by Dion Fortune
‘What do you suppose they were up to at that priory?’ said Hugh. ‘Raising the Devil?’
‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were trying to do exactly the same thing that you are trying to do— break away from their limitations and find fullness of life.’
‘I don’t think it would suit my style. I am out after Pan.’
‘Well, aren’t you approaching Pan through prayer and meditation?’
‘Now you mention it, I believe I am. In fact, I tried to apply to him the Method of St Ignatius. I made a mental picture of ancient Greece, and it came alive, and for a moment I found myself there. And then, last night, when I tried to do it again, I was too sleepy to keep control, and I dreamt of poor old Ambrosius. Or rather, I dreamt I was walled-up, like him, and very unpleasant it was, too. Then I bust out of that dream on to the Greek hillside in the sunshine, and someone was going up the hill ahead of me, and I believe it was you. At any rate, it was someone with your build and walk.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Mona noncommittally.
At that moment the curator returned. ‘I am sorry to have had to leave you,’ he said. ‘Would you care to see the illuminated manuscripts?’
They acquiesced, and he led them to a glass case, unlocked it, raised the lid, and began tenderly to turn over the heavy vellum pages of an exceedingly fine psalter.
‘This is particularly interesting,’ he said, ‘because all the initial letters are set in little scenes of the Abbey.’
He pointed out to them the high altar, the cloisters, the bell-tower, the great gate, the monks at work in the scriptorium. Then he turned another page, and pointed to a little picture of a black-robed monk sitting at his desk writing.
‘This is the man,’ he said, ‘who laid the foundations of the famous library. A great scholar in his day, but died young. Life was short in those days.’
They saw a minute but diamond-clear portrait of a youngish man, round-shouldered at his desk. Sharp-featured, clean-shaven, tonsured. Mona glanced up involuntarily at the face of the man beside her, bending over her shoulder. Feature for feature, the faces were identical; even the scholarly stoop of the shoulder was reproduced.
‘That was one of the priors, Ambrosius,’ said the curator. There was dead silence for a moment, Mona holding her breath and wondering what was going to come next.
Hugh broke it, and Mona thought his voice sounded rather odd.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me where they buried Ambrosius after they held the inquest on him?’
‘Ah, now, that’s a curious story. There is a small monastery in the town of the same Order as once owned the Abbey. The coroner offered the bones to them to inter in their graveyard, but they declined them, so they were buried in the churchyard in the village. Evidently Ambrosius died in bad odour. Now, if you will excuse me, I must get back to my work. Perhaps you will return these books to the desk when you have finished with them.’
Hugh took the chair Mr Diss had vacated and sat staring into space, making no attempt to start on the volume lying open in front of him. Mona, watching him, saw that he had gone very white and his eyes had a startled look in them. ‘Do you know, it gave me quite a turn seeing that picture of Ambrosius. It made me realize what that bricking-up meant. Now let’s have a look at this paper and see what else there is to be seen.’
‘“Born in 1477”,’ read Hugh. ‘“The illegitimate son of a huckster’s daughter. Showed such marked promise in scholarship that he was admitted to the Abbey school without fee. Received the tonsure while still a youth. Was in great favour with the abbot. His rapid promotion caused much jealousy. A special mission was sent to Rome to protest against the appointment of so young a man as prior. The old abbot lived to be eighty-six, and for the last few years of his life was bedridden. Ambrosius as prior had complete control. Much jealousy and opposition. Ambrosius, a man of strong character, overbore the opposition and carried out his own policy. He was not a great building ecclesiastic, but he was a great scholar and collector. Much criticized for using funds to buy Greek manuscripts instead of a piece of the True Cross that was on offer to the monastery. Influence of his enemies finally prevailed with Rome after the death of the old abbot, a mission of inquiry was sent to the Abbey, and he was removed from his place as abbot-elect. Nothing further is heard of him. There is no record of his fate, death, or place of burial.
