Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/112

 "Shrine of Fachnan! Will you not be reading? Read aloud the words! In precisely what manner will a Bishop, in the hour of death, receive the body of our Lord? I command you to read it!"

In terror-stricken lispings the priest mumbled from the book shaking under his eyes that the Bishop should kneel to receive the Host.

Laurence, son of Ivar, raised his arms a little.

"Lift me then to my knees," he ordered them, with authority.

They cried out at him in frightened entreaty:

"For Christ's sake!" the chaplain, foremost among them, pleaded. "You cannot kneel, my lord! I implore you! I have the power—I omit the kneeling."

The Bishop bent his brows angrily upon his confessor, and shook his arms upward again with an imperious gesture.

"You have power, have you!" he called out in truculent scorn. "You will be giving the law to me, will you? Am I your Bishop? Tell me that, you cropped clown! And will you stand between God's anointed and the rubric? Here you, Gilcreest! you, Duarcan! Lift me to my knees! I command it! I will be dying as befits my rank and my station!"

Tremblingly the two servants moved to his side, and with shoulders under his arms, raised the Bishop to his full height. Then they bent to lower him forward. The clerics had turned their brimming eyes away. Turlogh, and the armed men of his sept behind him, who were unafraid yet looked to see a countenance desolated by an anguish too great to gaze upon, beheld instead a strange luminous softness spread over the Bishop's swollen lineaments, and bring them back to human likeness, and stamp upon them the aspect of triumphant martyrdom. The face of the Bishop was white as death now, and as he sank slowly to his knees,