Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (398 page)

The priest only stamped his foot. And it occurred to Mr. Sorrell that after all it would be his best way to get into the workhouse. It would look much less odd to march in his nightgown in the procession than to walk alone, especially as they seemed to be expecting someone in his nightgown. When he once got into the building he would be able to apologise, and then perhaps they would lend him the other fellow’s clothes.

All these people seemed to be singularly intent upon their acting. They had not, he remembered, paid the slightest attention to anything that he said. No doubt it was a strain, taking part in that sort of thing. And, imagining that he was entering quite into the spirit of it, Mr. Sorrell took his place immediately in front of the priest and immediately behind the thurifers. Then, with the censers swinging and the fresh breeze blowing the smoke aside, the whole body got into motion. The crowd ran along beside them, calling out in high voices until the singing began again.

CHAPTER VIII.

AS well as he could see things for the incense smoke,
 
which rather stifled him, Mr. Sorrell perceived that a number of people were hurrying from the gates of the castle towards the building which he had taken to be a workhouse. There were old men with pikes and axes, two or three little boys with enormous swords which they bore over their shoulders, and four or five very old men indeed who carried crossbows.

At last there came running three ladies dressed — one, all in blue with a great head-dress like a steeple which raked high over her head, was tied round with gold cords. They glittered in the sun, and from them there depended a veil of white lawn that fluttered like a flag. She too carried a great sword, and she ran like a deer to get in front of the procession, which was nearing the workhouse gates. The two other women were dressed in grey, with sleeves of white lawn and with white hennins whose lines resembled the coifs that the nuns wore. The lady with the sword took up her position in the gateway of the workhouse. With high, hasty, and angry words she called the incongruous array of armed old men and boys to form into a knot behind her, so that the gateway was entirely filled up. A jagged array of spiky weapons, most of them very rusty, were pushed out towards the advancing procession. And, when they were no more than a few yards off, the procession itself came to an irregular halt.

“What the deuce is all this?” Mr. Sorrell asked of one of the little thurifers in front of him. “What
is
the old story? Did the lady of the castle try to bag the gold cross and the faithful slave? Or was it the nuns who tried to bag it and she enter a gentle protest?”

The boy looked at Mr. Sorrell in a stupid way and shook his head.

“Don’t
any
of you understand English?” Mr. Sorrell asked.

There was at this point a good deal of shouting, and from the nuns came sounds of consternation and anger. The priest was consulting with the foremost of them. He too showed animation and bad temper. And then suddenly a very high voice called out imperatively in French that there was no misunderstanding:

“Silence! Dogs!”

It was the lady with the sword. —

Mr. Sorrell had let himself drop into the rôle of a dispassionate spectator. It suited him very well and, since no one appeared to notice his garment, he had lost any feeling of uneasiness, though he was growing afraid that with all this delay he would miss his last train to town. At the same time the pageant itself was really interesting, he could not deny it. He had no idea that people went about these things with such earnestness. It might almost have been real life. There was one old chap with a sort of double-jointed flail that had three iron spiked balls jangling about on chains at its end. And there was another old man who had a great deal of difficulty in setting his rusty crossbow. He put the point upon the ground and pulled up the cord with both hands until it fitted into the notch. As for the lady with the steeple hat, she was behaving with the most extraordinary vigour, shouting out commands in a French Mr. Sorrell could almost understand, and banging the flat of her great long sword against the doddering and stupid members of the crowd who chanced to get in the way. The outer sleeves of the blue gown were so long that they brushed the ground when she was not waving her arms in the air. The bare sword, when it was not in use, she carried over her shoulder as if it were a sentinel’s gun.

After a long pause, the priest and two of the foremost nuns approached the lady. Immediately her eyes blazed with wrath and indignation, and with both her hands she elevated the sword above her head. The old men poked out their pike-heads, the little boys shook their swords as well as they could, and cried:

“Ho! a Coucy d’Enguerrand!”

