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Updated: June 27, 2025
And to him we undoubtedly owed our wretched lives that day. I in particular have good cause to be grateful. A German, all of six foot four, who swung a tremendously broad headsman's axe with a curved blade, tried several times to get at me. Each time the officer stopped him. Still he persisted. He apparently saw no one else and kept his eye fastened on me with deadly intention in it.
At the extreme end of the house, right opposite the windows of the headsman's bedroom, was a large mulberry tree, whose wide-spreading branches bent down over the roof of the house. With the help of these branches one could easily get to the fence, and then a bold leap down from the top of it would do the rest.
He had hurt himself somewhat severely when he leaped over the fence of the headsman's house. "Oh, why have you come home just at this time?" lamented the old servant, "if only it had been any other day in the whole year but this; this house is a sad dwelling-place just now, there are two corpses in it." "Who has died then?" "Mistress Leonora and little Ned. How they are all weeping within there."
Exactly as if these blood-hounds were tragic actors of which one could best produce his effects by fire and pathos, and the other by the subtlety of his conception. I call that an unprejudiced judgment. And why should not a man be great even as a murderer? From what hangman's noose did you drag out the neck of one, and from what headsman's block did you rescue the other when you found them?
The truth of these suggestions was plausible, and the noble Genoese drew back in cold disappointment. The châtelain consulted with those about him, and then desired the wife to come forth in order to be confronted with her husband. Marguerite obeyed. Her movement was slow, and her whole manner that of one who yielded to a stern necessity. "Thou art the headsman's wife?"
The work of fixing it in position work performed as quietly as could be, so that the only sound was the occasional thud of a mallet had just been finished; and the headsman's "valets" or assistants, in frock-coats and tall silk hats, were waiting and strolling about in a patient way.
"Then you, too, are one of them, eh?" cried she. "Did you not hear the cry of the death-bird?" stammered he. "What are you afraid of? Tis only my half-crazy old mother." At night the headsman's apprentices sleep on the floor of the loft. The headsman himself has a room overlooking the courtyard; Mekipiros slept in the stable outside with the watch-dog. All was silent.
Everyone began to applaud the delinquent and cry: "Vivat Janko," while they pelted the headsman's assistants with stinking eggs and rotten apples.
The waggish crowd pressed upon them from all sides, and while the funeral car with its canopy, its cortége, and its banners surrounded the door, one of the buxom wenches fell upon the neck of the drabant and kissed and hugged him, while a giant raven with a pointed beak forced his tankard on the headsman's assistant, and compelled him to drain it to the dregs, finally bonneting him with the empty tankard.
She beheld the axe in the headsman's hand; she saw him raise it for the fatal stroke. She was a woman no longer, but a lioness! Not a drop of blood was in her cheeks. Her nostrils were expanded and her eyes darted lightning. She drew out a dagger that she had concealed in her bosom, and made a path through the amazed, frightened, yielding crowd.
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