The church bells! The church bells! But they had swung him here into this narrow place and dark, and they would swing him into a darker and a narrower. They had swung Joan Heron there where she stood against the wall.... The many and the many and the many they had rung and swung to torture, infamy, and death! The church bells! They rang in the name of a gentle heart, but they rang also for the savage and poor guesses, the ferocities, the nomad imagination of an ancient, early people. They rang for Oriental ideas of despot and slave, thrones and princes, glittering reward of eternal, happy indolence, fearful punishment of eternal physical torment and ignominy! They rang head beneath the foot, and he that raiseth voice against this Order, not his body only, but his soul and his memory shall be flayed!... Palestine or England, what did it matter? Caiaphas or the Christian Church?... The searching, questing spirit that, age by age, lifted from the lower past toward the light of further knowledge, larger scope—and the past that, age by age, hurled its bolts and let its arrows fly and rang its iron bells against that spirit.... The bells rang and rang. He heard them sweet and softened across the years and knew that many loved them and held them holy; he heard them ring, jubilantly, above many a martyr’s stake, massacre, war, and torture chamber, ring the knell of just questioning, ring the burial, for yet longer and yet longer, of the truth of things; and knew that many, and those not the least worthy, must abhor them. He had loved them, too, but to-day he loved them not. They clanged with a hoarse old sound of savage gong and drum and tube calling to the sacrifice.... Between morning and midday the door opened and his red-faced, wry-mouthed friend of the Dutch wars appeared. “Two of the commissioners would talk with you.” They climbed the stairs leading from the darkness, and passed again through that long and narrow room. But though there were prisoners here, Joan Heron was not among them. The gaoler turned to the left and, opening a door, signed to him to enter a fair-sized, well-lighted room where were chairs and a table. The light dazzled him, coming from the almost night underfoot. When his vision cleared he saw that the two who awaited him were the minister of Hawthorn and Master Harry Carthew. CHAPTER XIX ADERHOLD AND CARTHEW MASTER CLEMENT sat, tense and straight, spiritually girded to meet Satan and his legionaries. Harry Carthew was standing when Aderhold entered the room, but immediately he came and sat beside the minister, his eyes, deep-set in a pale, fever-wasted countenance, regarding, not unsteadily, the prisoner. He had risen from his bed but a week ago; this was the first time he had ridden to the town. There was something strange in his countenance, a look now vacillating, now fixed and hardened. He held his gloves in one hand and drew them through the other with a repeated motion.