it.... He drew one long steady breath,
expelled it again, and turned back to my lord Shrewsbury. As he turned,
he saw him make a sign, and felt himself grasped from behind.

III

He reached at last with his hands the rung of the ladder on which the
executioner's foot rested, hearing, as he went painfully up, the roar of
voices wax to an incredible volume. It was impossible for any to speak
so that he could hear, but he saw the hands above him in eloquent
gesture, and understood that he was to turn round. He did so cautiously,
grasping the man's foot, and so rested, half sitting on a rung, and
holding it as well as he could with his two hands. Then he felt a rope
pass round his wrists, drawing them closer together.... As he turned,
the roar of voices died to a murmur; the murmur died to silence, and he
understood and remembered. It was now the time to speak.... He gathered
for the last time all his forces together. With the sudden silence,
clearness came back to his mind, and he remembered word for word the
little speech he had rehearsed so often during the last week. He had
learned it by heart, fearful lest God should give him no words if he
trusted to the moment, lest God should not see fit to give him even that
interior consolation which was denied to so many of the saints--yet
without which he could not speak from the heart. He had been right, he
knew now: there was no religious consolation; he felt none of that
strange heart-shaking ecstasy that had transfigured other deaths like
his; he had none of the ready wit that Campion had showed. He saw
nothing but the clear October sky above him, cut by the roofs fringed
with heads (a skein of birds passed slowly over it as he raised his
eyes); and, beneath, that irreckonable pavement of heads, motionless now
as a cornfield in a still evening, one glimpse of the river--the river,
he remembered even at this instant, that came down from Hathersage and
Padley and his old home. But there was no open vision, such as he had
half hoped to see, no unimaginable glories looming slowly through the
veils in which God hides Himself on earth, no radiant face smiling into
his own--only this arena of watching human faces turned up to his,
waiting for his last sermon.... He thought he saw faces that he knew,
though he lost them again as his eyes swept on--Mr. Barton, the old
minister of Matstead; Dick; Mr. Bassett.... Their faces looked
terrified.... However, this was not his affair now.