(June 1377–January 1380)
Riding out to Oby, Henry Yellowlees looked over the landscape with sunlike benevolence. The hay was newly cut and lay in swathes on the meadows as orderly as a mackerel sky, the spire laid its delicate shadow across the green ground, the willows drew their silvery foliage across the enamelled red of their bark. In returning to Oby he was returning to something he might love; and the thought that he might love it and the thought that he had no hold upon it swept over him together, so that he saw it as imperative that he should at once apply for priest’s orders and be ready to succeed Sir Ralph as convent priest. The old man could not last for ever; indeed, would he last long enough to fill those comfortable shoes until Henry was ready to step into them? Yet how foolish and impetuous to plight himself to Oby because it was enjoying a moment of midsummer beauty! – for the rest of the year what was it but mire and mist, boredom, loneliness, a worthless soil, and the wind ruffling the winter floods?
Sir Ralph rose out of the Waxle Stream to greet him, splashing and snorting through the reeds like a cow or a river-god. He had been poking about with a net for perch, his gown was bunched up round his thighs and his face with its deep wrinkles and tufted eyebrows and features shaped for wrath wore an expression of silvery innocence like the full moon. Full of pleasure at seeing Henry again he questioned him about his journey. Soon his attention slid away. He began throwing grasses into the river and drawing designs on the mud bank with his toes.
‘Since Whitsun,’ he said abruptly, ‘I have been thinking about the sacrament of baptism.’
Henry Yellowlees resigned himself. Sir Ralph’s thoughts on baptism had led him to conclude that the rite did not go far enough, what was squirting a baby? Well enough for a beginning, but for the full-grown man there should be a full immersion, for such was the baptism of John. For the sake of conversation Henry Yellowlees represented that there is no evidence in the scriptures that John had immersed Jesus, and that the tradition of the church, as expressed in art, was that John had scooped up the water of Jordan, perhaps with some vessel, perhaps with his hand, and had poured it on Jesus’s head. Meanwhile Sir Ralph was beating the Waxle with his net, and fidgeting. Suddenly he threw off his gown and waded back into the stream. ‘Let me baptise you,’ he begged. ‘You look very warm, a good sousing is just what you need. Come, off with your clothes! The nuns will not see you, they are all asleep.’
Moving a little further up the bank Henry asked if the prioress were in good health, if Dame Philippa were still coughing. But he asked in vain. The old man waded to and fro, happy as a cow, and rambled on in praise of water, water, he said, which was the innocent element. Why was the Redeemer of mankind for ever faultless and incapable of sin? Because he was a fish and for ever immersed in the flood. He swam for eternity in the waters which are above the earth. And in those waters, Sir Ralph continued, wading and splashing, in those waters there swim with Christ the souls of all his blessed; for heaven is a great fish-pond, and there you can see the Bishops and the Confessors nosing about like carp, and the Martyrs with bright bloody spots are trout, and the Virgins in their silver mail of chastity are dace. Whoever loves holiness must love water by natural inclination, he shouted, and whoever dies by drowning goes straight to God, filled to human bursting with the innocence and absolution of water. Scooping up a handful of water and pouring it on his head he threw himself under with a splash and displacement which sent the ripples over Henry’s feet.
With such a madman the only way was to humour his fancies. When he came up again Henry called out: ‘And what are the eels?’
‘The Doctors, the learned Doctors!’ cried Sir Ralph. ‘Are they not full of small bones and fatness? Wade in, young man, and receive the baptism of John!’
He showed no ill-feeling when Henry Yellowlees excused himself. His madness was akin to childishness: he was so perfectly convinced by his nonsense that he felt no need to proselytise.
Yet what if he should begin to throw the nuns into the Waxle Stream? If he did so, and a nun died, her death would be upon Henry’s soul. I am a custos, he said to himself, riding along the track between the willows; my only concern is with their temporalities, and if I say to the prioress that in my opinion her priest is mad she may ask me what my opinion has to do with it, and if I speak of it to the bishop he will have Sir Ralph out and a new man in; and what then will become of my plan of being priested myself and following Sir Ralph, and growing, I daresay, after ten winters as mad as he? It was clear to him that he would say nothing either to prioress or bishop. He also had a pretty strong impression that Sir Ralph was totally uninterested in the souls of his nuns.
By the time he reached the convent the picture of Sir Ralph tossing nuns into the Cow Pool seemed very unlifelike. It lost all validity when Dame Lovisa’s face looked out of the wicket. She raised – not her eyebrows, she had no eyebrows – but the roughened tracts of skin above her eyes, and remarked that he was quite a stranger. Though women arouse the lusts of the flesh they atone for it by quelling any vagaries of the imagination.
He made his report to the prioress. It struck him that he would not make her many more reports. In spite of her massive bulk and her straight back she seemed hollowed by some inward decay. She would drop suddenly, as the limb of an elm tree drops. She heard the news from Esselby with imperturbability, laughed, and turned the conversation to ask about the management of the vineyards at Killdew. Her gruff good manners made him realise for the first time how completely he had disgraced himself in his errand. But Ars nova had waylaid him: the man who arrived at Esselby was not the man who had set out on the morrow of Saint Pancras day. Like those who fall in with fairies, he had been conveyed under the green hill; and Triste loysir was the tune of that place. He would never be his own man again. Ars nova had worked its will on him only a little less commandingly than on the chaplain of the leper-house. One man it had killed and the other despatched without death into another world. If he seemed to come back, and be the same custos of Oby, who had miscarried of a business errand, it was only by force of habit, and with such inattentive freedom of mind that he was now asking himself whether Sir Ralph’s madness or the materialism of the nuns was furthest from real life. Yet what was real life? Not his own life, assuredly. He felt no pavement of reality under his feet, wandering among a chance assemblage of geometry, hunger, sickness, loaned horses, debts and shifts and other people’s intentions. Whose life was real? – old Longdock’s in the wildwood, the chaplain’s at the leper-house, the suave Killdew clerk’s? Each of them in his way knew what he wanted and sought it with self-will, and for that matter, with self-denial; for no doubt the Killdew clerk must have denied himself something in order to live with such a rotundity of worldliness, he must have trampled down some artless predisposition such as wishing to recite his own poems.
