subjects which the church inhibited; and so the monk was left to form vain conjectures respecting the cause of his reluctance to embrace the monastic state.
It is an old proverb, used by Chaucer, and quoted by Elizabeth, that 'the greatest clerks are not the wisest men'; and it is as true as if the poet had not rhymed or the queen reasoned on it. If Father Eustace had not had his thoughts turned so much to the progress of heresy and so little to what was passing in the tower, he might have read, in the speaking eyes of Mary Avenel, now a girl of fourteen or fifteen, reasons which might disincline her youthful companion towards the monastic vows. I have said that she also was a promising pupil of the good father, upon whom her innocent and infantine beauty had an effect of which he was himself, perhaps, unconscious. Her rank and expectations entitled her to be taught the arts of reading and writing; and each lesson which the monk assigned her was conned over in company with Edward, and by him explained and re-explained, and again illustrated, until she became perfectly mistress of it.
In the beginning of their studies, Halbert had been their school companion. But the boldness and impatience of his disposition soon quarrelled with an occupation in which, without assiduity and unremitted attention, no progress was to be expected. The sub-prior's visits were at irregular intervals, and often weeks would intervene between them, in which case Halbert was sure to forget all that had been prescribed for him to learn, and much which he had partly acquired before. His deficiencies on these occasions gave him pain, but it was not of that sort which produces amendment.
For a time, like all who are fond of idleness, he endeavoured to detach the attention of his brother and Mary Avenel from their task, rather than to learn his own, and such dialogues as the following would ensue:
'Take your bonnet, Edward, and make haste; the Laird of Colmslie is at the head of the glen with his hounds.'
'I care not, Halbert,' answered the younger brother; 'two brace of dogs may kill a deer without my being there to see them, and I must help Mary Avenel with her lesson.'
'Aye! you will labour at the monk's lessons till you turn monk yourself,' answered Halbert. 'Mary, will you go with me, and I will show you the cushat's nest I told you of?'
'I cannot go with you, Halbert,' answered Mary, 'because I must study this lesson; it will take me long to learn it. I am sorry I am so dull, for if I could get my task as fast as Edward, I should like to go with you.'
'Should you indeed?' said Halbert; 'then I will wait for you; and, what is more, I will try to get my lesson also.'
With a smile and a sigh he took up the primer, and began heavily to con over the task which had been assigned him. As if banished from the society of the two others, he sat sad and solitary in one of the deep window-recesses, and after in vain struggling with the difficulties of his task and his disinclination to learn it, he found himself involuntarily engaged in watching the movements of the other two students, instead of toiling any longer.
The picture which Halbert looked upon was delightful in itself, but somehow or other it afforded very little pleasure to him. The beautiful girl, with looks of simple yet earnest anxiety, was bent on disentangling those intricacies which obstructed her progress to knowledge, and looking ever and anon to Edward for assistance, while, seated close by her side, and watchful to remove every obstacle from her way, he seemed at once to be proud of the progress which his pupil made, and of the assistance which he was able to render her. There was a bond betwixt them, a strong and interesting tie, the desire of obtaining knowledge, the pride of surmounting difficulties.
Feeling most acutely, yet ignorant of the nature and source of his own emotions, Halbert could no longer endure to look upon this quiet scene, but, starting up, dashed his book from him, and exclaimed aloud, 'To the fiend I bequeath all books and the dreamers that make them! I would a score of Southrons would come up the glen, and we should learn how little all this muttering and scribbling is worth.'
Mary Avenel and his brother started and looked at Halbert with surprise, while he went on with great animation, his features swelling, and the tears starting into his eyes as he spoke. 'Yes, Mary, I wish a score of Southrons came up the glen this very day; and you should see one good hand, and one good sword, do more to protect you, than all the books that were ever opened, and all the pens that ever grew on a goose's wing.'
Mary looked a little surprised and a little frightened at his vehemence, but instantly replied affectionately, 'You are vexed, Halbert, because you do not get your lesson so fast as Edward can; and so am I, for I am as stupid as you. But come, and Edward shall sit betwixt us and teach us.'
'He shall not teach me,' said Halbert, in the same angry mood; 'I never can teach him to do anything that is honourable and manly, and he shall not teach me any of his monkish tricks. I hate the monks with their drawling nasal tone like so many frogs, and their long black petticoats like so many women, and their reverences, and their lordships, and their lazy vassals that do nothing but peddle in the mire with plough and harrow from Yule to Michaelmas. I will call none lord, but him who wears a sword to make his title good; and I will call none man, but he that can bear himself manlike and masterful.'
