Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/168

RV 100 (Rh) outrageous knave, who shall insure our meal and our malt, our herds and our flocks?'

'Marry, that will I, my brethren,' said an aged monk. 'Ah, brethren, you little know' what may be made of a repentant robber. In Abbot Ingilram's days—aye, and I remember them as it were yesterday—the freebooters were the best welcome men that came to Saint Mary's. Aye, they paid tithe of every drove that they brought over from the South, and because they were something lightly come by I have known them make the tithe a seventh—that is, if their confessor knew his business—aye, when we saw from the tower a score of fat bullocks or a drove of sheep coming down the valley, with two or three stout men-at-arms behind them with their glittering steel caps and their blackjacks and their long lances, the good Lord Abbot Ingilram was wont to say—he was a merry man—there come the tithes of the spoilers of the Egyptians! Aye, and I have seen the famous John the Armstrang—a fair man he was and a goodly, the more pity that hemp was ever heckled for him—I have seen him come into the Abbey church with nine tassels of gold in his bonnet and every tassel made of nine English nobles, and he would go from chapel to chapel, and from image to image, and from altar to altar, on his knees—and leave here a tassel, and there a noble, till there was as little gold on his bonnet as on my hood: you will find no such border thieves now!'

'No, truly, Brother Nicolas,' answered the abbot; 'they are more apt to take any gold the church has left than to bequeath or bestow any; and for cattle, beshrew me if I think they care whether beeves have fed on the meadows of Lanercost Abbey or of Saint Mary's!'

'There is no good thing left in them,' said Father Nicolas; 'they are clean naught. Ah, the thieves that I have seen! such proper men! and as pitiful as proper, and as pious as pitiful!'

'It skills not talking of it, Brother Nicolas,' said the abbot; 'and I will now dismiss you, my brethren, holding your meeting upon this our inquisition concerning the danger of our reverend sub-prior, instead of the attendance on the lauds this evening. Yet let the bells be duly rung for the edification of the laymen without, and also that