“Although he added nothing to the structure of the Abbey, he built a daughter-house three miles away at Thorley, and there he appeared to have founded a subsidiary community of his own. Nothing is known of its nature, however, the records of this period of the Abbey’s history having been destroyed in a fire which burnt out a part of the famous library, and in which perished all the Greek manuscripts purchased from Erasmus.”
‘Well, that doesn’t say much. I wonder who lit that fire? Their new Italian abbot, probably. I should say there is not much doubt about it that Ambrosius was up to some queer games, and the Greek manuscripts were at the bottom of the trouble. Come on, let’s go home and ask Jelkes what he makes of it.’
Hugh deposited Mona at the bookshop and went to put the car away.
‘Uncle Jelkes,’ said Mona, as soon as he had disappeared. ‘We’ve traced out the story of Ambrosius pretty completely, and Ambrosius was also after Pan, or something uncommonly like it. And I’ll tell you another thing, we saw a little picture of Ambrosius at the museum, and it might have been a portrait of Mr Paston.’
‘Damn!’ said the old bookseller, and sat down in his chair with a flop. ‘I knew it was going to be bad, but I never dreamt it was going to be as bad as all this!’
‘Uncle Jelkes, I don’t think it would take much to send Mr Paston off his head.’
‘Well, my dear, we can’t stop now we’ve started. That would make the devil of a mess. But where is the thing going to end? I’ve known things like this happen before. When a man who has been on the Path comes back to it again, circumstances often take him to the place of his last death.
‘Now we will watch and see what happens. Hugh may start recovering the memories of his last life.’
One subject, and one subject only, interested Hugh at that moment, but he found that neither Mona nor the old man were willing to talk about it. Whenever he introduced the name of Ambrosius they simultaneously and with one accord talked of something else. Hugh, who was an unsuspicious person, found this irritating. He was not sorry, therefore, to get off to bed early.
It was extraordinary the way that the recreant prior haunted his imagination; he could not get rid of him. Again and again the memory of his terrible death came back, and of the circumstances that led up to his death. From the scanty materials they had obtained, and his still more scanty appreciation of their significance, he tried to form a picture of the man’s personality and of the true inwardness of his history.
He could imagine the brilliant son of the huckster’s pretty but none too virtuous daughter, and wondered whether the abbot’s interest in him had been genuinely paternal. It was quite likely. Rome has always taken a humane view of human nature. He could see the lad accepting the monastic life with its intellectual opportunities readily enough; throwing himself heart and soul into it in fact, and winning rapid advancement at the hands of the all-too-complacent abbot. Then he could see the sudden wakening of another side of the man’s nature at the touch of Greek thought. God only knew what vivid play or daring poem had been among that job lot of Greek manuscripts purchased untranslated from Erasmus. He could imagine the tentative experimenting with some chant of invocation, and the sudden and unexpected obtaining of results, just as he himself had obtained them that night when he applied the Method of St Ignatius to the invocation of Pan. A man trained in the cloister would get results quickly and very definitely.
He could imagine the fascination of the pursuit growing on Ambrosius; the guarded sounding of others as to their fittedness for the enterprise; and then the cautious organization of the special
daughter-house where the new and absorbing interest could be pursued, safe from prying eyes.
Then he could imagine suspicion gradually being aroused; the spying and watching; the gradual piecing together of the damning evidence; finally, when the death of the old abbot removed his influential protector, the sudden swoop of Rome; the clean sweep of all sympathizers; the quarantining in their own priory of those who had actually participated in the pagan rites; and the walling-up of their leader in the cellars under their feet as a terrible warning, the slow tolling of the bell informing them of the slow approach of his death. Then the long dragging years of silence and solitude and darkness till to one by one came the still slower but inevitable end. And finally the old, old man of over eighty, on whom the cell-door had shut as a lad in his twenties, found at last his release, and the priory was abandoned to the wind and the rain.
