“Hush, for thy life, Gaspard!” muttered tremulously the man to whom he spoke. “Know’st thou not that yon monk hath such power as had the blessed saints of old, and that, had he heard these sacrilegious words of thine, it had cost him but the lifting of his finger to smite thee with palsy where thou standest? Heed well thy tongue, I counsel thee, lest it be withered betwixt thy jaws.”
Meanwhile the governor and his officers had fallen back to one side of the scaffold, and the three executioners to the other, leaving monk and criminal alone in the midst.
“Art thou guilty of what they lay to thy charge, my son?” asked Michael, bending over the prisoner, who was grovelling at his feet and clinging to them with the frantic energy of utter desperation.
“I am, I am!” moaned the doomed wretch, looking up at him imploringly. “But thou canst save me if thou wilt.”
“Even so spake the leper unto our Lord Himself,” said the monk, with a strange smile on his worn face; “and as he said, so it was done to him.”
Then he turned to the officials with a look so solemn and commanding, that to their startled eyes his slight form seemed to grow larger as they gazed.
“Hearken, my sons. Ye know that to me, all unworthy as I am, hath been given power to claim a man’s life from the law when fit cause shall appear. Now, methinks it were better for this man to live and repent than to be cut off in his sins, wherefore I claim him as the Church’s prisoner.”
In that age and that region there could be but one answer to such a claim, especially when made by one who was held to be little, if at all, less than a saint himself; and though the governor flushed angrily at this trespass on his privilege of destruction, and the hangman scowled sullenly to see his prey snatched from him, no one dared to object.
“He is thine,” said the governor, sulkily. “Clerk, make entry to that effect.”
But the scratching of the clerk’s ready pen on the parchment was suddenly drowned by the thud of a heavy fall, as the rescued criminal, unable to sustain the terrific shock of this unexpected deliverance, fell down in a fit.