The speaker’s face was haggard from brooding and lack of sleep, but his eyes glowed and burned, as his fellows growled assent.
“’Tis simple why we follow,” a second put in. “Is there a man of our faith who will not, when he hears the tale, rise up and stab the nearest of this black brood—though it be his brother? If so, God’s curse on him!”
“Amen! Amen!”
“So, and so only,” cried the first, “shall there be faith in our land! And our children, our little maids, shall lie safe in their beds!”
“Amen! Amen!”
The speaker’s chin sank on his breast, and with his last word the light died out of his eyes. La Tribe looked at him curiously, then at the others. Last of all at Tignonville, on whose face he fancied that he surprised a faint smile. Yet Tignonville’s tone when he spoke was grave enough.
“You have heard,” he said. “Do you blame us?”
“I cannot,” the minister answered, shivering. “I cannot.” He had been for a while beyond the range of these feelings; and in the greenwood, under God’s heaven, with the sunshine about him, they jarred on him. Yet he could not blame men who had suffered as these had suffered; who were maddened, as these were maddened, by the gravest wrongs which it is possible for one man to inflict on another. “I dare not,” he continued sorrowfully. “But in God’s name I offer you a higher and a nobler errand.”
“We need none,” Tignonville muttered impatiently.
“Yet many others need you,” La Tribe answered in a tone of rebuke. “You are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the King for the hands of the magistrates of Angers?”