Deep down I plunged, and swam far under water, to avoid a stroke from floating timber, and then I rose and glanced up-stream.  All the air was fiercely lit with the blaze of the burning barge; a hand and arm would rise, and fall ere I could seize it.  A hand was thrown up before me, the glinting fingers gripping at empty air.  I caught the hand, swimming strongly with the current, for so the man could not clutch at me, and if a drowning man can be held apart, it is no great skill to save him.  In this art I was not unlearned, and once had even saved two men from a wrecked barque in the long surf of St. Andrews Bay.  Save for a blow from some great floating timber, I deemed that I had little to fear; nay, now I felt sure of the Maid’s praise and of a rich ransom.

A horn of bank with alder bushes ran out into the stream, a smooth eddy or backwater curling within.  I caught a bough of alder, and, though nigh carried down by the drowning man’s weight, I found bottom, yet hardly, and drew my man within the backwater.  He lay like a log, his face in the stream.  Pushing him before me, I rounded the horn, and, with much ado, dragged him up to a sloping gravelly beach, where I got his head on dry land, his legs being still in the water.  I turned him over and looked eagerly.  Lo! it was no Glasdale, but the drowned face of Brother Thomas!

Then something seemed to break in my breast; blood gushed from my mouth, and I fell on the sand and gravel.  Footsteps I heard of men running to us.  I lifted my hand faintly and waved it, and then I felt a hand on my face.

CHAPTER XV—­HOW NORMAN LESLIE WAS ABSOLVED BY BROTHER THOMAS

Certain Scots that found me, weak and bleeding, by the riverside, were sent by the Maid, in hopes that I had saved Glasdale, whereas it was the accursed cordelier I had won from the water.  What they did with him I knew not then, but me they laid on a litter, and so bore me to a boat, wherein they were ferrying our wounded men across to Orleans.  The Maid herself, as she had foretold, returned by way of the bridge, that was all bright with moving torches, as our groaning company were rowed across the black water to a quay.  Thence I was carried in a litter to our lodgings, and so got to bed, a physician doing what he might for me.  A noisy night we passed, for I verily believe that no man slept, but all, after service held in the Church of St. Aignan, went revelling and drinking from house to house, and singing through the streets, as folk saved from utter destruction.

With daybreak fell a short silence; short or long, it seemed brief to me, who was now asleep at last, and I was rueful enough when a sound aroused me, and I found the Maid herself standing by my bedside, with one in the shadow behind her.  The chamber was all darkling, lit only by a thread of light that came through the closed shutters of wood, and fell on her pale face.  She was clad in a light jaseran of mail, because of her wound, and was plainly eager to be gone and about her business, that is, to meet the English in open field.