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And now the headsman's sword had shivered all this grandeur and happiness at a blow. The name of the dead statesman had become a word of scoffing and reproach; vagabond mountebanks enacted ribald scenes to his dishonour in the public squares and streets; ballad-mongers yelled blasphemous libels upon him in the very ears of his widow and children.
Give a prisoner his weapons, put him in a pit with beasts of reasonable strength, and let him fight to a finish if you choose, and I can look on there and applaud the strokes. The war prisoner, being a prisoner, has earned death by natural law, and prefers to get his last stroke in hot blood than to be knocked down by the headsman's axe.
Let her live on; but let her live beneath The headsman's axe, and, from the very hour One arm is lifted for her, let it fall. My lords, I now have heard your several thoughts, And give my ardent thanks for this your zeal. With God's assistance, who the hearts of kings Illumines, I will weigh your arguments, And choose what best my judgment shall approve.
"Thou canst then believe that a headsman's child is like the offspring of another and is not to be hunted of men like the young of a wolf." "Mother, this is the Baron de Willading's heiress," said Christine: "would she come here, did she not pity us?" "Yes, she can pity us and yet I find it hard even to be pitied!
"Who is at home here?" inquired a strong sonorous voice at the door of the headsman's dwelling, and immediately afterwards a shape huddled up in a grey mantle passed through the kitchen door. By the hearth were sitting Ivan and the woman of the house, it was a dark tempestuous night outside; it might have been about ten o'clock and every door was closed.
The carnival was also an apprentice, and he certainly had one of the very best billets, for all he had to do was to lie still and drink. When the carnival's funeral procession arrived in front of the cloister of the Jesuits, the two armed watchmen, the drabant and the headsman's assistant, were still standing there, one on each side of the door.
Those words had told her that Pollux was a doomed man; that apostasy on her part could not have saved his life; that had he not fallen by the Syrian's dagger, he would have been but reserved for the headsman's axe. And had Pollux perished thus, there would have been none of that gleam of hope which, at least in Zarah's eyes, now rested upon his grave.
The stranger thereupon tidied up his clothing, smoothed back his hair on both sides of his forehead, thereby giving to his features a gentle amiable expression, and softly tapped at the headsman's door. "Come in!" resounded a deep melancholy voice from within. The unknown youth entered and carefully closed the door behind him.
When he was nearer his end, when it seemed to him as if the headsman's block was not very far off, his willingness had intensified into 'having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. And when the end was all but reached, and he knew that death was waiting just round the next turn in the road, he said, with the confidence that in the midst of the struggle would have been vainglory, but at the end of it was a foretaste of the calm of Heaven, 'I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. That is our model, dear brethren, 'always courageous, afraid of nothing in life, in death, or beyond, and therefore willing to go from home from the body and to go home to the Lord.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman's axe.
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