A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set free from his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution with his hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was also being led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, were the words that they interchanged.
‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with thee who raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoice that thou, too, art going home.’
‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am not afraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’
He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ And when they were parted he still turned round to her once more, and said, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’
Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen the then common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified head downwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregs of the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sake of brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.[101] In point of fact, Nero had read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’[102] that tyrants had been known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himself suggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it. When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He well knew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him for mercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingering death. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days in complications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew that in a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.
Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. While the cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor, and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner had loosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.
He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed the Emperor’s alarm, exclaimed—
‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too, shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’
‘Crucify him!’ said Nero, passionately. ‘Stop his ill-omened and blaspheming mouth!’
But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.