CHAPTER V

A Timely Rescue

The later autumn of that year was already stripping the Breton woods of their leaves, and Bertrand du Guesclin’s fifteenth birthday was not far away, when a band of horsemen, twelve in number, rode into the town of Dinan, under the lowering sky of a gloomy October morning, at a flagging pace, which told that they had already ridden long and hard.

Two knights in complete armour; two stalwart esquires in plainer but as serviceable harness; a brace of handsome, smooth-faced boy-pages, barely twelve years old, lightly and daintily armed, and visibly proud of their finery; and half a dozen sturdy men-at-arms, whose weather-beaten faces and battered steel caps showed them to be no novices in war.

Such a train would have been, in that age, a scanty following for one knight, much more for two. But, small as it was, it drew much attention from the passers-by; for the dress, arms, and faces of the travellers marked them as English, and English faces and weapons, soon to be fatally familiar to the people of this quiet region, were a novelty among them as yet.

It was plain, however, that neither knights nor squires, but the two young pages, were the chief objects of attention, and certainly not without cause; for, apart from the gorgeous and somewhat foppish richness of their dress, they were as exactly alike as the twins in Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.”

Both had the same ruddy complexion, the same clear-cut, delicate features, the same bright blue eyes and wavy golden hair, the same height and build, the same precociously dignified and almost haughty bearing. Their very voices were the same; and, as if to make the confusion worse, they were dressed just alike! In a word, the closest observer could not have told which was which; and as ideal twin-brothers (which was just what they were), they might have matched the famous twins whose mishaps are chronicled in a popular song—

“And when I died, the neighbours came And buried brother John!”

Of the two knights, the younger seemed a brisk, comely, jovial youth, whose rather weak face told that his arm would be worth more than his head in the stirring times that were at hand. The very reverse might have been said of his companion, a tall, spare, sinewy man, with a grave and rather sombre face, which would have been handsome but for the sinister look given to it by the thin, pinched lips and small, deep-set, crafty eyes. A keen observer might have noted that, even while talking gaily with his young comrade, Sir Simon Harcourt contrived to keep a close though unobtrusive watch on his two pages, whom he ever and anon addressed as “fair nephews.”

Even before reaching the town gate the travellers met more than one startling example of the pleasant ways of that age.

On a huge tree by the wayside (whence a swarm of foul carrion birds flew screaming at their approach) hung the rotting corpse of a man, with his severed right hand nailed above him to show that he had been executed for highway robbery. Barely a hundred yards farther, a ragged, half-starved, wretched-looking creature begged alms of them in a lisping, whistling voice, fearfully explained by one glance at his disfigured face, the upper lip having been slit right up to the nostrils by the hangman’s knife—the punishment then awarded by the laws of France to “all such as speak blasphemies against God and the holy Church.”

A few minutes later a faint cry, half-drowned in a roar of savage laughter, drew their eyes to a deep, miry pool in a hollow below, in which a dozen ruffianly peasants were ducking a poor old paralytic woman on suspicion of being a witch; and as they came up to the gate they beheld another sight even more characteristic.

Just outside the gate sat a man wrapped in a long mantle of coarse grey frieze, with a heavy stick beside him; and as they were about to pass he rose and said, with a bow not at all in keeping with his rough dress—

“I pray you of your courtesy, fair sirs, to have pity on a poor sinner, and give me, each of you, as ye pass, one handsome blow with this good cudgel for the health of my soul.”

“Thou art doing penance, then?” said Harcourt, showing no surprise at a request that would have startled not a little any man of our day.

“Even as you say, Sir Knight,” replied the man in grey. “In this town, well-nigh a year agone, I did a grievous sacrilege (may the saints forgive me!) and confessed it not, nor thought more of it, making light of Heaven’s justice. But therein I erred greatly; for a sore sickness fell upon me, and, with the terror of death on my soul, I confessed my sin to a holy monk, and he appointed me this penance—that I should abide at the gate of this town, where my fault was wrought, with none other shelter than this mantle, craving a thwack from every one that went in or out, till I should have made up the full tale of three hundred stripes, according to the number of the days that passed betwixt the doing of my sin and the confessing thereof.”

“And how much lack’st thou yet of the number?” asked the younger knight.

“No more than forty and four, God be thanked,” said Grey-cloak.

“No more?” cried the young cavalier. “Nay, if that be all, I will gladly aid thee, as one Christian man should aid another, by discharging on thy shoulders, with mine own hand, the whole remaining debt.”

“I thank you humbly for your goodness, fair sir,” said the penitent, as gratefully as if the other had offered him the highest possible service; “but alack! it may not be. But one stroke may I have from each man who passeth, and all else is nought.”

“’Tis pity,” replied the young knight; “but, sith better may not be, we will do what we can. Here be some twelve of us, and we will at least help thee a dozen stripes nearer to the balancing of thine accompt.”

