"No, brother, think no more of it," said Richard.
And Evroult promised not to do so, if he could help it.
"There be caves in the African deserts, of which I have heard, where fiends do haunt, and terrify travellers even to death. One there was which was, to look upon, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, but they who passed a night there--and it was the only resting-place in the desert for many weary miles--went mad, frightened out of their senses by some awful vision which blasted those who gazed."
"But ought Christian men to fear such things?"
"No; neither ought they without a call to endanger themselves: 'He shall give His Angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways.' Now our way does not lie through these dark abodes."
But we must return to Wallingford Castle again, and the active life of the fighting world of King Stephen's days. Suffice it for the present to say, that the lives of the hermit and his two pupils, for such they were, continued to roll on uneventfully for many months--indeed, until the occurrence of totally unexpected events, which we shall narrate in due course.
An excessive rainfall during the late summer of this year destroyed the hopes of the harvest,--such hopes as there were, for tillage had been abandoned, save where the protection of some powerful baron gave a fair probability of gathering in the crops. In consequence a dreadful famine succeeded during the winter, aggravated by the intense cold, for a frost set in at the beginning of December and lasted without intermission till February, so that the Thames was again frozen, and the ordinary passage of man and horse was on the ice of the river.
The poor people, says the author of _The Acts of King Stephen_, died in heaps, and so escaped the miseries of this sinful world,--a phrase of more meaning then, in people's ears, than it is now, when life is doubtless better worth living than it could have been then, in King Stephen's days, when horrible and unexampled atrocities disgraced the nation daily, and the misery of the poor was caused by the cruel tyranny of the rich and powerful.
All this time our young friend Osric continued to be the favourite squire of Brian Fitz-Count, and, we grieve to say, became habituated to crime and violence. He no longer shuddered as of yore at the atrocities committed in the dungeons of the castle, or in the constant raids: the conscience soon became blunted, and he felt an ever-increasing delight in strife and bloodshed, the joy of the combat, and in deeds of valour.