Dunoisse’s ears burned like fire. The little priest’s great voice went on:
“We recognize in His Serene Highness a chaste spouse, a wise father, a prudent governor. How ill-advised should we be to prefer to a ruler such as this a bad Catholic, an individual whose personal history affords a lamentable example of ungoverned passions; who, dead to all sense of shame, blazons his infamy before the eyes of the conscientious and the decent——”
Dunoisse interrupted, saying with stiff lips:
“May I take it that these personalities are leveled at myself?”
The little priest returned, with extraordinarily quiet dignity:
“The rebuke, Colonel Dunoisse, is meant for you. I do not deal in personalities.”
He added, in a voice that sent keen, icy thrills coursing down the spines of his listeners:
“The Archbishop replies to the proposal contained in your agent’s letter emphatically in the negative. He says to you, Colonel Dunoisse, with the voice that speaks to you now: ‘You have offered us a price in money for the privilege of participating in the morrows procession. You have not scrupled to present yourself as a partaker in the solemnities of our Blessed Lady’s Festival. You shrink not at the thought of approaching Him Who is borne beneath the Sacred Canopy, unconfessed, unabsolved—in a state of deadly sin. Shameless, unabashed, you would display yourself to the scandal of Christ’s servants, accompanied by the partner of your lamentable errors—with your acknowledged mistress, the unfaithful wife of another, flaunting by your side!”
Henriette, pale as death, leaped up from her seat as a woman might who had swallowed some deadly alkaloid. Dumbly, as though the poison veritably stiffened her muscles, she writhed, fighting for speech—wrenching at the velvet ribbon that confined her swelling throat.
“You!—you!—you hear these insults?” she at last stammered, pointing a quivering hand at Dunoisse, whom the words seemed to have deprived of the powers of speech and motion. “Are you deaf, sir, that such things are spoken, and you stand there silent as one of those statues in the Cathedral? Are you dumb or paralyzed that you do not order this man to leave my presence? Cannot you see,” she raved, “that this is no messenger from the Archbishop? Some fanatical priest,—some presumptuous secretary,—has dared—has——! Just Heaven!—if my husband had been here, he would have thrown the creature from the room!”