Like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.'
R. BROWNING.
ARMAND was awakened the next morning by the noise of a great tumult in the street below. The two gentlemen who shared his room had gone out already, so he dressed hastily and followed their example. He found the town in utter confusion. Many of the shops had not been opened at all; others, especially those of the goldsmiths and moneychangers, were being shut up again, and carefully barred and bolted. Excited groups stood at the street corners and in the market-place, conversing together with ominous looks and shakings of the head. Someone, whom Armand knew, called out to him as he passed, 'Have you heard the news? The pope is gone! ‘Presently the same cry was repeated from another quarter. Everywhere he turned he heard it. The words echoed and re-echoed in every direction; they seemed to fill the air—‘The pope has gone! The pope has fled!’
He hurried to the chancellor's house, expecting a full explanation from Hubert. But even that household, usually remarkable for order and decorum, seemed to share the general panic and excitement. The chancellor's people were running to and fro; and those whom Armand accosted and asked about his brother could only tell him he was busy. At last, however, Hubert himself came hurrying downstairs with a letter in his hand. Seeing Armand, he cried, ‘Have you heard the news? The pope is gone!'
‘I have heard nothing else since I opened my eyes this morning,' said Armand. ‘But I want to speak to you. Whither are you going? '
‘To the lodging of the Cardinal of Cambray with this letter. Come with me; I may not stay.'
Armand could scarcely keep pace with his brother's rapid footsteps as he hurried along, talking eagerly the while. ‘The pope is gone—slipped out of town yesterday, while everyone was away at the tourney. In fact, we suspect now that the tourney itself was only a blind, got up by his friend the Duke of Austria, to favor his escape. He went off, it is said, in the disguise of a groom, leading a sorry horse, and with a kerchief round his head, to hide his face! '
Armand came to a dead stop in the midst of the crowded street, and, after an instant's silence, broke into a volley of knightly oaths.
‘Have you lost your wits?' cried Hubert in amazement. ‘But, whether or no, I can't stay for you. Come on! 'No—not my wits; but the best chance I am ever like to have of making my fortune,' said Armand, obeying him mechanically. ‘For I saw him yesterday, on my way to the tourney.'
‘Saw him? Saw whom? '
‘Our most holy father the pope. Just as you say, dressed as a groom, on a wretched horse, which he managed very ill. What I saw of his face—not much indeed—made me think of the High Mass in the cathedral, when—’
‘Why did you not give the alarm?’ broke in Hubert indignantly.
‘Give the alarm! Where is your sense, Hubert? How was I to think for one instant that the head of the Church, the Vicar of Christ, could be found in such a guise? Of course I thought it was only a chance resemblance that struck me.'
‘You knew, everyone did, how he dreads the Council and hates the Kaiser; and how glad he would be to see more than the length of his pastoral staff 'between himself and both. If you had but come back to the chancellor's and told me! '
‘If I had but been a wizard, like Virgil, or a father of magicians, like Prester John! '
But Hubert, not heeding him, went on in strong excitement: ‘And now, I suppose, we shall have all men thinking this will dissolve the Council—break it up in confusion. Not so, by the help of God! Rather will it prove how strong, how great, how irresistible it is! The Holy Council can do without the pope, for the Holy Council is above the pope. It is the voice of the Church—nay, it is the Church herself. It is his superior, his ruler, it may one day be his judge. Oh, he has done very well, this renegade pope! Not for himself, but for us—that is, for the Council. By this flight he has put himself in the wrong, and has shown to all the world where the right is. For once, might and right are together, and might and right both are, not with the pope, but with the Holy Council.'
‘Beshrew the Holy Council!’ said Armand to himself. ‘At this rate a man will never get a reasonable word from him about anything else.' But, after the first sense of annoyance, there came to him a feeling of relief. If from sheer lack of opportunity he could not make his confession to Hubert, that was no fault of his. No man could do the impossible. After all, it would be a very hard task to tell that story, especially to one so brave and truthful as Hubert, who would never himself have acted with such weakness. All this had flashed through the mind of Armand ere they reached the cardinal's lodging.
‘Here we are,' said Hubert. ‘I shall have to wait for an answer.'
