the little grating in the cloistered quadrangle, where it had seen a
Cistercian brother place the morning dole. It had daily welcomed the
growth of this vast and picturesque excrescence of the times; it had
smiled every morning upon this formidable yet quaint incrustation
of power and custom, ignoring, as Oldenhurst itself had ignored, the
generations who possessed it, the men who built it, the men who carried
it with fire and sword, the men who had lied and cringed for it, the
King who had given it to a favorite, the few brave hearts who had died
for it in exile, and the one or two who had bought and paid for it. For
Oldenhurst had absorbed all these and more until it had become a story
of the past, incarnate in stone, greenwood, and flower; it had even
drained the life-blood from adjacent hamlets, repaying them with tumuli
growths like its own, in the shape of purposeless lodges, quaintly
incompetent hospitals and schools, and churches where the inestimable
blessing and knowledge of its gospel were taught and fostered. Nor had
it dealt more kindly with the gentry within its walls, sending some to
the scaffold, pillorying others in infamous office, reducing a few to
poverty, and halting its later guests with gout and paralysis. It had
given them in exchange the dubious immortality of a portrait gallery,
from which they stared with stony and equal resignation; it had
preserved their useless armor and accoutrements; it had set up their
marble effigies in churches or laid them in cross-legged attitudes to
trip up the unwary, until in death, as in life, they got between the
congregation and the Truth that was taught there. It had allowed an
Oldenhurst crusader, with a broken nose like a pugilist, on the strength
of his having been twice to the Holy Land, to hide the beautifully
illuminated Word from the lowlier worshipper on the humbler benches; it
had sent an iconoclastic Bishop of the Reformation to a nearer minster
to ostentatiously occupy the place of the consecrated image he had
overthrown. Small wonder that crowding the Oldenhurst retainers