The bowmen pointed their crossbows. As far as Mr. Sorrell could hear, the lady said that nobody was going to be allowed to enter that convent. The priest uttered a number of inaudible words, and one of the nuns said something very energetically, pointing at the priest; and there was no mistaking the lady when she said that she would split the priest in half like a pig that was going to be killed. At this horror overtook the nuns, and they screamed. The lady spoke in such a high voice and with such distinctness, that Mr. Sorrell had very little difficulty in understanding her. At the same time it seemed to him to be odd that they should all speak French. He could only think that the Pageant Committee must have hired a company of French nuns for the performance. From what the lady said, Mr. Sorrell began to make out dimly the story. They were certainly quarrelling about him, or rather about the Greek slave that for the moment he represented.

In his interest at the unrolling of the plot, Mr. Sorrell found himself moving continually a little nearer. At last he stood almost immediately behind the priest and two nuns in a little open space from which the crowd had been driven. He was beginning very quickly to get the hang of the language, which seemed to him very much to resemble the Provençal that he had heard when he was inspecting a tin mine in the South of France. He caught words here and there, and of the rest his brain seemed automatically to fill in the sense.

As far as he could make it out, the priest’s proposal was that the nuns should have the custody of the cross of St. Joseph until the return from the wars of Sir John Egerton of Tamworth. On the other hand, the lady insisted that if the convent once got possession of the cross they would never give it up. Her voice was high and hard, and she cited instances such as how the Priory of Bridgewater went with a band of robbers and stole from the monks of Taunton the relics of St. Ostaurius, which were being translated with only a feeble guard from Godstow to Taunton itself. She mentioned also how certain monks near Cologne by force and fraud stole from Cologne Cathedral a large number of the relics of the 11,000 Virgins. She seemed, indeed, to Mr. Sorrell to have a memory exceedingly stored with misdeeds committed by various members of the monastic orders, and she cited grievances of her own against this very convent. These matters were, however, too complicated for Mr. Sorrell to follow, though he immensely admired the lady’s spirit and the way her eyes flashed. And she repeated again and again, that once the cross got into the hands of the nuns it would never come out again. For they would hide it away somewhere, or build it into their altar and swear that it was sacrilege to take it thence by force.

The priest and the nuns, as far as Mr. Sorrell could understand, represented that even if they were not themselves the proper guardians of the cross, no more was this lady whom Mr. Sorrell understood to be the Lady Blanche de Coucy d’Enguerrand. But surely the cross should be delivered into the hands of the Lady Dionissia de Egerton de Tamville. The Lady Blanche gave it to be understood that that was a foolish and a frivolous remark, for was the Lady Dionissia even married to the good Knight of Egerton of Tamworth? The Lady Dionissia was not even married, but merely contracted by proxy and sent for inspection to the Knight of Tamworth. The Knight of Tamworth had not so much as seen her, for he had gone away on his Scotch wars before ever the Lady Dionissia had reached there, coming from her home in the Northern Marches of Wales. It was therefore evident, the Lady Blanche said, that the Lady Dionissia was not the proper custodian of the cross, but that she herself was, since she was the cousin and next heiress to the fief of Egerton of Tamworth.

The priest, on the other hand, persisted that the Lady Dionissia was the proper guardian, the contract of marriage being made and during the period of inspection the lady enjoying all the privileges and rights of a knight’s wife. The Lady Blanche replied that it was true that the Lady Dionissia enjoyed all the privileges of rights of a knight’s wife, but these affected only her rank. They gave her no titles to property.

And whilst Mr. Sorrell was amazed at the nicety with which these two people split hairs, he thought it grew tiresome, and that after all it detracted somewhat from the merit of the pageant as a rendering of history. Life in the Middle Ages was such a very simple affair. He did not really suppose that they actually had any laws at all, whereas what they were carrying on now was rather more complicated than an average argument about mining rights in the Court of Chancery. And suddenly the Lady Blanche acted in a way which much more resembled Mr. Sorrell’s idea of procedure in mediaeval times.

