Finally they tied her to the cross with thongs about her wrists and ankles and one that pressed into the soft delicate contour of her neck. Thus she stood looking somewhere over and beyond those assembled around, her great, mournful eyes filled with the light and shadows of other thoughts, but wholly oblivious to the terror about her and to the fear that brooded there.
The executioner stepped up to her and rested his hand upon the bosom of her silken jacket. But as he moved his hand to tear it off there came a choking cry.
Tai Lin had risen to his feet; heavily he lifted his hands and the spectators could see he was trying in vain to speak as one gasps in a nightmare. He shook his quavering head and a foam oozed out of the corners of his mouth. Then as the executioner again raised his hand, Tai Lin with stupendous effort held out his heavy arms to her. His face became purple, his lips black, and a bloody ooze seeped out of them. A tremor passed through his gaunt form. For a moment he stood still and erect, then his arms fell to his side and he sank down lifeless in his chair. A convulsive movement shot through the multitude, followed by breathless silence.
The wife waited with closed eyes for the brutal hand. She did not see Tai Lin rise from his chair; she did not hear his choked cry, nor know that he had fallen dead. Now and then a tear struggled out and lingered momentarily on her long lashes. These little salt globules were the only signs of life in her, and the eyes of some watched them trickle away drop by drop.
Presently men turned to look at one another, then a wave of consternation swept over the bund. They began to whisper. And it was in the midst of this terrified hum that the magistrate raised his hand in command of silence.
“The Great Man, Tai Lin, has saluted the World. He alone was the accuser. The prisoner is free.”
As the executioner cut the deep-sunk thongs away and the wife sank down unconscious at the foot of the crucifix, there rose a noise half a sigh, half a strange murmur, the voice of this multitude, a crowd of men that shrank, shivered, then surged forward to look at the dead man still in the chair and a slender body lying limp at the foot of the cross, beautiful even in the guise of death; necklaced with a ribbon of bruised flesh, braceletted with wristlets of angry red.
It was over this swaying, murmuring mob that the bishop rose and lifted his hand imperiously.
“How is it,” he cried in clear, ringing tones, “that a magistrate of the Middle Kingdom dares hush up a public crime? This guilty woman was taken in the midst of her sin. In trial she confessed her guilt and was condemned by the law and her husband’s command. Dare a magistrate act contrary to this? Dare he act contrary to the three hundred and eighty-first section of the Code? Let him beware!”
The bishop turned, and with his thin lips curling looked sternly down upon the astonished magistrate. Over the bund fell a stillness—the silence of suspense. The eyes of the spectators, propped widely open, did not look away from the pallid man towering above them—with his relentless gaze rivetted upon his fellow judge.