“There is a malice,” cried Thurstan, “worse than maleficium! There is a crime worse than witchcraft, and that is—_ingratitude_! Prior, when I was but a young cloister-monk, I found thee a sickly beggar in the fens, and brought thee into this house! It was I that raised thee to thy present eminence and illustration, and now thou wouldst sting me to the heart! Prior, I say, there is worse guilt even than ingratitude, and that is treason to one’s country! Prior, I have long suspected thee of a traitorous correspondence with the Normans, or at least of a traitorous wish to benefit thine own worldly fortune by serving them by the damnable acts of betraying thy country and this house. I have been but a fool, a compassionating, weak-hearted fool not to have laid thee fast in a dungeon long ago. Remember! it is more than a year since I threatened thee within these walls. But I relied upon the Saxon honesty and the conscience and the solemn oaths of this brotherhood, and so thought that thou couldst do no mischief, and mightest soon repent of thy wickedness. And tell me, oh prior, and look me in the face, and throw back thy cowl that all may see _thy_ face; tell me, have I not a hundred times taken pains to show thee what, even in this world and in mere temporalities, hath been the hard fate of the Saxon monks and clergy that betrayed their flocks and submitted to the Normans? Speak, prior; I wait for thine answer.” But the prior could not or would not then speak. “Hola!” cried the abbat. “Is mine authority gone from me? Is the power I hold from Heaven, and from the sainted Confessor,[233] _Rex venerandus_, and by the one-voiced vote of this house, already usurped? Is my call to be disobeyed? Shall this false monk insult me before the brotherhood by refusing to answer me? I appeal to all the monks in chapter assembled.” Several of the monks said that the prior was bound to answer the question which the abbat had put to him; but the chamberlain stood forward and said with an insolent tone, that in a chapter like the present every monk might speak or be silent as he thought best; that the question was irrelevant; and that, moreover, Brother Thurstan (mark ye, he called him _frater_, and not dominus or abbat!) had put the said question in a loud, angry, and unmannerly voice; and was, as he was but too apt to be, in a very fierce and ungodly passion of rage. “Oh chamberlain!” cried the abbat, “thou art in the complot against me and thy country and the patrimony of Saint Etheldreda, and I have long thought it, and....” “And _I_,” said the chamberlain, audaciously interrupting the Lord Abbat while he was speaking, “And I have long thought that thou hast been leading this house into perdition, and that thou art not fit to be the head of it.”