“Brother Michael! Pilgrim of God! save me, save me!”
“Who calls me?” replied a clear, commanding voice from the other side of the square. “If any man need mine aid, I am here.”
At the same instant the crowd, close-packed as it was, parted like water, and through it came the mysterious monk whom Bertrand du Guesclin had met in the wood seven months before.
As he came up the steps of the scaffold, it was strange to see how all the actors in that horrible drama, from the pompous, self-important governor down to the brutal, soulless headsman, shrank from his look, and cast down their eyes as if detected in some shameful misdeed. True, they were only obeying the law; but perhaps, in the presence of this higher and purer nature, even these bigoted upholders of a law that was itself a fouler crime than any that it punished had, for one moment, some dim perception of a truth that the world has always been slow to learn—viz. that to treat men like wild beasts is hardly the way to make them better.
“Yon grey friar is a man,” said one of Sir Simon’s pages approvingly to the other, little dreaming how strangely he and Brother Michael were one day to come in contact. “Mark you, brother, how boldly he stands up in the midst, and how one and all give way to him? There was a good soldier lost to France, methinks, when he donned frock and cowl.”
And his brother fully agreed with him.
As soon as the pilgrim-monk was seen to mount the scaffold, he at once became the leading figure of this grim tableau, casting all others into the shade. The stately governor, the richly attired officers, the ranks of helmeted spearmen, dwindled into mere accessories, and all eyes were fixed in breathless expectation on the solitary monk himself.
“Peace be with ye, my children,” said he, in a voice which, low and gentle as it was, was heard over the whole square amid that tomb-like silence. “What man called to me for aid but now? and what is this that ye do here?”
For the first time in his life the worthy governor found some difficulty (to his own great amazement) in saying plainly that he was about to torture a man to death in the name of justice. But the ghastly accessories of the scene spoke for themselves, and a few words sufficed to put Brother Michael in possession of the whole case.
“What ill-luck brought him here?” growled a savage-looking fellow in the crowd, as he marked and rightly interpreted the effect of the monk’s sudden intervention. “What if he plead for this dog’s pardon, and so lose us the sport of seeing the rogue die, after all?”