There was one gleam of light that comforted Hugh in the utter gloom of the tragedy — the return of the prior’s spirit to stand by the men who had trusted him. He could imagine the shadowy figure, tall and gaunt in its heavy black habit, moving on sandalled feet along that upper corridor and pausing to talk to each monk in turn through the small barred wicket that alone remained open in the nailed-up doors of the cells. It never occurred to Hugh to ask himself how he knew that the cell-doors were nailed up.
He could imagine the amazement of the monks when first this spectral visitant greeted them through the narrow aperture; then their terror when they realized that their prior was indeed dead and that this was his ghost that had come to them. Then their gradual reassurement as they realized that the spirit was kindly — that death had in no way changed the man they had trusted. And finally, the establishment of regular communications between death-in-life and life-in-death so that the spirits of the imprisoned men rose out of the narrow confines of their cells and breathed a wider air.
Suddenly Hugh roused from his reveries to find the old bookseller standing over him, looking at him reproachfully and saying: ‘Laddie, you’ll set the house on fire if you go on like this.’
Hugh Paston smiled apologetically. ‘Do you know, I was actually at that priory, walking up and down the passage with Ambrosius and talking to the monks? Do you realize that the fellow came back from the dead every night and talked to them? And do you know what has just occurred to me? That if he could come back to them, would it be possible to persuade him to come back for me? Now if I got hold of a good medium, do you think I could get in touch with Ambrosius?’
The old man stood looking down at him with a very queer expression on his face. ‘I should leave mediums alone, if I were you, Hugh. You’ll get no good from them.’
‘Do you know, I believe Ambrosius would come back to me, I feel so much in sympathy with him. His history is so much like mine. I could do what he failed to do—’
A curious change came over the figure lying propped on its elbow in the bed. The rather boyish, eager, hesitating manner of a man uncertain of himself, who had never found himself, gave place to something entirely different. The air was that of a man accustomed to be obeyed. A man aloof, purposeful, resolute. The keen eyes gazed at Jelkes, but without any look of recognition in them.
‘Pax vobiscum,’ said Jelkes.
‘Et tibi, pax,’ said the man on the bed.
He looked into Jelkes’ eyes for a minute, then a shudder passed through him.
Jelkes wondered how much Hugh remembered of what had happened; how far the two modes of consciousness had made any sort of contact with each other. But there was no glimmering of awareness in Hugh’s rather nondescript grey-green eyes, so he bid his guest goodnight.
The next morning found Hugh perfectly normal, with no recollection whatever of the incidents of the previous night. He was all agog, however, to go down to the museum again and arrange to have the picture of Ambrosius in the illuminated psalter photographed.
Jelkes went round to fetch Mona while Hugh went to fetch the car. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘we’re in for the devil of a time. Ambrosius turned up last night in person.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Mona, startled, as much by his manner as his words.
‘I went into his room last night quite by chance and found him half asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand. He woke up and began talking about Ambrosius — I think he had been dreaming of him — and for about five seconds Hugh became Ambrosius, and, my God, he startled me! He didn’t know me from Adam, and he looked as fierce as a hawk. I addressed him in clerical Latin, and he answered me. And then he swung back to Hugh again, and, thank God, he doesn’t remember a thing about it this morning.’
‘If he has done it once, he will do it again, Uncle Jelkes, especially when he gets to the farm, and what will happen then?’
‘The Lord only knows. If he looks at you like he looked at me, you’ll run a mile. He must have been a terror of a prior.’
Mona went up and got her leather coat and hood, and they walked round to the shop together, where they found Hugh outside on the pavement, tinkering at the car. He straightened up at their approach, and greeted them with his usual diffident air, like a schoolboy greeting his family in public — much more pleased to see them than he dared to admit.