On the morrow there was William Holly waiting to go round with him, and the usual litany of this needing doing and that ill-done. William Holly was one of those small, tight men like a knot of wood, his cross-grainedness seemed a warrant of longevity; while there was a young man to snub, a new opinion to confute, a youthful hope to disparage, one would expect William Holly to be at his post. But today he had scarcely a contradiction in him, and in a manner quite unusual to him he stopped and pointed out the grave of the elder Frampton novice, who had died of measles, and Henry saw with amazement that tears were standing in his eyes. They finished their round and were looking at a spotted ox which had recently come in as a heriot when William Holly suddenly remarked that something in his inwards was gnawing and biting him, which he opined to be a toad, swallowed small in a salad; for nothing less malicious than a toad would have withstood the purges he had been taking. Henry Yellowlees foolishly allowed himself to say that he did not think a toad could live within a man. William Holly replied that every fool knew that a toad can live inside a stone for a hundred years if it pleased to.
The crab, the archer, the man with the water-pot – there is not a sign in the zodiac which has not its patronised malady, there is death, thought Henry, staring up past the spire, death in the firmament. Prioress, priest, bailiff, they were all growing old in this midsummer air. Another prioress would follow, another priest would be found; it would be harder to replace the bailiff; for William Holly was one of those yew-tree characters which do not allow younger yew trees to grow up in their shade. He rode away thinking of the pretty child who had outgrown them all in her dying, and that she would not have to suffer another winter’s chilblains, or a new-broom priest imposed by Bishop Walter. And as for the Esselby rent, let the bishop deal with it, he said to himself.
Any such hope was wiped out when he next saw the bishop. Here was another old age under sentence from a sign in the zodiac – in Bishop Walter’s case perhaps the sign of the scales, for his eyes were netted in wrinkles of calculation, and the word judgement continually recurred in his talk.
‘It is a judgement!’ he exclaimed of the non-payment of the Esselby rent. ‘Why should I intervene when God has judged? Oby is judged, I assure you. We can do nothing. It is taken out of our hands.’
His chaplain signed to Henry to say no more of it, and primmed up his lips as if to contain something unspeakable. No sense could ever be got out of that chaplain. Henry Yellowlees went to Humphrey Flagg, the bishop’s doctor. Humphrey Flagg was also devoted to Bishop Walter, but his love had more secularity in it. Besides, he was a Yorkshireman, a fellow-countryman of Henry’s.
‘It is no use. And I beg you not to vex him with any more talk of your nunnery. It only upsets him. And after all, what is one nunnery?’
‘But what has he got against it? What maggot is all this? What has anyone got against it? I suppose it is the most respectable nunnery in all his bishopric.’
‘I can only say that it made a bad impression on him. I have felt his pulse jump like a ram when someone has mentioned Oby.’
‘But why? The ladies of Oby don’t skip like lambs when someone mentions the bishop.’
Evading this, Humphrey Flagg continued: ‘The bishop is not like other men. His will is stronger than other men’s, his sensibilities are much more acute. His body is at the mercy of his soul, and the soul is a hard master. For some reason or other his soul flogs him with Oby, that is all I can tell you.’
‘Some prejudice,’ Henry grumbled. ‘Well, he sent his Dame Sibilla to Oby, anyhow. Why did he do that if Oby is such an offence to him?’
When Bishop Walter asked himself that same question, though he found many answers he could not hit on one that silenced it. At first the question had been no more than any other question, an exercise of a conscience which fed on scruples; for the bishop was a man who constantly asked himself questions and as constantly resolved them to his own satisfaction. But the Dame Sibilla question came back and back, and grew more urgent and more mysterious. Correspondingly, his first dislike of Oby, the dislike he had so naturally and properly conceived on discovering that the Oby nuns supposed they could throw dust in his eyes, had deepened into an apprehension of something quite unusually baleful, a wickedness beyond all the faults he had been able to catalogue and rebuke, a wickedness so wicked that it transcended his diagnosis, and only God could put his finger on it. That, of course, was why his first dislike had been so much sharper and more quivering than an intention to deceive a bishop might warrant. Oby was not singular in hoping to deceive a bishop, any more than in being luxurious, frivolous, worldly, and insolvent. Under these everyday offences a deeper abomination lay in wait.
Having got thus far in his surmising, the bishop naturally went on to seek out more information, keeping his ear to the ground; and naturally, he heard a good deal. Though everything he heard could be construed to Oby’s disadvantage he really heard nothing at all telling until just before Henry Yellowlees came back from Esselby. Then, in the course of conversation with a newly appointed summoner whose uncle had been clerk of the works at Etchingdon, he learned the true story of the Methley tithes: which was, that Thomas de Foley had given them to Oby as a price for the carnal pleasures he had enjoyed with his cousin, the Prioress Alicia. Hard on the heels of this enlightenment the bishop made a Visitation to the convent to which he had transferred Dame Alice. In many ways the Visitation was grievous, he noted for instance a shocking degree of gluttony, and the nuns were bristling with quarrels and slanders; but amidst all this Dame Alice’s simple homely pleasure at seeing him warmed his heart. In the course of their private interview she told him how she and Dame Johanna had always believed that the spire had fallen, and Dame Susanna had thrown herself under it, as a plain manifestation of the wrath of God. She also recounted the deaths of the boy who fell off the scaffolding, Ursula who fell down the stairs, the corrodian, Magdalen Figg, who fell into the fish-pond, and Magdalen’s husband, the old bailiff. Did it not seem as though God would scarcely allow a christian death-bed at Oby? How could she express her gratitude to the bishop for having delivered her from such a place?
And how, she added, was Dame Sibilla? – that sweet lady, the pattern of what a nun should be.
He stared at her, not daring to turn aside the question he dreaded to hear.
