oices left her to do as she pleased, to
tell or not.

*****

Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we
hope had her piece of bread and her _eau rougie_. In the afternoon these
indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions throw
a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which this
wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.

She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with
the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and held
her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point except that
of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also said that her
mother had told her what her father had said to her brothers: "If I
could think that the thing would happen of which I have dreamed, I wish
she might be drowned first; and if you would not do it, I would drown
her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost his senses when she went
to Vaucouleurs.

How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern, and
unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and pure
may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of personal
degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in the intensity
of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to us in many
lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures, with
no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every vicious
possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at the moment
when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to Rheims to see the
coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark, unresponsive, never more sure
than any of the Inquisitors that his daughter was not a witch, or worse,
a shameless creature linked to the captains and the splendid personages
about her by very different ties from those which appeared--there is at
least not a word to prove that he had changed his mind. She does not add
anything to soften the description here given. The sudden appearance of
this dark remorseless figure, looking on from his village, who probably
in all Domremy--when Domremy got to hear the news--would be the only
person who would in his desperation almost applaud that stake and
devouring flame, is too startling for words.

The end of this day's