- THE CITY OF PURE GOLD
"BLIND eyes, blind eyes!" sang the dancer.
Hilarius woke with a start. He had fallen asleep on a bench in the sunny courtyard and his dream had carried him back to the forest.
He sat rubbing his eyes and only half-awake, the sun kissing his hair into a halo against the old grey wall. A falcon near fretted restlessly on her perch, and a hound asleep by the fountain rose, and, slowly stretching its great limbs, came towards him.
It was four o'clock on a warm day in September; the courtyard was deserted save for a few busied serving men, and the knight and his household, were at a tilting in the Outer Bailey, all but the Lady Eleanor, Hilarius' mistress, for, as Martin had foreseen, Sir John had so appointed it.
It was now two months since Hilarius had come to the city which had seemed to him in the distance as the New Jerusalem full of promise; but he had found no angels at the gates, nor were the streets full of the righteous; nay, the place seemed nearer of kin to the Babylon of Blessed John's Vision - with a few holy ones who would surely be caught up ere judgment fell, amongst them Sir John and Lady Eleanor.
A good knight and a God-fearing man was Sir John, tender to his children, gentle with his people, a faithful servant to God and King Edward; shrewd withal, and an apt reader of men. Therefore, and because of the love he bore to Prior Stephen, he set Hilarius to attend his eldest daughter, who seemed to belong as little to this world as the lad himself; and felt that in so doing he had achieved the best possible for his old friend, according to his asking.
Hilarius for his part served the Lady Eleanor as an acolyte tends the chapel of a saint, only she was further removed from him than a saint, by reason of her pale humanity. He soon perceived, as he watched her at banquet, tourney, or pageant, that she went to a revel as to the Sacrament, and sat at a mummers' show with eyes fixed on the Unseen. She moved through the gay vivid world of Court gallants and joyous maidens like a shadow, and the rout grew graver at her coming.
It was much the same with her lover, Guy de Steyning - brother of that Hugh de Steyning men wot of as Brother Ambrosius - a gentle knight with mild blue eyes, a peaked red beard, and great fervour for heavenly things. The pair liked one another well; but their time was taken up with preparation for Paradise rather than with earthly business, and their speech lent itself more readily to devout phrases than to lovers' vows. It was small wonder, therefore, that another year saw them both by glad consent in the cloister, he at Oxford, and Eleanor in the Benedictine House of which her aunt was Prioress.
Hilarius had written of his saintly mistress to Prior Stephen just as he had written of the wondrous beauty of St Peter's Abbey:
"With all its straight, slender, upstanding pillars, methinks 'tis like the forest at home" (forgetting that his more intimate knowledge of the forest partook of the nature of sin). "The Lady Eleanor, my honoured mistress," he wrote, "is a most saintly and devout maiden, full of heavenly lore, and caring nought for the things of this world;" and he added, "'tis beautiful to see such devotion where for the most part are sinful and light-minded persons."
The Prior laid the script aside with a smile and a sigh; and when Brother Bernard asked news of the lad, answered a little sadly, "Nay, Brother, he still sleeps;" and indeed there seemed no waking him to a world of men - living, striving, sorely-tried men.
He dwelt in a land of his own making - a land of colour and light and shadow in which much that he saw played a part; only the gorgeous pageants turned to hosts of triumphant saints heralded by angels; while the knights at a tourney in their brave armour pictured St George, St Michael, or St Martin in his dreams.
It was a limner he longed to be, far away from the stir and stress, not a page attending a great lady to the Court functions. He yearned ever after the Scriptorium, with its busied monks and stores of colour and gold. It lay but a stone's throw away behind the jealous Monastery walls, but it was no part of Prior Stephen's plan that the lad should go straight from one cloister to another.
