Sir Nigel Chapter 2 - How the Devil Came to Waverley

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:23)
CHAPTER II. HOW THE DEVIL CAME TO WAVERLEY.
The day was the first of May, which was the festival of the blessed apostles Philip and James. The year was the 1349th from man's salvation. From Tiers to Sext, and then again from Sext to Nones, Abbot John of the House of Waverley had been seated in his study while he conducted the many high duties of his office. All around, for many a mile on every side, stretched the fertile and flourishing estate of which he was the master.
In the centre lay the broad Abbey buildings, with church and cloisters, hospitium, chapter house and freighter house, all buzzing with a busy life.
Through the open window came the low hum of the voices of the brethren, as they walked in pious converse in the ambulatory below.
From across the cloister there rolled the distant rise and fall of a Gregorian chant, where the presenter was hard at work upon the choir, while down in the chapter house sounded the strident voice of Brother Peter, expounding the rule of St. Bernard to the novices.
Abbot John rose to stretch his cramped limbs. He looked out at the green sward of the cloister, and at the graceful line of open Gothic arches which skirted a covered walk for the brethren within.
Two and two in their black and white garb, with slow step and heads inclined, they paced round and round.
Several of the more studious had brought their illuminating work from the scriptorium, and sat in the warm sunshine with their little platters of pigments and packets of gold leaf before them, their shoulders rounded, and their faces sunk low over the white sheets of vellum. There too was the copper worker, with his bourrin and graver. Learning and art were not traditions within the Cistercians, as with the parent order of the Benedictines, and yet the Library of Waverley was well filled both with precious books and with pious students.
But the true glory of the Cistercian lay in his outdoor work. And so ever and anon there passed through the cloister some sun-burned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water meadows speckled with the heavy fleeced sheep, the acres of corn land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards of the southern slope of Crookesbury Hill, the rows of hankley fish-ponds, the Frenchman marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotts all circled the great abbey round with the visible labours of the order.
The abbot's full and florid face shone with a quiet content as he looked out at his huge but well-ordered household.
Like every head of a prosperous abbey, Abbot John, the fourth of the name, was a man of various accomplishments. Through his own chosen instruments he had to minister a great estate and to keep order and decorum among a large body of men living a celibate life. He was a rigid disciplinarian towards all beneath him, a supple diplomatist to all above. He held high debate with neighboring abbots and lords, with bishops, with papal legates, and even, on occasion, with the king's majesty himself. Many were the subjects with which he must be conversant. Questions of doctrine, questions of building, points of forestry, of agriculture, of drainage, of feudal law, all came to the abbot for settlement. He held the scales of justice in all the Abbey boneyar, which stretched over many a mile of Hampshire and of Surrey. To the monks his displeasure might mean fasting, exile to some sterner community, or even imprisonment in chains.
Over the layman he could also hold any punishment save only corporeal death, instead of which he had in hand the far more dreadful weapon of spiritual excommunication. Such were the powers of the abbot, and it is no wonder that there were masterful lines in the ruddy features of Abbot John, or that the brethren, glancing up, should put on an even meager carriage and more demure expression as they saw the watchful face in the window above them.
A knock at the door of his studio recalled the abbot to his immediate duties, and he returned to his desk. Already he had spoken with his cellar and brier, almoner, chaplain, and lector. But now, in the tall and gaunt monk who obeyed his summons to enter, he recognized the most important, and also the most importunate, of his agents, brother Samuel the Sacrist, whose office, corresponding to that of the layman's bailiff, placed the material interests of the monastery and its dealings with the outer world entirely under his control, subject only to the check of the abbot.
Brother Samuel was a gnarled and stringy old monk, whose stern and sharp-featured face reflected no light from above, but only that sordid workaday world towards which it was forever turned. A huge book of accounts was tucked under one of his arms, when a great bunch of keys hung from the other hand, a badge of his office, and also, on occasion of impatience, a weapon of offence, as many a scoured head among rustics and laybrothers could testify.