Great Britain -- History -- Medieval period, 1066-1485 -- Juvenile fiction; Guilds -- Juvenile fiction; Middle Ages -- Juvenile fiction
“Howel's his father,” said Roger. “He's quite good to him--unless he's
drunk. Then he pounds him. He hates to have Gwillym make images; he
thinks it's witch-craft. Gwillym made an image of him once and the leg
broke off, and that very same day Howel's donkey kicked him and made him
lame for a week.”
“There's ower mony gowks in the land for a' the mills to grind,” said
David, and that was all they could get out of him. They knew he was
interested or he would not have been so Scotch. David could speak very
good English, and did as a rule, but with Eleanor and Roger he often
returned to the speech of his boyhood because they liked it so much.
They liked David exceedingly. He had seen more interesting things than
any one else they knew. He showed Roger how to make a fish-pond, and he
told Eleanor how the Saracen city in her tapestry ought to look. He
had himself been a slave among the infidels, and the children heard
his adventures with awe and delight. Eleanor loved the story of the
bath-pavilion like a tiny palace, built by the emir for the lady Halima,
and the turning of the course of a river to fill her baths and her
fountains, and water her gardens. Roger's hero was the young English
merchant who had escaped by swimming, under his master's very nose. If
one could have such exciting experiences it seemed almost worth while to
be a captive of the Moslems. But when Roger said so, David smiled a dry
smile and said nothing.
But it was of King Solomon that he spoke most, and he seemed to have the
sayings of the wise king all by heart. A Hebrew physician whom he had
once known used, he said, to write one of Solomon's proverbs on the lid
of every box of salve he sent out.
“You follow his wisdom, Master Roger,” David said one day, “and you'll
see how to build ye a house or a kingdom. 'Envy thou not the oppressor
and choose none of his ways,' he says. 'Withhold not good from them to
whom it is due, when it is in the power of man to do it,' he says. 'God
shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it
be good or whether it be evil.'
“I tell ye,” David added, glancing from the trim gray wall of the
lychgate up to the castle on the hill, “every day's judgment day wi' a
builder--or the head of a house.”
Thus the stonemason was touched more deeply perhaps than he would
have owned, by the likening of his face to that of Solomon in the clay
figures of little Gwillym ap Howel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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