In the street he found a multitude of persons flocking towards the cathedral; and, hurrying on with the rest, he entered at one of the side-doors, and crossed to the centre of the nave.
The sight that presented itself was certainly awful. No tapers were lighted at the high altar, not a shrine gave forth a single ray; but on the steps before the table stood the cardinal legate, dressed in the deep purple stole worn on the days of solemn fast in the church of Rome. On each hand, the steps, and part of the choir, were crowded with bishops and mitred abbots, each in the solemn habiliments appropriated by his order to the funeral fasts; and each holding in his hand a black and smoky torch of pitch, which spread through the whole church their ungrateful odour and their red and baleful light. The space behind the altar was crowded with ecclesiastics and monks, on the upper part of whose pale and meagre faces the dim and ill-favouring torch-light cast an almost unearthly gleam; while streaming down the centre of the church, over the kneeling congregation, on whose dark vestments it seemed to have no effect, the red glare spread through the nave and aisles, catching faintly on the tall pillars and Gothic tracery of the cathedral, and losing itself, at last, in the deep gloom all around.
The choir of the cathedral were in the act of singing the Miserere as the Count d'Auvergne entered; and the deep and solemn notes of the chant, echoed by the vaulted roofs, and long aisles, and galleries, while it harmonised well with the gloominess of the scene, offered frightful discord when the deep toll of the death-bell broke across, with sounds entirely dissonant. No longer doubting that his apprehensions were indeed true, and that the legate was about to pronounce the realm in interdict, Thibalt d'Auvergne advanced as far as he could towards the choir, and, placing himself by one of the pillars, prepared, with strange and mingled emotions, to hear the stern thunder of the church launched at two beings whose love had made his misery, and whose happiness was built upon his disappointment.
It were too cruel an inquest of human nature to ask if, at the thought of Agnes de Meranie being torn from the arms of her royal lover, a partial gleam of undefined satisfaction did not thrill through the heart of the Count d'Auvergne; but this at least is certain, that could he, by laying down his life, have swept away the obstacles between them, and removed the agonising difficulties of Agnes's situation, Thibalt d'Auvergne would not have hesitated--no, not for a moment!
At the end of the Miserere, the legate advanced, and in a voice that trembled even at the sentence it pronounced, placed the whole realm of France in interdict,--bidding the doors of the churches to be closed; the images of the saints, and the cross itself, to be veiled; the worship of the Almighty to be suspended; marriage to the young, the eucharist to the old and dying, and sepulture to the dead, to be refused; all the rites, the ceremonies, and the consolations of religion to be denied to every one; and France to be as a dead land, till such time as Philip the king should separate himself from Agnes his concubine, and take again to his bosom Ingerburge, his lawful wife.
At that hard word, concubine, applied to Agnes de Meranie, the Count d'Auvergne's hand naturally grasped his dagger; but the legate was secure in his sacred character, and he proceeded to anathematise and excommunicate Philip, according to the terrible form of the church of Rome, calling down upon his head the curses of all the powers of Heaven!
"May he be cursed in the city, and in the field, and in the highway! in living, and in dying!" said the legate; "cursed be his children, and his flocks, and his domaines! Let no man call him brother, or give him the kiss of peace! Let no priest pray for him, or admit him to God's altar! Let all men flee from him living, and let consolation and hope abandon his death-bed! Let his corpse remain unburied, and his bones whiten in the wind! Cursed be he on earth, and under the earth! in this life, and to all eternity!"
Such was in some degree, though far short of the tremendous original, the anathema which the legate pronounced against Philip Augustus--to our ideas, unchristian, and almost blasphemous; but then the people heard it with reverence and trembling; and even when he summed up the whole, by announcing it in the name of the Holy Trinity--of the Father--of all mercy!--of the Son--the Saviour of the world!--and of the Holy Ghost--the Lord and Giver of Life! the people, instead of starting from the impious mingling of Heaven's holiest attributes with the violent passions of man, joined the clergy in a loud and solemn Amen!
At the same moment all the sounds ceased, the torches were extinguished; and in obscurity and confusion, the dismayed multitude made their way out of the cathedral.