Avemaria rang at sunset, but they did not hear it, and at the end the holy man within crept nearer and raised himself.

“I must see your face, brother,” he said.  “It may be then that I shall know the message that your soul bears to the King.”

Master Richard came out of his heavenly swoon then, and saw the face close to his own, and what he said of it to me I dare not tell you, but he bitterly reproached himself that he had ever doubted whether this were a man of God or no.

As he turned his own face this way and that, that the failing light might fall upon it, he said that beneath him in the little street there was a crowd assembled, all silent and watching the heavenly colloquy.

When he looked again, questioning, at the holy old man, he saw that the other’s face was puckered with thought and that his lips pouted through the long-falling hair.  Then it disappeared, and a grunting voice came out of the dark, but the sound of it was as if the old man wept.

“I do not know the message, brother.  Our Lord has not shewed it to me, but He has shewed me this—­that soon you will not need to wear His wounds.  That I have to say. Oremus pro invicem.” ["Let us pray for one another.”]

* * * * *

The crowd pressed close upon Master Richard as he came down from the window, and, going in the midst of them in silence, he came to saint Peter’s gate where the black monks dwell, and was admitted by the porter.

How Master Richard saw the King in Westminster Hall:  and of the Mass at Saint Edward’s Altar

Revelabit condensa:  et in templo ejus omnes dicent gloriam.

He will discover the thick woods:  and in His temple all shall speak His glory.—­Ps. xxviii. 9.

IV

Master Richard did not tell me a great deal of his welcome in the monastery:  I think that he was hardly treated and flouted, for the professed monks like not solitaries except those that be established in reputation; they call them self-willed and lawless and pretending to a sanctity that is none of theirs.  Such as be under obedience think that virtue the highest of all and essential to the way of perfection.  And I think, perhaps, they were encouraged in this by what had been said of themselves by our holy lord ten years before, for he was ever a favourer of monks. [This may have been Eugenius IV., called Gloriosus.  If so, it would fix the date of Richard at about 1444.] But Master Richard did not blame them, so I will not, but I know that he was given no cell to be private in, but was sent to mix with the other guests in the common guest-house.  I know not what happened there, but I think there was an uproar; there was a wound upon his head, the first wound that he received in the house of his friends, that I saw on him a little later, and he told me he had had it on his first coming to London.  It was such a wound as a flung bone or billet of wood might make.  He had now the caput vulneratum, as well as the cor vulneratum [wounded head ... wounded heart.] of the true lover of Jesus Christ.