One by one the twelve whacks were duly administered, and then the train rode on again—the knights exchanging meaning glances, the pages tittering audibly, and the men-at-arms (who had evidently no idea of anything ludicrous in what had passed) grave as judges, while the thrashed man, as he rubbed his bruised shoulders, called after them, obviously in perfect good faith—

“May Heaven requite you for your goodness, kind sirs, and help you in your need as ye have helped me.”

Hardly had the riders entered the town when they were almost swept away by the rush of a mob of townspeople—men, women, and children—all hurrying so eagerly toward the great market-place, that they scarcely heeded Sir Simon’s inquiry to what spectacle they were thronging in such haste.

But the answer, when it did come, was amply sufficient. These eager sightseers were running to see a man put to death.

The French wit who caustically said that he had “witnessed all the public amusements of England, from the quiet cheerfulness of a funeral to the boisterous gaiety of a hanging,” might have uttered his cruel jest as sober earnest, had he lived in the “good old days” of Edward III. In that iron age, the mere sport of which was a mimicry of war in which brave men were constantly falling by the hands of their best friends or nearest kinsmen, all classes alike ran to enjoy the sight of tortures and executions, as we should now enjoy a circus or a pantomime; and crippled beggars, and mothers with babes at their breasts, would drag themselves for miles through dust or rain to see a criminal broken on the wheel or burned alive.

Thus it was now. As the knights and their train rode on through the narrow, crooked, filthy streets, the ever-growing crowd thickened around them, till at last Harcourt was fain to place at the head of the troop his three strongest men-at-arms, who cleared the way unceremoniously with their stout spear-shafts. Thus they continued to advance slowly, till a sudden turn round the corner of the great square brought the whole dreadful scene before them at once.

Just in front of the town hall, at the very spot where Bertrand du Guesclin afterwards fought his famous combat with the English champion, Thomas of Canterbury, rose like an island out of the sea of upturned faces a high wooden platform, on which, in an iron frame filled with blazing wood, stood a huge cauldron, big enough to cook an ox whole.

All around this scaffold (for such it was) glittered the weapons of a double row of halberdiers in steel caps and buff-coats, as a barrier against the surging crowd. Above them, on one side of the platform, stood the Governor of Dinan himself (a portly, middle-aged, rather stern-looking man in a suit of embroidered velvet) amid a group of richly dressed officials; and beside him was his secretary, a prim, grave man in black.

On the farther side of the scaffold, close to the now steaming cauldron (on which their eyes were fixed with a look of hungry, wolfish expectation) stood three short, sturdy, ill-looking fellows, ominously clad in blood-red shirts and hose, with their brawny arms bare to the shoulder. There was no need to ask who they were; a child would have known them at a glance for the executioner and his two assistants.

But it was neither the gaily dressed officials nor their grim satellites who drew the chief attention of the crowd. All eyes were fixed on a bare-headed, half-stripped figure just behind the men in red, with heavy fetters on its wrists and ankles. This wretched creature lay helplessly heaped together as if paralyzed by weakness, or benumbed with terror; and the deathlike paleness of his coarse face, with the fixed stare of blank, stony horror in his bloodshot eyes, would have told to the most careless observer that this was the man who was doomed to die.

“Mother, mother!” cried a young girl, who stood at a window of a tall corner-house, “hither, hither quickly! The water is nigh to the seething, and it were pity for thee to miss the sight of the punishment.”

“Thou art right, Jeanneton,” said a buxom matron, stepping up beside her, “and the better luck ours that our window looks right down on the scaffold. From hence I can see the fellow’s very face (and marry! ’tis as pale as a spectre!) at mine ease, without being trampled in yon crowd as one treads grapes in the vintage.”

Just then the blast of a trumpet echoed through the still air, and a fantastically dressed man, stepping to the front of the platform, made proclamation as follows:—

“Oyez, oyez, oyez (hearken)! Hereby let all men know that forasmuch as Pierre Cochard, of the town of Dinan-le-Sauveur, in the bishopric of St. Malo, hath been found guilty of sundry crimes and misdeeds, and notably of clipping and debasing the coin of our lord the king, therefore hath the king’s grace ordained, of his great clemency and justice, that even as the said Pierre Cochard hath melted and defaced the good and lawful coin of this realm, so shall he be himself melted and defaced in like fashion, till no trace of him remain; to wit, that he die by water and by fire, being plunged into yon cauldron, and therein boiled alive. God save the king!”

Of all the countless listeners, not one had the least perception of the horrible irony that lurked in this prayer to the God of mercy for the welfare of a king who could doom his fellow-men to a death like this. All they saw in the whole affair was a rogue receiving his due; nor could far more civilized ages triumph over them on that score, since, as much as three centuries later, seven men were hanged and a woman burned for the same offence in England itself.

When the herald’s voice had died away, there sank over that great multitude a dead hush of terrible expectation, amid which the executioner’s harsh tones were plainly heard to the farthest corner of the square, as he said to the governor, with a clumsy obeisance—

“My lord, the water boils, and all is ready!”