She had been gazing hard at Mr. Sorrell, who was looking at her admiringly over the priest’s shoulder, and suddenly with both hands she raised her enormous sword. The nuns shrieked and ran away; even the priest, beetle-browed and militant, moved several paces to the right. And then, with an extraordinarily hard grip, she had Mr. Sorrell by the wrist, dropping the sword on to the ground, where it jangled and vibrated.

“Come, thou!” she exclaimed, and Mr Sorrell felt a jerk in his shoulder such as pulled him past her and right in amongst the men with the pikes and the axes. He was surrounded by all these armed men, as if he were inside a British square at Tel-el-Kebir.

“Well now!” he exclaimed, “that’s more like business.”

The nuns surged round them, lifting their hands on high and crying out with their coifs waving. But the Lady Branche called out to her men:

“Ho, fellows! March!”

And Mr. Sorrell had to move along with some expedition in order that his bare heels might avoid the points of their shoes.

Before they had gone a dozen yards the body of them all halted, for they missed their natural leader. The Lady Blanche — Mr. Sorrell saw her over an array of weapons that resembled a bedraggled hedge — the Lady Blanche was talking energetically to the Abbess, who had appeared beneath the gateway. She was telling the Abbess that thus she was foiled in her evil design; that it was time that some of the great ones of the land thus handled the Churchmen who were growing too fat and haughty. She was minded to come in a very short time with some of her men and to burn the convent about the ears of the nuns. The Abbess blinked at her with mild and indulgent irony.

She said that it was none of her business that the nuns had come to take the cross; the chapel was in the care of the community, and in nowise affected her revenues as Abbess.

The Lady Blanche shrugged her shoulders, and uttered a laugh of derision. She said that the Abbess was all one pack with the others.

The Abbess smiled again, and she said that she would to God she might be the first to suffer amongst the religious of the Church. For assuredly the Church grew fat by means of persecution, as was well seen in the case of the Blessed Martyr Thomas of Canterbury, whom the King having had killed, he was forced to do penance, and afterwards to forfeit to the Church a good part of his own lands.

The Lady Blanche laughed highly. They were not, she said, in those old outlandish times, which were a hundred years ago, or more. Now they were differently inclined.

The Abbess said that that was very well, for no one had laid hands upon the Churchmen since that time. And if one once more should be slain, assuredly it would very much augment the faith of that realm of England in what was assuredly an age of unbelief.

The Lady Blanche retorted: would the Abbess have them returned to the dark and gross superstitions of their fathers and grandfathers, when it was believed that by a stroke of the pen a Churchman could turn silver into gold, the blessings of heavy crops of wheat into black blight, or night into day? Now that so many could write, these puffed-up pretensions had had the wind let out of them.

The Abbess raised her voice at last, because she intended to be heard on all sides:

“Go your ways off our grounds!” she said. “Madam, you are a foolish woman, and it was the best day that the convent has had that you and not my flock took the cross to itself. I had rather you had been the thief than we. But now go off this ground, which is holy, having known the tread and been the gift of the blessed Edward Confessor. Because you took the cross I have no ill-will against you, but I have no time to bandy words with you, nor are a pair of women fit to discuss holy mysteries, though I dwell among them and am more fit to discuss them than you. But this I tell you, that if you further profane this ground against the will of me who am Abbess, an action shall lie against you in the Bishop’s Court, and be referrable to the Court of Rome — such a lawsuit as shall cost you some of your land.”

And incontinently the Abbess retired into the little wicket chamber of the sister that kept the gates. She closed the door in the Lady Blanche’s face, for it was her intention to have the last word.

The Lady Blanche breathed deep in her chest with rage that she could not satisfy, and then she called to her the little page Jehan to pick up her great sword, which still lay upon the ground. Fire flashed from her eyes, and her hands were clenched as she went towards her armed men, thinking of how she would be avenged upon this Churchwoman who had eluded her. She came right in among them, and, calling out to them to march, she walked herself by Mr. Sorrell’s side.