The monastery; The abbot.

84 WAVERLEY NOVELS.
late in waiting upon your reverend lordship. I am grown somewhat fatter
since the field of Pinkie, and my leathern coat slips not on so soon as it
was won't; but the dungeon is ready, and though, as I said, I have been
somewhat late "
Here his intended prisoner walked gravely up to the oficer's nose, to his
great amazement.'You have been indeed somewhat late, bailie," said he, "and I am
greatly obligated to your buff-coat, and to the time you took to put it on.
If the secular arm had arrived some quarter of an hour sooner, I had been
out of the reach of spiritual grace; but as it is, I wish you good even, and
a safe riddance out of your garment of durance, in which you have much
the air of a hog in armour."
Wroth was the bailie at this comparison, and exclaimed in ire- " An it
were not for the presence of the venerable Lord Abbot, thou knave-"
"Nay, an thou wouldst try conclusions," said Christie of the Clinthill,
"I will meet thee at day-break by Saint Mary's Well."
"Hardened wretch!" said Father Eustace, "art thou but this instant
delivered from death, and dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?"
" I will meet with thee ere it be long, thou knave," said the bailie, " and
teach thee thine Oremus."
" I will meet thy cattle in a moonlight night before that day," said he of
the Clinthill.
" I will have thee by the neck one misty morning, thou strong thief,"
answered the secular officer of the Church.
"Thou art thyself as strong a thief as ever rode," retorted Christie;
" and if the worms were once feasting on that fat carcass of thine I might
well hope to have thine office, by favour of these reverend men."
"A cast of their office, and a cast of mine," answered the bailie; "a
cord and a confessor, that is all thou wilt have fiom us."
"Sirs," said the Sub-Prior, observing that his brethren began to take
more interest than was exactly decorous in this wrangling betwixt justice
and iniquity, "I pray you both to depart-Master Bailie, retire with your
halberdiers, and trouble not the man whom we have dismissed.-And thou,
Christie, or whatever be thy name, take thy departure, and remember thou
owest thy life to the Lord Abbot's clemency."
"Nay, as to that," answered Christie, "I judge that I owe it to your
own; but impute it to whom ye list, I owe a life among ye, and there is
au end." And whistling as he went, he left the apartment, seeming as if
he held the life which he had forfeited not worthy further thanks.
"Obstinate even to brutality!" said Father Eustace; "and yet who
knows but some better ore may lie under so rude an exterior?"
" Save a thief from the gallows," said the Sacristan-" you know the rest
of the proverb; and admitting, as may Heaven grant, that our lives and
limbs are safe from this outrageous knave, who shall insure our meal and
our malt, our herds and our flocks?"
" Marry, that will I, my brethren," said an aged monk. " Ah, brethren,
you little know what may be made of a repentant robber. In Abbot Ingilram's days-ay, and I remember them as it were yesterday-the freebooters
were the best welcome men that came to Saint Mary's. Ay, they paid
tithe of every drove that they brought over from the South, and because
they were something lightly come by, I have known them make the tithe a
seventh-that is, if their confessor knew his business-ay, when we saw
from the tower a score of fat bullocks, or a drove of sheep, coming down
the valley, with two or three stout men-at-arms behind them with their
glittering steel caps, and their black-jacks, and their long lances, the good
Lord Abbot Ingilram was wont to say-he was a merry man-there come
the tithes of the spoilers of the Egyptians! Ay, and I have seen the
famous John the Armstrang- a fair man he was and a goodly, the more