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.”