Menaces, they informed her, came with better grace
from those who had the power to enforce them; and,
with a brutal scoff, the Croatian bade her merit their
indulgence by frank discoveries and voluntary confessions.
He insisted on knowing the nature of the connection
which the imperial colonel of horse, Maximilian, had
maintained with the students of Klosterheim; and upon
other discoveries, with respect to most of which Paulina
was too imperfectly informed herself to be capable
of giving any light. Her earnest declarations
to this effect were treated with disregard. She
was dismissed for the present, but with an intimation
that on the morrow she must prepare herself with a
more complying temper, or with a sort of firmness in
maintaining her resolution, which would not, perhaps,
long resist those means which the law had placed at
their disposal for dealing with the refractory and
obstinate.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Paulina meditated earnestly upon the import of this
parting threat. The more she considered it, the
less could she doubt that these fierce inquisitors
had meant to threaten her with torture. She felt
the whole indignity of such a threat, though she could
hardly bring herself to believe them in earnest.
On the following morning she was summoned early before
her judges. They had not yet assembled; but some
of the lower officials were pacing up and down, exchanging
unintelligible jokes, looking sometimes at herself,
sometimes at an iron machine, with a complex arrangement
of wheels and screws. Dark were the suspicions
which assaulted Paulina as this framework or couch
of iron first met her eyes; and perhaps some of the
jests circulating amongst the brutal ministers of her
brutal judges would have been intelligible enough,
had she condescended to turn her attention in that
direction. Meantime her doubts were otherwise
dispersed. The Croatian officer now entered the
room alone, his assessors having probably declined
participation in that part of the horrid functions
which remained under the Landgrave’s commission.
This man, presenting a paper with a long list of interrogatories
to Paulina, bade her now rehearse verbally the sum
of the answers which she designed to give. Running
rapidly through them, Paulina replied, with dignity,
yet trembling and agitated, that these were questions
which in any sense she could not answer; many of them
referring to points on which she had no knowledge,
and none of them being consistent with the gratitude
and friendship so largely due on her side to the persons
implicated in the bearing of these questions.
“Then you refuse?”
“Certainly; there are three questions only which
it is in my power to answer at all—even
these imperfectly. Answers such as you expect
would load me with dishonor.”
“Then you refuse?”
“For the reasons I have stated, undoubtedly
I do.”
Copyrights
Memorials and Other Papers — Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
