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Updated: May 1, 2025
As she gazed in my face there came over hers a look of pleased surprise, and then, as her eyes passed rapidly down my limbs and up again, her face was not overshadowed with the look of disappointment which I had waited for yes, waited for, like a pinioned criminal for the executioner's uplifted knife; but the smile of pleasure was still playing about the little mouth, while the tender young eyes were moistening rapidly with the dews of a kind of pity that was new to me, a pity that did not blister the pride of the lonely wounded sea-gull, but soothed, healed, and blessed.
At four o'clock the executioner's assistants came to fetch him; he was placed lying on a bier and carried out in that position. On the way he met the criminal lieutenant of Orleans, who once more exhorted him to confess his crimes openly; but Grandier replied "Alas, sir, I have avowed them all; I have kept nothing back." "Do you desire me to have masses said for you?" continued the lieutenant.
"My father spoke to me of that, Sir Ralph, but told me that he would rather that I were with some simple knight than with a great noble, for that in the rivalries between these there might be troubles come upon the land, and maybe even civil strife; that one who might hold his head highest of all one day might on the morrow have it struck off with the executioner's axe, and that at any rate it were best at present to live quietly and see how matters went before taking any step that would bind me to the fortunes of one man more than another."
He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism. The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends.
The Chambre Ardente charges me with a crime; but, as I hope to die a Christian's death, though it may be by the executioner's hand I am free from all blood-guiltiness. Not by my hand not by any crime of my committing, was it that the unfortunate Cardillac came to his end."
"And yours, too," he may have added under his breath as he stalked out. It was not worth a swing of the executioner's axe in these times of war. News had arrived from the state capital that morning of which Mr. Dodd knew nothing. Certain feudal chiefs from the North Country, of whose allegiance Mr.
Betea, the most powerful of the King's Ocras, seemed to delight in making our lives a burden to us, for amid luxurious surroundings we were beaten, starved, and ill-treated, until even death under the executioner's knife seemed a preferable fate. Six months passed; six weary months of slavery and wretchedness.
Clouds of smoke roll toward me, dim flames quiver up from it. There is a sound of roasting and frying and the seething fat spurts high. No wonder; there's going to be a wedding. "Would you like to see the executioner's sword?" my friend asks. A mysterious shudder runs down my limbs. "I'd like to well enough," I say fearfully.
"Then, monseigneur, if you know that, I must further add a fact of which you are ignorant that if the king were to know this evening of the presence of this musketeer, this abbe, this bishop, this confessor, here he, who has risked everything to visit you, to-morrow would behold the steely glitter of the executioner's axe in a dungeon more gloomy, more obscure than yours."
The last words of the Burgomaster as he bowed his neck to the executioner's stroke were, "Voor wel gedaan, kwaclyk beloud," "For faithful service, evil recompense."
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