"He has just said to the gentleman," he said, loud and flat into the silent room, "'If she opens her mouth, Ormerod, you had better get aboard yourself before dark, for I'll not go to Exeter gaol alone.'"
VII.
Afterward Marian could never quite remember the order in which things happened in the next quarter of an hour. She remembered Crispin's face, which went the colour of tallow. She remembered the captain saying, very coldly, that he had never heard such an impudent fabrication in his life and that he would not stand in a clergyman's study and be made the butt of a stable-boy's conjuring tricks. She remembered Nance edging toward the door, and Lusty, who was slow but not a fool, stepping in front of it.
And she remembered old Mr. Trevisa, who had sat through it all with his long face growing longer, putting his spectacles back on and taking a sheet of paper and writing something on it, and folding it, and handing it to his clerk.
"Mr. Pascoe," he said. "Go to the far end of the room, if you please, by the bookcase, and read that to the prisoner. Do not raise your voice. Do not let anyone else see the paper. Young man, you will tell me what he says."
The clerk went to the bookcase, twelve feet off, and unfolded the paper, and read from it in a murmur so low that Marian, sitting nearer than Jory, caught only the rhythm of it.
Jory watched the clerk's mouth. His own lips moved very slightly as he watched, as if he were tasting the words. Then he said: "'Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to'—" He stopped, and frowned. "I did not get the last word, sir. It is a long word. The tongue goes behind the teeth at the start of it, and the lips push out in the middle, but he dropped his head."
Mr. Trevisa took the paper back from his clerk and looked at it for a long time.
"'Destruction,'" he said. "The Proverbs, the thirty-first chapter, the eighth verse." He laid it on the desk. "You did not pretend to the word you could not see."
"No, sir. If I did that you would have no reason to believe the others."
The old man nodded slowly. Then he looked at Nance, by the door, and Marian saw something come into his mild face that had not been there before.
"I am discharging the prisoner," he said. "There is not evidence on which I could in conscience commit him. A watch in a bed of straw in a loft that any man may climb to is nothing at all, and the only witness who would connect him with it has told me a story which I am now satisfied cannot be true. Constable, take those irons off him. As for you"—to Nance—"you will hold yourself ready to answer for what you have sworn in this room. I shall be considering it."