It was M. d’Agen’s breastpiece saved my life by warding off the point of the varlet’s sword, so that the worst injury I got was the loss of my breath for five minutes, with a swimming in the head and a kind of syncope. These being past, I found myself on my back on the ground, with a man’s knee on my breast and a dozen horsemen standing round me. The sky reeled dizzily before my eyes and the men’s figures loomed gigantic; yet I had sense enough to know what had happened to me, and that matters might well be worse.
Resigning myself to the prospect of captivity, I prepared to ask for quarter; which I did not doubt I should receive, since they had taken me in an open skirmish, and honestly, and in the daylight. But the man whose knee already incommoded me sufficiently, seeing me about to speak, squeezed me on a sudden so fiercely, bidding me at the same time in a gruff whisper be silent, that I thought I could not do better than obey.
Accordingly I lay still, and as in a dream, for my brain was still clouded, heard someone say, ‘Dead! Is he? I hoped we had come in time. Well, he deserved a better fate. Who is he, Rosny?’
‘Do you know him, Maignan?’ said a voice which sounded strangely familiar.
The man who knelt; upon me answered, ‘No, my lord. He is a stranger to me. He has the look of a Norman.’
‘Like enough!’ replied a high-pitched voice I had not heard before. ‘For he rode a good horse. Give me a hundred like it, and a hundred men to ride as straight, and I would not envy the King of France.’
‘Much less his poor cousin of Navarre,’ the first speaker rejoined in a laughing tone, ‘without a whole shirt to his back or a doublet that is decently new. Come, Turenne, acknowledge that you are not so badly off after all!’
At that word the cloud which had darkened my faculties swept on a sudden aside. I saw that the men into whose hands I had fallen wore white favours, their leader a white plume; and comprehended without more that the King of Navarre had come to my rescue, and beaten off the Leaguers who had dismounted me. At the same moment the remembrance of all that had gone before, and especially of the scene I had witnessed in the king’s chamber, rushed upon my mind with such overwhelming force that I fell into a fury of impatience at the thought of the time I had wasted; and rising up suddenly I threw off Maignan with all my force, crying out that I was alive—that I was alive, and had news.
The equerry did his best to restrain me, cursing me under his breath for a fool, and almost; squeezing the life out of me. But in vain, for the King of Navarre, riding nearer, saw me struggling. ‘Hallo! hallo! ‘tis a strange dead man,’ he cried, interposing. ‘What is the meaning of this? Let him go! Do you hear, sirrah? Let him go!’
The equerry obeyed and stood back sullenly, and I staggered to my feet, and looked round with eyes which still swam and watered. On the instant a cry of recognition greeted me, with a hundred exclamations of astonishment. While I heard my name uttered on every side in a dozen different tones, I remarked that M. de Rosny, upon whom my eyes first fell, alone stood silent, regarding me with a face of sorrowful surprise.