'For Heaven's sake, peace, brother!' said Edward; 'if such words were taken up and reported out of the house, they would be our mother's ruin.'
'Report them yourself, then, and they will be your making and nobody's marring save mine own. Say that Halbert Glendinning will never be vassal to an old man with a cowl and shaven crown, while there are twenty barons who wear casque and plume that lack bold followers. Let them grant you these wretched acres, and much meal may they bear you to make your brochan.' He left the room hastily, but instantly returned and continued to speak with the same tone of quick and irritated feeling. 'And you need not think so much, neither of you, and especially you, Edward, need not think so much of your parchment book there, and your cunning in reading it. By my faith, I will soon learn to read as well as you; and—for I know a better teacher than your grim old monk, and a better book than his printed breviary; and since you like scholar-craft so well, Mary Avenel, you shall see whether Edward or I have most of it.' He left the apartment, and came not again.
'What can be the matter with him?' said Mary, following Halbert with her eyes from the window, as with hasty and unequal steps he ran up the wild glen. 'Where can your brother be going, Edward? What book?—what teacher does he talk of?'
'It avails not guessing,' said Edward. 'Halbert is angry, he knows not why, and speaks of he knows not what; let us go again to our lessons, and he will come home when he has tired himself with scrambling among the crags as usual.'
But Mary's anxiety on account of Halbert seemed more deeply rooted. She declined prosecuting the task in which they had been so pleasingly engaged under the excuse of a headache; nor could Edward prevail upon her to resume it again that morning.
Meanwhile Halbert, his head unbonneted, his features swelled with jealous anger, and the tear still in his eye, sped up the wild and upper extremity of the little valley of Glendearg with the speed of a roebuck, choosing, as if in desperate defiance of the difficulties of the way, the wildest and most dangerous paths, and voluntarily exposing himself a hundred times to dangers which he might have escaped by turning a little aside from them. It seemed as if he wished his course to be as straight as that of the arrow to its mark.
He arrived at length in a narrow and secluded cleuch or deep ravine, which ran down into the valley and contributed a scanty rivulet to the supply of the brook with which Glendearg is watered. Up this he sped with the same precipitate haste which had marked his departure from the tower, nor did he pause and look around until he had reached the fountain from which the rivulet had its rise.
Here Halbert stopped short, and cast a gloomy and almost a frightened glance around him. A huge rock rose in front, from a cleft of which grew a wild holly-tree whose dark-green branches rustled over the spring which arose beneath. The banks on either hand rose so high and approached each other so closely, that it was only when the sun was at its meridian height, and during the summer solstice, that its rays could reach the bottom of the chasm in which he stood. But it was now summer, and the hour was noon, so that the unwonted reflection of the sun was dancing in the pellucid fountain.
'It is the season and the hour,' said Halbert to himself; 'and now II might soon become wiser than Edward with all his pains! Mary should see whether he alone is fit to be consulted, and to sit by her side, and hang over her as she reads, and point out every word and every letter. And she loves me better than him—I am sure she does, for she comes of noble blood, and scorns sloth and cowardice. And do I myself not stand here slothful and cowardly as any priest of them all? Why should I fear to call upon this form—this shape? Already have I endured the vision, and why not again? What can it do to me, who am a man of lith and limb, and have by my side my father's sword? Does my heart beat, do my hairs bristle at the thought of calling up a painted shadow, and how should I face a band of Southrons in flesh and blood? By the soul of the first Glendinning, I will make proof of the charm!'
He cast the leathern brogue or buskin from his right foot, planted himself in a firm posture, unsheathed his sword, and first looking around to collect his resolution, he bowed three times deliberately towards the holly-tree, and as often to the little fountain, repeating at the same time, with a determined voice, the following rhyme:
'Thrice to the holly brake,
Thrice to the well;
I bid thee awake,
White Maid of Avenel!
'Noon gleams on the lake,
Noon glows on the fell;
Wake thee, O wake,
White Maid of Avenel!'
These lines were hardly uttered, when there stood the figure of a female clothed in white, within three steps of Halbert Glendinning.
I guess 'twas frightful there to see
A lady richly clad as she—Beautiful
exceedingly.[1]
- ↑ Coleridge's Christabel.