Chapter III

A few months afterwards, when the savour of the jest had become somewhat stale in the nostrils of the town, it happened that old Master Matthew, looking out of an upper chamber at the backside of the house early one morning, spied a certain maid washing out her smocks in a little green and private garden, and his mind was so perturbed at the view of her pretty cheeks, fair white arms and full bosom, that his evil old frame began to shake with desire from head to foot. He spied upon her secretly for some days, and then, unable to contain any longer, he went incontinently to her father (who was a poor man of the town) and obtained the girl in marriage, offering largely for her and buying her with money as though she had been a cow or a sheep instead of a Christian woman.

When the news got about the town that old Master Matthew was minded to marry a young wench, great was the talk thereof. Some asked what an old wretch, who had enough to do with cordials and powders to keep the flicker of life in his withered carcass, could want with a wife. Others said that there was not heat enough in his heart to warm his own body in bed of a winter’s night, and that he had better be thinking of burying instead of marrying; others that he had been better minded to patch up his old soul for the next world than to meddle with womankind, with much more that was true of the same sort. Even his infamous companions in sin, the Apostles (or the Apostates as they might have been more rightly called), came and reasoned with him against his intention, saying that a young wife would be wanton, fickle, and wasteful, spending and squandering on rich garments for her back and rare dainties for her belly, and wasting in a few months what he had hardly gotten in so many years, and that she would make his life a Hell or at least a Purgatory so as to bundle him as quickly as might be into his grave, that she might enjoy his goods and fortune with a lusty young husband of her own choosing after his decease. But old men are violent and headstrong in their fancies, and Master Matthew in his sudden heat seemed to love the wench even more than his gold and silver, so that all their persuasions were of no effect.

On the bridal day, therefore, away he crept to Church in a shabby green jerkin, which he had had from Nick the Piper in pawn, with a favour in his bosom and a stick in his hand. Holy Virgin, but a pretty couple the jolly young Margot and he made, she fresh and fair as a mead in May when it is all be-starred with flowers, he like a figure of Old Time on a monument. He tottered along clinging to her arm like a brat to his mother’s gown, stumbling and coughing and wheezing and spitting as though he would shatter his old frame to pieces. She looked straight before her, and the tears stood in her bonny blue eyes.

So they came to the threshold of the Church, and lo, just as the wretched old man put forth his quivering foot to touch consecrated ground, the Lord showed full mightily that He does not sleep or slumber, for He touched the stone whereon William had carved the carrying hence of Master Matthew by Devils with His finger and it fell suddenly from its place and smote the usurer on his bald and shining skull, crushing him to the ground. When they ran to him and raised him up, he was dead. Truly, when William carved that stone, God inspired him more than he thought, so that his chisel carved not only symbols but also prophecies.

When the news of this event became known in the town, folk said that it was a judgment of God upon Master Matthew, because he had practised the sin of usury, and they began to ask how long the remaining eleven Apostles would be suffered to live in their wickedness. Many thought that each in his turn would be slain in precisely the same manner, each by his own carven stone as he went through the great West porch to offer hypocrisy at the altar of the Most High. When men met any of them walking abroad, they would stand and jeer at them with cunning words.

‘Nay, I know not, Master Luke,’ would Nick the Piper say, ‘but if I were one of you fellows, who live in the corner of the Market, I would never go into the Church unless it were by the windows.’

‘Is Master Mark alive yet?’ would ask the Fletcher. ‘I wot he had been killed by a shrewd blow on the pate days ago.’

‘Hast thou heard?’ quoth Sim. ‘An angel sat watching all last Holy Day on the great porch. I marvel, Master Mark, that thou and thy fellows come not to Church. Surely thou hast been instructed and knowest what is fit for a Christian man?’

‘Has Master Philip’s stone fallen from the Church porch yet?’ asked the Arrowsmith. ‘Methinks it seemed perilously loosened last time I saw it.’

Robert the Carpenter, meeting three of the Apostles in the Market Place, stopped them and roundly declared in the hearing of all that he would build eleven good oak coffins for such as might be in need of them as cheaply as might be, were they only bespoken at once and in that quantity.

By reason of so many quips and dry bobs the Apostles were in a few weeks brought to a misery and humiliation befitting their state of sin. They scarcely dared poke their noses from their lattices into the street but folk would begin to cry out upon them and to wonder loudly that they were still alive. None of them dared go to Church; Master Mark, taking his courage in both hands, set out one Holy Day, but when he came in sight of the church porch, and caught sight of the gap in the upper projection thereof, whence Master Matthew’s stone had fallen, his heart failed him and he turned back, and that although many good men standing within the porch, encouraged him to enter, calling to him that it were better to be damned as a usurer than as a heretic. This saying, getting passed from mouth to mouth, gave new matter to the people, who now stood about in their idle moments under the Apostles’ houses in the corner of the Market Place, and cried to each other that the Abbot had written a letter to the Archdeacon of the Diocese that there were eleven men in the town, who came to none of the Divine Services, and were esteemed either heretics or Jews, and that the Archdeacon had sent word in reply that he would shortly come with his clerks and purge the town of heresy as though with a raging fire, and further inquiring whether there were any known and notorious practisers of usury in the Borough.

At which words the eleven Apostles, who stood each one listening beside his lattice, quaked with dread and crept away silently to the back of the house, being too afeared to listen to any more of such talk.