Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln / A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England
sword and the sceptre were turned to the spade and lifted only in prayer. There were not only the allurements of hardship, but also his parents’ faith and his own early lessons tugging at his heart strings. He found means to go with his prior into the awful enclosure, and the austere passion seized him. He told his heart’s desire to an old ex-baron, who probably felt some alarm that a young gentleman who had campaigned so slightly in the plains of active life should aspire to dwell upon these stern hills of contemplation. “My dear boy, how dare you think of such a thing?” he answered, and then, looking at the refined young face before him, warned the deacon against the life. The men were harder than stones, pitiless to themselves and to others. The place dreary, the rule most burdensome. The rough robe would rake the skin and flesh from young bones. The harsh discipline would crush the very frame of tender youth.
The other monks were less forbidding. They warmly encouraged the aspiration, and the pair returned to their home, Hugh struggling to hide the new fire from his aged friend. But the old man saw through the artless cloakings and was in despair. He used every entreaty to save Hugh for the good work he was doing, and to keep his darling at his side. Hugh’s affectionate heart and ready obedience gave way, and he took a solemn oath not to desert his canonry, and so went back to his parishing.
But then came, as it naturally would come to so charming and vigorous a lad, the strong return of that Dame Nature who had been so long forked forth by his cloistral life. A lady took a liking to this heavenly curate. Other biographers hint at this pathetic little romance, and cover up the story with tales of a wilderness of women; but the metrical biographer is less discreetly vague, and breaks into a tirade against that race of serpents, plunderers, robbers, net weavers, and spiders—the fair sex. Still, he cannot refrain from giving us a graphic picture of the presumptuous she-rascal who fell in love with Hugh, and although most of his copyists excise his thirty-nine graphic lines of Zuleika’s portrait, the amused reader is glad to find that all were not of so edifying a mind. Her lovely hair that vied with gold was partly veiled and partly strayed around her ivory neck. Her little ear, a curved shell, bore up the golden mesh. Under the smooth clear white brow she had curved black eyebrows without a criss-cross hair in them, and these disclosed and heightened the clear white of the skin. And her nose, too—not flat nor arched, not long nor snub, but beyond the fineness of geometry, with light, soft breath, and the sweet scent of incense. Such shining eyes too: like emeralds starring her face with light! And the face, blended lilies and roses in a third lovely hue that one could not withdraw one’s eyes from beholding. The gentle pout of her red lips seemed to challenge kisses. Shining as glass, white as a bell flower, she had a breast and head joined by a noble poised throat, which baited the very hook of love. Upon her lily finger she wore a red and golden ring. Even her frock was a miracle of millinery. This lovely creature, complete to a nail, much disturbed the mind of Hugh, and played her pretty tricks upon her unexercised pastor: now demure, now smiling, now darting soft glances, now reining in her eyes. But he, good man, was rock or diamond. At last the fair creature actually stroked his arm, and then Hugh was startled into a panic. His experience and training had not been such as to fit him to deal with situations of this sort. He fled. He cut out the skin of the arm where her rosy fingers had rested. He found it impossible to escape from the sight of many fair maids of Burgundy. Zuleika was fascinating enough, but his original Adam within (whom he called Dalilah) was worse. He forsook his post, broke his vow, and bolted to the Grande Chartreuse.
One modern biographer, who is shocked at his perjury to the prior, would no doubt have absolved him if he had married the lass against his canonic vows. Another thinks him most edifyingly liberal in his interpretation of duty. Is there any need to forestall Doomsday in these matters? The poor fellow was in both a fix and a fright. Alas! that duties should ever clash! His own view is given with his own decisiveness. “No! I never had a scruple at all about it. I have always felt great delight of mind when I recall the deed which started me upon so great an undertaking.” The brothers of the Charterhouse gladly took him in, the year being about 1160, and his age about twenty, let us say; hardly an age anyhow which would fit him for dealing with pert minxes and escaping the witcheries of the beauty which still makes beautiful old hexameters.
