Then appeared a file of soldiers and officers, and in their midst was a rigid figure lashed between two condemned criminals. One a murderer, particularly odious to the Stuttgart burghers, for he had stabbed his employer, a well-known lady, the much-esteemed widow of a popular town councillor. The other a notorious horse-stealer, whom the law-abiding Stuttgarters had stoned but a few months past.
The rigid figure was ridiculous enough: the great waxen head sculptured to an unmistakable, though grotesque, likeness of the well-known features of Baron Forstner; then the long, emaciated limbs and even the man's noticeably narrow, flat feet had been reproduced, and they shuffled stiffly along the frost-dried cobble stones. It was a masterpiece of ridicule, yet there was something furiously cruel in the whole absurd travesty of a human being, something terrible in this association in ignominy, between the stiff, swaying waxen thing and the condemned criminals. Slowly this strange procession passed through the crowd, and the three figures—the two living, and the gruesome, inanimate parody of life—were pushed into the circle of faggots in the centre of the market-place and bound all three to the tall middle pillar. Then the common hangman, a huge, heavy-featured Swabian—a butcher by usual occupation—stepped forward and demanded in the accustomed formula: 'If by the will of God and His representatives of law and order on earth, these miserable men were to be sent to their eternal punishment?' The chief officer of law made answer that such was the 'will of Heaven and of the very noble Prince, our Lord Eberhard Ludwig, Duke and Ruler of Wirtemberg.' Then a member of the privy council rose, and in solemn tones read the indictment of Friedrich Haberle, the murderer, and Johannes Schwan, the horse-stealer, condemned to be burned at the stake, together with the effigy of the detestable traitor and purloiner of State monies, Christoph Peter Forstner.
In spite of the threatened penalty, a murmur ran through the onlookers. They had expected to see a lifeless thing burned, but could they indeed be forced to witness the burning of two living men? The execution of a witch was another thing—they enjoyed that; but in cold blood to watch two human beings, not horrible magicians but merely sinners—to see these creatures burned along with that ghastly, lifeless, waxen thing,—that was awesome! A woman in one of the windows screamed, a child in the crowd below lifted a wailing cry. Perhaps the whole thing was inconsistent! What difference between the holocaust of a witch and that of two vile criminals? What matter to the dying men that an absurd image should be burned with them? yet there lay some indescribable horror in it.
The hangman advanced and applied a flaming torch to the tar-smeared faggots, which began to hiss and splutter in the still, frosty, winter air.
'Hold!' cried the privy councillor, 'unbind those men! Friedrich Haberle and Johannes Schwan are reprieved from death, their sentence is commuted to flogging and banishment. Beside Christoph Peter Forstner's crimes these men have hardly transgressed. It is the will of his Highness that they should go free, in token of his wise mercy and to let you see how sure is his justice! And against so lenient a Prince has this odious traitor Forstner conspired! Hangman, do your work upon his image in symbol of his well-deserved punishment, from which the unjust protection of a foreign monarch shields the actual person of this criminal. But let this symbol of death be ever present in the souls of all beholders. Such will be the bodily fate of all those who conspire against his Highness or his Highness's government.'
The flames sprang upwards, licking round the waxen figure and scorching the arm of one of the criminals who was being released from the cords that bound him.
Every eye was upon the beauty of the woman seated beside the Duke Eberhard Ludwig. In abject submission and deadly hatred they gazed on the face of her who thus threatened them, for they read her threat against themselves in every word of the privy councillor's discourse, her menace in each flame which consumed the waxen figure of her enemy, Baron Forstner.
