The man spoke. “We bend to God.”
“To God within,” said one of the women. “Not to ill within—not to luxury, pomp, and tyranny!”
“Woe!” cried the other woman, the younger. “Woe when the hearth no longer warms, but destroys!”
“Bougres,” spoke the secretary at his master’s ear. “Paulicians, Catharists, Bons hommes, Perfecti, Manichees.”
“That is to say, heretics,” said Ugo. “They grow hideously bold, having Satan for saviour and surety! Take order for these. Lodge complaint against them. See them laid fast in prison.”
The younger woman looked at him earnestly. “Ah, ah!” she said. “Thou poor prisoner! Let me whisper thee—there is a way out of thy dark hold! If only the door is not too high and wide and fully open for thine eyes to see it!”
“They are not of Roche-de-Frêne,” spoke the secretary. “I warrant them from Toulouse or Albi!”
“I, and more than I, have eyes upon Count Raymond of Toulouse,” said the bishop. “Two or three of you take these wretches to the right officer. And do thou, Nicholas, appear against them to-morrow.”
He touched his mule with his riding switch and rode on, a dark-browed man, with a thin cheek and thin, close-shutting lips. He was a martial bishop; he had fought in Sicily and at Damascus and Edessa, and at Constantinople.
The street ran steeply upward, closing where, in the autumn day, there spread and towered the castle. Ugo, approaching moat and drawbridge, put with a customary action his hand over his lips and so regarded outer and inner walls, the southward-facing barbican and the towers that flanked it,—Lion Tower and Red Tower. Men-at-arms in number lounged within the gate, straightening when the warder cried the bishop’s train. Ugo took his hand from his lips and crossed the hollow-sounding bridge. He rode beneath the portcullis and through the deep, reverberating, vaulted passage opening on either hand into Lion Tower and Red Tower, and so came to the court of dismounting, where esquires and pages started into activity. From here he was marshalled, the secretary and a couple of canons behind him, to the Court of Honour, where met him other silken pages.