I am not just now in the vein
for being picked off at a long shot." And saying these words,
he spurred up his four-footed better half, and galloped off
as nimbly as if he had had an arrow singing behind him.
"Is this lady Matilda, then, so very terrible a damsel?"
said Sir Ralph to brother Michael.
"By no means," said the friar. "She has certainly a high spirit;
but it is the wing of the eagle, without his beak or his claw.
She is as gentle as magnanimous; but it is the gentleness of the
summer wind, which, however lightly it wave the tuft of the pine,
carries with it the intimation of a power, that, if roused
to its extremity, could make it bend to the dust."
"From the warmth of your panegyric, ghostly father," said the knight,
"I should almost suspect you were in love with the damsel."
"So I am," said the friar, "and I care not who knows it;
but all in the way of honesty, master soldier. I am,
as it were, her spiritual lover; and were she a damsel errant,
I would be her ghostly esquire, her friar militant.
I would buckle me in armour of proof, and the devil might thresh me
black with an iron flail, before I would knock under in her cause.
Though they be not yet one canonically, thanks to your soldiership,
the earl is her liege lord, and she is his liege lady.
I am her father confessor and ghostly director:
I have taken on me to show her the way to the next world;
and how can I do that if I lose sight of her in this? seeing
that this is but the road to the other, and has so many
circumvolutions and ramifications of byeways and beaten paths
(all more thickly set than the true one with finger-posts
and milestones, not one of which tells truth), that a traveller
has need of some one who knows the way, or the odds go hard
against him that he will ever see the face of Saint Peter.
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