The Wanderer and the Way 21
Wicked Pagan Nonsense
This is Chapter 21 of The Wanderer and the Way, now available for purchase.
“That young woman has been very badly frightened,” Mother Rotlenda said. The Mother Superior of that house was a tall, plain, stern woman of middle age, a woman of great practical charity but little natural sympathy. The eye with which she regarded Theodemir seemed to suggest that her general opinion of the spear side of humanity was that they were best kept at arm’s length. The crime of having frightened Agnes, her tone suggested, was to be laid at Theodemir’s door until she was persuaded otherwise.
“She was almost raped, Mother. I had to kill three men to save her from it.”
“And quite proud you are of yourself for that, I see. Yet if you had not led her into it, she would not have been in danger of it in the first place.”
“On the contrary, Mother, if I had not taken her with me, she would have been raped and beaten by my uncle until her spirit was broken and she was made his concubine. And we did not set out alone but in the company of thirty armed men. But they gave their lives, as I must presume, to save us from a marauding band of Moors. And so we had to go on alone.”
“And you tell me that these men were the escort of the ambassador of King Alphonso of Asturias to Charles, King of the Franks?”
“Yes, Mother. I am that ambassador.”
“You are very young for that part.”
“The king had lost faith in priests and captains to carry his message to King Charles without picking quarrels with his courtiers, Mother.”
Mother Rotlenda’s face betrayed a momentary amusement at these words, be she was not deterred from her purpose. “Young women are often carried on such journeys for immoral purposes,” she said.
“The purpose in this case was to preserve her from immoral usage, as I have explained,” Theodemir replied. He was conscious that he was in no position to be ungracious to his hostess but was beginning to find her line of questioning bordering on the impertinent. He perceived, however, that Mother Rotlenda enjoyed the impertinence that her office permitted her to express without fear of rebuke, and therefore he controlled his temper and attempted to smile when he replied.
“From what she has told me, it seems that there were several young women in the same peril on your uncle’s estates, as indeed there are on the estates of many wicked men. Why, therefore, did you choose to rescue her, and her alone, from this fate and to do so while you held a commission of such gravity from your king?”
“I had a vision in which God commended her to my care,” he replied. “I was standing in the Church of Santa Maria in Iria Flavia, with Bishop Quendulf by my side urging some other task upon me, and I heard Agnes singing the hours, heard her as if she had been there beside me, her voice echoing from the stones. And I knew then that the task that the bishop wished me to undertake was not what God wanted, but that I was instead to devote myself to her. But the vision was interrupted, and so the fullness of my responsibility to her was not told to me.”
Mother Rotlenda laughed at this. She almost doubled over in her mirth, for her laughter was not a calculated rhetorical device but the genuine laughter spontaneously born of astonishment.
“Nonsense,” she said when she could contain herself. “Do you think that if God wished to give you a message in a vision, he would allow himself to be interrupted? No, your vision was nothing but a fancy born of your inflamed loins.”
“I know how it sounds, Mother,” he replied. “But is it not so of all visions? We are told that St. Paul was knocked off his horse by God on the road to Damascus and thereby became a convert to the faith. Yet if the same story were told of another man, we would say that he fell off his horse in a drunken stupor and banged his head on a stone.”
“Ah, you are St. Paul now!” Mother Rotlenda exclaimed.
“No, Mother, not at all. I do not pretend that my own vision, that my own vocation, was of a kind with that of a great saint.”
“No,” the nun replied, “Your vision and your vocation was that you were to devote yourself to a pretty girl that you had fallen in love with, who was, inconveniently, married to someone else. Oh, a very common vision, that. A very common vocation!”
“Her husband is dead, Mother,” he said, smarting.
“Well then it is a simple matter. Offer her marriage. It is better to marry than to burn, as your patron reminds us.”
“I have offered her marriage,” he said. “She has refused me.”
“Ah, yes,” Mother Rotlenda said, “she tells me that she is cursed on account of her sin of proposing to lie with one young man while being betrothed to another. Though you will note that the second part of this is really irrelevant to the sin. She should not have proposed to lie with the young man at all, being not married to him. That would be fornication, and a very serious sin. But being the barbarian that she is, she sees only the breaking of the oath, not the indulgence of the lusts of the flesh. But quite as bad as this is her sacrilegious belief in curses. She is Irish, and they are a people who believe in all this wicked pagan nonsense.”
“She is half Welisc, Mother, not Irish,” Theodemir said, thankful to have some matter on which to correct the scolding nun, no matter how trivial a point it might be. “And she reminds me, with some pride, that the Welisc and the Irish were Christians long before your ancestors and mine brought down Rome itself in our pagan fury.”
Mother Rotlenda dismissed this with a wave of her hand, “Irish or Welisc, they are all the same people. Bretons, Galicians, Vascones alike. Lacking stature, superstitions, violent, and given to drink. Pretty, sometimes, among the women. The men are all ill-favored. Half-Christian at best, in my experience. To think that she is cursed by God! Where can she have learned such nonsense? I cannot believe that Mother Wynflaed of Whitby has not beaten such wicked superstition out of her postulants. I shall write a letter to Mother Wynflaed to complain of this laxness.”
