For the first time the boy faltered and stumbled, and looked this way and that as if for a chance of escape. But there was none, and Father Bernard, by laying his hand on his arm, seemed to give him courage. "I do," he answered, in a low tone.
"Why?" the President demanded, with a quick look at his colleagues. He spoke amid an irrepressible murmur of interest. The tale had been told once, but it was a tale that bore telling.
"Because--I heard him plan his wife's death--and I thought it right," the boy stammered, terror growing in his eyes. "I wanted to save her. I did not know. I did not think."
The President looked towards the king, but suddenly from an unexpected quarter came an interruption. Madame rose trembling to her feet and stood grasping the bar before her. Her face passed from white to red, and red to white. Her eyes glittered through her tears. The woman beside her would have held her back, but she would not be restrained. "What is this?" she panted. "Does he say that my husband was--there?"
"Yes, madame, he does," the President answered indulgently.
She looked at him for a moment wildly, then sank back on her stool and began to sob. She had gone through so many emotions; love and death, shame and fear, had so sported with her during the last few days that she could taste nothing to the full now, neither sweet nor bitter. As the dawning of life and hope had left her rather dazed than thankful, so this stab, that a little earlier would have pierced her very heartstrings, did but prick her. Afterwards the thankfulness and the pain--and the healing--might come. But here in the presence of all these people, where so much had happened to her, she could only sob weakly.
The President turned again to the king. Louis nodded, and with a painful effort--for he stammered terribly--spoke. "Who is th-this lad?" he said. "Ask him."
The judge bowed and returned to the witness. "You call yourself Jean de Bault?" he said somewhat roughly. The name, and especially the particle, displeased him.
Jehan opened his mouth to answer, but Father Bernard interposed. "Tell His Majesty," he said, "what you told me."
After a moment's hesitation the boy complied, speaking fast, with his face on his breast and a flushed cheek. Nevertheless, in the silence every word reached the ear. "I am Jehan de Bault," he pattered in his treble voice, "seigneur of I know not where, and lord of seventeen lordships in the county of Perigord----" and so on, and so on, through the quaint formula to which we have listened more than once.