He recovered, however, to live long and peacefully in the monastery where his rescuer placed him, extolled by its prior as the best of his lay-servants. But that day’s vision of death had been too close and too ghastly for its influence ever to pass wholly away; and to the end of his days, he could never hear, without shuddering and swooning, the hiss and bubble of boiling water.
CHAPTER VI
Mighty to Strike
“Now, beshrew these darksome woods, with ne’er a path through them! I had rather (so help me good St. George of England!) be set to find my way through yon Maze of Woodstock, of which the ballad-makers tell.”
“Right, comrade. And methinks these thickets, where twenty men might lie in ambush unseen within a spear’s length of us, are a choice chapel for the clerks of St. Nicholas” (i.e. robbers).
“Nay, if that were all, I care not, for even a passing brush with forest-thieves or outlaws were better than no fight at all; and I trow the lasses in merry Hampshire will hold us cheap when they hear that we have come oversea without one fight to rub the rust off our weapons. But, if all tales be true” (the speaker sank his voice to an awe-stricken whisper), “there be worse things than thieves in these woods.”
“Not a word of that, lad, an’ thou lov’st me. There is a time and a place for all things, as good Father Gregory was wont to say; and this” (casting a nervous glance over his shoulder into the deepening gloom around) “is neither the time nor the place, I trow, for tales of sprites and hobgoblins.”
Thus muttered Sir Simon Harcourt’s men-at-arms as they struggled wearily through the wood that had witnessed Bertrand du Guesclin’s wolf-fight, on the third evening after their departure from Dinan. But in exercising so freely an Englishman’s natural privilege of grumbling, the stout Hampshire yeomen were by no means without excuse.
They had been forcing their way for more than an hour through the tangled thickets of a gloomy and almost pathless wood, without ever coming any nearer, so far as they could see, either to getting clear of that dismal maze or reaching the town of Rennes, where they meant to spend the night. Then, darkness was coming on fast, menacing them with the far from agreeable prospect of wandering in the woods all night long; and last, but certainly not least, the huge black storm-cloud that was blotting out the red and angry sunset betokened the approach of such a tempest as even the hardy English would not willingly have faced unsheltered.
“’Tis not for myself I care,” said one of them; “shame on the man who makes moan like a child over a wet jerkin or an empty stomach. But my young lords are not ripe yet for hungry days and wet nights, and I ever deemed that his worship, Sir Simon, did not well to bring them hither.”
He glanced pityingly as he spoke at the slim forms of the two boy-pages.