"It is all up with us," whispered Ripon to Dacre.
"My God and my King! It is a noble cause to die for," answered the cavalier, and his proud face looked beatified.
There was a dread and awful silence as the attorney-general finished his last words. The hour for judgment had arrived, unless it were that some senator or commoner wished to speak for or against the prisoners. A bitter and illiterate friend of the government saw fit to spring to his feet and enter upon a violent harangue. Clemency would be misplaced in the present juncture, he said. Death for one and all was the proper measure to be meted out to Royalists and traitors. His truculent words seemed to please the audience, and he sat down amid a tempest of applause. For an instant there was no movement on either side of the house, and then Richard Lincoln, the leader of the opposition, arose and stepped out into the aisle, so as to command his hearers. A flutter of expectation, a murmur of surprise, spread through the assembly, and as he opened his mouth to speak, every ear was alert to catch his words.
"I rise," he said, "to speak for the people, the great, true-souled people. They have, it seems to me, no representative here, or I have failed to interpret aright the language of my predecessor. Are the people merciless? Have they no heart? I know that the contrary is true. It is no argument with them that others have preferred cruelty to mercy, and vengeance to justice. I stand here to-day, for the people and for justice."
He paused, and as no sound expressed one way or the other the feelings of his auditors, he spoke once more:
"Let these men live. Fine or imprisonment will accomplish all that you desire, save the satisfaction of revenge. Capital punishment in this age of the world is an ugly smear upon the escutcheon of constitutional liberty. Let these men live, and your children's children will write you down in their books as worthy of remembrance. They are guilty, but blood will not atone for wrong-doing. Let them live, I say, in the name of justice and the people."
He finished and sat down. Not much of a speech in the way of argument, some will say. It is the manner more than the matter of words that sways men's hearts. No cheers were heard, it is true, but his hearers sat upon the benches thoughtful and silent. The Speaker of the House glanced about him, but no one rose to contradict the testimony that had fallen from the lips of Richard Lincoln.
And now the judges arose and left the hall. For four hours the assembly and the crowds in the streets waited in patience. Before the fifth had elapsed the usher's rod announced that a verdict had been reached. The silence was breathless. The Speaker took the scroll from the hands of William Peters, the leader of the House, and read aloud that John Dacre, as the master spirit of the late rebellion at Aldershot, was sentenced to be shot to death at noon of the next day, and that all the other leaders were to be imprisoned for the term of fifteen years.
There was a roar and a rush as the people rose to escape from the galleries, and few observed a slender girl slip from her seat to the floor. A woman with beautiful eyes, whose face was otherwise veiled from view, stooped to her succor, then gave a shrill cry. Mary Lincoln lay lifeless. Mrs. Oswald Carey, whose shriek it was that made this known, was not one to believe that a woman can die of a broken heart. But if even such a result of her treachery had been foreshadowed to her, she would not have faltered.