Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The White Company Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musicalclangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbingrising and falling upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts-as common asthe chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet the fishers and the peasants raised theirheads and looked questions at each other, for the angelus had already gone and vespers was still faroff. Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were neither short nor long?All round the Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long green-paved avenues of gnarledoaks and of lichened beeches the white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yardand the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from thedistant iron-works of Sowley and the outlying grange of St. Leonard's, they had all turned their stepshomewards. It had been no sudden call. A swift messenger had the night before sped round to theoutlying dependencies of the Abbey, and had left the summons for every monk to be back in thecloisters by the third hour after noontide. So urgent a message had not been issued within thememory of old lay-brother Athanasius, who had cleaned the Abbey knocker since the year after theBattle of Bannockburn.