The Grand Inquisitor was a lovely slim young nun, with a dainty gipsy face, all brown and golden, full-cheeked, pink-lipped, black-browed. I see her still, the exquisite monster, with her long slim fingers, as delicate as ivory, and the perfidious witchery of her radiant dark smile.
"You mustn't tell lies, Angela. You were seen to break the statue."
I stood up in vehement protest, words poured from me in a flood; they gushed from me like life-blood flowing from my heart, and in my passion I flung my books on the floor, and vowed I would never eat again, but that I'd die first, to make them all feel miserable because they had murdered me. And then the pretty Inquisitor carried me off, dragging me after her with that veiled brutality of gesture that marks your refined tyrant. I was locked up in the old community-room, then reserved for guests, a big white chamber, with a good deal of heavy furniture in it.
"You'll stay here, Angela, until I come to let you out," she hissed at me.
I heard the key turn in the lock, and my heart was full of savage hate. I sat and brooded long on the vengeance I desired to wreak. Sister Esmeralda had said she would come at her good will to let me out. "Very well," thought I, wickedly; "when she comes she'll not find it so easy to get in."
My desire was to thwart her in her design to free me when she had a mind to. My object was to die of hunger alone and forsaken in that big white chamber, and so bring remorse and shame upon my tyrants. So, with laboured breath and slow impassioned movements, I dragged over to the door all the furniture I could move. In my ardour I accomplished feats I could never have aspired to in saner moments. A frail child of eight, I nevertheless wheeled arm-chairs, a sofa, a heavy writing-table, every seat except a small stool, and even a cupboard, and these I massed carefully at the door as an obstruction against the entrance of my enemy.
And then I sat down on the stool in the middle of the chamber, and tore into shreds with hands and teeth a new holland overall. Evening began to fall, and the light was dim. My passion had exhausted itself, and I was hungry and tired and miserable. Had any one else except Sister Esmeralda come to the door, I should have behaved differently, for I was a most manageable little creature when not under the influence of the terrible exasperation injustice always provoked in me. But there she stood, after the repeated efforts of the gardener called up to force open my prison door, haughty, contemptuous, and triumphant, with me, poor miserable little me, surrounded by the shreddings of my holland pinafore, in her ruthless power.
A blur of light, the anger of madness, the dreadful tense sensation of my helplessness, and before I knew what I had done I had caught up the stool and wildly hurled it at her triumphant visage. Oh, how I hated Sister Esmeralda! how I hated her!
The moment was one of exceptional solemnity. I was not scolded, or slapped, or roughly treated. My crime was too appalling for such habitual treatment. One would think I already wore the black shroud of death, that the gallows stood in front of me, and beside it the coffin and the yawning grave, as my enemy, holding my feeble child's hand in a vice, marched me down the corridor into the dormitory, where a lay-sister was commanded to fetch my strong boots, my hat and cloak.