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.