Chapter 6 - Page 2

Mary's, and endeavoured
to provide for them by getting admitted into his Monastery as
Sub-Prior a brother Cistercian, a man of parts and knowledge, devoted
to the service of the Catholic Church, and very capable not only to
advise the Abbot on occasions of difficulty, but to make him sensible
of his duty in case he should, from good-nature or timidity, be
disposed to shrink from it.

Father Eustace played the same part in the Monastery as the old
general who, in foreign armies, is placed at the elbow of the Prince
of the Blood, who nominally commands in chief, on condition of
attempting nothing without the advice of his dry-nurse; and he shared
the fate of all such dry-nurses, being heartily disliked as well as
feared by his principal. Still, however, the Primate's intention was
fully answered. Father Eustace became the constant theme and often the
bugbear of the worthy Abbot, who hardly dared to turn himself in his
bed without, considering what Father Eustace would think of it. In
every case of difficulty, Father Eustace was summoned, and his opinion
asked; and no sooner was the embarrassment removed, than the Abbot's
next thought was how to get rid of his adviser. In every letter which
he wrote to those in power, he recommended Father Eustace to some high
church preferment, a bishopric or an abbey; and as they dropped one
after another, and were otherwise conferred, he began to think, as he
confessed to the Sacristan in the bitterness of his spirit, that the
Monastery of St. Mary's had got a life-rent lease of their Sub-Prior.

Yet more indignant he would have been, had he suspected that Father
Eustace's ambition was fixed upon his own mitre, which, from some
attacks of an apoplectic nature, deemed by the Abbot's friends to be
more serious than by himself, it was supposed might be shortly vacant.
But the confidence which, like other dignitaries, he reposed in his
own health, prevented Abbot Boniface from imagining that it held any
concatenation, with the motions of Father Eustace.

The necessity under which he found himself of consulting with his
grand adviser, in cases of real difficulty, rendered the worthy Abbot
particularly desirous of doing without him in all ordinary cases of
administration, though not without considering what Father Eustace
would have said of the matter. He scorned, therefore, to give a hint
to the Sub-Prior of the bold stroke by which he had dispatched Brother
Philip to Glendearg; but when the vespers came without his
reappearance he became a little uneasy, the more as other matters
weighed upon his mind. The feud with the warder or keeper of the
bridge threatened to be attended with bad consequences, as the man's
quarrel was taken up by the martial baron under whom he