And as she knelt, weeping and praying, the entire crowd, touched to the heart, broke into a burst of weeping and lamentation. Winchester wept, and the judges wept. Pierre Cauchon was overwhelmed with emotion. Here and there an English soldier laughed, and suddenly a hoarse voice cried: "You priests, are you going to keep us here all day?" Without any formal sentence, the Bailiff of Rouen waved his hand, saying, "Away with her." Jeanne was seized roughly by the soldiers and dragged to the steps of the stake. There she asked for a cross. One of the English soldiers who kept the way took a piece of staff, broke it across his knees in unequal parts, and, binding them hurriedly together, handed to her. She thanked him brokenly, took it, and kissing it pressed it against her bosom. She then prayed Massieu to bring a cross from the church that she might look upon it through the smoke. From the church of Saint Saviour a tall cross was brought, and Brother Isambard held it before her to the end; for she said: "Hold it high before me until the moment of death, that the cross on which God is hanging may be continually before my eyes." Then bravely as she had climbed the scaling ladders at Orléans and Jargeau the Maid ascended the steps of the scaffold to the stake. The good priest, Isambard, accompanied her with words of consolation. As she was being bound to the stake she looked her last upon the towers and hills of the fair city, and again the cry escaped her lips: "Ah, Rouen! I greatly fear that you shall suffer for my death." Cauchon, hoping that now some word of denouncement against her King might be uttered, came to the foot of the scaffold; once again she cried to him: "Bishop, I die through you." Only once did her spirit falter. When the executioner applied the torch to the faggots, and a dense volume of smoke rolled up she gasped, "Water, holy water!" Then, in quick forgetfulness of self, for Brother Isambard still remained with her, though the pitiless flames had already begun to ascend--she bade him go down lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last she was left alone. Upward leaped the red flames, eager for their prey; upward curled the dense, suffocating smoke; the air quivered and whirled with red, stifling heat; and suddenly, from out of that fiery, awful furnace, there came the clarion tones of the Maid, clear as on the battle field, exultant with the triumph of a great victory: "My Voices were from God! They have not deceived me! Jesus! Jesus!" And so died the Maid; a martyr, not for religion, but for her country. She died, but the lesson of her life lives on: faith and work; for by these two may marvels be wrought and the destiny of nations changed. "The men-at-arms will fight; God will give the victory." CHAPTER XXVIII AT DOMREMY "_To our Holy Father, the Pope, to whom, and to God first, I appeal._" JEANNE'S _own words in the Square of St. Ouen_.