Enough; the matter was summed up. Here was the executioner, here his cart, ready to carry her to the stake. Would Joan of Arc submit to Holy Church, or would she burn, now, in an hour's time?
You are to remember that this child was not yet nineteen years of age; that she had been in prison, enduring every torment except that of actual bodily torture, for a year. To remember, too, that even our Supreme Exemplar prayed once that the cup might pass from him.
Instantly a paper was thrust into her hand, and she was bidden sign it. Bystanders say there was a strange smile on her lips as she made her mark, a circle, as we know she could not write her name. She was hustled back to prison, leaving tumult and uproar behind her. The English were furious. They had come to see a burning, and there was no burning. Warwick made complaint to Cauchon; the King of England would be angry at the escape of this witch.
"Be not disturbed, my Lord!" said the Bishop of Beauvais. "We shall soon have her again."
Back to prison! not, as she had hoped and prayed, to a prison of the Church, where men whose profession at least was holy would be about her; where possibly she might even see and speak with a woman; where she might hear mass, and make confession. No! back to the old foul, hideous cell, to the brutal jeer and fleer of the English men-at-arms. Back, under sentence of imprisonment for life.
Meekly the poor girl went; meekly she put off her page's costume, and assumed, as she was bidden, a woman's dress.
On some aspects of the dark days that followed I cannot dwell; suffice it to say that they were the bitterest of all the bitter year; suffice it to say that when her judges came to her again they found her once more in her page's dress, which she refused to give up again until the end.
This was not the only change they found, nor the greatest. Back in the cell, the Voices had spoken loud and clear in rebuke and reproach. St. Margaret, St. Catherine, both were there. Both told her of the great pity of that betrayal to which she had consented, when she made that abjuration and revocation to save her life; told her that by so doing she had condemned herself.
"If I were to say" (it is herself speaking now) "that God did not send me I would condemn myself, for true it is that God sent me. My Voices have told me since that I greatly sinned in that deed, in confessing that I had done ill. What I said, I said in fear of fire."[69]