*****

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 examination was remarkable also for a sudden light upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most cherished hopes to deliver.