At these words, she could no longer contain herself, and covering her face with her hands, she sobbed aloud, remembering all her wilfulness in the past.
“What I have to say,” continued Sir Jonathan, “is not much. But straws show the drift of the current, and little acts the soul’s bent. The night of the same day on which I saw the prisoner standing on the block near the town-pump, I went with a recipe to Master Wentworth’s home to have him brew me a concoction of herbs. The recipe I brought from England. Knowing he was very learned in the art of simpling, I took it to him. I found him in his still-room, working. Having transacted my business, I seated myself and we lapsed into pleasant converse. While thus talking, he opened the door, called his daughter from the kitchen, and gave her a small task. At last, as it drew near the ninth hour when the night-watchman would make his rounds, I rose and said farewell to Master Wentworth, he scarce hearing me, absorbed in his simples. As I was about to pass the prisoner, my heart not being hardened toward her for all her vanities, I paused, and put my hand in my doublet pocket, thinking to pleasure her by giving her a piece of silver, and also to admonish her with a few, well-chosen words. But as my fingers clasped the silver piece, my attention was arrested by the expression of the prisoner’s face. So full of malice was it that I recoiled. And at this she uttered a terrible imprecation, the words of which I did not fully understand, but at the instant of her uttering them a most excruciating pain seized upon me. It racked my bones so that I tossed sleepless all that night.”
He paused and looked around solemnly over the people. “And since then,” he added, “I have not had one hour free from pain and dread.”
As Sir Jonathan finished his testimony, he glanced at Deliverance, whose head had sunk on her breast and from whose heart all hope had departed. If he would say naught in explanation, what proof could she give that she was no witch? Her good and loyal word had been given not to betray her meeting with the mysterious stranger.
“Deliverance Wentworth,” said Chief Justice Stoughton, “have you aught to say to the charge brought against you by this godly gentleman?”
As she glanced up to reply, she encountered the malevolent glance of Sir Jonathan defying her to speak, and she shook with fear. With an effort she looked away from him to the judges.
“I be innocent o’ any witchery,” she said in her tremulous, sweet voice. The words of the woman who had been in jail with her returned to her memory: “There is another judgment, dear child.” So now the little maid’s spirits revived. “I be innocent o’ any witchery, your Lordships,” she repeated bravely, “and there be another judgment than that which ye shall put upon me.”
Strange to say, the sound of her own voice calmed and assured her, much as if the comforting words had been again spoken to her by some one else. Surely, she believed, being innocent, that God would not let her be hanged.
The fourth witness, Bartholomew Stiles, a yeoman, bald and bent nearly double by age, was then cried by the Beadle.