"The three minutes for consideration is now up. My old enemy and my young enemy, you must now open the door and come forth."
The crowd waited in hushed suspense for what would come next.
Why did not the people inside fire beneath the sure protection of their stronghold? What spell had this woman cast over them? Had she really the power, then, to break through bolts and bars with a mere word, a mere look?
Then the virago, with a haughty look, turned towards the people, and addressed them with a penetrating voice:
"If they won't speak I will. Friends and comrades, these bigwigs here have sworn our ruin. They want to root out the whole lot of us, why, then, should we have mercy on them? Now, however, it is not we who are in their power, but they who are in ours. Their own sins have delivered them into my hands. You know, and the whole world knows, that that stuck-up gentleman yonder, Széphalmi, Esq., once upon a time exposed his firstborn child. He cast it forth in the wilderness, cast it forth among the wild beasts, because he feared the shame of it forsooth!--ha, ha, ha! Has a poor man ever done the like of that? Aye, and it was a poor man who found the child, it was a poor man who had compassion on the little outcast thrown in his way, it was a poor man who brought it up as if it were his own child. And now, if you please, these high and noble gentlemen cast poison into the wells of the poor man that they may destroy him, root and branch."
The mob listened to these murderous words with ever increasing eagerness.
At the same time it did not escape Dame Zudár's attention that a key had been put into the iron door of the castle from the inside, and that it was being turned softly.
So now she fell a-shouting more noisily than ever.
"Before you kneels the foster-daughter of the headsman's wife. Who was that child's mother? who gave her to the headsman's wife? Her mother, I tell you, was a great lady, none other than Benjamin Hétfalusy's daughter, whom the wrath of God smote down together with that little murderer, her infant son. I nourished and brought up that child, and what thanks did I get for it? Only this: that these bigwigs have determined to kill us all by poisoning our meat and drink, that they may thereby bury their shameful secret. But I declare their design aloud, so that every man may know it. This girl is Hétfalusy's grand-daughter. This girl is in our power, and if these fine gentlemen so much as crumple a single hair of any of your heads, I will plunge this knife into the child's heart."