“Yes,” she answered; and then it came out that the Voices had talked with her about the abjuration--told her about it, I suppose. She guilelessly reasserted the heavenly origin of her mission, and did it with the untroubled mien of one who was not conscious that she had ever knowingly repudiated it. So I was convinced once more that she had had no notion of what she was doing that Thursday morning on the platform. Finally she said, “My Voices told me I did very wrong to confess that what I had done was not well.” Then she sighed, and said with simplicity, “But it was the fear of the fire that made me do so.”
That is, fear of the fire had made her sign a paper whose contents she had not understood then, but understood now by revelation of her Voices and by testimony of her persecutors.
She was sane now and not exhausted; her courage had come back, and with it her inborn loyalty to the truth. She was bravely and serenely speaking it again, knowing that it would deliver her body up to that very fire which had such terrors for her.
That answer of hers was quite long, quite frank, wholly free from concealments or palliations. It made me shudder; I knew she was pronouncing sentence of death upon herself. So did poor Manchon. And he wrote in the margin abreast of it:
“RESPONSIO MORTIFERA.” Fatal answer. Yes, all present knew that it was, indeed, a fatal answer. Then there fell a silence such as falls in a sick-room when the watchers of the dying draw a deep breath and say softly one to another, “All is over.”
Here, likewise, all was over; but after some moments Cauchon, wishing to clinch this matter and make it final, put this question:
“Do you still believe that your Voices are St. Marguerite and St. Catherine?”
Then she made direct and clear affirmation that she had never had any intention to deny them; and that if--I noted the if--“if she had made some retractions and revocations on the scaffold it was from fear of the fire, and it was a violation of the truth.”
There it is again, you see. She certainly never knew what it was she had done on the scaffold until she was told of it afterward by these people and by her Voices.
And now she closed this most painful scene with these words; and there was a weary note in them that was pathetic: