“Well spoken!” cried the duke, pleased with a chivalrous scruple so fully in the spirit of the age. “Take my sword at least, young sir. I warrant it will not be long idle in hands like thine!”
John III. spoke more truly than he could himself foresee. Even while he was speaking, King Edward’s messengers were bearing over the sea their master’s defiance to Philip of France, and the “Hundred Years’ War” had begun.
“Thou art indeed my true son and heir,” said the exultant Sire du Guesclin, again embracing his victorious son; “and now can I well believe yon prophecy that thou should’st be the glory of our house and of the whole realm of France, and that thy name should live in story while one stone of our castle stands on another.”[[1]]
The term thus specified was fated to be much shorter than good Sir Yvon’s feudal pride would have thought possible. The traveller who now flies in one day from Paris to the heart of Brittany on the wings of a smoke-breathing dragon, of which the fourteenth century never dreamed, sees near the railway-station of Broons no vestige of the birthplace of Brittany’s greatest champion; and, but for the monument with which Breton patriotism has marked the spot, might let it pass unnoticed and unknown.
| [1] | The resemblance between this authentic exploit of our hero and the famous tournament scene in “Ivanhoe” (which it may perhaps have suggested) is too obvious to need pointing out. |
CHAPTER IX
Into the Dragon’s Jaws
“Draw back thy head into the leaves, wilt thou, fool? The glitter of that morion would scare our birds if they fly this way, to say nought of thine ill-favoured visage, that looks like a dog robbed of a bone!”
“Draw back thy long tongue betwixt thy teeth, I counsel thee, lest I shorten it with my dagger!”
“Come, no quarrelling when there is work in hand,” broke in a deeper growl, “or I brain ye both with my axe, which hath split skulls as thick ere now!”