The soldiery, however, interfered by arresting the unsuspecting victim of these rumors, and at this early hour the prisoner had been brought into the judgment hall to await a mockery of trial.
“Answer me, daughter of Belial!” said the judge, as soon as the murmurs of the mob allowed him to be heard. “Will you confess your crime? Speak, or you die! Know you that the rack, aye! fire itself, awaits you if your obstinacy continues?”
The prisoner was a slight girlish creature, sitting with her face buried in her hands, directly opposite to the judge. She was apparently young, and her figure, so far as it could be seen through the thick veil which shrouded her form, was light and agile as that of a sylph. To the judge’s question she made no answer. She only shook her head despondingly, and those nigh her fancied they heard her sob.
“To the stake with the heathen sorceress! She deals with the evil one!” shouted the mob. “What need we further than this silence? Away with her—away!”
At these fearful words, repeated now for the second time, and growled forth with an ominous fierceness, appalling even to the hearer, the prisoner was observed to tremble, whether with fear or otherwise we know not, and lifting her veil up with a sudden effort, she rose to her feet, turned hastily around to the mob, and disclosed a countenance of such surpassing loveliness to their gaze, that even those who had cried out most unrelentingly for her blood now shrank abashed into silence, while others, who had been less eager for her condemnation, audibly murmured in her favor.
“What would ye have of me?” she said, addressing the judge, and for the first time standing unveiled before him. “As there is a God in whom we both believe, I have told you only the truth. I am a stranger, a foreigner, a defenceless woman, but not the less the affianced bride of one of your proudest nobles, the Count de Garonne.”
The tone in which she spoke was firm, but oh! how touchingly sweet; and her words were uttered in broken French, with a perceptible Oriental accent. Loud murmurs arose in her favor as she ceased speaking. The tide was turning. But the judge now spoke:
“Out on thee, woman of hell! Out on thee for a base slanderer of a noble of France, and a holy crusader! Thou the betrothed bride of Garonne! As soon would the eagle mate with the vulture. I tell thee, woman, that thy story of having been shipwrecked when coming to France, and of all thy train having been lost except thy two Ethiopian myrmidons, is a foul lie, and I am almost minded to wring the truth from thee on the rack.”
“I have said it,” said the prisoner, in a firm voice, for she felt her life depended on her calmness, “and if you will give but one week, only one little week, I will prove it before man as well as God. I came from Syria in the same fleet with my lord, but under charge of his mother’s confessor—now a saint in Heaven!—but being separated by a storm, in which our galley was shipwrecked, I was thrown unprotected on your shores. I am a stranger here. My servants even have deserted me. I do no one harm. I plot no treason. All I ask is to pass on my way. Oh!” she continued, with a burst of emotion, “if you have a daughter, think what would be your feelings if she was to be thus set upon in a strange land,” and she burst into tears. Again the crowd murmured in her favor.
“Woman!” sternly interposed the judge, unmoved by her emotion, “look at the victim of your sorcery, and seek no longer to deceive us by your lies. Stand forth, Philip the Deformed!”