The Knights of England, France, and Scotland

by Henry William Herbert

with many a manly voice swelling more lustily the nuptial cadence, they passed the little green descending to the horse-road, Marguerite clinging now to his supporting arm and looking tenderly up into his with eyes suffused with happy tears and cheeks radiant with dimpled smiles and rosy blushes.

But at the moment when the bridal-train was wheeling down toward the road, and had now nearly reached the point of its intersection with the foot-path, the loud and noisy trampling of many horses, and the jingling clash of the harness of armed riders, was distinctly heard above the swelling chorus of the hymenean, above the chiming of the wedding-bells; and within a few seconds, two or three horsemen crossed the brow of the eastern hill, at a gentle trot, and were followed by a company of some fifty men-at-arms, under the guidance of an old officer, whose beard and hair, as white as snow, fell down over his gorget from beneath the small, black-velvet cap, which alone covered his head, for his helmet hung at his saddle-bow. The troopers were all armed point-device, in perfect steel, with long, pennoned lances in their hands, two-handed broadswords slung across their shoulders from the left to the right, and battle-axe and mace depending on this side or that from the pommels of their steel-plated saddles. Their horses, too—strong, powerful brutes of the Norman stock, crossed with some lighter strain of higher blood—were barded, as it was termed, with chamfronts and neck-plates, poitrels on the breast, and the bards proper covering the loins and croup; and all were arrayed under a broad, square banner, blazoned, as if every eye of the bridal-party could at once distinguish, with the bearings of the lords of Castel de Roche d’or.

No sooner had they discovered this, than they halted, and formed a line along the edge of the road, anxious to testify their respect to their young lord—who now, recently of age, was returning, after years of absence, from the château of his guardian—and eager to observe the passage of the cavalcade.

The persons who led the approaching band were three in number, two of whom rode a few horse-lengths in advance of the third, and were evidently of rank superior to the rest; while something seemed to indicate, though it was indefinite, and not very obvious how far it did so, that even between these two there subsisted no perfect equality.

He to the left was the elder by many years; a finely-formed and not ill-favored man, of some forty-five or fifty years; magnificently apparelled in a suit of rich half-armor, with russet-leather boots meeting the taslets or thigh-pieces at the knee; accoutred with heavy gilded spurs, and wearing on his head a crimson-velvet mortier, adorned by a massive gold chain, and a lofty plume of white feathers.

And he it was, who, although in his outward show he was the more splendid—though he bestrode his steed with an air of pride so manifest, that you might have fancied he bestrode the universe—though he addressed all his inferiors with intolerable haughtiness, and appeared to look upon all his equals as inferiors—yet, by his demeanor toward the youth who reined his Arab courser by his side, and by his almost servile watching of his every motion, and lowering his voice at his every word, appeared to be oppressed in his presence by a sense of the utmost unworthiness, and scarcely to hold himself entitled to have an opinion of his own until sanctioned by that of the young marquis de Roche d’or.

The features of this man were certainly well-favored rather than the reverse—for the brow, the eyes, the outlines, were all good; and yet the expressions they assumed, as he was moved by varying passions, were so odious and detestable, that on a nearer view, a close observer would probably have styled him hideous, and avoided his advances. Pride, of the haughtiest and most intolerant form, would at one time writhe his lip and deform his every lineament; at another, it would yield to the basest, the most abject servility. Cruelty alone sat fixed and permanent in the thick, massive, animal jaw, the low and somewhat receding forehead, and the oblique glances of the cold, clear, gray eye; but sensuality, and sneering sarcasm, and utter want of veneration or belief for anything high or holy, had left their hateful traces in the lines about his mouth and nostrils: nor were these odious, ineradicable signs of an atrocious character redeemed by the evident presence of high intellect and pervading talents, for that intellect was of a shrewd, keen, cunning caste, and was in no wise akin to anything of an imaginative, a noble, or a virtuous type.

Such was the appearance, such the aspect, of a man renowned in his day far and wide through France, but renowned for evil only. Such was Canillac le fou—a soubriquet which he had won throughout his province, for the insane, frantic, and unnatural vice and crime which had marked his whole career from boyhood. Canillac the madman!—and with good reason did the vassals of the old house of Roche d’or shrink upon themselves, and draw instinctively one toward the other, like wild-fowl when they see the shadow of the soaring falcon, with a foreboding of peril near at hand, when they beheld this fierce, voluptuous, pitiless monster—whose favorite boast it was that he had never spared a woman in his passion, nor a man in his hatred—riding at the bridle-rein of their young lord, as his chosen friend and companion, and probably as the arbiter of his pleasures, instigator of his vices!

And of a truth they had good cause to shrink and tremble, an’ had they but then known that which was even now impending, to curse the very hour in which he or they were born—he to inflict, they to endure the last, worst outrages of feudal tyranny and wrong!

But they as yet knew nothing, nor, save instinctively, foreboded anything; but he, with his keen, furtive, ever-roving glances, noted (what none less sly, suspicious, and acute, would have suspected) the secret and intuitive horror with which the peasantry of Castel de Roche d’or regarded him, and vowed at once within his secret soul that they should have good cause to curse him, and that speedily.