Silvius kept watch there, striding to and fro, blowing on his nails, and beating his arms against his body like a great black bird. He envied his Abbot the rights of an unbridled tongue, for Silvius would have been a libertine that night in the matter of godly invective and abuse. He could hear voices, the dull, half-suppressed voices of people who spoke earnestly, and yet with passion. Once he thought that something stirred in the hedge near him, for he was startled, and stood still to listen. A prowling fox might have taken fright, or a bird fluttered from its roosting place. Meanwhile on the threshold of that dark cell stood Reginald the Abbot, shocked, unable to retain much store of anger. A shadowy something knelt there close to him. The very heart of Denise seemed under his feet. “Lord, let me go,” was all that she could ask. And again— “Lord, let me go, away yonder, into the dark.” Reginald looked down at her from the serene height of his abbacy. “Daughter,” he said at last, with no sententiousness, “go, and God pity you. It is better that this should end. Yet, wait till the day comes. You would lose your way on a night such as this.” “I will wait, lord,” she answered, utterly humble because of his kindness, and her own poignant shame. When Abbot Reginald returned through the gate in the thorn hedge, Dom Silvius’s voice hissed at him out of the darkness, for the cold had sharpened a venomous tongue. “The jade, has she confessed?” Reginald was possessed by a sudden unchristian lust to smite Dom Silvius across the mouth. “My son,” he said very quietly, “take care how you cast stones.” And he was more cold to Silvius on the homeward way than the breath of the winter wind. But Silvius, that dreamer of dreams, that most mundane monk, who thought more of the jewels crusting a reliquary than the Cross of Christ, did a vile and a mean thing that night. Denise, poor child, was to slip away, so Reginald said, at dawn; but Reginald did not tell Dom Silvius that he had left money on the stones whereon she knelt. And Silvius, still venomous because he deemed himself befooled, took pains to betray Denise’s secret going. And the method of the betrayal was the meanest trick of all. When he had seen Abbot Reginald safe within the Abbey, he called two servants and went out with a basket of victuals to visit certain of the sick poor. That the hour was a strange one for such charity counted for nothing with Silvius whose head was full of the ferment of his spite. Many of the folk had gone to their beds, but some few he found still lingering about the covered embers on the hearth. It was counted for holiness to Silvius that he should come on God’s errand at such an hour. “Feed my sheep,” the Lord had said. And Silvius fed certain of them that night with hypocritical humilities, shaking his head sadly, and dropping a few treacherous words like crumbs into mouths that hungered. CHAPTER XXII