Sir Simon

“ No mention has hitherto been made of that important person, because he in no way concerns this story, except by the fact of his existence. He was a distant kinsman of the present baronet, who had never seen him. He was in diplomacy, and so lived always abroad. People are said to dislike their heirs.
If Sir Simon disliked any human being, it was his. He did not dislike Lady Rebecca; he was only out of patience with her; she certainly was an aggravating old woman—living on to no purpose, that he could see, except to frustrate and harass him. ”

“ I exhort you, especially, to agree one with another; and in what excellency any one of you exceeds another, to yield to him so far, and by that means to reap the advantage of every one's own virtues. Do you then esteem Simon as your father, because he is a man of extraordinary prudence, and be governed by him in what counsels be gives you. ”

“ I saw that."
"Trace has got his silent crotchets just as much as anybody else," cried Sir Simon, a shade of deeper anger in his tone. "I'll talk to him; I'll talk to the three. Treat Paradyne as you do the rest, Dr. Brabazon; I would ask it of you as a personal favour. I turn the boy away! I've just as much right to do it as he has to turn me out of Pond Place. Deprive the lad of an education; of the means by which he'll have to make his bread? No; a hundred times over, no," concluded Sir Simon, in an explosive tone, the stick descending again. ”

“ Very early in the morning of the 14th May, Simon arrayed his troops and began his march southward upon the royal army. Dawn was just breaking when his first troopers came over the high Down and saw Lewes in the morning mist, the royal banners floating from the Castle—all still asleep. Slowly and at his ease Simon ordered his men. Upon the north, conspicuously, he set his litter with his standard above it and about it massed the raw levies of London. Upon the south he gathered the knights and men-at-arms led by the young Earl of Gloucester. ”

“ When Simon saw this he could not forbear weeping and began to tell her a dismal story concerning the stocks; but she wanted her money for the eggs: But Simon being deaf, could not hear her, which made her fall on him with such fury, that at last he was obliged to run upstairs and jump out of the chamber window which when she saw, she followed him down the town with an hundred boys and girls after them, Simon still crying out to the people people, You may see what it is to be married. ”

“ Simon's skill, courage, energy, and ruthlessness carried all before him, and speedily made him master of all southern Gaul. He continued to style himself Earl of Leicester, and he seems to have kept up his communications with England and to have been an object of deep interest and admiration to his fellow-barons there, for in 1210 John was scared by a rumour that they were plotting to set up Simon of Montfort as king in his stead. One of the conditions required by the pope for reconciliation with John in 1213 was that Simon should be restored to his rights. ”

“ Simon, do us the favour to tie us up in sacks and throw us into the river that we may give up our thieving ways and become the owners of flocks.’
‘I am ready,’ answered Simon, ‘to do what you please; there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you.’
So he took three strong sacks and put a man in each of them, and fastened them up so tightly that they couldn’t get out, and then he threw them all into the river; and that was the end of the three rogues. But Mr. Simon returned home to his faithful Nina rich in flocks and gold, and lived for many a year in health and happiness. ”

“ Simon's chantry was founded by Simon Symeon in 1381-2, "for the soul of Duke Henry, for the healthful estate of John of Gaunt, his son, Henry, earl of Derby, Simon Symeon and Elizabeth his wife, for their souls after death and the souls of the fathers and mothers of Simon and Elizabeth and all the faithful departed." On the day of Simon's obit, the office and mass of the dead were to be sung, and one of the canons was to say mass at the altar which Simon had constructed in the north part of the church, and three masses were to be said daily at the same altar. ”

“ Let him hang us if he dare, and the disgrace be his that is coward enough so to make an end of his enemy.
“O sir,” said Simon, “but that is poor comfort to a man that has to leave a small family behind him.
“Simon! are you afraid to die?” cried the captive laird, in a tone of rebuke.
“No, your honour,” said Simon—“that is, I am no more afraid to die than other men are, or ought to be—but only ye’ll observe, sir, that I have no ambition—not, as I may say, to draw my last breath upon a wuddy, but to have it very unnaturally stopped. ”

