Lord Montagu's Page. G. P. R. James

and left the room, saying he must go and see his cousin, who, "as they all knew, lived hard by;" and the rest of the troopers set to serious work first upon some sour wine, and then upon some of that good or bad spirit which has crowned the name of Nantes with a certain sort of immortality. Poor Pierrot! it was a sore temptation for him, especially when his young master was gone to carry some refreshment to the page; but he resisted during the very short period of Edward's absence, and Master Ned's eye was a strong corroborative of resolution after his return. The monks tasted, at first shyly, and then more boldly; and Edward drew from them the important fact that there were very few brethren in the convent, some of them being absent on quête, some on leave. Moreover the abbey, he said, had never been very full, since the abbacy—as was so common in France—had been bestowed upon a well-known painter of Paris, a layman.

      There was some deep drinking that night; but still Pierrot, though he could have emptied the most capacious flagon there at an easy draught, maintained the combat against habit gloriously, till at length, just as the leader of the party returned, at the end of two hours, the good Rochellois, finding himself weak with the labor of resistance, retired to rest, after having received a hint from his master, which happily he was in a state to profit by—happily indeed for him. "The primrose path to the everlasting bonfire" men have strewed in their imaginations with all sorts of sweet things; but, take my word for it, it is paved by Example—that most slippery and dangerous of all asphalts. Luckily for him, the troopers did not care a fig whether he drank or not, and thus all he had to resist was the sight of outstretched arms and full cups; but he had something better on the other side: he had the warning of rolling eyes, and hiccoughing throats, and maudlin faces, and embarrassed tongues, which he had never seen before when he was himself sober enough to appreciate them fully. "Well, drunkenness," he thought, as he left the room, "is a very beastly thing, it is true."

      The monks withdrew nearly at the same time; and I am well pleased to say that, although they had shown during that night, amongst the pies and the pottles, no narrow objection to either those carnal or those spiritual things which some castes of Hindoos call the "creature comforts of life," not one of them had an uneven step or an unsteady head. Probably they drank seldom; for those who drink often deprive themselves of the power of drinking at all—soberly.

      The coach-driver was soon under the table; and the troopers, though most of them, when the last drop provided was emptied from the flask, could make their way by diagonals to the dormitory assigned to them, were in a state which promised no early rising on the following day; and Edward and his friendly soldier parted about eleven o'clock, the latter merely saying, "We shall have a heavy storm to-night. The clouds are rolling up like distant mountains. But all the better for your purpose. Remember three!"

      The consequences! Good God! How frightful a thing it is to consider what—under an overruling hand and will omnipotent—may be the consequences of the smallest deed we do. The consequences immediate, proximate, future! How many lives, what an amount of misery, how much damnation, may depend upon a light word, an idle jest, a sportive trick!

      Should such a consideration forbid us to act and do, to resolve and to perform? Far from it. Man is an active being, and his life is deeds. Each moment must have its thought or its action, or the whole is sleep; but the consideration of that strange thing, CONSEQUENCE—that overruling of our deeds to ends that we see not—should teach us so to frame thought, word, and act, that, be the consequences what they may, we may be able at the great end of all to say, boldly, "I did it in an honest heart." God himself is responsible for the result if man acts with purity of intent.

      Not one man in that small room who had that night "sinned as it were with a cart-rope" ever saw the dawning of the morning; and it was a heavy thought to Edward Langdale for many a year after, "What share had I in this?" For himself, he took the little lamp which had been left for him, and sought the cell where his pallet lay. But he had no thought of sleep. As he went along the corridor, with the rays just gleaming upon the fretted stone-work, something like a flash reddened the dim panes of the painted windows, and some seconds afterward a distant roar was heard, as if of a heavy sea rolling along an extended shore. "It will thunder," he said to himself; but he thought of it no more; and, opening the door of the cell, on the little table beneath the window appeared the missal and the skull and cross-bones—the memento mori of the cloister.