“Ill times, brothers,” said one older than the rest. “These ‘Free Companies,’ as men call them, are the bane of France. Luckily they have not come thus far yet; but who knows when they may? And if they do we are lost, one and all. Robbers in bands of twenty and thirty be ill enough, I trow; but when there come robbers enow for a whole army, with horse and foot, generals and captains, who take castles and put towns to ransom, what then?”
“Thou’rt right, Jacques. Wherever they have passed, ’tis as a flight of yon locusts whereof pilgrims tell. The whole face of the land is blasted!”
“Marry, thou say’st it, Paul; rich man’s hall or poor man’s hut, ’tis all one to them. Hath a peasant but one liard (halfpenny) sewn up in the lining of his hose, they will find and seize it!”
“There be worse things in the land than they, howbeit,” said another man.
“What, what?” cried several voices at once. “What worse can there be, lad?”
“Demons,” said Pierre, in a hoarse whisper, “such as he of the Haunted Circle.”
“Is the Phantom Knight abroad again, then?” asked Jacques, in an awe-stricken tone, while a visible shudder ran through the whole group.
“Ay, that is he. But three nights agone, Jean Roquard came home pale and fainting, having met the Phantom Knight in the moonlight; nor hath he been his own man since.”
“What is this tale, then, of the Haunted Circle and the Phantom Knight?” asked a stout, ruddy man—shown by the pack beside him to be a travelling pedlar—whose air of good-humoured impudence might have served Shakespeare as a model for his Autolycus.
“Thou must needs be a stranger here, not to know it!” cried Paul. “But if thou wouldst hear the tale, here is one can tell it thee. Sing us the lay, Gilles. I fear it not by day, though I would not care to hear it at night.”