CHAPTER II
BROTHER HUGH
“Ye might write th’ doin’s iv all th’ convents iv th’ wurruld on the back of a postage stamp, an’ have room to spare,” says Mr. Dooley; and we rather expect some hiatus in our history here. Goodbye to beef, butter, and good red wheat; white corn, sad vegetables, cold water, sackcloth take their place, with fasts on bread and water, and festivals mitigated by fish. Goodbye to pillows and bolsters and linen shirts. Welcome horse-hair vests, sacking sheets, and the “bitter bite of the flea,”—sad entertainment for gentlemen! Instead of wise and merry talk, wherein he excelled, solitary confinement in a wooden cell (the brethren now foist off a stone one upon credulous tourists) with willing slavery to stern Prior Basil. The long days of prayer and meditation, the nights short with psalmody, every spare five minutes filled with reading, copying, gardening and the recitation of offices. All these the novice took with gusto, safe hidden from the flash of emerald eyes and the witchery of hypergeometrical noses. But temptation is not to be kept out by the diet of Adam and of Esau, by locked doors, spades, and inkpots. The key had hardly turned upon the poor refugee when he found he had locked in his enemies with him. His austerities redoubled, but as he says he “only beat the air” until He who watches over Israel without slumber or sleep laid His hand upon him and fed him with a hidden manna, so fine and so plentiful that the pleasures of life seemed paltry after the first taste of it. After this experience our Hugh used to be conscious always of a Voice and a Hand, giving him cheer and strength, although the strong appetites of his large nature troubled him to the last. Here Hugh devoured books, too, until the time floated by him all too fleetly.
His great affectionate heart poured itself out upon wild birds and squirrels which came in from the beech and pine woods, and learned to feed from his platter and his fingers. It is difficult to read with patience that his prior, fearing lest he should enjoy these innocent loves too much, and they would “hinder his devotion,” banished these pretty dears from the dreary cell. But in charity let us suppose that the prior more than supplied their place, for Hugh was told off to tend a weak old monk, to sing him the offices, and to nurse the invalid. This godly old man, at once his schoolmaster and his patient, sounded him whether he wished to be ordained priest. When he learned that, as far as lay in Hugh he desired nothing more, he was greatly shocked, and reduced his nurse-pupil to tears by scolding him for presumption; but he presently raised him from his knees and prophesied that he would soon be a priest and some day a bishop. Hugh was soon after this ordained priest, and was distinguished for the great fervour of his behaviour in celebrating the Mass “as if he handled a visible Lord Saviour”—a touching devoutness which never left him, and which contrasted strikingly with the perfunctory, careless or bored ways of other priests. He injured his health by over-abstinence, one effect of which was to cause him to grow fat, Nature thus revenging herself by fortifying his frame against such ill-treatment.
In the talk time after Nones, the brothers had much to hear about the storms which raged outside their walls. It is rather hard for us nowadays to see things through Charterhouse spectacles. There is our lord the Pope, Alexander III., slow and yet persistent, wrestling hard with the terrible Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who is often marching away to seiges of Milan, reducing strong rogues and deeply wronging the church (whose forged documents are all purely genuine). Then what a hubbub there is in the church! Monstrous anti-popes, one of whom, Victor, dies, and a satanic bishop Henry of Liége consecrates another, Pascal, and the dismal schism continues. Then our lord Alexander returns to Rome, and the Emperor slaughters the Romans and beseiges their city and enthrones Pascal. There are big imperial plans afoot, unions of East and West, which end in talk: but Sennacherib Frederick is defeated by a divine and opportune pestilence. Then Pascal dies, and the schism flickers, the Emperor crawls to kiss the foot of St. Peter, and finally, in 1179, Alexander reigns again in Rome for a space. Meantime, Louis VII., a pious Crusader, and dutiful son of the Regulars, plays a long, and mostly a losing, game of buffets with Henry of Anjou, lord of Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, Aquitaine and Gascony, and leader of much else besides, King also of England, and conqueror of Ireland—a terrible man, who had dared to aspire to hang priestly murderers. He has forced some awful Constitutions of