In a moment the men cut him down; but the work was done.
“Bear his worship to yon cottage, and look to him,” cried the elder esquire, as the knight reeled in his saddle and fell heavily to the earth; “I ride to Winchester for a leech.”
Away he flew, as one who rides for life and death; but, with all his speed, he rode in vain.
Three days later, Sir Simon Harcourt died; and those who stood by his death-bed saw with secret horror that, to the last moment, his skeleton hands kept working themselves convulsively against each other, as if striving to wipe off some fancied stain.
So died the arch-plotter, in sight of the rich heritage for which he had played so foully, and which he never enjoyed; nor could he have found a fitter epitaph than the solemn text read over his grave by good William de Wykeham, the founder of Winchester College—
“This night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?”
CHAPTER XV
A Night Alarm
“Well, friend Gaspard, if these English wolves have the better of us in the open field, we are as good as they when it comes to defending towns. Six months, and better, have the rogues lain before our town, and not got it yet.”
So spoke a Breton soldier to his comrade, as they stood on the walls of Rennes on a gloomy November evening in 1353, looking down on the countless white tents that shimmered ghost-like through the deepening gloom, and the lights that spangled the blackness like huge glow-worms.
Amid the great struggle between France and England, the rival claimants of the Duchy of Brittany, Charles of Blois and Earl de Montfort, had got up a little private war of their own. Most of the leading Breton knights (including Bertrand du Guesclin) supported Charles’s cause, while England sided with the Earl; and Rennes being the most important town that held out for Charles, the English were doing their best to take it, though as yet in vain.