But here and there he made the acquaintance of a priest or a monk whose
learned conversation harmonized with his thoughts and helped the grave
illusion in which--perhaps out of sheer idleness--he loved to think
himself back in the abbey in England. And so he led a life unlike the
lives around him, and many of the people in the quarter learned to know
him by sight, and called him and his men 'the English'; and as most of
the people of Rome were very much occupied with their own affairs,
chiefly evil, Gilbert was allowed to live as he pleased. But for the
fact that even his well-filled purse must in the course of time be
exhausted, he might have spent the remainder of his life in the Lion
Inn, by the bridge, carelessly meditative and simply happy. But other
forces were at work to guide his life into other channels, and he had
reckoned ill when he had fancied, being himself unmoved, that the love
of such a woman as Queen Eleanor was a mere incident without
consequence, forgotten like a flower of last year's blossoming.
Several times during the winter and in the spring that followed, the
friar Arnold came to see him in his lodgings and talked of the great
things that were coming, of the redemption of man from man by the
tearing down of all sovereign power, whether of pope or emperor, or
king or prince, to make way for the millennium of a universal republic.
Then the fanatic's burning eyes flashed like beacons, his long arms
made sudden and wild gestures, his soft brown hair stood from his head
as though lifted by a passing breeze, and his whole being was
transfigured in the flash of his own eloquence.
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