“There was once a king who had the open eyes, and he looked into heaven and hell.  He saw there two friends whom he had known in the flesh; the one was a hermit, and the other another king.  The hermit was in hell, and the king in heaven.  When he asked the reason of this, one told him that the hermit was in hell because of his consorting with the king, and the king in heaven because of his consorting with the hermit.”

I understood him, but I said nothing.

“Pray for me then, Sir John,” said Master Richard.

Then we kissed one another, and he was gone without another word along the white road.

How Master Richard fared:  how he heard Mass in Saint Pancras’ Church:  how he came to Westminster:  and of his colloquy with the Ankret

Abyssus abyssum invocat:  in voce cataractarum tuarum.

Deep calleth on deep:  at the noise of Thy flood-gates.—­Ps. xli. 8.

III

The tale of his journey and of his coming to London he told me when I saw him again at the end.  He spoke to me for over an hour, and I think that I have remembered near every word, but I cannot write down the laughter and the tears that were in his voice as he told me.

As he went along the road beneath the trees and the stars, carrying his kirtle, with his books and other things in his burse, and his hat on his shoulders, he was both happy and sorry.

There are two kinds of happiness for mortal men:  there is that which is carnal and imperfect and hangs on circumstances and the health of the body and such like things; and there is that which is spiritual and perfect, which hangs on nothing else than the doing of the will of God Almighty so far as it is known, so that a man may have both at once, or either without the other.  Master Richard had the one without the other.

At first he could not bear to think of what he had left behind him—­his little quiet house and meadow and the stream where he washed, and the beasts and men that loved him; and he threw himself upon the other happiness for strength.  By the time that he had arrived at the ford he was so much penetrated by this better joy that he was able to look back, and tell himself, as he had told me, that he bore with him always wherever he went all that he had left behind him.  It was ever his doctrine that we lose nothing of what is good and sweet in the past, and that we suck out of all things a kind of essence that abides with us always, and that every soul that loves is a treasure-house of all that she has ever loved.  It is only the souls that do not love that go empty in this world and in saecula saeculorum.  He thought much of this on his road, and by the time that he had come so far that he thought it best to sleep by the wayside, the warmth had come back that had left him for four days.