At the words, as if that dread signal had broken the spell that paralyzed him, the doomed man sprang to his feet with a long, wild scream of mortal agony, so terrific that even the brutal mob shuddered as they heard it.

But the executioner and his mates, to whom such horrors were a mere everyday matter, remained wholly unmoved, and advanced to their fell work with perfect unconcern. Already they had clutched the victim to hurl him into the boiling cauldron, when his eyes, as they wandered despairingly over the unpitying crowd below, lighted up with a sudden flash of recognition, and, wrenching himself with a mighty effort from the grasp of his tormentors, he flung out his fettered arms wildly, and shrieked, in tones more like the yell of a wounded wild beast than a human voice—

“Brother Michael! Pilgrim of God! save me, save me!”

“Who calls me?” replied a clear, commanding voice from the other side of the square. “If any man need mine aid, I am here.”

At the same instant the crowd, close-packed as it was, parted like water, and through it came the mysterious monk whom Bertrand du Guesclin had met in the wood seven months before.

As he came up the steps of the scaffold, it was strange to see how all the actors in that horrible drama, from the pompous, self-important governor down to the brutal, soulless headsman, shrank from his look, and cast down their eyes as if detected in some shameful misdeed. True, they were only obeying the law; but perhaps, in the presence of this higher and purer nature, even these bigoted upholders of a law that was itself a fouler crime than any that it punished had, for one moment, some dim perception of a truth that the world has always been slow to learn—viz. that to treat men like wild beasts is hardly the way to make them better.

“Yon grey friar is a _man_,” said one of Sir Simon’s pages approvingly to the other, little dreaming how strangely he and Brother Michael were one day to come in contact. “Mark you, brother, how boldly he stands up in the midst, and how one and all give way to him? There was a good soldier lost to France, methinks, when he donned frock and cowl.”

And his brother fully agreed with him.

As soon as the pilgrim-monk was seen to mount the scaffold, he at once became the leading figure of this grim tableau, casting all others into the shade. The stately governor, the richly attired officers, the ranks of helmeted spearmen, dwindled into mere accessories, and all eyes were fixed in breathless expectation on the solitary monk himself.

“Peace be with ye, my children,” said he, in a voice which, low and gentle as it was, was heard over the whole square amid that tomb-like silence. “What man called to me for aid but now? and what is this that ye do here?”

For the first time in his life the worthy governor found some difficulty (to his own great amazement) in saying plainly that he was about to torture a man to death in the name of justice. But the ghastly accessories of the scene spoke for themselves, and a few words sufficed to put Brother Michael in possession of the whole case.

“What ill-luck brought him here?” growled a savage-looking fellow in the crowd, as he marked and rightly interpreted the effect of the monk’s sudden intervention. “What if he plead for this dog’s pardon, and so lose us the sport of seeing the rogue die, after all?”

“Hush, for thy life, Gaspard!” muttered tremulously the man to whom he spoke. “Know’st thou not that yon monk hath such power as had the blessed saints of old, and that, had he heard these sacrilegious words of thine, it had cost him but the lifting of his finger to smite thee with palsy where thou standest? Heed well thy tongue, I counsel thee, lest it be withered betwixt thy jaws.”

Meanwhile the governor and his officers had fallen back to one side of the scaffold, and the three executioners to the other, leaving monk and criminal alone in the midst.

“Art thou guilty of what they lay to thy charge, my son?” asked Michael, bending over the prisoner, who was grovelling at his feet and clinging to them with the frantic energy of utter desperation.

“I am, I am!” moaned the doomed wretch, looking up at him imploringly. “But thou canst save me if thou wilt.”

“Even so spake the leper unto our Lord Himself,” said the monk, with a strange smile on his worn face; “and as he said, so it was done to him.”

Then he turned to the officials with a look so solemn and commanding, that to their startled eyes his slight form seemed to grow larger as they gazed.

“Hearken, my sons. Ye know that to me, all unworthy as I am, hath been given power to claim a man’s life from the law when fit cause shall appear. Now, methinks it were better for this man to live and repent than to be cut off in his sins, wherefore I claim him as the Church’s prisoner.”

In that age and that region there could be but one answer to such a claim, especially when made by one who was held to be little, if at all, less than a saint himself; and though the governor flushed angrily at this trespass on his privilege of destruction, and the hangman scowled sullenly to see his prey snatched from him, no one dared to object.

“He is thine,” said the governor, sulkily. “Clerk, make entry to that effect.”

But the scratching of the clerk’s ready pen on the parchment was suddenly drowned by the thud of a heavy fall, as the rescued criminal, unable to sustain the terrific shock of this unexpected deliverance, fell down in a fit.

He recovered, however, to live long and peacefully in the monastery where his rescuer placed him, extolled by its prior as the best of his lay-servants. But that day’s vision of death had been too close and too ghastly for its influence ever to pass wholly away; and to the end of his days, he could never hear, without shuddering and swooning, the hiss and bubble of boiling water.