Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers | Page 4

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 her own reputation was a little blown upon in the earlier days of her earthly pilgrimage; then things were so apt to be misrepresented--in short, she would leave the whole affair to St. Austin, who being a gentleman, could interfere with propriety, avenge her affront as well as his own, and leave no loop-hole for scandal. St. Austin himself seems to have had his scruples, though of their precise nature it would be difficult to determine, for it were idle to suppose him at