By Stelfax’s directions the luckless gentleman was accommodated with an easy-chair near the fire, and a glass of strong water being administered to him by the host, he speedily began to revive.
Meantime, the company had resumed their seats, though the questionable individuals we have described were evidently ill at ease, and Captain Goldspur, who puffed away furiously at his pipe, looked askance at Stelfax from beneath his heavy brows. But if he or his companions meditated any attack upon the Roundhead leader, the formidable appearance of the latter served to restrain them. Neither was Stelfax unsupported. His three men had entered the room and seated themselves at the further end of the benches, ready to obey their captain’s slightest behest.
However conversation might have gone on before the arrival of the Ironsides, it flagged now—the only person who maintained his character for loquacity being Cisbury Oldfirle. He talked on with his wonted volubility. Undismayed by Stelfax’s stern looks, he entered into conversation with him, and gave him many particulars concerning the ancient family of Poynings, to which the other listened with some degree of attention, and then inquired whether the worshipful captain had heard the legend of the Devil’s Dyke, and finding—as might be expected—that he had not, volunteered to relate it to him—premising that he could not entirely vouch for its authenticity. Having been supplied by the assiduous host with a bottle of admirably brewed sack, Stelfax felt disposed to accord the talkative pedagogue his attention, and listened with more patience than might have been expected to the weird, and somewhat extravagant, legend which will be found narrated—almost in Master Oldfirle’s own language—in the next chapter.
IV
THE LEGEND OF THE DEVIL’S DYKE AS RELATED BY MASTER CISBURY OLDFIRLE, SCHOOLMASTER, OF POYNINGS
THE wondrous event I am about to detail happened in the time of the good Saint Cuthman of Steyning, in this county—a holy man, who from his extraordinary piety and austerity was believed to be endowed with supernatural power. Many miracles are attributed to him, some of which occurred long before his canonization. While yet a boy, and employed in tending his father’s sheep on the downs, in order to pursue his devotional exercises undisturbed, he was wont to trace a large circle round the flock with his crook, beyond which none of them could stray, neither could any enemy approach them. Moreover, the good saint could punish the scoffer, as well as bless and sustain the lowly and the well-doer. Derided by certain blasphemous haymakers for carrying his palsied mother in a barrow—no better means of conveyance being at hand at the time—he brought down a heavy shower upon their heads, rendering their labour of no account; and thenceforward, whenever grass was cut and dried within that meadow, rain would fall upon it, and turn it to litter. Such was holy Cuthman—a man, you will perceive, whom it was necessary to treat with the respect due to his exalted virtues.
At a later period of the saint’s life, when his aged mother had gone from him, when he had built a wooden church with his own hands at Steyning—wherein, in the fulness of time, he was interred—and when his reputation for sanctity and austerity had greatly increased, causing him to be equally reverenced and dreaded—dreaded, I mean, by evil-doers, to whom he was especially obnoxious—the holy man walked forth one afternoon, in early autumn, wholly unattended, across the downs; his purpose being to visit a recluse, named Sister Ursula, who dwelt in a solitary cell on the summit of a hill adjoining Poynings, and whom he had been told was sick, and desirous of being shriven by him. Now Saint Cuthman had his staff in his hand, without which he never journeyed abroad, and he walked on until he reached the eminence for which he was bound. On the brow of this hill in former times the heathen invaders of the land had made a camp, vestiges of which may still be discerned. But it was not with these memorials of a bygone and benighted people that Saint Cuthman concerned himself. If he thought about the framers of those mighty earthworks at all, it was with thanksgiving that they had been swept away, and had given place to a generation to whom the purer and brighter light of the Gospel was vouchsafed.