Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers | Page 4

newly opened grave.
"_Benedecite!_ fair son"--(the Baron was brown as a cigar)--
"_Benedecite!_" said the Chaplain.
The Baron was too angry to stand upon compliment. "Bury me that
grinning caitiff there!" he, pointing to the defunct.
"It may not be, fair son," said the friar, "he hath perished without
absolution."
"Bury the body!" roared Sir Robert.
"Water and earth alike reject him," returned the Chaplain; "holy St.
Bridget herself--"
"Bridget me no Bridgets!--do me thine office quickly, Sir Shaveling! or
by the Piper that played before Moses--" The oath was a fearful one;
and whenever the Baron swore to do mischief, he was never known to
perjure himself. He was playing with the hilt of his sword. "Do me
thine office, I say. Give him his passport to heaven."
"He is already gone to Hell!" stammered the Friar.
"Then do you go after him!" thundered the Lord of Shurland.
His sword half leaped from its scabbard. No!--the trenchant blade, that
had cut Suleiman Ben Malek Ben Buckskin from helmet to chin,
disdained to daub itself with the cerebellum of a miserable monk;--it
leaped back again;--and as the Chaplain, scared at its flash, turned him
in terror, the Baron gave him a kick!--one kick!--it was but one!--but
such a one! Despite its obesity, up flew his holy body in an angle of
forty-five degrees; then having reached its highest point of elevation,
sunk headlong into the open grave that yawned to receive it. If the
reverend gentleman had possessed such a thing as a neck, he had
infallibly broken it! as he did not, he only dislocated his vertebrae--but
that did quite as well. He was as dead as ditch-water!
"In with the other rascal!" said the baron--and he was obeyed; for there
he stood in his boots. Mattock and shovel made short work of it; twenty
feet of superincumbent mould pressed down alike the saint and the
sinner. "Now sing a requiem who list!" said the Baron, and his lordship
went back to his oysters.
The vassals at Castle Shurland were astounded, or, as the Seneschal
Hugh better expressed it, "perfectly conglomerated," by this event.
What! murder a monk in the odor of sanctity--and on consecrated

ground too! They trembled for the health of the Baron's soul. To the
unsophisticated many, it seemed that matters could not have been much
worse had he shot a bishop's coach-horse--all looked for some signal
judgment. The melancholy catastrophe of their neighbors at Canterbury
was yet rife in their memories; no two centuries had elapsed since those
miserable sinners had cut off the tail of the blessed St. Thomas's mule.
The tail of the mule, it was well known, had been forthwith affixed to
that of the Mayor; and rumor said it had since been hereditary in the
corporation. The least that could be expected was, that Sir Robert
should have a friar tacked on to his for the term of his natural life!
Some bolder spirits there were, 'tis true, who viewed the matter in
various lights, according to their different temperaments and
dispositions; for perfect unanimity existed not even in the good old
time. The verderer, roistering Hob Roebuck, swore roundly, "'Twere as
good a deed as to eat, to kick down the chapel as well as the monk."
Hob had stood there in a white sheet for kissing Giles Miller's daughter.
On the other hand, Simpkin Agnew, the bell- ringer, doubted if the
devil's cellar, which runs under the bottomless abyss, were quite deep
enough for the delinquent, and speculated on the probability of a hole
being dug in it for his especial accommodation. The philosophers and
economists thought, with Saunders McBullock, the Baron's bagpiper,
that a 'feckless monk more or less was nae great subject for a
clamjamphrey,' especially as 'the supply exceeded the demand;' while
Malthouse, the tapster, was arguing to Dame Martin that a murder now
and then was a seasonable check to population, without which the isle
of Sheppey would in time be devoured, like a mouldy cheese, by
inhabitants of its own producing. Meanwhile the Baron ate his oysters
and thought no more of the matter.
But this tranquillity of his lordship was not to last. A couple of Saints
had been seriously offended; and we have all of us read at school that
celestial minds are by no means insensible to the provocations of anger.
There were those who expected that St. Bridget would come in person,
and have the friar up again, as she did the sailor; but perhaps her
ladyship did not care to trust herself within the walls of Shurland Castle.
To say the truth, it was scarcely a decent house for a female saint to be
seen in. The Baron's gallantries, since he became a widower had been
but too notorious; and