"By my faith," she cried, "full well dare I both say and swear that he is the noblest Christian of all Christians, and the truest lover of the faith and the Church."
Charles, were I set to devise for you a fitting doom, I would have you loiter through some dim place of forgotten things—not forever, but as near it as Divine Mercy would allow—seeing always before you the pale Maid in her fetters, hearing always from her lips those words of undying trust and love.
Enough; the matter was summed up. Here was the executioner, here his cart, ready to carry her to the stake. Would Joan of Arc submit to Holy Church, or would she burn, now, in an hour's time?
You are to remember that this child was not yet nineteen years of age; that she had been in prison, enduring every torment except that of actual bodily torture, for a year. To remember, too, that even our Supreme Exemplar prayed once that the cup might pass from him.
"I submit!" said the Maid.
Instantly a paper was thrust into her hand, and she was bidden sign it. Bystanders say there was a strange smile on her lips as she made her mark, a circle, as we know she could not write her name. She was hustled back to prison, leaving tumult and uproar behind her. The English were furious. They had come to see a burning, and there was no burning. Warwick made complaint to Cauchon; the King of England would be angry at the escape of this witch.
"Be not disturbed, my Lord!" said the Bishop of Beauvais. "We shall soon have her again."
Back to prison! not, as she had hoped and prayed, to a prison of the Church, where men whose profession at least was holy would be about her; where possibly she might even see and speak with a woman; where she might hear mass, and make confession. No! back to the old foul, hideous cell, to the brutal jeer and fleer of the English men-at-arms. Back, under sentence of imprisonment for life.
Meekly the poor girl went; meekly she put off her page's costume, and assumed, as she was bidden, a woman's dress.
On some aspects of the dark days that followed I cannot dwell; suffice it to say that they were the bitterest of all the bitter year; suffice it to say that when her judges came to her again they found her once more in her page's dress, which she refused to give up again until the end.