During the last weeks
before Gilbert's departure, when he was hourly gaining strength and
could no longer bear to be shut up within the walls of the convent, he
had made a companion of Dunstan, walking and riding with him, for the
fellow could ride, and sometimes entering into long arguments with him
about matters of belief and conscience and honour, and the two had
become attached to each other by their unlikeness; not precisely as
friends and equals, yet by no means as master and man; it was rather
the sort of relation which often existed between knight and squire,
though the two were of the same age, and though Gilbert had no
immediate prospect of winning knightly spurs.
It would have been hard, however, to admit that Dunstan could ever
develop into a knight himself. There were strange little blanks in his
ideas of chivalry, curious, unfeeling spots in his moral organization,
which indicated another race, another inheritance of thought, the
traditions of a world older and less simple than the one in which
Gilbert had been brought up.
For Gilbert was the type of noble youth in the days when the light of
chivalry had dawned upon an age of violence, but was not yet fully
risen. God, honour, woman--these made up the simple trinity of a
knight's belief and reverence, from the moment when the Church began to
make an order of fighting men, with ceremonies and obligations of their
own, thereby forever binding together the great conceptions of true
Christianity and true nobility.
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