I believe that it is one thing to confront with calmness a death that is known to be inevitable, and quite another and a far more difficult thing to assume the same brow where hope and a chance remain. I am not greatly ashamed, therefore, that in a crisis which amply justified all the horror and repugnance which mortals feel at the prospect of sudden and violent dissolution, I fell below the heroic standard, and said and did things, _miles impar Achilli_.
Nevertheless, it is with no good-will I dwell on the matter; in writing, as in life, there are decencies and indecencies; things to be told and others to be implied. Let few words then suffice, alike for the moment when Charnock, holding back the others, wrung from me, half-swooning as I was, the admission that I had been to Kensington, and that the sentry was not mistaken: and for those minutes of frenzied terror which followed, when screaming and struggling in their grasp, now trying to fling myself down, and now shrieking prayers for mercy, I was dragged to a spot below the hook, and held there by relentless fingers while a rope was being fetched from the next room. I had no vision, as I have read some have, of the things done in my life: but the set, dark faces that hemmed me in under the light, the grim looks of one, and the scared pallor of another, even Ferguson's hideous visage as he hovered in the background, biting his nails between terror and exultation--all these, even enlarged and multiplied, I saw with a dreadful clearness, and a keenness of vision that of itself was torture.
"Oh, God!" I cried at last. "Help! Help!" For from man I could see no help.
"Ay, man, pray," said Charnock, inexorably. "Pray, for you must die. We will give you one minute. Here comes the rope. Who will fasten it?"
"A fool," cried a hard gibing voice, from somewhere beyond the circle. "No other."
I started convulsively: I had forgotten the girl's presence. So doubtless had the conspirators, for at the sound they turned quickly towards her; and, the ring of men opening out in the movement, she became visible to me. She stood confronting all, daring all. Her lips red, her face white as paper, her eyes glittering with a strange, wild fierceness. Long afterwards she told me that the sound of my shrieks and cries ringing in her ears had been almost more than she could bear: that as scream rose on scream she had driven the nails into her palms until her hands bled, and so only had been able to restrain herself, knowing well that if she would intervene to the purpose her time was not yet.