VOLUME THE SECOND.
CHAPTER I.
Gloom and consternation spread over the face of France:--the link seemed cut between it and the other nations of the earth. Each man appeared to stand alone: each one brooded over his new situation with a gloomy despondency. No one doubted that the curse of God was upon the land; and the daily,--nay, hourly deprivation of every religious ceremony, was constantly recalling it to the imaginations of all.
The doors of the churches were shut and barred; the statues of the saints were covered with black; the crosses on the high roads were veiled. The bells which had marked the various hours of the day, calling all classes to pray to one beneficent God, were no longer heard swinging slowly over field and plain. The serf returned from the glebe, and the lord from the wood, in gloomy silence, missing all those appointed sounds that formed the pleasant interruption to their dull toil, or duller amusements.
All old accustomed habits,--those grafts in our nature, which cannot be torn out without agony, were entirely broken through. The matin, or the vesper prayer, was no longer said; the sabbath was unmarked by its blessed distinctness; the fêtes, whether of penitence or rejoicing, were unnoticed and cold in the hideous gloom that overspread the land, resting like the dead amidst the dying.
Every hour, every moment, served to impress the awful effects of the interdict more and more deeply on the minds of men. Was a child born, a single priest, in silence and in secrecy, as if the very act were a crime, sprinkled the baptismal water on its brow. Marriage, with all its gay ceremonies and feasts, was blotted, with other happy days, from the calendar of life. The dying died in fear, without prayer or confession, as if mercy had gone by; and the dead, cast recklessly on the soil, or buried in unhallowed ground, were exposed, according to the credence of the day, to the visitation of demons and evil spirits. Even the doors of the cemeteries were closed; and the last fond commune between the living and the dead--that beautiful weakness which pours the heart out even on the cold, unanswering grave,--was struck out from the solaces of existence.
The bishops and clergy, in the immediate neighbourhood of Dijon, first began to observe the interdict; and gradually, though steadily, the same awful privation of all religious form spread itself over France. Towards the north, however, and in the neighbourhood of the capital, the ecclesiastics were more slow in putting it in execution; and long ere it had reached the borders of the Seine, many a change had taken place in the fate of Guy de Coucy.
Having ascertained that the cotereaux had really left his woods, De Coucy gave his whole thoughts to the scheme which had been proposed to him by his squire, Hugo de Barre, for surprising Sir Julian of the Mount and his fair daughter, and bringing them to his castle, without letting them know, till after their arrival, into whose hands they had fallen.