Angers were yielding, reluctant and scowling, to the hand which held the city in its grip. But to have come so far on the wings of hate, and to do nothing! To have come avowedly to preach a crusade, and to sneak away cowed! To have dragged the Bishop’s Vicar hither, and fawned and cajoled and threatened by turns—and for nothing! These things were passing bitter—passing bitter, when the morsel of vengeance he had foreseen smacked so sweet on the tongue.
For it was no common vengeance, no layman’s vengeance, coarse and clumsy, which the priest had imagined in the dark hours of the night, when his feverish brain kept him wakeful. To see Count Hannibal roll in the dust had gone but a little way towards satisfying him. No! But to drag from his arms the woman for whom he had sinned, to subject her to shame and torture in the depths of some convent, and finally to burn her as a witch—it was that which had seemed to the priest in the night hours a vengeance sweet in the mouth.
But the thing seemed unattainable in the circumstances. The city was cowed; the priest knew that no dependence was to be placed on Montsoreau, whose vice was avarice and whose object was plunder. To the Archdeacon’s feeble words, therefore, “We must look,” the priest retorted sternly, “not to M. de Montsoreau, reverend Father, but to the pious of Angers! We must cry in the streets, ‘They do violence to God! They wound God and His Mother!’ And so, and so only, shall the unholy thing be rooted out!”
“Amen!” the Curé of St.-Benoist muttered, lifting his head; and his dull eyes glowed awhile. “Amen! Amen!” Then his chin sank again upon his breast.
But the Canons of Angers looked doubtfully at one another, and timidly at the speakers; the meat was too strong for them. And Lescot and Thuriot shuffled in