‘I have often asked myself why you sent Dame Sibilla to Oby.’ Her eyelids closed down, as though the sight of his distress were something that must be eaten in private. Sighing appreciatively, and gently wagging her head, she murmured: ‘I should not be so presumptuous. But it seemed to me you were sending a lamb among the wolves.’
‘Yes, yes!’ he answered, and hastily blessed the understanding creature.
Dame Alice was perfectly satisfied with this interview, and lived on in peace of mind. It was not in any case likely that the prioress of Oby would denounce her; but if she did Bishop Walter would not now be inclined to listen with any favour. That goose was cooked. The bishop’s satisfaction did not last so long. By the evening the answer supplied by Dame Alice to the inexorcisable question had shrivelled into no answer at all. It is a function of lambs to be sent among wolves; such a sending would have been pious and meritorious, and God might have been expected to bless it. But this was no such thing. He had placed his great-niece at Oby in order to chasten an extravagant house by compelling it to take in three unprofitable newcomers. Dame Sibilla had not been so much sent as a lamb as applied as a leech.
Yet God had permitted it. Perhaps God had even designed it. It was in God’s hands, and there he must leave it. He had repeatedly tried this answer, and whenever he tried it, it led to Abraham and Jephtha. Abraham had been ready to sacrifice Isaac, Jephtha had not been ready to offer up his daughter but had done so nevertheless. Of the two, it seemed to Bishop Walter that Jephtha’s case was nearest his own. With Abraham, God proceeded directly and with the authority of a father, but in his dealings with Jephtha he availed himself of a stratagem, at the last moment substituting Jephtha’s daughter for what Jephtha very likely expected to be a ram. Preaching on the duty of obedience the bishop perplexed his hearers, for it was unlike him to enter so feelingly into the emotions of pre-christian characters. Yet the lesson was clear, and several fathers went home to beat their children with renewed zeal and confidence.
Why had he sent Dame Sibilla to Oby?
In his crannies of spare time and in his wakeful nights the bishop brooded over the girl and over his kinship with Jephtha and over the curse accumulating about the house of Oby. Suppose that the spire, bought by incest and profanation, should fall again, and Dame Sibilla be underneath it? . . . but the death of the body is of no importance, he could not consider withdrawing her for such a light reason. Suppose the miracle of the Esselby rent (it could hardly be less than a miracle that a hardened excommunicate should be melted by the exhortations of Henry Yellowlees) should be repeated and repeated till Oby became insolvent? . . . why then, of course, the nuns would have to be dispersed, Dame Sibilla among them. But suppose that while remaining at Oby Dame Sibilla fell under the power of whatever mysterious evil accumulated there, and by some mischance or the dire deliberation of God’s will were damned? . . . would it not be his doing, and would not God require her soul at his hands?
He thrust the thought away. It was a sleight of Satan’s, who also tempted Job. But after a while the speculation would creep back again, hooded in the guise of an omen, or lurking in the pages of a book, or dancing in a candleflame. Throughout his life Walter Dunford had availed himself of his naturally strong sense of the supernatural, and had been constantly assisted by visions and by voices, sometimes almost believing, and never quite disbelieving, and always convinced that even if he did a trifle enhance and exploit these adjuncts from another world it was by God’s will and for God’s purpose that he did so, just as he allowed his authentic mortifications to play their useful part in the world’s eye. Now he was nearing threescore, and the visions and the mortifications had done their work on him. The Dame Sibilla question, which had entered his mind as no more than a whet to his prejudice against the house of Oby, had become his meat and drink, his scourge and hair-shirt, his prayer and his sentence. In reality, he might have been hard put to it to recognise her among his other nieces and great-nieces in religion; but she was the sole grand-child of his dead brother Thomas, whom once he had loved; and now the remembrance of this, jangling his rusty affections, enforced her on his imagination, and made her seem dear, and terrible, and like a vow.
Meanwhile, Oby was due for a Visitation. A date was fixed. He became accustomed to hearing Oby spoken of: it took its place with other commonplaces, it assumed a covering of other people’s fears, his doctor’s fears of ague and unsuitable diet, his secretary’s fears of finding a great deal that would be troublesome. It eased him to hear such talk of Oby, and to reply that the Visitation was a painful duty which he must at all costs fulfil. The day before he was due to set out an attack of fever and vomiting prostrated him, and Henry Yellowlees was sent off to tell Oby that the Visitation must be postponed.
He did not recover till after the equinox. By then the weather made going to Oby impossible, so Humphrey Flagg said, and the secretary remarked that a few months more or less could not make much difference to an establishment like Oby. Their fears muffled Oby no longer, and the bishop was left to contemplate his own, until the November evening when his brother’s voice spoke in his ear, louder than the north wind and the sleet that rattled on the windows of the lady chapel, saying: ‘Deliver my darling from the power of the dog!’ It was a plain command. But he could not obey it, because of the terror it roused up in him, and because he failed to obey he feared the more.
‘You think too much of Oby,’ his secretary said, when on the morrow he was told to make arrangements for Oby to be visited by a proxy.
A few nights later another gale got up. This night he was in bed. He rose, saying he must pray, and dismissed his attendants. Presently they heard him shuffle out of his chamber and along the gallery from which stairs led down into the cathedral. At the head of the stairs he saw that they were following him, and turned on them so furiously that they stayed where they were, eyeing each other uneasily, and saying that one must not intervene in such manifestations of piety. The wind was shouting in the north porch like the sea struggling in a cavern, and it seemed to him that he was walking on the cold pavement of ocean. There, like the bones of a wreck, was his tall throne: he paused for a moment and looked at it. Then he went on into the lady chapel, and threw himself on the ground as a dog casts himself down in his kennel. The gale gathered up more strength, the first handful of sleet struck against the windows, and Thomas’s voice spoke in the wind; using the words indeed of David, that same David whom the bishop had praised so handsomely in the last paragraph of the first book of his treatise De Cantu, but uttering them in the voice of a character much less venerable and amenable than the son of Jesse, a character dark, frightful, and unknown, some god of the ancient Britons, perhaps, whom Walter Dunford’s ancestors had appeased with living sacrifices.
The gale died down a little before dawn, and it was then that the sleepy group in the gallery heard their bishop’s footsteps on the stairs. They took him up in their arms, and he looked at them, but could say nothing for his teeth were chattering with cold. Whatever it was that Walter Dunford had heard in the north wind it had wholly delivered him over to the supernatural on which he had so long and so confidently relied. His faculties of piety and imagination were at work with him as they had never been at work before, and the people about him began to say that he had fallen suddenly into dotage. What else could they say, seeing him sit groaning, with his hands wandering through his white hair?
After this he allowed himself to be treated as a sick man, to be kept warm in a little room, and fed on wine-whey, and to have his feet washed in warm water. Christmas went by, and Epiphany, and Candlemas, he grew no better and no worse. Then Humphrey Flagg remembered the only weakness that Walter Dunford had ever indulged himself with: an affection for other Dunfords.
‘Would you not allow one of your nieces to come and nurse you?’
The old man looked up with a sudden watery brilliance like a dash of November sunlight.
‘My great-niece Sibilla. Let her come.’
The doctor suggested that one of the intermediate generation of Dunford nuns might be more comfortable, and have more leech-craft.
‘No, no! Let it be Dame Sibilla. She is the nearest, she would travel at the least charge. I will have no unnecessary expense.’
Humphrey Flagg congratulated himself on finding the right stimulant for the poor old man. It was extraordinary how at the thought of seeing another Dunford he roused up and became almost his former self. He even remembered that the custos of Oby could combine fetching Dame Sibilla with his customary visit of inspection. However, Henry Yellowlees was not troubled with this errand. The occasion called for something more ceremonious, and a litter and a discreet escort set out for Oby to bring Dame Sibilla away.
Still clasping her bundle of remedies and delicacies she fell on her knees beside the great chair where the bishop sat, huddled in a white woollen gown. All through the darkening afternoon he had sat before the fire, seeing her image among the flames which were alternately the flames of hell-fire and the flames of the seraphim. Sometimes a log fell to bits, sometimes the missel-thrush in the pear tree set up its song against the gusty rain-pelts. At intervals his doctor or his chaplain came to his side and glanced at him.
Now he turned and looked into her very face. It seemed to him that he had never seen such a worldly countenance. Her cheeks were flushed with the sudden change from the cold journey to the heated room, her eyes flashed and twinkled, her teeth, protruding under her short upper-lip, gave her smile an expression of carnal alacrity – and she smiled a great deal. The world, which he thought he had foresworn, gazed up in his face, patted his arm, fingered his ring, as confidently as though he had never slighted it.
Still on her knees she began to rummage in her bundle, pulling out one thing after another, misnaming and mislaying them, and littering the floor with waddings and wrappings. Here was some honey, broom honey which never fails to allay a cough. Here was some of Oby’s marzipan, specially made on purpose. Here was a bottle of mead. Here was a little pillow. Here was a most remarkable salve for stiff joints, and here was an ointment for chilblains, and here was a plaster to be laid over the heart. Here were some comfits, and here was a distillation of mugwort, and here was another psalter from Dame Lovisa, and here were some candied stems of angelica, and here was a towel embroidered by the novices, and here was some damson jam. Everything had a recommendation or a message or had been specially made or had a history of healing. And in the confusion of giving she displayed and explained at random, so that the pillow was to be laid over the heart and honey was sovereign for stiff knees.
The doctor came forward and whispered that the bishop was extremely weak and must not be tired with talking.
‘Of course, of course, I quite understand,’ she replied; and out came more damson jam, and a long story of how the tree had been pruned by a passing friar, and had responded with a wonderful crop, but after all not so many had been gathered because the magpies came and pillaged it; but next year they would throw a net over it, a fishing-net which had been bought at Waxelby at much below the usual price because the vendor was a fisherman’s widow who had been thankful to close with Dame Lovisa’s offer of half the price in money and the rest to be made up in prayers for the fisherman’s soul. For Dame Lovisa managed such things cleverly, and would make an excellent prioress.
‘What? Another de Stapledon prioress?’ enquired the dying man.
‘Yes, indeed! We have quite made up our minds, she is certainly what God wishes. And Dame Eleanor will still be treasuress, and Dame Philippa will stay with the novices, and Dame Dorothy will be cellaress, and . . . ’
‘And you, my child?’
‘Sacrist, perhaps. Unworthily, but you see there are so few of us.’ But the first two words had sufficiently proclaimed a violent spiritual ambition socketed in complacence. In due course, a Dunford prioress.
‘A solemn charge,’ he said.
The flask of mead, set working by its journey, had been placed injudiciously near the fire, and now it blew its stopper out. The bishop started and crossed himself. While Dame Sibilla mopped and talked, and mingled the goodness of the mead and the privilege of being sacrist and how much mead was lost and yet how much was spared, all with a kind of tranquil flurry, he stared at the flask with his jaw trembling and his thin hands fidgeting. The doctor rose from his bench in the corner and began mixing something in a little bowl. He was too late. The bishop staggered up from his chair, and fell on his knees, howling. The doctor ran with his bowl, the chaplain snatched up a crucifix, exclaiming: ‘These accursed women!’ and held it before the bishop’s eyes. But he eluded them both, dragging himself about the room on his knees, howling, and knocking on his breast. It was Dame Sibilla, getting in front of the chaplain, who stayed him. Kneeling herself, and clasping him round the waist, she wrestled with him until she had him down on the floor with his head in her lap.
‘How you frightened us!’ she said. ‘You mustn’t pray so loud, nor so suddenly. You must tell us when you wish to pray, then we will all pray together, like Abraham and his household.’
‘Not Abraham, not Abraham! Jephtha!’
‘Who was it? Did you see a vision?’ she asked.
‘An omen!’ he said, gasping and whistling. ‘God’s wrath!’
‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulcra regionum,’
intoned the chaplain.
