“Yes,” returned Margeret undaunted, “of that I have heard, and it is of that we have come hither to speak. You may call us bewitched if you will, but I and these two witnesses of mine must raise our voices for truth and justice’s sake. Come, Amos, tell these good gentlemen what befell when you climbed upon the beam. And later my daughter will have something further to testify.”
Amos, quite enjoying his sudden importance, stepped up beside Margeret and told with great cheeriness how he and Dicky Porter, in their eagerness to see the witch, had damaged the beam in the corridor so that later it fell.
“And any one who looks at the broken wood,” he concluded, “can see that it was rotten and ready to give way.”
“The boy’s words prove nothing,” thundered forth Master Mather; “he and his young comrades were chosen as instruments of Providence, that is all.”
It was an old explanation among the Puritans, but for once it seemed to give little satisfaction to those who listened. Amos Bardwell and Dicky Porter, small, impish and ever in mischief, seemed not the most likely tools to be chosen by Heaven. People began to shake their heads in doubt. Terror and credulity could drive them far, but there were limits, even so.
“We will listen to what the maid has to say,” announced the chief magistrate, declining to commit himself over Amos’ story.
Alisoun stepped bravely up and stood beside her mother. The dense crowd below seemed to her to number a thousand thousand instead of only the few hundred that they were. Her breath caught in her throat and her tongue was dry, so that the first words she tried to speak would make no sound. Did it bring help or only an added pang of shame that she saw, at that moment, Gilbert Sheffield come through the narrow street and look up at her amazedly from the edge of the throng? He had hastened from the wharf and had arrived just in time to hear her confession. For a minute it seemed that her cup of humiliation had overflowed and that she could never speak. Then one look into his honest brown eyes steadied her as nothing else could have done; his presence gave her courage, although it deepened the crimson of her cheeks.
Mother Garford, looking down in trembling fear, spoke out for the first time.
“Oh, Mistress Alisoun, sweet Mistress Alisoun,” she cried; “tell the truth and save me if you can.”
Alisoun climbed a step higher and took the old woman’s shaking hand in hers.