Hugh and Mona drove off in the car and Jelkes watched them go. What was going to be the end of that also? Hugh Paston was a wealthy and well-connected man, still young, and, at the moment, very unbalanced. Mona, the daughter of a Nonconformist minister in a small manufacturing town in the Midlands, was a young woman with a stormy emotional past behind her. She had lived as girl artists breaking out from such homes are apt to live — going from one extreme to the other. Hugh had been educated at Harrow and Balliol, Mona at the local high-school. Hugh was accustomed to a very sophisticated type of femininity. If Mona managed to be clean and tidy, that was about as high as she aspired. Jelkes judged that Hugh’s present mood was a reaction to the shock and disillusionment he had been through, and that when it wore off he would revert to normal and return to his own kind. He would no longer be willing to put up with the discomforts of the bookshop or the limitations of Mona’s society.
At the moment Mona appeared to be taking things impassively and impersonally. Her attitude was that of a woman humouring her employer, falling in with his mood, and at the same time keeping him at arm’s length. But he knew from experience that underneath her impassive exterior, Mona Wilton was a young woman of stormy emotions, and apt to get the bit between her teeth in pursuit of them. Jelkes could not quite see how romance was going to come into it, in view of all the circumstances, but all the same, he wished Hugh would give Mona a list of what he wanted and send her out to attend to it, instead of running round with her like this.
In the meantime Hugh was putting the car along in the way to which it was accustomed, and they were not long before they arrived in the little town and had sought out the photographer. They took the scrubby little man and his gear to the museum, where he did his job and departed; but Hugh, as Mona expected, remained bent over the illuminated pages of the ancient book. She watched his face as he studied them, and it seemed to her that his features changed as she watched him, taking on the same air of a watching hawk that was worn by the sharp features of the tonsured head rising from the black folds of its thrown-back cowl in the four-hundred-year-old picture. The two men were certainly extraordinarily alike, and as the living man stared at the dead one, he grew more and more like him.
It seemed to Mona as if her employer were hypnotizing himself with the picture of the dead monk, and she felt that she had better break the spell before it took altogether too much hold on him.
She leant forward, intending to touch him on the sleeve, but the leg of her chair slipped on the uneven floor, and instead she touched him on the bare skin of his wrist. He looked up suddenly, and met her eyes, and the man who looked up was not Hugh, but Ambrosius, and he had reacted to her touch as a cloistered monk might be expected to react. Mona found herself looking into the eyes of a bird of prey.
She knew well enough that she had Ambrosius and not Hugh Paston to deal with, but she had no means of knowing whether the monkish celibate was infuriated by her touch, or stirred out of all reason by it. She was alone with him in a large empty upper room of the medieval house that served the town as a museum. From the ordinary point of view she was dealing with a madman — a man who imagined himself to be a dead and gone monk of sinister history. She was not even sure if a man of his epoch would understand modern English if she spoke to him — he must be a coeval of Chaucer. Not knowing what to do, she very wisely did nothing. The eminent churchman, whether real or imaginary, was unlikely to resort to any sudden violence or unseemliness.
Fra Ambrosius — it was impossible to think of him as Mr Paston — stared at her with the fixity of a snake at a bird. It was probable that he was just as much surprised as she was by the encounter. The room would appear familiar enough to him — it was a room of his own period, carefully preserved and restored; the book under his hand was one of his own books. The table on which it rested was a refectory table out of the monastery itself. The only thing, beside Mona herself, that was out of the picture was a notice on the wall requesting people not to smoke — a request which could have conveyed nothing to him even if he were able to decipher the modern script.
But he was not paying any attention to notices. He was entirely occupied in attending to what was before him. Mona in the vivid green of the dyed leather was sufficiently incongruous to eyes accustomed to the crude dyes of the Middle Ages. She had an elfin face at the best of times, and in her quaint green hood she looked even to modern eyes, accustomed to freakish fashions, like something strayed from the greenwood — how must she have appeared to the cloistered eyes of the ecclesiastic, accustomed to the soberly coifed heads of the medieval women, and only to those at a distance?