“Ah ha!” then cried cruel Sassard with his foot upon the stair,
“Have I come to thee, my boaster?” and he whirled his sword in air.
“Thou who pratest of thy power to protect her to the death,
What think’st thou now of Sassard and the wind’s aspiring breath?”
“What I think let this same show you,” answered fiery Enguerrand,
And he poised his lofty battle-ax with sure and steady hand;
“Now as Heaven loveth justice, may this deathly weapon fall
On the murderer of my brothers and th’ undoer of us all.”
With one mighty whirl he sent it; flashing from his hand it came,
Like the lightning from the heavens in a whirl of awful flame,
And betwixt the brows of Sassard and his two false eyeballs passed,
And the murderer sank before it, like a tree before the blast.
“Now ye minions of a traitor if you look for vengeance, come!”
And his voice was like a trumpet when it clangs a victor home.
But a cry from far below him rose like thunder upward, “Nay!
Let them turn and meet the husband if they hunger for the fray.”
O the yell that sprang to heaven as that voice swept up the stair,
And the slaughter dire that followed in another moment there!
From the least unto the greatest, from the henchman to the lord,
Not a man on all that stairway lived to sheath again his sword.
At the top that flame-bound forehead, at the base that blade of fire—
’Twas the meeting of two tempests in their potency and ire.
Ere the moon could falter inward with its pity and its woe,
Beaufort saw the path before him unencumbered of the foe.
Saw his pathway unencumbered and strode up and o’er the floor,
Even to the very threshold of his lovely lady’s door,
And already in his fancy did he see the golden beam
Of her locks upon his shoulder and her sweet eyes’ happy gleam:
When behold a form upstarting from the shadows at his side.
That with naked sword uplifted barred the passage to his bride;
It was Enguerrand the dauntless, but with staring eyes and hair
Blowing wild about a forehead pale as snow in moonlit glare.
“Ah my master, we have held her, we have guarded her,” he said,
“Not a shadow of dishonor has so much as touched her head.
Twenty wretches lie below there with the brothers of Germain,
Twenty foemen of her honor that I, Enguerrand, have slain.
“But one other foe remaineth, one remaineth yet,” he cried,
“Which it fits this hand to punish ere you cross unto your bride.
It is I, Enguerrand!” shrieked he; “and as I have slain the rest,
So I smite this foeman also!”—and his sword plunged through his breast.