“But I had a right to resume it, because the promises made to me
have not been kept–promises that I should be allowed to go to
mass and receive the communion, and that I should be freed from
the bondage of these chains–but they are still upon me, as you
see.”
“Nevertheless, you have abjured, and have especially promised to
return no more to the dress of a man.”
Then Joan held out her fettered hands sorrowfully toward these
unfeeling men and said:
“I would rather die than continue so. But if they may be taken off,
and if I may hear mass, and be removed to a penitential prison, and
have a woman about me, I will be good, and will do what shall
seem good to you that I do.”
Cauchon sniffed scoffingly at that. Honor the compact which he
and his had made with her?
Fulfil its conditions? What need of that? Conditions had been a
good thing to concede, temporarily, and for advantage; but they
have served their turn–let something of a fresher sort and of more
consequence be considered. The resumption of the male dress was
sufficient for all practical purposes, but perhaps Joan could be led
to add something to that fatal crime. So Cauchon asked her if her
Voices had spoken to her since Thursday–and he reminded her of
her abjuration.
“Yes,” she answered; and then it came out that the Voices had
talked with her about the abjuration–told her about it, I suppose.
She guilelessly reasserted the heavenly origin of her mission, and
did it with the untroubled mien of one who was not conscious that
she had ever knowingly repudiated it. So I was convinced once
more that she had had no notion of what she was doing that
Thursday morning on the platform. Finally she said, “My Voices
told me I did very wrong to confess that what I had done was not
well.” Then she sighed, and said with simplicity, “But it was the
fear of the fire that made me do so.”
That is, fear of the fire had made her sign a paper whose contents
she had not understood then, but understood now by revelation of
her Voices and by testimony of her persecutors.
She was sane now and not exhausted; her courage had come back,
and with it her inborn loyalty to the truth. She was bravely and
serenely speaking it again, knowing that it would deliver her body
up to that very fire which had such terrors for her.
That answer of hers was quite long, quite frank, wholly free from
concealments or palliations. It made me shudder; I knew she was
pronouncing sentence of death upon herself. So did poor Manchon.
And he wrote in the margin abreast of it:
“RESPONSIO MORTIFERA.”
Fatal answer. Yes, all present knew that it was, indeed, a fatal
answer. Then there fell a silence such as falls in a sick-room when
the watchers of the dying draw a deep breath and say softly one to
another, “All is over.”
Here, likewise, all was over; but after some moments Cauchon,
wishing to clinch this matter and make it final, put this question:
“Do you still believe that your Voices are St. Marguerite and St.
Catherine?”
“Yes–and that they come from God.”
“Yet you denied them on the scaffold?”
Then she made direct and clear affirmation that she had never had
any intention to deny them; and that if–I noted the if–“if she had
made some retractions and revocations on the scaffold it was from
fear of the fire, and it was a violation of the truth.”
There it is again, you see. She certainly never knew what it was
she had done on the scaffold until she was told of it afterward by
these people and by her Voices.
And now she closed this most painful scene with these words; and
there was a weary note in them that was pathetic:
“I would rather do my penance all at once; let me die. I cannot
endure captivity any longer.”
The spirit born for sunshine and liberty so longed for release that it
would take it in any form, even that.