The spectators had watched this conversation between the bishop and the magistrate without comprehending what had passed between them, but when they again saw the Vermilion Pencil rise slowly, when they saw the executioners lift up the still unconscious woman from the foot of the cross and revive her, a shudder passed through them. They swayed backward as from a sudden yawning of an abyss. They were shoved backward one over another until the bund around the crucifix was again clear.
The executioner, having revived the wife, bound her once more to the crucifix; again the thongs hid the red rings around her wrists and neck. Her eyes, still moist with tears, cast one fleeting, reproving look around her, full of injured, startled wonder.
Then the executioner with the beheading sword came and stood on the right of the crucifix; the one with the reviving sponge stood on the left, while in front of her was the other, his sleeves rolled up and by his side a small basket of knives. These men did not take their eyes away from the pencil of death, which again lay on the crimson cloth.
The Pencil moved.
Involuntarily the spectators turned away as they heard a cry of gentle protestation.
The executioner cut the left shoulder of her jacket, laying bare her arm and part of her bosom, which was not unlike ivory sheened with the pink of silk. She looked up into the face of her slayer, and those spectators that dared to raise their eyes saw his hand waver. Then the ascending Pencil stopped. The first stroke was now to be given.
When the Breton went out of the Mission gate followed by the Children of the Deluge, he turned east upon Old River Street and as he went along there rose at certain intervals that terrible cry, “Hung Shun Tien!” Men stopped in their labour at the sound of this, and when they saw the tall black-robed Breton with the Great Symbol gleaming on his bosom, when they saw the stern, armed array behind him holding overhead their right hands with thumbs pointing upward, they either drew back in consternation or put aside the implements of their labour and joined themselves to this body of sombre men. They asked no questions; they looked neither to the right nor to the left, but simply dropped their queues over their right shoulders in a loop and brought the end around the neck, tying it in the Sign of Shou. Then they held their right hands overhead and when the others cried out: “Hung Shun Tien!” so cried they.
In this manner beggars peeped out of their holes and joined them. Merchants came from their gilded shops and rolling up their silken robes took their places beside the beggars. Thieves crept out from their hidings and sentries left their stations. Hucksters put down their trays and scholars their brushes. Itinerant barbers, physicians, cooks, fortune-tellers, robbers, clerks, silk robes, and tatters; youths and tottering old men; from mansions and cellars and hovels and holes came the Children of the Deluge to follow the black-robed man upon whose bosom the Symbol rested.
As the Deluge burst through the labyrinthine windings of the suburbs in their race with death, the old men and those that were feeble, panting, and wheezing, dropped out, but new recruits took their places and the flood was swollen as it rushed along, so that before the head debouched into the Street of the Sombre Heavens, the rear could no longer hear the battle-cry of the van falling sonorous and terrible upon the silence of twilight.