"Battered armour is the worn breviary of the soldier!" commented Mariana. "Had these horsemen white scarves belting them?"
"Each man of them!" Jean-aux-Choux answered. "But even he that rode at the head had his armour (so much of it as he wore) in a like state; but whereas all the others rode with plain steel helms, there was a white plume in his. Those who stood near called it his panache, and said it was miracle-working. Also he wore a cloak, like that of a night-sentinel, but underneath, his doublet and hose were of olive-green velvet. He was of a hearty countenance, robust of body, and rode gallantly, with his head thrown back, laughing at little things by the way—as when a court page-boy, all in cloth of gold, fell off the tree on which he had climbed to see the show, and had to be pulled out of the river, dripping and weeping, with a countryman's rake all tangled in the hinder breadths of his raiment."
"The Bearnais! To a hair!" cried the Jesuit. "Ah, what a man! What a man—if only he were on the side of Holy Church——"
"He is a heretic of heretics," said the Surintendant Temel, "and deserves only the flames and the yellow robe!"
"It is a pity," said Mariana, with a certain contempt for such intolerance of idea; "you would have found him an equally good man in your father's wheat-field, and I, at the King's council. One day he will give our Philip tit-for-tat—that is, if he live so long!"
"Which God forbid!" said the inquisitor.
"Amen!" assented Frey Tullio.
"Well," smiled Mariana, "there is no pleasing you. For me, there are many sorts of gallant men, but with you, a man must either swallow all the Council of Trent, or be food for flames."
The inquisitors were silent. Discussion was not their business. They worked honestly from ten in the morning till five in the afternoon. Therefore, they deserved their rest, and if Mariana persisted in talking they would not get it. Still, they were eager to hear what the servant of Raphael Llorient had to say.
Mariana made Jean a signal to go on with his tale. He continued: