Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/115

 into the theatre to be present at the more exciting part of the performance.

Sister Gertrude was first made to ascend the high stage in the centre of the theatre. During the reading of her sentence, which lasted half an hour, "bold and unabashed in aspect, mumbling, she vomited forth horrid blasphemies, so that the ushers at her side were obliged to shut her mouth with a gag."

Then the same was done by Fra Romualdo. He, too, showed all the signs of the most hardened impenitence. He did not bow to the crucifix, nor even to the Inquisitors! But it does not seem to have been considered necessary to gag him.

The next thing was to strip the prisoners of their religious habit. For this purpose the pitched and painted garments had to be lifted off them. Then the friar's and nun's dresses were "opprobriously" taken off, and the pitch saturated garments were replaced. The hair of the female prisoner was also saturated with pitch.

Just then, the wretched woman "seemed to give some signs of a disposition to relent." Immediately a theologian of first-rate power was called in haste from a neighbouring monastery of Jesuits, and was closeted with her. But at the end of a very few minutes, he left her, and reported that any apparent movement of penitence on her part had been either momentary or feigned.

Then the sitting in the theatre was at an end. The Inquisitors rose, and returned in carriages provided by the viceroy, to their palace; not to be absent—let it not be supposed for an instant—from the burning, but to change their dresses, and to return forthwith to the Piano di Santo Erasimo, in which the execution was to take place.

There also, scaffoldings and stands had been erected, in such sort as to allow everybody a full and near view of the execution. And the senators and the nobles, and the monks and the friars, and the ladies, all hurried away from the theatre to their places in the plain of Santo Erasimo. And there, again, refreshments—ices, cakes, and so forth—were handed round; for it was now within an hour of sunset; they had been at it all day; and a little more sustentation of the body was necessary for those who were not sustained by the excitement of being about to be burned alive.

From the theatre to the place of execution, each of the two impenitent heretics was carried on a cart drawn by bullocks; standing upright on the cart, tied to a stake securely fixed in the floor of it. The cart carrying Sister Gertrude entered the space railed off in the middle of the large piazza, first. Four theologians got into each cart, two standing on each side of either prisoner, "and all these doctors continued their fervent exhortations and last salutary admonitions unceasingly, during the whole transit."

Think of the horrible falsity, sham, and hollowness of the whole thing! Picture to yourself the figures of those eight learned divines, in their doctors' gowns, with the "azure hat" peculiar to the servants of the Inquisition on their heads, vicing with each other in urgently and with much gesticulation deafening the ears and stunning the minds of the poor wretches about to die in the flames, with voluble trash drawn from the cut-and-dry manuals of their science!

The stake to which each victim was to be bound, was erected on a scaffolding raised a considerable height from the ground. Under this scaffolding, and not around the person of the prisoner, were heaped together the fagots and fuel; an arrangement which secured, both considerable prolongation of the victims' agonies, and a far more complete view of them by the assembled multitude, than the less ingenious method of heaping fagots around the body of the sufferer.

"Then," when Gertrude had ascended the scaffold and been bound to the stake, "the servants and indefatigable priests of the Holy Office opened their last batteries against the hardened heart of the obstinate wretch. And truly it is not possible to describe with the pen how they sweated for her conversion, both coming along in the cart, and on the scaffold in the last moments of her miserable life, in the hope of bringing her to see her errors! But at last, their energies being worn out, and seeing that their exhortations, their labour, and their tears were uselessly poured forth, they were obliged to retire and leave the place to Justice.

"Thereupon they first burned her hair [saturated with pitch, it will be remembered] to let her feel a small taste of the burning of the fire [literally word for word], but she showed no more care for her hair than for her soul. Then they set fire to the pitch-soaked outer garment, to try whether the heat of the flames would make her open her eyes. But finding that she was still most obstinate, they set fire to the wood of the furnace underneath, which, burning the planks that supported her, the wretch plunged down into the fire, and was there consumed, and her soul passed from the temporal to the eternal fire."

Then came the bullock-drawn cart bearing the other victim. "But as he was descending from it, the concourse of people who crowded around him was extraordinary. Cavaliers, monks, and people of every condition, showing an immense zeal for his eternal salvation, threw themselves at his knees, and with loving reproaches, and with entreaties, and with acts of profound humiliation on their knees, strove by force of tears to prove their desire for his salvation, imploring him to repent, and to have mercy on his own soul. But they all spoke both with their tongues and with their eyes to one deaf. He remained inflexible, without giving the least sign of repentance or emotion."

"Then he was closely bound to the stake by the executioner. And they set fire to the garment soaked in pitch. Thereupon he made violent struggles to loose himself, and blew at