A little farther on they came to two pillars, and between these was a huge wheel closely studded with iron prongs; and entangled in these were bones and fragments of cloth miserably dispersed over the wheel.
Gerard hid his face in his hands. "Oh to think those patches and bones are all that is left of a man! Of one who was what we are now."
"Excusez! a thing that went on two legs and stole; are we no more than that?"
"How know ye he stole? Have true men never suffered death and torture too?"
"None of my kith ever found the way to the gibbet, I know."
"The better their luck. Prithee how died the saints?"
"Hard. But not in Burgundy."
"Ye massacred them wholesale at Lyons, and that is on Burgundy's threshold. To you the gibbet proves the crime; because you read not story. Alas! had you stood on Calvary that bloody day we sigh for to this hour, I tremble to think you had perhaps shouted for joy at the gibbet builded there; for the cross was but the Roman gallows, Father Martin says."
"The blaspheming old hound!"
"Oh fie! fie! a holy and a book-learned man. Ay, Denys, y'had read them, that suffered there, by the bare light of the gibbet. 'Drive in the nails!' y'had cried: 'drive in the spear! Here be three malefactors. Three "roués."' Yet of those little three one was the first Christian saint, and another was the Saviour of the world which gibbeted him."