When Ulenspiegel and Soetkin passed along the street, their hands tied behind them, the fishmonger was posted on the threshold of his house, to look at them.
And the citizens of Damme, men and women, were on the thresholds of their houses also. Mathyssen, a near neighbour of the fishmonger, heard Ulenspiegel say to the informer:
"God will curse thee, tormentor of widows!"
"Thou wilt come to an ill end, persecutor of orphans!"
The folk of Damme having thus learned that it was upon a second denunciation by Grypstuiver that the widow and the orphan were thus being haled off to prison, hooted the fishmonger, and that night flung stones through his windows. And his door was covered with filth.
And he no longer dared to leave his own house.
Towards ten o'clock in the forenoon Ulenspiegel and Soetkin were brought into the torture chamber.
There were the bailiff, the clerk and the sheriffs, the executioner from Bruges, his assistant and a barber surgeon.
The bailiff asked Soetkin if she was not holding back goods that belonged to the Emperor. She replied that having nothing, she could hold back nothing.
"And thou?" asked the bailiff, speaking to Ulenspiegel.
"Seven months since," said he, "we inherited seven hundred carolus; some of these we ate. As for the others, I cannot tell where they are; I think indeed that the traveller on foot that stayed in our house, for our undoing, took the rest away, for I have seen nothing since then."
The bailiff asked again if both persisted in declaring themselves innocent.
They answered that they were holding back nothing that belonged to the Emperor.
"The charges against you being serious and the accusation well sustained, you must needs, if you do not confess, undergo the question."
"Spare the widow," said Ulenspiegel. "The fishmonger has bought up everything."
"Poor lad," said Soetkin, "men cannot endure pain as women can."
Seeing Ulenspiegel pale as the dead because of her, she said again:
The bailiff asked the executioner if he had in readiness the implements and all things needful to discover the truth.
The judges, having consulted, decided that, in order to come at the truth, they should begin with the woman.
"For," said one of the sheriffs, "there is no son so cruel or hard hearted as to see his mother suffer without making confession of the crime and so to deliver her; the same will do any mother, were she a tigress at heart, for her offspring."