“Notre Dame! Notre Dame! to the rescue!”
Mingling with that shout came the thunder of charging hoofs, and a single rider, in black armour, burst into the midst of the ruffianly throng, with closed visor and levelled lance.
Down went the first robber who met that terrible charge, pierced through steel and bone and body, till the good lance stood out a full yard behind his back. Ere the next man’s uplifted sword could descend, the black rider’s battle-axe flashed and fell, and sword and hand dropped in the trampled dust together. With a crash like the fall of an oak, the terrible axe smote the head of a third ruffian, who fell dead where he stood, cloven through steel-cap and skull to the teeth.
“It is Monseigneur St. Michael, the Prince of Angels!” shouted the Raguenel men, with one voice; “he is sent to our aid by Our Blessed Lady herself. At them, comrades! Heaven fights for us!”
The same conviction pulsed like an electric shock through the terrified corsairs, and, giving up all thought of resistance, they turned to fly, some even flinging away their arms as they ran.
But it was too late. Before them was a rushing river, behind them the avenging swords of their pursuers; and few, very few, ever reached the boats. Two were cut down while actually springing on board, and a third, missing his leap, fell headlong into the water, and was dragged down by the weight of his armour to rise no more, shrieking in vain for the help which no one had any thought of giving; for, in an age when men were daily falling by each other’s hands in scores and hundreds, what mattered one life more or less?
But the unknown champion whose prowess had turned the fray, where was he? Standing motionless among the dead, like one spellbound, glancing in wondering awe from the livid features of the last man that he had struck down (no other than the pirate captain himself) to the calm, sweet face of the lady he had rescued. At last, as if half-stifled by his own contending emotions, he threw open his visor; and at sight of the face thus revealed, one of the wounded Raguenel men, who lay near, muttered tremulously—
“Had I not heard him utter a holy name, I had assuredly taken him for the Evil One himself!”
But just then the dying Blaise, with that sudden return of perfect consciousness which is so often, in such cases, the immediate forerunner of death, looked up with a glance of joyful recognition at the grim visage that frowned from beneath the black warrior’s helmet, and cried with the last effort of his failing strength—
“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin! Then is my lady’s prophecy made good, and the hour of my death hath seen the coming of our deliverer. God’s blessing be on him!”