“ On 20 June 1239 Simon stood godfather to the king's eldest son [see Edward I] . In August he and his wife were invited to the queen's churching at Westminster; on the night before the ceremony, however, they met with a most insulting reception from the king. A debt which Simon owed to Count Peter of Brittany, and for non-payment of which, due in the summer of 1237, he had been threatened with excommunication, had been somehow transferred to the queen's uncle, Thomas of Savoy. Thomas had apparently set the king to enforce its payment. ”

“ In his young days Simon had been one of the gayest and most active youths of the neighbourhood, but as he grew old and stiff he found it very difficult to walk, and his faithful servant urged him to get a horse so as to save his poor old bones. At last Simon gave way to the request and persuasive eloquence of his housekeeper, and betook himself one day to the market where he had seen a mule, which he thought would just suit him, and which he bought for seven gold pieces. ”

“ From that moment Simon was virtually governor of king and kingdom. His exceptional importance, and the exceptional danger to which it exposed him, were marked by his solitary exemption from a decree forbidding all persons to wear arms (16 July) , and by a warning written to the barons by "a faithful Englishman," to bethink them of another leader in case he should die. Dangers indeed were thickening round him. In September he and his partisans were excommunicated by a papal legate. In November the lawless doings of the royalists on the Welsh border forced him to march against them. ”

“ Richard Simon had quitted Winchester to fulfil his duties as priest in the town of Oxford. No man was better fitted than Simon to act a prominent part in a state-plot. He was brave; but the priestly garb having wrested the sword from his hand, circumstances had converted that active courage, which might have signalized him in the field, to a spirit of restless intrigue; to boldness in encountering difficulties, and address in surmounting them. ”

“ After growing rich with his accumulated booty, Simon was inclined to become respectable, a recourse which was always open to him—France, England, Spain, the United Provinces, vieing with each other to secure him by high rank and pay as an honoured member of their national marine. ”

“ This time Simon turned as white as a sheet, and seemed stupefied, as if a sudden electric shock had smitten him. He babbled some incoherent words, and went hastily to a small closet where he usually kept his liquors. Although astonished at his emotion, I was too preoccupied with my own idea to pay much attention to anything else.
"You say truly when you call Madame Vulpes a devil of a woman," I continued, "Simon, she told me wonderful things tonight, or rather was the means of telling me wonderful things. Ah! if I could only get a diamond that weighed one hundred and forty carats!" ”

“ If he did nothing, Charles's army would be destroyed and Simon would probably be killed along with everyone else.
He remembered something Roland, his true father, had told him many years ago: No one who wants to live through a battle can afford to feel sorry for the men he is trying to kill. Make sure you kill them first, and then you can mourn for them afterward.
Putting his sympathy for the Romans out of his mind, Simon began to give orders to his archers. He deployed them in a line stretching from the Tiber to a thick grove of trees to the east. ”

“ There lived in Oxford one Richard Simon, a priest, who possessed some subtlety, and still more enterprise and temerity. This man had entertained the design of disturbing Henry’s government, by raising a pretender to his crown, and for that purpose he cast his eyes on Lambert Simnel, a youth of fifteen years of age, who was son of a baker, and who, being endowed with understanding above his years, and address above his condition, seemed well fitted to personate a prince of royal extraction. ”

“ It is all up with us if he does. Monsieur le Comte could no more hide it than a baby could hide a pin in its clothes.”
She opened the door and almost pushed Sir Simon out, in her terror lest the doctor should walk in without being warned.
Sir Simon met him at the back of the cottage. A few words were exchanged, and they came in together. Raymond met them on the stairs. The medical man preferred seeing his patient alone; the nurse might be present, but he could have no one else. In a very few minutes he came down, and a glance at his face set the father’s heart almost completely at rest. ”

