“Have I ever denied it?” exclaimed Zegota warmly--“But I have said, and I say again that I believe the news is true,--and that these howling hypocrites,--” this with an angry gesture of his hand towards the open square where the chanting priests who headed the procession were coming into view--“have truly received an unlooked-for check from the King!”
Sergius Thord laid one hand heavily on his shoulder.
“When the King--when any king--does anything useful in the world, then you may hang me with your own hands, Zegota! When did you ever hear, except in myths of the past, of a monarch who cared for his people more than his crown? Tell me that! Tell me of any king who so truly loved the people he was called upon to govern, that he sacrificed his own money, as well as his own time, to remedy their wrongs?--to save them from unjust government, to defend them from cruel taxation?--to see that their bread was not taken from their mouths by foreign competition?--and to make it possible for them to live in the country of their birth in peace and prosperity? Bah! There never was such a king! And that this man,--who has for three years left us to the mercy of the most accursed cheat and scoundrel minister that ever was in power,--has now declared his opposition to the Jesuits’, is more than I will or can believe.”
“If it were true?”--suggested Zegota, with a more than usually vicious tug at his beard.
“If it were true, it would not alter my opinion, or set aside my intention,” replied Thord,--“I would admit that the King had done one good deed before going to hell! Look! Here come the future traitresses of men--girls trained by priests to deceive their nearest and dearest! Poor children! They know nothing as yet of the uses to which their lives are destined! If they could but die now, in their innocent faith and stupidity, how much better for all the world!”
As he spoke, the wind, swooping into the square, and accompanied by a pattering gust of rain, fell like a fury upon the leaders of the religious procession and tore one of the great banners out of the hands of the priest who held it, beating it against his head and face with so much force that he fell backward to the ground under its weight, while from a black cloud above, a flash of lightning gleamed, followed almost instantaneously by a loud clap of thunder, which shook the square with a mighty reverberation like that of a bursting bomb. The children screamed,--and ran towards the Cathedral pellmell; and for a few moments there ensued indescribable confusion, the priests, the people, and the white-veiled girls getting mixed together in a wild hurly-burly. Sergius Thord suddenly left his companion’s side, and springing on a small handcart that stood empty near the centre of the square, his tall figure rose up all at once like a dark apparition above the heads of the assembled crowd, and his voice, strong, clear, and vibrating with passion, rang out like a deep alarm bell, through all the noise of the storm.