He bent over her with a hoarse cry, tugging at his bonds until one from pity severed them with a stroke of his knife.
"Rose, Rose, you here?"
She opened her eyes and smiled. Death bore a radiant visage, seeing that her lover's arms were about her, his breath was on her cheeks, her life was for his. A tall, slender figure sprang to her side, pressed a crucifix against her stiffening lips, and all was over.
Murmuring the prayer for the dead, the figure kneeled in solemn contemplation of the lovely face, and then suddenly drew itself up and turned its burning eyes upon the throng. A shiver ran through them all. It was their old leader, Robert Annys.
For an instant he looked on them in silence. In his face, grief and pity, and anger and indignation, all struggled for mastery. As his gaze wandered to the rich stuffs, trampled and soiled on the ground, the shattered, gaping chests, the twisted pieces of silver and gilt, and finally the lance with the grewsome head surveying the smoking and blackened ruins of the Manor House, at last the indignation—passionate, intense—conquered.
"How came ye so to shame our Cause?" The words burst from him at white heat.
"What is this before me?" he asked; "a gathering of thieves and robbers and murderers, or of true men—workers who are throwing down their tools that their brethren may also have bread between their teeth? Are we men in whose bosoms burns the desire to sweep off the face of the earth all unruth and injustice and wrong? or are we, as some men say of us, but varlets whose envy and greed make us lust for the ease of the gentles? Are we seeking to build up or to destroy? Answer me that! I tell you, fellow-men, we dare not come before the King with our hands dripping with blood and the land laid waste by our torches. And how dare we come before God with a prayer for justice on our lips, but only envy and murder in our hearts?"
The men stood in awed silence, looking up at Annys, who seemed to tower above them in his righteous indignation—Robert Annys, beloved of all, who had put himself again at their head as by a miracle.
The beautifully modulated voice swept on, the voice with the old familiar ring in it, the voice that once had wielded such power over them. Impassioned it continued, and yet with the overtone of a great pity and tenderness now vibrating through it.