Burgundy started up, and partly drew his sword; but another blow beat him on his knee again, and another cast him headlong to the ground. A strong man, named Oliver de Laget and another sprang upon him, and thrust a sword into his body. At the same moment, a scuffle occurred at a little distance between one of the followers of the duke and some of the dauphin's party, and Jean Charost saw a man fall; but all was confused and indistinct. Horror, surprise, and a wild, grasping effort of the mind to seize all the consequences to France, to England, to himself, which might follow that dreadful act, stupefied and confounded him. Every thing passed, as in a dream, with rapid indistinctness, to be brought out vivid and strong by an after effort of memory. That the duke was killed at the very feet of the dauphin, was all that his mind had room for at the moment.
The next instant a voice exclaimed, "Look to the dauphin--look to the dauphin!" and Jean Charost saw him staggering back from the rail as pale as death, and with his eyes half closed.
It is not unlikely that many there present had contemplated as possible some such event as that which had taken place, without any definite purpose of effecting it, or taking any part therein. Popular expectation has often something prophetic in it, and the warning voice, which had rendered so many grave and thoughtful during the whole course of that morning, must have been heard also by the actors of the scene which had just passed. But one thing is certain, and the whole history of the time leaves no doubt of the fact, that the dauphin himself had neither any active share in his cousin's death, nor any participation in a conspiracy to effect it. They bore him back, fainting, to the little pavilion which had been raised for his accommodation, and thence, after a time, led him, in profound silence, to the abbey, while his followers secured a number of the Duke of Burgundy's immediate attendants, and the soldiery, crowding on the bridge, threatened the castle itself with assault.
Jean Charost retired from the scene with a sad heart. His hopes were disappointed; his fate seemed sealed; but though he felt all this bitterly, yet he felt still more despondency at the thought of his unhappy country's fate. Personal rivalry, selfish ambition, greed of power and of wealth, undisciplined valor, insubordinate obstinacy, were all urging her on to the verge of a precipice from which a miracle seemed necessary to save her. The feelings which filled his breast at that moment were very like those expressed by the contemporary historian when he wrote, "Only to hear recounted this affair is so pitiful and lamentable that greater there can not be; and especially the hearts of all noble men, and other true men, natives of the kingdom of France, must be of great sadness and shame in beholding those of such noble blood as of the fleur de lis, so near of kindred, themselves destroy one another, and the same kingdom placed, in consequence of the facts above mentioned, and others past and done before, in the way and the danger of falling under a new lord and altogether going to perdition."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
To dwell minutely upon a period unfilled by action, and merely marked by the revolution of day and night, even in the life of a person in whom we have some interest, would be almost as dull as to describe in detail the turning of a grindstone. It is not with the eventless events of a history that we have to do--not with the flat spaces on the road of life. We sit not down to relate a sleep or to paint a fishpond.
Little occurred to Jean Charost during the rest of his stay in France that is worth the telling which will not be referred to hereafter. Let us change the scene then, and, spreading the wings of Fancy, fly on through the air of Time to a spot some years in advance.
There was an old house, or rather palace, and well it deserved the name, situated near the great city of London, close upon the banks of the River Thames. Men now living can remember parts of it still standing, choked up with houses, like some great shell of the green deep incrusted with limpets and other tiny habitations of the vermin of the sea. At the time of this history it had gardens running all around it, extending wide and pleasantly on the water side, though but narrow between the palace itself and the stone-battlemented wall which separated them from the great Strand road leading from the Temple gate of the city to the village of Charing.
Fretted and richly carved in some parts, plain and stern in others, the old palace of the Savoy combined in itself the architecture of several ages. Many were the purposes it had served too--sometimes the place of revelry and mirth--sometimes the witness of the prisoner's tears. It had been the residence of John, king of France, during his captivity in England some half century before; and since that time it had principally served--grown almost by prescription to be so used--as an honorable prison for foreign enemies when the chances of war brought them in bonds to England.
In the midst of the embattled wall that I have mentioned, and projecting a little beyond its line, stood a great gate-house, which has long since been pulled down, or has fallen, perhaps, without the aid of man; and that gate-house had two large towers of three stories each, affording very comfortable apartments, as that day went, to their occasional tenants. They were roomy and pleasant of aspect enough. One of these towers was appropriated to the wardens of the Savoy and their families, while the other received at various times a great number of different denizens, sometimes princes, sometimes prisoners, sometimes refugees, people who remained but a few days, people who passed there half a lifetime. The stone walls within were thickly traced with names, some scrawled with chalk, or written in ink; and among these the most conspicuous were records of the existence there for several years of persons attached to the unfortunate King John.