what the men were talking.
“Of Amboise, Madame. You have heard nothing of Amboise?”
Bertrande shook her head.
“You are Catholic, Madame?”
Bertrande nodded.
“And so am I, Madame, but Amboise was the work of the Guises. God be praised, we have no such Catholics in Toulouse. It seems there was a conspiracy of a sort, not greatly proved—there was more talk than evidence. And for that—every kind of death: hangings, decapitations, drownings, without number every day, and so for a whole month. I am Catholic like yourself, Madame, but in Toulouse for every Catholic there is at least one Protestant. And they are good people, Madame. I promise you, I would as soon cut off my own head as that of my neighbor, and that for his being merely a Protestant!”
“But judging from those faces,” said Pierre Guerre, indicating the talkers on the other side of the room, “one would think it a rebellion sooner than a conversation.”
“A rebellion, yes,” said the hostess. “I would not think it impossible. Toulouse has not always been bound to the French crown.”
She went off, and the somber discussion continued, never more animated, never less intense, like a storm cloud that hangs patiently at the edge of an horizon, waiting for a wind to blow it into action.
“I do not know what is the matter with the world,” said Pierre Guerre. “It seems to be breaking up in little pieces. In the days of Francis we were strongly French.”
The room in which they slept, the entire party of mountaineers, for the inn was crowded, was hot and close. In the morning the streets were still warm and in the unmoving air the odors and stenches of the previous days remained, like a kind of disembodied refuse. There was none of the early morning crispness of the mountains, nor the amplitude of the purified air in which odors of the farm, of the beasts and of cooking, stood like symbols of the force and vigor, the healthiness of life. Bertrande awoke unrefreshed and felt in the air, as in her mind, the sultriness which paralleled the sullen temper of the men in the eating-room the evening before.
After the cup of wine, which seemed sour, and a piece of bread, which seemed bitter, she followed Pierre Guerre bare-headed through the streets to the council chambers of the Parliament in the Château Narbonnais.
The streets were crowded. People were speaking, not the mountain patois, but Languedocien, and with a curiously clanging, hard resonance, which made, in the narrower passages, everything seem to be spoken twice, re-echoed in metallic vigor from the dusty walls. And all the way Bertrande asked of herself, What am I doing here, in this unhappy town, in this prolonged stench, this heat, this desolating strangeness? I am pursuing a man to his death, a man who has been many times kind to me, who is the father of my smallest child. I am destroying the happiness of my family. And why? For the sake of a truth, to free myself from a deceit which was consuming me and killing me. She remembered herself speaking to Martin’s sister.
“What would you have, my sister? The truth is only the truth. I cannot change it.”
The sister had replied:
“It is true only for you.”
“And might I be wrong?” she asked herself again as she mounted the stone steps and stood waiting before the great, closed door. She felt, in approaching this tribunal of Toulouse, a finality she had not felt at Rieux. It would not be possible for her to appeal this decision. It waited for her, behind those doors, in the quality of a doom. Suddenly her confidence deserted her, and terror engulfed her. She saw herself as borne forward helplessly on a great tide of misunderstanding and mischance to commit even a greater sin than that of which she had been afraid. The words of the priest returned to her. It had been holy counsel; she had refused it. She broke into a heavy sweat which turned cold on her skin and made her shudder even in the meridional heat. She was dizzied. The door before her grew insubstantial, invisible, as if she had walked into an icy cloud on the summit of La Bancanère. Blindly, she reached out her hand for Uncle Pierre, and, the doors being opened, she entered the courtroom leaning on his arm.
The judges of Toulouse wished to confront the two accusers with the accused, but singly, feeling that much might be revealed to the acute observer in the countenances of the accusers which had not been recorded in the account of the case forwarded to them by the judges of Rieux. Accordingly, once inside the courtroom, Bertrande was constrained to leave the support of Uncle Pierre, and, attended by a guard, advanced before the very seat of the judges. A hum of voices which had filled the room ceased suddenly as she appeared. In the abrupt silence she heard the admonition and then the question of the judge and, lifting her eyes, saw before her at the distance of only a few feet, the man for whom she had felt for one extraordinary year a great and joyous passion. He was regarding her with a look at once patient, tender and ironic. In her distress she saw no other face, and could not bear the contemplation of that tender gaze. She looked down, dropping her head forward, while the blood beat upward into her face and then receded. Who was this Arnaud du Tilh? What manner of man was he that he did not return her hatred with hatred, and why had he not made good his escape from this most dangerous justice on the day when she had first suspected him? Her face turned very white, while a return of the giddiness which had seized her just before she entered the court made it almost impossible for her to continue standing. She replied to the questions of the judges in a half-audible voice, and was then escorted to a small doorway through which she gained the courtyard, the sunlight, and a degree of solitude. She was instructed to return to the inn and to remain there until sent for. She went to her room and lay down.
Inside of an hour Pierre Guerre, who had been similarly instructed, joined her there. He was morose, annoyed at being detained at the inn, feeling himself a prisoner and having no occupation, large or small, with which to while away the time. He felt that he had behaved badly at the trial, and it was true that, although his conviction was as sound as ever, his manner had been hesitating, and embarrassed. He had felt himself stared at and smiled at as a peasant, a mountaineer. He had overheard, as the guard led him through the crowded room, an amused comment on his dress, the wit of which he had not understood, but the intent of which he had understood only too well. Annoyed at the crowd, humble before the judges, suddenly for the first time in his life acutely self-conscious, he had lost, for the space of five minutes, the simple dignity which had lent, at Rieux, such great weight to his testimony. Added to this discomfort was the spectacle of the impostor who had lost during his period of imprisonment some of his healthy brown color but none of his air of being arrogantly in the right.
“We are lost,” said old Pierre to himself as he returned to the inn. “If it depended on me, we are lost indeed.”
He dared not mention his discomfort to his niece, but it was the principal reason for the morose silence with which he rejoined her and set himself to wait out the day.
Bertrande lay upon the bed and regarded the stained canopy. Or she turned her head idly and surveyed the wall, or the figure of old Pierre seated on a straight bench under the window. She felt a great illness. A weight seemed to lie upon her breast which made breathing difficult, and the air which entered her lungs, after she had made so great an effort to expand them, contained no freshness, no reviving quality. Her mind had gone numb through prolonged self-examination. Exhausted and trapped by all these walls, by all these circumstances, she lay still and remembered that the one thing she desired was to be free of Arnaud du Tilh.
Meanwhile the court was proceeding with the examination of witnesses. One hundred and fifty witnesses had been called from the hearing at Rieux, and thirty new ones. Jean Espagnol testified as he had done at the former trial, and introduced a friend, Pelegrin de Liberos by name.
Pelegrin de Liberos, being