“ All the explanation Raymond could give of Sir Simon’s extraordinary conduct was that he had received a telegram the day before which obliged him to set out for London immediately; he had not entered [Pg 319] into any explanation, but the intelligence was apparently rather exciting than painful, for he had gone away in very good spirits. The travellers looked at each other in perplexity. ”

“ Simon,—by what motives was his father actuated when he gave him this name? Simon, who denied our Lord Jesus Christ, Simon who was the creator of the historical crime of simony, or sacrilege. I direct my question through all historical ages: was there ever in the world a father who predestined his child's career thus by the mere name? What inveterate cynicism, what dreadful criminal instincts! You will deny and trade with a people's holiest possession,—its native land. Yes, gentlemen, all this is implied in the name of Simon. ”

“ Simon had been to Dover, and obtained supplies lately; Amalric was astonished that he had not already joined his father, and the Earl's face looked careworn and grave.
"My heart misgives me about Simon," he said. "He was always rash and headstrong. I summoned him a long while since to meet me, and join forces; and had he obeyed without question, we might perchance this day be standing victors once again. But instead of coming to me, he has been marching through the country gathering reinforcements. These may serve us well, I do not doubt ”

“ There was bitterness in his voice, and everyone knew he was thinking of his children in Capernaum.
Jesus felt great sympathy for Simon, and his answer was very gentle. "Yes, Simon, you have given up much. But you need not fear—a man who gives up his home and his property for my sake will never be sorry. He will receive back a hundred times over the eternal gifts which God gives those who love him. Many who now are rich will be the last in God's Kingdom; but those who are poor for my sake will be the very first in his Kingdom!"
That night the disciples stayed in Tarichaea. ”

“ Simon, the last of the firm, unmarried, and without near relation, was at the time of this story turned sixty, a clean-shaven, bright-eyed, old-fashioned type of man, sedate, famed for his cellar, and a member of the Athenæum—a man you never, never would have imagined to possess such a thing as a past; never would have imagined to have been filled with that semidiabolical, semiangelical joy of life which leads to the follies of youth. ”

“ Before Simon could rise I ran to the spring near the rock and hurried back with my cap full of the liquid. As 250I neared the place where the dying man lay, I saw something white, like a piece of parchment, in Simon’s hand, and the sailor hurriedly thrust it into his pocket.
Sir George drank eagerly, and Simon and I bathed his face.
The sun was fully up now, flooding us all in the golden light. The tide came farther on the sands, the gulls flitted out over the waves, and, in the woods back of us the birds were singing. ”

“ Let us see what is in the royal warrant,” and he drew the parchment from his pocket.
“What is it about, Simon, for I am no hand at the law.”
Thereupon Simon related the tale, as he had it from his master, I suppose, of how I had fought on the side of Duke Monmouth, and had been adjudged a traitor, but had escaped ere I could be sold to slavery. As Simon progressed I saw the Captain’s face grow grave and stern, for, it seemed, he was a great friend at court, and all his people had been against Monmouth. Therefore he had little liking for a rebel like myself, and one who was accused of treason. ”

“ But over and above all this, Simon himself is a most vehement orator, trained in the dialectic art, and in the meshes of syllogisms; and what is worse than all, he is greatly skilled in the magic art. And therefore I fear, lest haply, being so strongly fortified on every side, he shall be thought to be defending the truth, whilst he is alleging falsehoods, in the presence of those who do not know him. ”

“ When Simon saw all this, he said to himself: “This man, if he were a prophet, would have perceived who and what manner of woman this is who thus touches him; that she is a notorious sinner.” And Jesus, knowing what was going on in Simon’s mind, spoke up, saying: “Simon, I have something which I would like to say to you.” Simon answered, “Teacher, say on.” Then said Jesus: “A certain wealthy moneylender had two debtors. ”