“Indeed!” I answered, sardonically, “I do confess I am more surprised than perhaps I should be. It is as charming a handmaid as any knight could wish. Shall you send one of those long raven tresses home to thy absent lady with thy next budget of sighs and true-love tokens?”
But Flamaucœur shook his head, and said I misunderstood him bitterly. He was going on to say he meant to free the maid “to-morrow or the next day,” when we turned a corner in our martial village street, and pulled up at our own tent doors.
Now, that Breton girl had submitted so far to be dragged along, in a manner of lethargy born of her sick heart and misery, but when we stayed our chargers the very pause aroused her. She drew her poor frightened wits together and glared first at us, and then at our knightly pennons fluttering over the white lintels of our lodgment; then, jumping to some dreadful, sad conclusion, she fired up as fierce and sudden as a trapped tigress when the last outlet is closed upon her. She stamped and raged, and twisted her fair white arms until the rough withies on her wrists cut deep into the tender flesh and the red blood went twining down to her torn and open bodice; she screamed and writhed, and struggled against the glossy side of that gentle and mighty war-horse, who looked back wondering on her and sniffed her flagrant sorrow with wide velvet nostrils—no more moved than a gray crag by the beating of the summer sea—and then she turned on us.
Gads! she swore at us in such mellow Bisque as might have made a hardened trooper envious! Cursed us and our chivalry, called us forsworn knights, stains upon manhood, dogs and vampires!—then dropped upon her knee, and there suppliant, locked her swollen and bloody hands, and, with the hot white tears sparkling in her red and weary eyes, knelt to us, and in the wild, tearful grief of her people, “for the honor of our mothers, and for the sake of the bright distant maid we loved,” begged mercy and freedom.
And all through that storm of wild, sweet grief that callous libertine, Flamaucœur, made no show of freeing her. He sat his prick-eared, wondering charger, stared at the maid, and fingered his dagger-chain as though perplexed and doubtful. The hot torrent of that poor girl’s misery seemed to daze and tie his tongue: he made no sign of commiseration and no movement, until at last I could stand it no longer. Wheeling round my war-horse, so that I could shake my mailed fist in the face of that sapling villain:
“By the light of day!” I burst out, half in wrath and half in amused bewilderment, “this goes too far. Why, Flamaucœur, can you not see this is a maid in a hundred, and one who well deserves to keep that which she asks for? Jove! man, if you must have a handmaiden, why, the country swarms with forlorn ones who will gladly compound with fate by accepting the protection of thy tent. But this one!—come!—let my friendship go in pawn against her, and free the maid. If you must have something more solid—still, set her free, unharmed, and I will give thee a helmetful of pennies—that is to say, on the first time that I own so many.”
But Flamaucœur laughed more scornfully than he often did, and, muttering that we were “all fools together,” turned from me to the wild thing at his side.
“Look here,” he said, “you mad girl. Come into my tent and I will explain everything. You shall be all unharmed, I vow it, and free to leave me if you will not stop—this is all mad folly, though out here I cannot tell you why.”
“I will not trust you,” she screamed, in arms again, straining at those horrid red wrists of hers and glaring on us—“Mother of Christ!” she shouted, turning to a knot of squires and captains who had gathered around us—“for the dear Light of Heaven some of you free my wretched spirit with your maces, here—here—some friendly spear for this friendless bosom—one dagger-thrust to rid me from these cursed tyrants, and I will take the memory of my slayer straight to the seat of mercy and mix it forever with my grateful prayers. Oh, in Christian charity unsheath a weapon!”