‘I saw a vision,’ said Dame Sibilla. ‘Just when the cork flew out and I was blaming myself for my carelessness in putting the flask so near the fire and wasting all that good mead that Dame Margaret showed us how to make, just then I saw Saint Magdalen spilling the ointment from a vase and smiling, as much as to say one need not worry about a little waste.’
‘Quid Mariam absolvisti,’ said the chaplain, glaring at Dame Sibilla but following her lead.
‘But it is not the first time I have seen one of the saints,’ Dame Sibilla continued soothingly. ‘At Allestree I saw Saint Jerome several times. He used to sit in the cloisters with a book on his knee. The Allestree priest was unable to believe it, and told me that nuns had no business to see visions. But how can one help it, if heaven sends them? However, I do not talk about it. How do you feel now? Perhaps you might eat a little angelica. It is the best kind, the kind that is prepared with vine-leaves.’
The chaplain laid down the crucifix and said in an undertone to Humphrey Flagg that they would have to get rid of her somehow. The doctor replied that she seemed to be doing him good. Shrugging his shoulders the chaplain remarked that it was no sort of death-bed for a bishop to lie with his head in a nun’s lap mumbling angelica, and that he would not have expected a doctor, a professional man, to be so tolerant of convent quackeries, little pillows and what not, to which the doctor retorted that speaking as a professional man he did not look to see the bishop die for several days to come. They were still wrangling in their corner when Dame Sibilla announced to them that her great-uncle was now in a peaceful sleep and that she thought he should be carried to his bed.
The way she oversaw this operation and particularly the ineffable little pats she gave to the pillows drove Humphrey Flagg to the chaplain’s way of thinking. With single-hearted courtesy they conducted her to her lodging, where a respectable widow was in readiness to wait on her. But a couple of hours later they were compelled to call her back, for the bishop had started up in bed declaring that he had seen her carried away by a piebald dog as large as a horse, that she was lost and God would require his soul for it. Now for more visions, the chaplain observed sombrely. This time Dame Sibilla quieted the bishop with a long account of the finances of Oby. But the chaplain was no better pleased. He had taken a prejudice against her.
Meanwhile, all the poor in the city knew that Bishop Walter was dying, and with the irrational hopefulness of the poor were praying fervently for his recovery. They trooped in processions to the cathedral, they knelt in prayer at the palace gate, they clamoured for relics to be brought from all parts of the kingdom immediately. Children were beaten to make them pray more fervently, for the prayer of a child has more power than any grown person’s prayer, women vowed the babe in the womb to God’s use provided God would spare them the bishop, and hunchbacks, who are known to be luck-givers, were seized on by the crowd and rubbed against the palace walls. For he was the poor man’s bishop, he had considered the poor, he was their father, their treasure, their only warm garment, their champion before God and man, their only flatterer. The crowd wept and swayed, telling each other how even now, at death’s door, he would not lie in a bed but lay on the ground with nothing but straw beneath him. None was more fervent than the harlots whom he had cast out of the city, and who now came in a procession, combed and clean and wearing their best clothes, to pray for the man who had taken them seriously. Walking among these crowds Henry Yellowlees felt himself someone apart, a ghost perhaps, or more truly a figure in geometry, a stalking displeased triangle among these swelling curves of emotion. The death of Walter Dunford, whom all these people were so passionately and so pleasurably lamenting, and whom he had for so long so violently hated, roused in him nothing but a kind of quiet despising astonishment at having hated so violently. In the same way, a stink which has half-choked one, when run to earth becomes no more than the shrivelled body of some wretched rat.
Since his scholars were constantly being called off to sing litanies he had time on his hands, and spent it wandering in and out of the crowd as one wanders in and out of a forest. It amused him to hear all the talk about the nun who was in constant attendance on the dying man. She was a nun of extraordinary saintliness, and in a vision of the Virgin she had been commanded to go to him. She was a doctoress of renowned skill and was keeping him alive by a secret remedy. She was a witch, and killing him as fast as might be. Who would believe him if he had said that he knew all these remarkable ladies and had discussed the price of salt fish with them? He noted that it was quite untrue to suppose that men will fight for their beliefs. All three schools of thought about the bishop’s nun heard each other’s heresies without the slightest movement of ill-will. Mankind untutored and savage will fight for bread or a bedfellow, but must be schooled by theologians before it will fight for a faith.
He had tired of watching the crowds (which anyhow had grown less as the bishop’s dying delayed) and was sitting in his old haunt among the scattered masonry of Jupiter’s temple when the note of the passing bell clashed out. It was evening. The dew was falling, the scent of the gone blossom hung on the chilling air like the ghost of the day, the birds had left off singing and were settling themselves for the night with occasional screeches of alarm. A little while before, a party of vagrants had come into the enclosure where they pulled up some gorse stakes and kindled a fire. He had watched the first twine of smoke stain the pure dark blue of the sky and listened to their quiet grunting voices as they sat unbinding their feet before the blaze. The smoke veered aside, and where it had been he saw the first star, and a moment later the first stroke of the bell expanded in the air and died trembling.
Walter Dunford was dead. But every other consideration was lost in a transport of gratitude for his part in the elegy, for the death which had set the bell tolling in the innocent solemn dusk with notes as apt and compelling as the longs in Triste loysir. If he knelt to pray for the bishop’s soul it was because his pleasure was so intensely physical that he must buttress it by some constraint of asceticism, and the discomfort of his knees on the cold turf would substantiate his delight.
Closer within the circumference of the bell’s vibration the news was heard with rather different ears. The clerics hurrying to take their part in the prayers glanced at each other with a flash of eye, admitted man’s poor mortality with small shrugs. ‘At last!’ said the glances, and the shrugs replied: ‘We are well out of it.’
