“Why have you resumed this male habit?”

I did not quite catch her answer, for just then a soldier’s halberd slipped from his fingers and fell on the stone floor with a crash; but I thought I understood Joan to say that she had resumed it of her own motion.

“But you have promised and sworn that you would not go back to it.”

I was full of anxiety to hear her answer to that question; and when it came it was just what I was expecting.  She said—­quiet quietly: 

“I have never intended and never understood myself to swear I would not resume it.”

There—­I had been sure, all along, that she did not know what she was doing and saying on the platform Thursday, and this answer of hers was proof that I had not been mistaken.  Then she went on to add this: 

“But I had a right to resume it, because the promises made to me have not been kept—­promises that I should be allowed to go to mass and receive the communion, and that I should be freed from the bondage of these chains—­but they are still upon me, as you see.”

“Nevertheless, you have abjured, and have especially promised to return no more to the dress of a man.”

Then Joan held out her fettered hands sorrowfully toward these unfeeling men and said: 

“I would rather die than continue so.  But if they may be taken off, and if I may hear mass, and be removed to a penitential prison, and have a woman about me, I will be good, and will do what shall seem good to you that I do.”

Cauchon sniffed scoffingly at that.  Honor the compact which he and his had made with her?

Fulfil its conditions?  What need of that?  Conditions had been a good thing to concede, temporarily, and for advantage; but they have served their turn—­let something of a fresher sort and of more consequence be considered.  The resumption of the male dress was sufficient for all practical purposes, but perhaps Joan could be led to add something to that fatal crime.  So Cauchon asked her if her Voices had spoken to her since Thursday—­and he reminded her of her abjuration.

“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.