"The witness who will be produced before you, and the prisoner's own actions, will give you the matter," De Violaine said now, addressing the other members of the court, "upon which you have to form a conclusion. The witness is the traitor, Francbois, whom you condemned yesterday. What he knows he must tell in spite of his condemnation, or means will be used to make him do so," and he glanced towards a man leaning behind one of the great stone columns that, at regular distances, supported the heavily-traced and groined roof. For there was still another man within that hall, one on whom Bevill's eyes had not yet lighted--a man, old and grizzled, yet strong and burly and roughly clad--a man who stood by a strange-looking instrument that lay along the floor and was a complicated mass of rollers and cords and pulleys--a thing that was, in truth, the rack. Near this there stood, also, four or five great copper pots, each holding several gallons of water, and having great ladles of the same metal in each. These things stood here close to the rack and that dark, forbidding man because, as all of that Court knew well, when the rack failed to elicit the truth from prisoner or suspected witness, the question à l'eau--namely, the pouring of quart after quart of water down the throats of the wretched victims, never failed in its effect.
"Let us hear the man," an officer who was in command of the Regiment de Montemar said. "If he endeavours to lie or to deceive us the----" and he glanced towards the executioner as he leant against the column.
"Bring in the man, Francbois," De Violaine said now, addressing some of the soldiers who were near Bevill, and a few moments later the already condemned traitor stood before those who had judged him yesterday.
Whether it was the horror of that condemnation which now sat heavily on his soul, or whether it was the fear of what might be the outcome of any evidence he should soon give--he had glanced affrightedly at the rack and the great water-pots and the grim attendant of both as he was brought in--he presented now a pitiable aspect. His face was colourless, or almost ashy grey, and resembled more the appearance of a terrified Asiatic, or an Asiatic whose blood was mixed with that of some white race, than the appearance of a European. His eyes had in them the terrified look of the hare as it glances back, only to see the hound that courses it upon its flank; his whole frame, in its tremblings and flaccidity, bespoke the awful terror that possessed him.
"Pasquedieu!" the young Duc de Guise muttered, as his eyes glanced from the shivering object to the tall, sturdy form and calm, unruffled, though solemn, countenance of the man against whom the other was to testify. "Pasquedieu! that this one should have his life in the hand of such as that." And, though those by his side did not hear the words muttered beneath the Duke's slight moustache, it may well be that their thoughts kept company with his.
"Tell your tale again as you told it to me when you came here to inform against this Englishman," De Violaine said now in an icy tone; "and tell it truthfully, remembering that----" but he, too, paused in his words, the sentence being finished by the one glance he cast towards the column down the hall.
Then, in a voice that trembled in unison with the tremors of his frame, though it gained strength--or was it audacity?--as he proceeded without interruption from any of those listeners seated before him, Francbois told the same story he had told at first to the Governor, Only, if he were to die, as die he now knew he must, he was resolved that he would leave no loophole through which this other--this accursed, contemptuous Englishman who stood by his side so calmly, as though he, too, were a judge and not a prisoner--should escape and live.
He pictured him as a browbeating, turbulent Briton even in those far-off days in Paris when both he and Bracton were schoolmates; he told how he was ever filled with hatred of France and Frenchmen; and how, even here in Liége, Bracton had boasted that he would outwit any Frenchman in and around it, and slay all who attempted to thwart him. And, next, he told how he and Sparmann, going to the Weiss Haus to arrest this man, had been set upon in the dark by him; how Bracton had stabbed Sparmann through the breast and disarmed him, Francbois, so that he was unable to succour his companion.
But now he was forced to stop in the unfolding of his narrative.
Bracton, who until this moment had uttered no word but had contented himself with standing calmly before his judges, spoke now.