of thee, Oh, rise upon our sight!
There was no hope any more. I knew it now. I knew that Joan’s
letter was a message to No‰l and me, as well as to her family, and
that its object was to banish vain hopes from our minds and tell us
from her own mouth of the blow that was going to fall upon us, so
that we, being her soldiers, would know it for a command to bear
it as became us and her, and so submit to the will of God; and in
thus obeying, find assuagement of our grief. It was like her, for she
was always thinking of others, not of herself. Yes, her heart was
sore for us; she could find time to think of us, the humblest of her
servants, and try to soften our pain, lighten the burden of our
troubles–she that was drinking of the bitter waters; she that was
walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I wrote the letter. You will know what it cost me, without my
telling you. I wrote it with the same wooden stylus which had put
upon parchment the first words ever dictated by Joan of Arc–that
high summons to the English to vacate France, two years past,
when she was a lass of seventeen; it had now set down the last
ones which she was ever to dictate. Then I broke it. For the pen
that had served Joan of Arc could not serve any that would come
after her in this earth without abasement.
The next day, May 29th, Cauchon summoned his serfs, and
forty-two responded. It is charitable to believe that the other
twenty were ashamed to come. The forty-two pronounced her a
relapsed heretic, and condemned her to be delivered over to the
secular arm. Cauchon thanked them.
Then he sent orders that Joan of Arc be conveyed the next morning
to the place known as the Old Market; and that she be then
delivered to the civil judge, and by the civil judge to the
executioner. That meant she would be burnt.
All the afternoon and evening of Tuesday, the 29th, the news was
flying, and the people of the country-side flocking to Rouen to see
the tragedy–all, at least, who could prove their English sympathies
and count upon admission. The press grew thicker and thicker in
the streets, the excitement grew higher and higher. And now a
thing was noticeable again which had been noticeable more than
once before–that there was pity for Joan in the hearts of many of
these people. Whenever she had been in great danger it had
manifested itself, and now it was apparent again–manifest in a
pathetic dumb sorrow which was visible in many faces.
Early the next morning, Wednesday, Martin Ladvenu and another
friat were sent to Joan to prepare her for death; and Manchon and I
went with them–a hard service for me. We tramped through the
dim corridors, winding this way and that, and piercing ever deeper
and deeper into that vast heart of stone, and at last we stood before
Joan. But she did not know it. She sat with her hands in her lap
and her head bowed, thinking, and her face was very sad. One
might not know what she was thinking of. Of her home, and the
peaceful pastures, and the friends she was no more to see? Of her
wrongs, and her forsaken estate, and the cruelties which had been
put upon her? Or was it of death–the death which she had longed
for, and which was now so close?
Or was it of the kind of death she must suffer? I hoped not; for she
feared only one kind, and that one had for her unspeakable terrors.
I believed she so feared that one that with her strong will she
would shut the thought of it wholly out of her mind, and hope and
believe that God would take pity on her and grant her an easier
one; and so it might chance that the awful news which we were
bringing might come as a surprise to her at last.
We stood silent awhile, but she was still unconscious of us, still