"And the rest is soon answered. I am no spy. Had I escaped from here with her whom I love, no word of your plans and dispositions should have ever passed, not even though Peterborough had bade me speak and divulge all; though he had told me that on my utterance all my future hopes rested. As for the passports, listen, messieurs, I beg. I loathed landing under an assumed name on the soil acquired by you; had it been possible, I would have come in plume and corselet, as once I came against you when an English cuirassier. But that was not possible, while as for the second papers--ah, well! there was no other way. That unhappy man now dead would have avenged my honourable defeat of him--one given face to face, by man to man--by himself denouncing me behind my back in his new shape of spy, of informer; he who had been our ally, the countryman of our King! In Antwerp, in St. Trond, he would have done so; also in Liége, had not this man whom you have heard slain him. Messieurs, there is no more. I have been what you are all. I have faced death before; it will not fright me now, much though I desire to live." And beneath his breath Bevill added, "For her."
He ceased, and, in ceasing, knew that in his few, quietly spoken words he had better pleaded his cause than if he had uttered one word for mercy. For though the eyes of all his judges had never left his face, they had been grave, but not hostile. He knew--he felt--that, had there existed no absolute code by which they were forced to condemn him for that which he had done, there would be no condemnation. But still there was the code, as he had known from the moment when Peterborough had first opened to him the matter of his quest for Sylvia; from the moment he set out upon his enterprise.
The heads of the members of the Court were close together now; the registrar was reading a paper to them he had written; a moment later the paper and a pen were handed to the Duc de Guise, who, although the highest in position, was the lowest in military rank, and was therefore to sign first.
For a moment this young man of superb lineage, though a lineage on which there rested, as it had rested for more than a century, so dark and awful a blot, sat gazing at the paper before him while biting the feather of the pen; then he said, or asked:
"The prisoner is a Protestant?"
"He is," De Violaine answered, gazing astonished at him.
"I will not sign," the Duke said, throwing down the pen.
"Monseigneur!"
"'I will not sign,' the Duke said,
throwing down the pen"--p. 1034.