He plucked Dunoisse back into the room with one imperative hand, unhooking the shabby black cloak with the other. He shook it deftly from his shoulders, removed his soft felt hat, threw it aside, and stepped out upon the balcony, revealed as a small slight figure in a worn black cassock, red-piped, red-buttoned, and sashed, his high-domed baldish head covered with a purple skull-cap, the sacred symbol hanging by its golden chain upon his breast. And at the sight of him a change came over all those waiting faces, and a feline purr of satisfaction came from the great crowd.
The Archbishop said, in a mild and gentle tone, addressing the assemblage:
“My children, we are not ignorant of the cause of this demonstration. You are gathered here to protest, by force if necessary, against what justly appears to you a sacrilege of the most flagitious kind——”
In every attentive face there showed upon the instant a gaping hole. A roar of assent responded that shattered the leaping columns of the Market Place fountains into a rain of glittering fragments. Scared doves rose in bevies from the housetops, wheeling in circles under the rose-flushed sunset sky. The Archbishop went on, in a voice of astonishing resonance and power:
“My children, be at peace! No indignity such as you have had reason to fear will be offered to the Divine Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, or to the Immaculate Virginity of His Holy Mother!”
He lifted his hand.
“Therefore, I say to you, profane not the Eve of the Feast with violence! Disperse without casting one other stone. Be assured, Colonel von Widinitz-Dunoisse will not walk in the procession unless in a state of soul conducive to edification. I bid you now go home!”
The Archbishop might have been obeyed, but that a lean tall man in seedy black, with burning cavernous eyes in a lean, parched, yellow face, leaped up upon the bronze balustrade of one of the Market Place fountains, and cried, in a voice that cracked like a breaking stick:
“He has scattered money among you, and some of you have stooped to gather it! For shame! Do you not know whence those accursed coins were taken? Then I will tell you. From the dowry of the Carmelite Sister Thérèse de Saint-François! From the funds of the House of Mercy over whose closed doors the ivy is growing! From the Treasury of Christ!... Then hurl back the defiled and tainted coins with contempt and indignation! Drive forth the thief’s son with his harlot! Purge the town of them! Kill—a-a-a!”
The lean man threw up his hands at this juncture, and fell back frothing in epilepsy. But he had spoken words that had the effect of oil poured upon a slackened furnace. The hubbub of voices that ensued reduced even the Archbishop to dumb show. Stones began to fly, no longer leveled at the room behind the balcony, where the high-domed head and pale, worn profile of the prelate were descried, as he parleyed with the unwished-for visitors.... The lower windows suffered attack; and with the larger missiles came hopping the coppers and silver bits that had been scattered from Steyregg’s bag. Those who grudged parting most threw hardest of all.... The crash and tinkle of breaking glass went on until every window-frame in the frontage of “The Three Crowns” presented a central void befringed with splinters—until the landlord, hysterical with loss, rushed out bareheaded into the Market Place, and, falling upon his knees, solemnly swore that if the work of destruction did but cease, the loathed intruders should then and there depart from his house.