For Bishop Walter’s last days on earth had been painful and unedifying, and his vitality was so obstinate that no one could feel assured that he would not contrive to exert himself in some irreparable dying scandal. Twice he had broken out of his chamber, saying that he must go out and repent in the face of the poor (for he was acutely aware of that vast audience waiting outside); and only the deftness of that nun had turned him back. Repentance is proper. But Bishop Walter repented beyond all decorum, raving with fear of death and fear of hell and with a self-hatred that slashed out to include all mankind. What it was all about no one had leisure to surmise, any more than when a house is burning the men fighting the fire have time to speculate what caused it. He raved like a madman, they agreed; but the madman was a madman in full possession of his wits, able to rip up the sophistries of would-be comforters, able to recall in their utmost niceties the intrigues of half a century before. Theological acumen had never been attributed to him, even by his backers. He had made his name by simple piety, personal austerities, industry, saintly eccentricity, and a marvellous head for business. But now in the process of demonstrating himself damned no schoolman could have bettered him. He argued like an eel; and the force of all his arguments and of his natural acerbity was directed against the consolations they offered him. Nothing would persuade him to lie down and die in quiet, trusting to the church to manage his affair for him. The devils they exorcised were no sooner disposed of than they came back reinforced with more devils. The relics they brought him he greeted with computations of how much they had cost, how much they had earned, how much they would be worth in ten years’ time at that rate of earning. They brought in strangers (against better judgement, but his misery was so authentic that they were ready to try any remedy), summoning friars, anchorites, pious children, even an old woman of the locality who had been whipped for declaring that the Virgin was so familiar with her as to have picked the lice out of her head. But these were no more effective than the people of his household. For a minute or two he welcomed them with craving submission, clasped their hands, whispered in their ears; but the welcome would turn into satire, confutation, abusive home-truths, and mockery. They had waited till he seemed past speech before giving him the holy oils. Half an hour later he began to writhe, and muttered that the oil was burning him, was eating his flesh away; and to their horror they saw his dry skin redden and rise up.
After his death the marks were as plain as if branded with a hot iron. The chaplain, exhausted beyond endurance and beyond tact, pointed them out to Dame Sibilla, saying: ‘There they are. What do you make of it?’ She replied that to her they looked like roses. The doctor, who had really loved Walter Dunford, and was half-dead from watching him die, turned aside with a groan at such silliness.
Yet when he was an old man, and the death of the bishop had taken its place in his memory as one of many deaths, he often quoted Dame Sibilla as an example of the medicinal virtues of virginity. For the bodily heat of a virgin, he said, is at once purer and more vehement than the heat of a deflowered creature, and when the physicians put Abishag into King David’s bed they were applying this knowledge, and put her there with no carnal intention but exactly as they would have poured virgin honey into a wound or bound virgin wool about an inflamed joint. And the brain of an old man, he continued, is vexed with cold humours, and chafes and maddens like a river impeded with ice, so that meekness itself becomes irascible and breaks out in furies and contentions. In such cases a virgin, the more simple-witted the better, can do more than any other medicine. She need not be put into the sick man’s bed; her mere presence is enough.
That was how, twenty years after, Humphrey Flagg accounted for the behaviour of Dame Sibilla. Of all those taking part in the bishop’s last days she alone remained confident and serene. As his fits grew worse, as he raved more savagely and feared more abjectly, she seemed to be in her element like a water-spaniel in the flood. She was clumsy, she was obtuse, she was insufferably trivial in the remedies she suggested and the consolations she offered. But her devotion to the dying man was unquestionable and in the face of his agony her obtuseness took on a quality of intrepidity. Nothing daunted her competence. Did the bishop see devils? She saw them too, in gross and in detail. Naturally, at the death-bed of a bishop the powers of hell would make the most of their opportunity of such a catch. Repentance? But of course! The greater the saint, the greater the repentance. Reproaches and revilings? Again of course. What could be more distressing to the eyes of a dying man than the sight of the world’s wickedness, and how could a bishop spend his last breath more valiantly than in rebuking sin and confounding the vain-glorious? Doubts, self-damnings, despair? Yes, yes, that was how the dying must feel, but it was all quite natural and nothing to be alarmed at. Besides, think of God’s mercy, and of all the poor folk outside, all praying for his soul. The crowd was larger than ever, she said, stepping back from the window with her eyes enlarged as if they had spread to contain the sight of such a multitude. So she flattered and consoled, and belittled this and magnified the other, holding her conjuror’s mirror before his eyes. And in the intervals of peace that she won for him he lay with his head in her bosom, clutching at her veil to cover him and sometimes murmuring that he could die in peace for he had saved her from the power of the dog, and at other times listening with a drowsy satisfaction to her chatter about Oby. After he was dead she began to weep, and shook as if an ague shook her; but almost in the next breath she was supping hot wine and patronising Humphrey Flagg, her tears splashing into the cup as she assured him how interested the ladies of Oby would be when she told them of his prescriptions.
By the time the funeral had taken place (naturally she stayed for the funeral) reports of the bishop’s manner of dying had got out; and this was spread about as the doing of the nun who had bewitched him, calling up devils to torment him and prolonging his agony by knots tied in the fringe of the counterpane. Such a person should be got rid of expeditiously and with as little show as possible. But when the steward sent for Henry Yellowlees and told him that he must take Dame Sibilla back to Oby, Henry expostulated that if she were to ride openly through the streets she would be stoned: let her stay a while longer, he urged, while he himself rode to Oby and arranged for an escort of some of her own community with whom she could travel back, a nun among nuns. But no one at the palace cared what became of Dame Sibilla, all they cared for was to be rid of her and rid of the last Dunford. Fortunately the old widow who had been told off to wait on her admired her profoundly; by her arrangements and connivance Dame Sibilla slipped out before dawn, dressed like a serving-woman in short petticoats and a hat with a flapping brim. By the time the sun rose they were well away from the city, riding over the green turf speckled with primroses. It embarrassed him to see her dressed like a secular person, but she took it very lightly and enjoyed the hat. He was relieved when later in the day she went into a thicket and came out in her nun’s clothing.
