“Or, perhaps,” put in another, looking at the last speaker—“perhaps he hinted that if the maid escaped from his hated clutches she would fall into thine, St. Caen, and she chose the lesser evil. It were an argument that would well warrant so sudden a conversion!”
“Well! Well!” quoth the fool, “we will not quarrel over the remembrance of the meat which another dog has carried off. Good-by, fair Sirs, and may God give you all as efficient tongues as Sir Flamaucœur’s when next you are bowered with your distant ladies!” and laughing and jesting among themselves the soldiers strolled away, leaving me to seek my solitary tent in no good frame of mind.
CHAPTER XIV
Such sights and scenes as these will show the chivalrous army with whom I served in but an indifferent light. And ill it would beseem me, who remember this time with pride, and the gloomy pleasure of my latter life, to stain the fair fame of English chivalry or to discredit with the foul life of its outer remnant our gallant army or that Royal person who shone in the white light of his day, the bravest knight and the gentlest king of any then living.
This Sovereign was, above everything, a soldier. He observed all that passed in his camp with extraordinary acumen. It was my chance, soon after we joined the army, to catch his eye by some small deed of prowess in a mêlée near his standard, and that shrewd Sovereign called me to him, and asked my name and fame—the which I answered plausibly enough, for my tongue was never tied to the cold sterility of truth—and then, pointing to where there lay on his shield a famous dead English captain of mercenaries, asked me if I would do duty for that soldier. I knew the troops he had led. They were grizzled veterans, rough old dogs every one of them, who had rode their close-packed chargers, shoulder to shoulder, through the thick tangles of a hundred fights. I had seen them alone, those stern old fellows, put down their lances and, altogether, like the band of close-united brothers that they were, go thundering over the dusty French campagnas, and, to the music that they loved so well, of ringing bits and hollow-sounding scabbards, of steel martingale and harness—delighting in the dreadful odds—charge ten times their number, and burst through the reeling enemy, and override and trample him down, and mow great swathes from his seething ranks, and revel in that thunderous carnage, as if the red dust of the mêlée were the sweetest air that had ever fanned their aged beards!
“Ah! Prince!” I said, speaking out boldly as that remembrance came before me, “by Thor! if those good fellows will take so young a one as I for leader, in place of a better, I will gladly let it be a compact.”
“They will have you readily enough,” replied the King, “even if it were not mine by right to name their captain, according to their rules.” And, mounting the gray palfrey, he rode in camp, the better to spare his roan war-horse, he took me to where the troops were ranged up after the charge that had cost them their leader, and gave them over to me.
Thus was I provided with a lordly following, and the King’s gratitude for my poor service expressed; but still I appeared strangely to haunt the Sovereign’s memory. He looked back at me once or twice as though I were something most uncommon, and not long afterward he would have me sup with him.
It happened as we fell back from the farthest limit of our raid, burning and plundering as we went along the Somme. One evening a fair French chateau on a hill, bending down by grassy slopes to the slow stream below, had fallen to our assault. In truth, that fair pile had found us rude visitors. Twice in the storm the red flames had burst out of its broad upper corridors, and twice had been subdued. Its doors and gateways were beaten in, its casements burst and empty, the moat about it was full of dead men, the ivy hung in unsightly tatters from its turrets, and on the smooth grass glacis copingstone and battlements—hurled on us by the besieged as we swarmed up the ladders—lay in crumbling ruins. Yet it was, as I say, a stately place, even in its new-made desolation; and I was standing at the close of a long, dusty autumn day by my tent door, watching the yellow harvest moon come over the low French hills, and shedding as it rose a pale light over the English camp and that lordly place a little set back from it, when down through the twilight came a page who wore on sleeve and tunic-breast the royal cognizance. Was I, he questioned, the stranger knight new come from England? and, that being answered, he gave his message: “King Edward would be glad if that knight would take his evening meal with him.”
I went—how could I else?—and there in the great torn and disordered hall of the castle we had taken was a broad table spread and already laid with rough magnificence. Page and squire were hurrying here and there in that stately pillared chamber, spreading on the tables white linens that contrasted most strangely with the black, new-made smoke-stains on the ceiling; piling on them gold and silver basins and ewers and plates bent and broken, just as our men-at-arms had saved them from pillaged crypts or rifled treasure-cells. Others were fixing a hundred gleaming torches to the notched, scarred columns of that banquet-place, and while one would be wiping half-dried blood of French peer and peasant from floor and doorway, or sprinkling rushes or sawdust on those gory patches, another was decanting redder burgundy—the which babbled most pleasantly to thirsty soldier ears as it passed in gushing streams from the cellar skins to supper flagon! It was an episode full of quaint contradictions!