Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/108

 "I will not suffer my priests to be dictating to me," he said. "They have never dared give the law to me, living; it is not for them to be appointing a time for my death. I will choose my own season and the hour that pleases me best. St. Kieran's bones! Am I less a Bishop than I was?"

Turlogh smiled a little in turn. "I would not be saying you are less in any respect whatever," he replied. He stole a glance over the other's unwieldy bulk to point his meaning, and the Bishop laughed painfully.

"You are more after my heart than the others," he sighed, "and I come to you at the end, only for burial at your hands. That is the way of life, Turlogh, son of Fineen, and the way of death too. They speak a true word enough, these young men of mine. I cannot be going any further. I know it well enough that I shall die here in Dunbeekin. But it is not for them to tell me so. I was Vicar-General for twenty years, and Lord Bishop for eight, and no priest yet wagged his head before me, or gave me the word what I was to do. They are not much, these striplings of mine. They stand in good subjection to me, but they have no invention in their minds. They would not be fit to bury a bishop. It should be a great spectacle, with armed men and fires and a blaze of jewels among the funeral hangings, and the keening of trained women in companies, so that children would remember it when they were palsied with old age. These trivial boys I have with me are not capable of it. They would not lay out the worth of ten cows on me. They have pure hearts, but no proper sense of pageantry. Would you have been seeing any great prelate buried?"

Turlogh shook his head.

"But you have some learning," pursued the other. "It is known to you from books what princes and Chieftains have done before