“This. That it is in the power of the Holy Father,--and that power he would doubtless allow you, as his dear son and most faithful servant, to employ for yourself, without sending to Rome, which might cause painful delays--to--” It might seem strange that William, Taillebois, Guader, Warrenne, short-spoken, hard-headed, hard-swearing warriors, could allow, complacently, a smooth churchman to dawdle on like this, counting his periods on his fingers, and seemingly never coming to the point. But they knew well, that the churchman was a far cunninger, as well as a more learned, man than themselves. They knew well that they could not hurry him, and that they need not; that he would make his point at last, hunting it out step by step, and letting them see how he got thither, like a cunning hound. They knew that if he spoke, he had thought long and craftily, till he had made up his mind; and that, therefore, he would very probably make up their minds likewise. It was--as usual in that age--the conquest, not of a heavenly spirit, though it boasted itself such, but of a cultivated mind over brute flesh. They might have said all this aloud, and yet the churchman would have gone on, as he did, where he left off, with unaltered blandness of tone. “To convert to other uses the goods of the Church,--to convert them to profane uses would, I need not say, be a sacrilege as horrible to Heaven as impossible to so pious a monarch--” Ivo Taillebois winced. He had just stolen a manor from the monks of Crowland, and meant to keep it. “Church lands belonging to abbeys or sees, whose abbots or bishops are contumaciously disobedient to the Holy See, or to their lawful monarch, he being in the communion of the Church and at peace with the said Holy See. If, therefore,--to come to that point at which my incapacity, through the devious windings of my own simplicity, has been tending, but with halting steps, from the moment that your Majesty deigned to hear--” “Put in the spur, man!” said Ivo, tired at last, “and run the deer to soil.” “Hurry no man’s cattle, especially thine own,” answered the churchman, with so shrewd a wink, and so cheery a voice, that Ivo, when he recovered from his surprise, cried,-- “Why, thou art a good huntsman thyself, I believe now.” “All things to all men, if by any means--But to return. If your Majesty should think fit to proclaim to the recalcitrants of Ely, that unless they submit themselves to your Royal Grace--and to that, of course, of His Holiness, our Father--within a certain day, you will convert to other uses--premising, to avoid scandal, that those uses shall be for the benefit of Holy Church--all lands and manors of theirs lying without the precincts of the Isle of Ely,--those lands being, as is known, large, and of great value,--Quid plura? Why burden your exalted intellect by detailing to you consequences which it has, long ere now, foreseen.”