It was a Flemish painting, perhaps a hundred years old, and represented a young saint, Agnes, Barbara, or Cecilia, being led out to martyrdom.
The virgin, robed in white, with fair hair, combed carefully in thin curls over her slanting shoulders, stood in the midst of a neat and flowery field, on which daisies and other little plants shone like stars.
She lifted her round and smiling face, which was freshly coloured and seemed never to have known care nor trouble, to a clear and lovely blue sky.
Behind her the executioners, elaborately clad in ruffled scarlet breeches and embroidered doublet, stood ready with rope and axe, and in the distance a hill town showed against the blue horizon with the distinctness of a toy model.
The picture fascinated Rénèe, it was so serene, so pleasant, so far removed from horror or disgust, terror or pain, that it might make a tired soul long to die that way, calm and smiling in a daisied meadow that was but one step from the paradise where a martyr's crown was already being plaited by the angels and saints.
There were martyrs now; men, women, and children as pious, as steadfast as any of the early Christians whom heathens slaughtered and to whom altars were set up all over Europe, died every day in the Netherlands. But not that way.
Rénèe knew it was not that way, the way of peace, with flowers beneath and the blue heavens above—nay, it was in the common day-time, amid the sordid surroundings of the market-place, with insults, with jeers, with flames, smoke, the shrieks of fellow-victims, the frenzied preaching of the monks, the groans of the crowd, with their ravaged homes perhaps within sight, their frantic children driven back by the soldiers, with all the details of pain and misery and dreariness, with none to comfort nor encourage—Rénèe knew that this was how the Netherlanders died—died daily by every manner of torture, by every form of terrible and horrible death.
There were some who were never seen in the market-place nor on the public gallows; these were they who were thrown into the prisons of the Holy Inquisition, and never more came forth from the dark only lit by the glare of the torture fires, or the silence broken only by groans of mortal agony and the calm adjurations of the monks.
Rénèe turned her eyes away from the picture. "It was never like that," she said to herself; "it lies—and who can tell that the heavens opened to receive them, and the saints crowded to welcome them? Who can tell? Who has seen it?"
She gazed into the Prince's garden, but the fairness of it brought no peace to her heart.