Charles Stuart turned his head away with a sigh. All that was good and noble and kind in him went out to that man, in whose innocence he firmly believed but whom he found was well-nigh intolerable.
But Michael now was obliged to pull his senses back to the exigencies of the moment and he pleaded "Guilty!" in a calm and steady voice. He had not even grasped the full meaning of the indictment read out at full length by the Attorney-General. All he knew was that he was accused of having plotted to murder the king, whom he revered, and of having sold his country to the head of a Church to which he did not happen to belong.
Michael desired his own condemnation. He was here solely for that, in order that the man whom his ice maiden loved with that cold, passionless heart of hers might give her all that she wanted, all that was her due. But the inactivity of the moment was so terrible to bear. To a man accustomed to rule his own destiny, to choose his own path, and to say to Fate: "This will I do, and thou art my slave!" to a man of that stamp the present situation was well-nigh intolerable.
The long-drawn-out speech of the Attorney-General, the platitudes addressed to the accused by the Lord Chief Justice, his own answers mechanically given soon left him wandering into the realms of unreality.
The heat in the room pressed upon his temples like a monster weight of lead. Michael, gazing with eyes that saw not on the solemn scene in which he was the chief personage, soon fell into a kind of torpor akin to a trance. Ghost-like forms clad in crimson robes, grinning faces with perruques awry, began to dance before his fevered fancy. They twirled and turned, round and round the flickering flames of the lamps, until these were magnified an hundredfold and multiplied innumerably. Now faces and forms disappeared: there were only a thousand millions of eyes that blinked and blinked, the while the lamps were will-o'-the-wisps, glowworms with monstrous shining horns that stood upright on iron tails and joined in the wild saraband which had transformed the solemn Hall of Westminster into the precincts of Hell.
Then gradually all the grinning faces, all the glowing monstrosities and witch-like forms became a gigantic circle of ruddy light wherein flames flickered at intervals like unto a burning halo which seared the eyes of the beholder. And right in the very centre of that transcendent glow two faces appeared, white and ghost-like, spirits surely from a world beyond.
Michael knew that he was dreaming, his temples and pulses were throbbing. He had lost count of space and of time. He just breathed and held himself upright and no more; living had become an unknown thing to him. But the faces were there still, in the centre of the glowing halo, and they were those of his beautiful snowdrop and of Master Legros, tailor to the King of France.