"Orleans would count it for naught," he said, "if they received the victuals without the Maid."
She decided to go, and crossed the stream with two hundred men-at-arms and part of the supplies. At eight o'clock that evening she entered the city, on horseback, in full armor, her banner preceding her, beside her Dunois, behind her the captains of the garrison and several of the most distinguished citizens. The population hailed her coming with shouts of joy, crowding on the procession, torch in hand, so closely that her banner was set on fire. Joan made her horse leap forward with the skill of a practised horseman, and herself extinguished the flame.
It was a remarkable change in her life. Three years before, a simple peasant child, she had been listening to the "voices" in her father's garden at Domremy. Now, the associate of princes and nobles, and the last hope of the kingdom, she was entering a beleaguered city at the head of an army, amid the plaudits of the population, and followed by the prayers of France. She was but seventeen years old, still a mere girl, yet her coming had filled her countrymen with hope and depressed their foes with dread. Such was the power of religious belief in that good mediæval age.
The arrival of the Maid was announced to the besiegers by a herald, who bore a summons from her to the English, bidding them to leave the land and give up the keys of the cities which they had wrongfully taken, under peril of being visited by God's judgment. They detained and threatened to burn the herald, as a warning to Joan, the sorceress, as they deemed her. Yet such was their terror that they allowed the armed force still outside the city to enter unmolested, through their intrenchments.
JOAN OF ARC AT ORLEANS.
The warning Joan had sent them by herald she now repeated in person, mounting a bastion and bidding the English, in a loud voice, to begone, else woe and shame would come upon them.
The commandant of the bastille opposite, Sir William Gladesdale, answered with insults, bidding her to go back and mind her cows, and saying that the French were miscreants.
"You speak falsely!" cried Joan; "and in spite of yourselves shall soon depart hence; many of your people shall be slain; but as for you, you shall not see it."