The laymen who were present shuddered.  The two canons who faced them crossed themselves, muttering, “Avaunt, Satan!”

“It is for you to decide,” the priest continued, gazing on them passionately, “whether you will side with him or with the Angel of God!  For I tell you it was none other executed the Divine judgments at Paris!  It was none other but the Angel of God held the sword at Tours!  It is none other holds the sword here!  Are you for him or against him?  Are you for him, or for the woman with the mark of the Beast?  Are you for God or against God?  For the hour draws near!  The time is at hand!  You must choose!  You must choose!” And, striking the table with his hand, he leaned forward, and with glittering eyes fixed each of them in turn, as he cried, “You must choose!  You must choose!” He came to the Archdeacon last.

The Bishop’s Vicar fidgeted in his chair, his face a shade more shallow, his cheeks hanging a trifle more loosely, than ordinary.

“If my brother were here!” he muttered.  “If M. de Montsoreau had arrived!”

But Father Pezelay knew whose will would prevail if Montsoreau met Tavannes at his leisure.  To force Montsoreau’s hand, therefore, to surround him on his first entrance with a howling mob already committed to violence, to set him at their head and pledge him before he knew with whom he had to do—­this had been, this still was, the priest’s design.

But how was he to pursue it while those gibbets stood?  While their shadows lay even on the chapter table, and darkened the faces of his most forward associates?  That for a moment staggered the priest; and had not private hatred, ever renewed by the touch of the scar on his brow, fed the fire of bigotry he had yielded, as the rabble of 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!”