“Everything goes,” he said in a deep and rusty voice, “by looking at more than just itself. In another day in England or in another country to-day, you’d have been racked or put to the scarpines till, when they wanted you, we’d have had to carry you!”
“That’s true enough,” said Aderhold. “One should have a grateful heart!... True enough—as I know—as I know!”
“It’s ten days to assizes,” said the gaoler. “It isn’t lawful to put folk to the question in England—though if you stand mute, there’s peine forte et dure—and of course nobody’s going to do anything that isn’t lawful! But you know yourself there are ways—”
“Yes,” said Aderhold. “Do you mean that they will be used?”
But the gaoler grew surly again. “I don’t know anything except that they want your confession. They’ve got a story that’s going to be sold in chap-books all over England—and ballads made—and of course they want all the strange things in. It’s like the pictures of George and the Dragon—the more dreadful the dragon, the taller man is the George! The town’s all abuzz—with the King writing a learned letter, and the bishop coming and the Witch Judge.—They want a dreadful dragon and the tallest kind of George!”
“I see,” said Aderhold. “Even the dragon, the spear at his throat, expected to flatter!—O Diogenes! let us laugh, if we die for it!”
“Anan?” said the gaoler. “Well, it stands that way.”
The door shut behind him, grating and heavy. That it stood that way Aderhold found in the days that followed....
It drew toward assizes. Five days before the time he found himself one late afternoon, after a weary, weary hour of facing the commission, again in the long, dusky prison room where he had seen Joan. He knew now that it was a kind of antechamber, a place where prisoners were drawn together to wait occasions. More than once during these last days he had been kept here for minutes at a time, and sometimes others had been here and sometimes not. But Joan Heron never. One day he had seen Dorothy, and in passing had managed a moment’s word. “Dorothy, Dorothy! I am sorry—” Dorothy had gasped and shrunk aside. “Oh, wicked man! Oh, Master Aderhold—” He had seen also the youth with a clear passion for knowledge to whom he had lent books and talked of Copernicus and Galileo. This one had not been fearful of him.