Theodemir felt a pang of compassion for Mother Wynflaed of Whitby as he imagined her receiving such a letter and staring at it with some incredulity.
“As to the girl,” Mother Rotlenda continued, “I have scolded her most severely for this nonsense. Have you confessed your sin to a priest, I asked her. Yes, Mother, she said. Did he give your absolution for it, I asked her. He did, Mother, she said. Did he give you a penance to perform, I asked her. He did, Mother, she said. And did you perform it to the letter as he prescribed, I asked her. Yes, Mother, she said. And do you know that this is the method that Christ and his church have laid down for the forgiveness of sins? Yes mother, she says. Then it is very wicked and impious of you to believe that you are cursed by God and that he is punishing you beyond the penance that the priest, who is, in this matter, the full plenipotentiary of Christ himself, has imposed upon you and that you have performed. Yes, Mother. I suppose, Mother, she said, with downcast eyes!”
“And did she believe you, Mother, that she is under no such curse?” he asked, with a quickening of hope.
“Do you believe me that you have had no vision concerning her but only the prompting of your own desire for her, which you have sought to justify by invoking God as the progenitor of your lust?”
“I confess that I find it hard to do so, Mother.”
“Well you have your answer, then. Pagans, the pair of you. Full of lurid imaginings that keep you from the peaceful and reverent conduct of your earthly life.”
“Mother,” he said, with some passion, “nothing would delight me more than to settle down to a peaceful and reverent conduct of daily life if I could do so with her by my side.”
“If you want a wife, young man, I am sure that there are many young women who would serve you just as well.”
“I want no other but her.”
“Well, I very much doubt you are going to get her. Have you considered a life in the church?”
He had considered a life in the church. He had not told Mother Rotlenda of his encounter with the preaching monk in Rome, nor of the religious conviction with which it had inspired him, nor yet of the spiritual disappointments that had attended him on his bitter trek home. It was clear to him in that moment what kind of judgment she would make on them and on his character in general, and he had no wish to hear her express it.
“Is she recovering, Mother?” he asked. “The trials of the road were new to her. I am inured to them and felt them less keenly.”
“She is, besides, a woman,” the nun replied, “and her stride is not as long as yours, and therefore she has taken many more steps than you have on this journey.”
This was not a strict truth, for he and Agnes had fallen into step with each other, just as their breathing and the beating of their hearts had fallen into step as they slept with her curled against his back. But that had meant that his pace had been less than it would have been if he had been walking alone, which had at times been a trial to him. But this seemed a quibble very much not worth voicing.
“She was extraordinarily brave, Mother, and never complained,” he said.
“Of course she was,” Mother Rotlenda replied, “For we women must bear far more suffering than you men. It is for this reason that you must use us tenderly.”
“I have always striven to use her as tenderly as I could,” he said.
“Did you?” she asked. “There are many women who come to our door in need of our care after being used tenderly by men.”
“But she is recovering?” he asked again, not wishing to engage her on the difference between himself and other men.
“The recovery of the body is not in doubt,” Mother Rotlenda said. “She is young and in good general health. The recovery of the mind and of the spirit is another question.”
“Her mind and spirit were much troubled before I ever met her, Mother. She described herself as a woman torn in two. And indeed, I have seen both parts of her, and I have long wondered which part of her should prevail if she is to be made whole again.”
“You claim that you are not responsible for the troubles of her mind and spirit, then?” Mother Rotlenda asked.
“Does she say that I am?” he asked.
“No,” the nun replied darkly. “She speaks nothing but good of you. But this worries me, for I have heard other women say so of the very men who had used them cruelly. They feared to say anything against them, every spirit of resistance having been beaten out of them.”
“If I were such a man, Mother,” he asked, “would I have brought her to you and surrendered her to your care?”
“Perhaps not,” Mother Rotlenda said, “But if you would have me believe you, let me put you to the test.”
“I will endure your test for her sake,” he replied.
“You are about the business of your king, yes?” she asked him.
“I am, Mother. I am sent to Aachen with a plea to King Charles on behalf of King Alphonso.”
“Go, then,” she said. “You are quite well enough to travel. Go about your business and leave her here with us. She has much healing to do, of body, mind, and spirit, and we can nurse her through all of this. Do this, and I will believe that you have never meant ill towards her nor treated her with less than kindness.”
“This is a very cruel test, Mother,” he said. “To prove my love and care for her, I must abandon her?”
“Abandon? Hardly! You did well in choosing to bring her here, the best home you could possibly have found for her.”
“I have my vocation to consider, Mother. I cannot abandon the charge that God has given me.”
“Not that nonsense again!” the nun protested. “Well, if I cannot convince you that you are mistaken, here, I will give you the second half of your vision. She was in a place of danger and of sin. You have brought her, through many perils and privations, to a place of safety and of grace. There, that was the meaning of your vocation. You have completed your part of it. You have done what God asked of you. Go on your way now and leave the rest of it to God and to me.”
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