Papa Legros spoke with so much simplicity, such perfect dignity, and withal had made so logical a statement, that it seems impossible to imagine that it should not carry at least as much conviction to the minds of judge and jury and of all the assembly as the obviously lying statements of the informers had done. Yet such was the temper of the times, such the wave of intolerant fanaticism which had passed over the country, that even whilst good Master Legros was stating so noble and simple a point of truth, the first murmurs of dissent against him and his daughter rose throughout the hall: whispered words of "foreign papist," of "prejudiced witnesses," of "a wench and her lover," flew from mouth to mouth.
Rose Marie, whose sensibilities were attuned to their highest pitch, felt this wave of antipathy, even before its first faint echo had actually reached her ears.
She was quite clever enough to know that the simple mention of an actual fact by herself and her father would not be sufficient to turn the tide of judicial sympathy back toward Michael, after the perjuries of men who had for some time now been exalted into popular heroes; she had, alas, known only too well that she had not yet reached the summit of that Calvary which she had set herself to climb for the loved one's sake.
There were yet many cups of bitter humiliation which she and her kind father would have to drain ere an innocent man was forbidden to give his life for another, and the first of these was being held to her lips even now by the Attorney-General, as he said, turning once more to her:
"You are aware, Mistress, of these statements to which your father hath sworn in open court. Do you on your own account and independently of your father, add your sworn testimony to his?"
"I do, sir," she replied; "I swear, quite independently of what my father hath said, that on the evening of the 19th day of April, when the false witnesses aver that my lord of Stowmaries was in Paris, he was at St. Denis with me."
"You are quite sure of the date?"
"Am I like to forget?"
"Odd's fish!" he retorted, with a sarcastic curl of the lips, "when a pretty wench is in love."