'No use in my standing in the street while his eminence spoils a sheet of good paper,' returned Armand, now thoroughly convinced of the insignificance of his private affairs in Hubert's eyes, compared with those of the Council and the pope. But—stay one instant. All the Burgundians will be asking how can the Council possibly go on without its head. Nay, how can it live for a single day, thus decapitated— not being like St. Denis. What shall I say to them? '
‘Say to them that the Council will go on and prosper, since its true head is no renegade pope, but One whom for reverence I name not now,' said Hubert, looking back over his shoulder as he disappeared within the open door.
The tide of public events was now sweeping onward, with so strong and full a current that many an eddy of private feeling and interest was caught up and carried away with it. Young Hubert Bohun was not so much carried away as borne triumphantly on the crest of the advancing wave—like a flake of foam, in itself a thing of naught and swiftly vanishing, yet for its little moment flashing in the sunlight, the brightest, gladdest spot in all the scene. Probably no one else so thoroughly enjoyed the grand triumph of the Council over the pope. Certainly no other eye saw the vision that gleamed upon the ardent fancy of this young enthusiast, of the Holy Council, in the guise of the Archangel Michael, standing sword in hand over a prostrate dragon wearing a tiara.
Yet in this enthusiasm there was just a hint, a suspicion —no more—of something overstrained and unnatural. There was a touch of exaggeration, quite unconscious, of course, but still betraying the truth that, after all, the passion was only a reflected one. A youth of Hubert's character could not fail to believe what the chancellor believed, to worship what the chancellor loved. But the chancellor believed and loved like a toil-worn, world-weary man, with more than fifty years of sad experience behind him; still clinging in faith to high ideals, yet knowing how far the actual always falls short of the ideal. His young satellite, on the other hand, believed and loved like a dreamer. So entirely had he given the reins to his imagination, that up to this time he actually thought the Council composed, for the most part, of men like Jean Gerson. Armand, with not half his brains, yet saw the men and things around him much more truly. Armand's position as a Burgundian had early given him a personal knowledge of the shameless venality of the Council. If he was not himself behind the scenes, he knew those who were; and he had learned from them how bare, how coarse, how unsightly were the wires that moved most of those stately figures, so grand in the eyes of his single-hearted brother.
The morning after the flight of Pope John, the Kaiser rode in state through the city, and proclaimed that the Council was not dissolved; that its sessions would continue, and that he would protect it. The Chancellor of Paris was requested to prepare a discourse setting forth its rights and its duties. Gerson responded with a trumpet-blast. Never before had the place of the General Council, as the true representative and mouthpiece of the General Church, been so ably, so eloquently, so irresistibly set forth. Never before had the usurped supremacy of the so-called Vicar of Christ' received such a tremendous blow. Never before had it been proved so clearly that it was the Council, not the pope, which was infallible!
‘What the soul of the Council' devised and dictated, the hands of the Council were strong and very courageous to carry out. The fugitive pope was cited to appear before the Council; was brought back to Constance a disgraced and humiliated captive; was suspended; was imprisoned. Not even then was the degradation of the successor of St. Peter, and the triumph of the Council, complete. A tremendous list of accusations was drawn up against him; from which, if but one-tenth part of them were true, it appeared that Balthazar Cossa was not only unworthy to reign over the Church of God, but unworthy to live upon the earth which God had made.
Amongst the voices raised against him there was one which said aloud, in the Council itself, that he deserved the crowning torture and ignominy of all—the death of fire. This was the voice of Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, an Englishman of whose part in the Council Englishmen have no need to be ashamed, and who in this instance uttered his righteous indignation in the rough accents of his time.
Our young scribe had abundant occupation in those days for his ever-ready pen. There was one business, however, in which the chancellor would not allow him to meddle. His hand must not copy, his eye must not even rest upon, the articles of accusation against the pope; so hideous were the enormities, so unutterably foul and abominable were the sins enumerated there. This work was for older hands, for eyes that had already looked shudderingly—or, perhaps, alas! not shudderingly—down into the blackest ‘depths of Satan.'
Was it wonderful that the great chancellor himself, in this hour of his glory, showed no exultation? All was going well with the causes he had at heart—with the greatest of them all, the cause of the Council as against the pope and above the pope—with ' the affair of Jean Petit '—and with the condemnation of Wickliffe's teachings and his works. Yet the lines of sorrow and perplexity deepened every day on that sad, anxious face. No one knew the secrets of his breast, for he spoke of them to none. But it was easy for loving eyes, like those of Hubert, to see that this heart, so strong, so brave, so true even, was not a heart at rest.