When they got to Oby all the nuns were standing in front of the house to receive her. Looking for the spire to prick the horizon Henry had wondered how she would be feeling, returning after those weeks of violent emotion to a future flat as the landscape that lay before them. Such a life was comfortable, creditable, happier, probably, than the lives of most other women; and of course in accordance with God’s wishes; but after her part in the drama of Walter Dunford’s death-bed it must seem tame. She jumped nimbly to the ground and dived in among the others and disappeared.
During Dame Sibilla’s absence a new voice had been added to the familiar voices. There had always been plenty of owls round Oby, but this spring an owl established somewhere near by had taken to hooting by day. It was astonishing to hear its tu-whoo come floating out from amidst the pink and white of the apple-blossom or tranquilly joining in the midday office. Because this is the kind of thing that frightens servants and excites novices, the ladies of the convent took the line that such behaviour on the part of an owl showed a wrong-headed playfulness; and Dame Philippa’s comment that the poor creature must be kept awake by the thought of its sins was often repeated. Possibly Dame Lovisa, so coolly attentive to every hint of a prioress-ship hastening towards her, may have thought otherwise of the owl. But she was quite as discreet as Dame Matilda had been towards the old prioress thirty years earlier, and when Dame Adela (as usual voicing everyone’s silliest thought with an added personal tactlessness) said that it was a good thing that Dame Margaret was too deaf to hear the owl hooting for her, Dame Lovisa left it to Dame Eleanor to retort that deafness saved people from hearing a great deal of silliness besides owls, and only remarked that living in a damp climate often renders people hard of hearing.
The convent was full of old women. There was the prioress, Dame Margaret, Dame Dorothy, Dame Cecily – true, she was not really old, but she was blind and sickly: the owl had plenty to choose from before it hooted its Come-away! for Adela; but death, even the death that takes someone else, is frightening, and Adela feared the owl. Her fear expressed itself in bravado. Perhaps because the de Retteville blood ran in her veins, and from Brian onwards the Rettevilles lived for hunting and were more in sympathy with the beasts they slew than with their own kind, Dame Adela was what in later days came to be called a nature-lover. Birds perched on her hand, lizards ran up her wide sleeves, she had pet toads and spiders as well as her troops of pet dogs; though she had never learned her plain-chant she could bark like a fox, whistle like a blackbird, and imitate perfectly every noise in nature. Now when the owl hooted she answered it; and if it did not hoot she would hoot herself, and provoke it to reply. No one troubled to check her. Perhaps even they inclined to encourage her. If there was anything alarming about an owl hooting in broad daylight there was nothing alarming about Dame Adela, so the one was approximated to the other. And when Sir Ralph, poking out from under his abstraction as a tortoise pokes out its head from under its shell, remarked in his Whitsunday sermon that there seemed to be a great quantity of owls about this season and that no doubt owls had their own language as much as the Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, but that as there was no record that the Apostles began to understand owls Christians must wait till the second coming of the Paraclete before they tried to do so, his hearers paid no special attention to this observation.
Then one noontide, to make conversation, Dame Sibilla asked when the daylight owl had begun to hoot: she had not noticed it before she left Oby. One remembered one thing and one another, the date was hunted through remembrances, it was when Dame Amy had a whitlow, it was just before the pear tree blossomed, it was round about the time when the refectory was whitewashed. Then Dame Cecily recalled that it was on Saint Bennet’s eve.
Dame Sibilla changed colour, and presently asked another question about something else. She need not have troubled. Conversation flowed on, Bishop Walter was dead and gone from their minds, the fact that the midday owl had begun hooting on the day he died struck no one, nor would anything have been made of it, had it been otherwise. If the midday owl hooted for any purpose it hooted for Oby.
Seeing that no one put the owl and the bishop together she felt relieved. Not to anyone, not to herself even, would she quite admit that there had been anything unseemly in the bishop’s manner of dying; but though in the main she was zealously self-deceiving she had filaments of shrewdness floating from her, and it was with one of these that she sensed that other people were willing enough to be scandalised, and that there was plenty to scandalise them. What had been the likeness of roses to her, for instance, the chaplain had seen with impurer eyes. So hearing the owl – or Dame Adela – she was grateful that no one at Oby was so ill-natured as to suppose that these untimely cries voiced the uneasy estate of her great-uncle’s soul. Why should they, why should they? Unfortunately, by combating the idea that anyone should think so, she began to think so herself. To admit such a thought was disloyal to a man of saintly character and unjust to herself: what would become of the shining part (she knew it had been shining) she had played at the vexed death-bed of a saint if in reality that death-bed had been the death-bed of a reprobate? One must flee from temptation. Becoming convinced that this was a temptation Dame Sibilla fled from it to the best of her considerable abilities, smothering it in prayers, industry and sociability. For all that, it was soon remarked on that Dame Sibilla could infallibly distinguish between the real owl and Dame Adela – she had such a fine ear.
It was about this time that Dame Lilias plucked up enough resolution to follow Dame Sibilla into a corner and go through with what she wanted to ask.
‘While you were attending Bishop Walter I suppose you and he sometimes talked of Oby.’
‘Yes, indeed! He asked me many questions, and even when he was too weak to question me he liked to hear me talk about it. It is astonishing how much he remembered about us, what an interest he took in us. Truly, a father to his poor nuns!’
‘Did he happen to say anything about me?’
‘Oh yes, I told him how you made the salve and the distilled betony water.’
After a bitter swallow Dame Lilias brought herself to ask if that were all. Umbraged, Dame Sibilla replied in the tone of voice most commonly used towards Dame Lilias, a brisk rallying tone of voice: ‘I think that was all. He was very weak, and suffering much, and he had a great deal to think of besides us and our little affairs.’
Dame Lilias straightened herself out of her habitual drooping posture and looked fixedly at Dame Sibilla.
‘When your great-uncle made his Visitation here I asked him for permission to become an anchoress. He then said he would think of it and send me word. That was five years ago. I wondered if, in his last hours, he had time to remember this.’
Out in the orchard Dame Adela hooted.
‘But perhaps he had too many things on his mind to give a thought to me.’
The owl replied to Dame Adela. Dame Sibilla said warmly: ‘An anchoress! I never knew that you wished to be an anchoress. How did it happen, how did you come to wish it? An anchoress! How well I understand such a wish!’
When Dame Sibilla wished to please she could put a great deal of skill and determination into it. Willy-nilly, Dame Lilias had to tell the whole story. Willy-nilly, she received from Bishop Walter’s great-niece the sympathy she had hoped for in vain from Bishop Walter. Everything in the story, the long desolation, the voice of the saint, the bruised neck, assailed Dame Sibilla in her core of romantic and real piety. Overlooking the implied disparagement of the bishop, she exclaimed:
‘You really heard his voice? How wonderful, how satisfying! I have sometimes seen saints myself but I have never heard one.’ (For it was also wonderful and satisfying that these supernatural experiences should be thus diversely distributed.)
‘Bishop Walter did not think so well of it, you see,’ said Dame Lilias.
‘He had so many things to think of, he had so much on his mind,’ reiterated Dame Sibilla, but in a graver voice.
Sometimes God sends a death-bed, sometimes a martyrdom, sometimes, as at Allestree, a pestilence. Now God had sent a mission. In a flash Dame Sibilla realised that she and she only could put through this affair of an anchoress and carry out the spoken command of a patronal saint. The notion of making an anchoress glowed in her imagination; perhaps, later on, she would become an anchoress too. Meanwhile, she would give an anchoress to God and the church.
‘If only I had known in time,’ she sighed, ‘I would have spoken to my dear uncle. He would have listened favourably, he would certainly have found time to give his blessing and order the preliminaries. Well, we must do what we can without him! I shall always feel that it has his approval, that we are carrying out his wish.’
It was not so much a moral scruple as personal fastidiousness that made Dame Lilias say:
‘I cannot feel sure that he wished it. He did not give me such an impression. And during five years he did nothing about it.’
‘It slipped his memory. He was so desperately busy. He never slept more than four hours, he snatched his meals, his whole time was given to God and the church. Or perhaps he did remember it, and gave directions to a secretary, and it was the secretary, not he, who forgot. That seems much likelier. It took four secretaries to keep up with him, and anything may be mislaid among four secretaries. No doubt that was it. My uncle would not have forgotten anything to do with Oby.’
‘He was not very well pleased with Oby when he came here.’
‘Oh, but all that was quite changed, you know.’
Dame Sibilla knew that this was not exactly true. But then there are two truths, perhaps three truths, perhaps a dozen. In any case there is the exact and mortal truth which marches with the living and there is the other truth whose dominion opens out with death, a more insighted truth which enables the survivors to give a tranquillising variant, to anoint the waves with oil. It was the mortal truth that when Bishop Walter gave his attention to Dame Sibilla’s talk about Oby he usually did so with an appearance of reservation and mistrust. But then all she had told him must have combated his prejudice and led him to change his mind. And as his features up to the moment of death had been vexed and furious and after his laying-out were the image of an austere repose, so his suspicions of Oby, she felt sure, must have changed to a discerning benevolence. Thus her statement to Dame Lilias which neither of them could mortally and exactly credit was true nevertheless, and not to have spoken it would be impiety and injury to the dead. Surely the souls blessedly afflicted in purgatory need not endure the further pang of hearing themselves misrepresented by truths merely mortal and occasional. In the same way the owl, more often than not, was only Dame Adela. She could not really believe that some little mishap like slighting Dame Lilias’s vocation could compel her great-uncle’s soul to hang hooting round Oby: but in the light of the post-mortal truth now shining so clearly on Walter Dunford it was plain that he would wish poor Dame Lilias to achieve her ambition, and so one must endeavour, if only as a simple piety to the dead, to bring it about.
It was a thousand pities that the first movers in the business were now so ineffective. The bishop was dead, the prioress heavy with age, and it was impossible to get any sense out of Sir Ralph. Though he remembered everything to do with Dame Lilias and was full of good will, nothing developed from the good will but more good will, and speculations as to the view Dame Lilias would have from her slot window and if the angels, which in a marish country are winged like herons, might not be winged like pigeons in a more comfortable type of landscape. There remained Dame Lilias and Saint Leonard. Dame Lilias was almost as ineffective as the others. The long decline of hope deferred, hope disillusioned, hope slighted and put away, had left her in a state of apathy. She was so apathetic that she did not even oppose Dame Sibilla’s intentions. She was like a weed in the water. As for Saint Leonard, another word from him would have put everything in train. But he did not speak it. And the image of Our Lady gazed at the crucifixion of her son, intent as a child at a fair with her blue eyes and pink cheeks, and could think of no sorrow like unto his sorrow.
All this was very discouraging. If Dame Sibilla had not possessed her full share of the Dunford suppleness and resolution she might have abandoned her project. But she persisted, with here a step and there a tweak, praying intemperately and hinting discreetly until she actually contrived to fan up a sort of community pique that Oby, possessing a nun called by heaven to adopt the mortified career of anchoress, could not have been better attended to. Yes, really, it was a great slight! Not every convent can make such an offer, not every convent wants to; yet for five years Oby had been offering its Dame Lilias and was offering her still.
In order to establish this frame of mind Dame Sibilla had had to yield a little ground in the matter of Bishop Walter. A new truth was made plain: that saintliness and episcopacy cannot abide under the same hood, and that a bishop as saintly as Bishop Walter left too much to his secretaries, and was flouted by his underlings, who disregarded his intentions and hoodwinked a good old man with stories of: ‘Yea, immediately, it shall be seen to tomorrow.’ Witness the case of Dame Lilias’s vocation, trampled and forgotten under the feet of these officials.
‘They should have left him in peace among his poor,’ she grieved. ‘They should not have compelled him to become a bishop. He was not meant for a bishop. If they had not bishoped him, I daresay he would be alive and with us to this day.’
She was about to add, ‘And making Dame Lilias an anchoress,’ but she remembered that the presentation of anchoresses is an appurtenance of bishops.