But when Girolamo saw that the Saxon people were beginning to avoid him as one that had the pest, and that the monks of Ely were pointing at him with the finger, and that silent tongues and angry eyes, with crossings and spittings on the ground and coarse objurgations, met him wherever he went, he grew incensed and spoke freely with the Lord of Brunn about it. “Girolamo, my friend and best coadjutor,” said the Lord of Brunn, “think nothing of it! This is but the talk of ignorance or malice. Beshrew me an I do not think that the Normans have gotten some traitor to raise this babel and thereby injure us. But the Lord Abbat Thurstan, who hath shrieved and assoiled thee so often, will now answer for the purity of thy faith as for his own, and will silence these murmurers.” But it was not so: Hereward made too large an account not of the good will, but of the power of Thurstan, not knowing all that passed in the chapters of the house, nor so much as suspecting half of the cabals that were framing in secret meetings and in close discussions by night in the dormitories. No sooner had the Lord Abbat begun to reprehend such as spoke evil of the Salernitan, than the factious and false parts of the monks declared among themselves that, Christian prelate as he was, he had linked himself with a sorcerer; and in charges they had already prepared, and with great privacy written down upon parchment, they inserted this—that Abbat Thurstan, unmindful of the duties of his holy office, and in contempt of the remonstrances of the prior, the chamberlain, and others, the majority of the house Ely, had made himself the friend and defensor of the said Girolamo of Salerno, that dark mysterious man who had notoriously sold himself to the arch-fiend, who had gone into the depths and iniquities of necromancy beyond all precedent, and who had, by his truly diabolical art, raised devils, trafficked with witches, and brought hell-fires upon earth.