“Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia.”
At the same time an isolated voice, not in the choir, intoned from the step of the high altar this impressive offertory:
“Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam æternam et in judicium non venit; sed transit a morte in vitam.”
This chant intoned by a few old men lost in the gloom of the church, and directed at this beautiful creature full of youth and life, wooed by the balmy air of spring, and bathed in sunshine, was the mass for the dead.
The multitude listened with pious attention.
The hapless, terrified girl seemed to lose all sight and consciousness in this view into the dark bowels of the church. Her white lips moved as if she prayed, and when the hang-man’s assistant advanced to help her down from the tumbrel, he heard a low murmur from her— “Phœbus!”
They untied her hands and made her descend from the cart, accompanied by her goat, which they had also unbound, and which bleated with delight at finding itself free. She was then made to walk barefoot over the rough pavement to the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to the door. The rope she had round her neck trailed after her like a serpent in pursuit.
The chant ceased inside the church. A great cross of gold and a file of wax tapers set themselves in motion in the gloom. The halberds of the bishop’s guard clanked, and a few moments later a long procession of priests in their chasubles and deacons in their dalmatics advancing, solemnly chanting, towards the penitent, came into her view and that of the crowd. But her eye was arrested by the one who led the procession, immediately behind the cross-bearer.
“Oh,” she murmured with a shudder, “’tis he again— the priest!”
It was the Archdeacon. On his left walked the sub-chanter, on his right the precentor, armed with his wand of office. He advanced with head thrown back, his eyes fixed and wide, chanting with a loud voice:
“De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam.
“Et projecisti me in profundum corde maris et flumen circumdedit me.”
As he came into the broad daylight under the high Gothic doorway, enveloped in a wide silver cope barred with a black cross, he was so pale, that more than one among the crowd thought that it was one of the marble bishops off some tomb in the choir come to receive on the threshold of the grave her who was about to die.
No less pale and marble than himself, she was scarcely aware that they had thrust a heavy lighted taper of yellow wax into her hand; she did not listen to the raucous voice of the clerk as he read out the terrible wording of the penance; when she was bidden to answer Amen, she answered Amen.
The first thing that brought back to her any life and strength was seeing the priest sign to his followers to retire, and he advanced alone towards her. Then, indeed, she felt the blood rush boiling to her head, and a last remaining spark of indignation flamed up in that numbed and frozen spirit.
The Archdeacon approached her slowly. Even in her dire extremity, she saw his lustful eye wander in jealousy and desire over her half-nude form. Then he said to her in a loud voice: