Each church and
monastery door poured forth its priests or friars to swell the line, and
the various lay confraternities, issuing in their distinctive dress from
their "lodges" or assembly-rooms, formed a link between the secular and
religious divisions of the procession. The market-place was strewn with
sand and sweet herbs; and here, on the doorsteps of the Cathedral,
between the featureless porphyry lions, the Bishop waited with his
red-robed chapter, and the deacons carrying the painted banners of the
diocese. Seen thus, with the cloth-of-gold dalmatic above his pontifical
tunic, the mitre surmounting his clear-cut impassive face, and the
crozier held aloft in his jewelled gloves, he might have stood for a
chryselephantine divinity in the porch of some pagan temple.
Odo, riding beside the Duke's litter, had leisure to note not only the
diverse features of the procession but their varying effect on the
spectators. It was plain that, as Trescorre had said, the pilgrimage was
popular with the people. That imaginative sensuousness which has
perpetually renewed the Latin Church by giving form and colour to her
dogmatic abstractions, by transforming every successive phase of her
belief into something to be seen and handled, found an irresistible
outlet in a ceremony that seemed to combine with its devotional intent a
secret element of expiation. The little prince was dimly felt to be
paying for the prodigality of his fathers, to be in some way a link of
suffering between the tongue-tied misery of the fields and the insolent
splendour of the court; and a vague faith in the vicarious efficacy of
his devotion drew the crowd into momentary sympathy with its rulers.
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