He was very fat, with a shaven, swarthy face and the dewlap of an ox. In that round fleshliness his eyes were sunken like two black buttons, malicious through their very want of expression. His mouth was loose-lipped and gluttonous and cruel.
When he spoke, the deep rumbling quality of his voice was increased by the echoes of that vaulted place.
“What is your name?” he said.
“I am Agostino d'Anguissola, Lord of Mondolfo and...”
“Pass over your titles,” he boomed. “The Holy Office takes no account of worldly rank. What is your age?”
“I am in my twenty-first year.”
“Benedicamus Dominum,” he commented, though I could not grasp the appositeness of the comment. “You stand accused, Agostino d'Anguissola, of sacrilege and of defiling holy things. What have you to say? Do you confess your guilt?”
“I am so far from confessing it,” I answered, “that I have yet to learn what is the nature of the sacrilege with which I am charged. I am conscious of no such sin. Far from it, indeed...”
“You shall be informed,” he interrupted, imposing silence upon me by a wave of his fat hand; and heaving his vast bulk sideways—“Read him the indictment,” he bade one of the amanuenses.
From the depths of a vizored cowl came a thin, shrill voice: