“’Tis pity,” replied the young knight; “but, sith better may not be, we will do what we can. Here be some twelve of us, and we will at least help thee a dozen stripes nearer to the balancing of thine accompt.”
One by one the twelve whacks were duly administered, and then the train rode on again—the knights exchanging meaning glances, the pages tittering audibly, and the men-at-arms (who had evidently no idea of anything ludicrous in what had passed) grave as judges, while the thrashed man, as he rubbed his bruised shoulders, called after them, obviously in perfect good faith—
“May Heaven requite you for your goodness, kind sirs, and help you in your need as ye have helped me.”
Hardly had the riders entered the town when they were almost swept away by the rush of a mob of townspeople—men, women, and children—all hurrying so eagerly toward the great market-place, that they scarcely heeded Sir Simon’s inquiry to what spectacle they were thronging in such haste.
But the answer, when it did come, was amply sufficient. These eager sightseers were running to see a man put to death.
The French wit who caustically said that he had “witnessed all the public amusements of England, from the quiet cheerfulness of a funeral to the boisterous gaiety of a hanging,” might have uttered his cruel jest as sober earnest, had he lived in the “good old days” of Edward III. In that iron age, the mere sport of which was a mimicry of war in which brave men were constantly falling by the hands of their best friends or nearest kinsmen, all classes alike ran to enjoy the sight of tortures and executions, as we should now enjoy a circus or a pantomime; and crippled beggars, and mothers with babes at their breasts, would drag themselves for miles through dust or rain to see a criminal broken on the wheel or burned alive.
Thus it was now. As the knights and their train rode on through the narrow, crooked, filthy streets, the ever-growing crowd thickened around them, till at last Harcourt was fain to place at the head of the troop his three strongest men-at-arms, who cleared the way unceremoniously with their stout spear-shafts. Thus they continued to advance slowly, till a sudden turn round the corner of the great square brought the whole dreadful scene before them at once.
Just in front of the town hall, at the very spot where Bertrand du Guesclin afterwards fought his famous combat with the English champion, Thomas of Canterbury, rose like an island out of the sea of upturned faces a high wooden platform, on which, in an iron frame filled with blazing wood, stood a huge cauldron, big enough to cook an ox whole.
All around this scaffold (for such it was) glittered the weapons of a double row of halberdiers in steel caps and buff-coats, as a barrier against the surging crowd. Above them, on one side of the platform, stood the Governor of Dinan himself (a portly, middle-aged, rather stern-looking man in a suit of embroidered velvet) amid a group of richly dressed officials; and beside him was his secretary, a prim, grave man in black.
On the farther side of the scaffold, close to the now steaming cauldron (on which their eyes were fixed with a look of hungry, wolfish expectation) stood three short, sturdy, ill-looking fellows, ominously clad in blood-red shirts and hose, with their brawny arms bare to the shoulder. There was no need to ask who they were; a child would have known them at a glance for the executioner and his two assistants.