The two priests looked at the girl unmoved, chewing their betel all the while; the judges listened in silence, with an air of amused incredulity, as to a fairy-tale. She continued:--
"Just then P'hra Bâlât and his other disciples returned from their morning ablutions. I crawled to his feet, and told him that I was Tuptim. He started back and recoiled to the end of the cell, as if the very earth had quaked beneath him, leaving me prostrate and overwhelmed with horror at what I had done. In a moment afterwards he came back to me, and, while weeping bitterly himself, begged me that I would cry no more. But the sight of his tears, and the grief in my heart, made me feel as if I were being swallowed up in a great black abyss, and I could not help crying more and more. Then he tried to soothe me, and said, 'Alas! Tuptim, thou hast committed a great sin. But fear not. We are innocent; and for the sake of the great love thou hast shown to me, I am ready to suffer even unto death for thee.' This is the whole truth. Indeed, indeed, it is!"
"Well, well!" said P'hayaprome Baree Rak, "you have told your story beautifully, but nobody believes you. How will you tell us who shaved off your hair and your eyebrows, and brought you that priest's dress you had on yesterday?"
The simple grandeur of that fragile child, as she folded her chained hands across her bosom, as if to still its tumultuous heaving, and replied, "I will not!" defies all description.
I had drawn quite near to Tuptim when she began her simple narrative, and was so much absorbed in attention to what she said, and in admiration of the fearlessness as well as of the beauty and majesty of that little figure, that I had remained rooted to the spot, standing there mechanically, and hardly noting what was going on around me. But the effect of that reply was startling; it brought me suddenly to my senses and to a full appreciation of the scene before me.
There was a child of barely sixteen years hurling defiance, at her own risk and peril, at the judges who appeared as giants beside her. To make such a reply to those executors of Siam's cruel laws was not only to accept death, but all the agonies of merciless torture. As her refusal fell like a thunderbolt upon my startled ears, she seemed a very Titan among the giants.