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Confess, can't you? In spite of everything, you're tortured by remorse. Remember your dismay, at the restaurant, when you had seen the newspaper. What? Jacques Aubrieux condemned to die? That's more than you bargained for! Penal servitude would have suited your book; but the scaffold!... Jacques Aubrieux executed to-morrow, an innocent man!... Confess, won't you? Confess to save your own skin!
Ten o'clock had sounded some time since, when there was a sudden movement in the crowd, a backward pressure by the ranks of guards, and a man, saluting as he passed, walked up that narrow, human lane to the little square and mounted the scaffold with a firm tread. A great hush fell, broken only by the sounds of sobbing. This man a coward!
"I read that in that old letter among your papers, Rupert." "Yes, the Luck went from him. He survived Marston Moor; he survived the death of his royal master, Charles the First, on the scaffold. He lived long enough to witness the return of the Stuarts to England. But the Luck was gone, and with it the good fortune of his line.
The Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall, he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe, enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw aside to let him pass.
His hour came at sunup of a clear, crisp, October morning, when a rime of frost made a silver carpet upon the boarded floor of the scaffold, and in the east the heavens glowed an irate red, like the reflections of a distant bale-fire. From his cell door before the head warder summoned him forth, he drove away with terrible oaths the clergyman who had come to offer him religious consolation.
Just at this place something went wrong with one of the waggon wheels, and the procession came to a stop. A crowd collected, and we heard some of the grown-up people say, that the scaffold was being carried out for the ceremony of to-morrow. Then, more intensely than ever, one realised the condition of the doomed men.
Michael Angelo took down the platform, and took away so much rope from it, that having given it to a poor man that assisted him, it enabled him to dower and marry two daughters. Michael Angelo erected his scaffold without ropes, so well devised and arranged that the more weight it had to bear the firmer it became.
There isn't one, not the poorest man among us, that wouldn't be willing to do honour to the memory of the great men of the past that died on the scaffold in defence of the liberty of the people. It's the cursed system of Castle Government and the tyranny of the landlords, and the way the people is driven off their farms by the rack-renting flunkeys of the rent office.
"O doctor, doctor!" protested half a dozen voices. "I beg your pardon! Don't let us be hasty, I say; and let us consider, For an assassination there must be a motive, and an all-powerful motive; for, aside from the scaffold which he risks, no man is capable of killing another man solely for the purpose of shedding his blood.
"In effect," said Monmouth, smiling bitterly, "nothing was more naturally arranged; it was only too easy for Sidney to persuade me, to turn aside my objections." "And what objections could you make?" said Angela. "What was there astonishing in that King James, not wishing to shed your blood on the scaffold, should connive at your escape?"
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