The conversation closed here, but Chandos could not dismiss the subject from his mind. He mused upon what he had heard, and hope gradually broke through the gloom of his disappointment.
He then told his knights he would ride to Poictiers, and they joyfully caparisoned their horses.
Chandos and forty spears left Chauvigny before daylight, and getting into the Frenchmen’s course, they soon overtook them near the bridge of Lusac. They were on foot, preparing to attack Sir Thomas Percy and his little band, who had posted themselves on the other side of the bridge.
Before the Frenchmen and Bretons had arranged their plan of assault, they heard the trampling of Chandos’s war-horses, and turning round they saw his dreadful banner displayed. He approached within three furlongs of the bridge and had a parley with them. He reproached them for their robberies and acts of violence in the country whereof he was seneschal.
“It is more than a year and a half,” he continued, “that I have set all my aim to find and encounter you, and now, I thank God, I see you and speak to you. It shall soon be known who is prowest, you or I. You have often vaunted your desire to meet me; now you may see me before you.—I am John Chandos: regard me well,” he thundered in their ears, his countenance darkening as he spoke.
At that moment an English squire was struck to the earth by the lance of a Breton. The generous nature of Chandos was rouzed at this ungallant act; and, in a tone of mingled expostulation and reproof, he cried to his own company, “Sirs, how is it that you suffer this squire thus to be slain? A foot, a foot!”
He dismounted, and so did all his band, and they advanced against the French. His banner, with the escutcheon above his arms, was carried before him, and some of his men-at-arms surrounded it. Chandos missed his steps, for the ground was slippery from the hoar-frost of the morning, and in his impatience for battle he entangled his feet in the folds of his surcoat. He fell just as he reached his enemy; and as he was rising, the lance of a French squire entered his flesh, under the left eye, between the nose and the forehead. Chandos could not see to ward off the stroke; for, some years before, he had lost the sight of that eye, while hunting the hart in the country round Bourdeaux: unhappily, too, his helmet was without the defence of its vizor.
He fell upon the earth, and rolled over two or three times, from the pain of the wound, but he never spoke again.
The French endeavoured to seize him; but his uncle, Sir Edward Clifford, bestrode the body, and defended it so valorously, that soon none dared to approach him.
Grief at his death.