Surprised and outnumbered as they were, the garrison defended themselves with courage and obstinacy. All resistance, however, was vain, and an hour later not a Frenchman remained alive within the castle. All that had not fallen under the terrible axes of the Butchers had made their escape by the postern.
Breydel's wounded honor was now avenged; but his end was only half-attained, for the Lady Matilda had not yet been found. After a long and fruitless search in every corner and crevice of the castle, from its loftiest turrets to its deepest dungeons, under the guidance of one who knew it well, he was obliged to conclude that she had been carried off. And now, to make his vengeance complete, he set fire to the four corners of the building. Soon the flames mounted high into the heavens.
The walls cracked and fell, the infuriated assailants hewed down the gates, the bridge, the posts, and hurled them into the burning pile. Long before morning nothing was left of the magnificent castle of Male that the fury of the Butchers and the devouring fire could lay waste.
Round about the fire-bell resounded from village to village, and the peasants, as in duty bound, hurried up to help at the call; but they arrived only to be spectators of the scene of destruction, which, to say the truth, did not greatly displease them.
"There!" shouted Breydel, with a voice at once deep and clear, as the last turret fell in; "now let to-morrow's sun look down upon the place where the castle of Male once was!"
And the Butchers marched off in a body to Bruges, singing in chorus as they went the song of the Lion.
CHAPTER V
At the time of the conquest of West Flanders by the French, in the year 1296, the castle of Nieuwenhove had offered them an especially obstinate resistance. A great number of Flemish knights had shut themselves up within it under Robert de Bethune, fully resolved to listen to no proposals of surrender so long as a single man remained in a condition to defend himself. But their valor was in vain against the overpowering force of their assailants; most of them perished, fighting desperately on the ramparts. The French, on entering tnrough the breach effected by their engines, found not a living soul within the walls; and for want of living beings upon whom to wreak their vengeance, they fired the castle, and afterward deliberately battered down what the flames had spared, and filled up the moat with the rubbish.
The ruins of the castle of Nieuwenhove lay some few miles from Bruges, in the direction of Courtrai, surrounded by a thick wood. At a considerable distance from any human habitation, it was but seldom that the place resounded with the foot of man; the more so, as the incessant screeching of the night-birds, which harbored there in great numbers, had possessed the country people with the idea that the spot was haunted by the unquiet spirits of the Flemings who had fallen in the combat, and who now wandered upon earth crying for vengeance, or wailing after repose. But, though ruined for all purposes of defense or habitation, the castle was yet not so utterly destroyed but that its ground-plan could be distinctly traced. Even considerable remnants of the walls were still standing, though cracked in every direction; large pieces of the roofing lay on the ground beside the stonework which had formerly supported them; and windows might here and there be seen, of which the stone mullions were yet undestroyed. Everything betokened a devastation effected in haste; for while some portions of the building had been deliberately and effectually demolished, others again had been left comparatively uninjured. The castle yard still formed an enclosure, though but a broken one, and encumbered in every direction with heaps of rubbish and scattered stones. During six years, moreover, which had now elapsed since the assault and conflagration, time and nature had done their work to increase the wildness of the scene; a vegetation, rank and luxuriant, in part concealed, in part set off with its rich green the cold gray of the shattered walls, and was itself relieved in turn by the varied tints of the flowers which grew profusely among it.
It was four in the morning; a faint glimmering, forerunner of the rising sun, was just appearing upon the eastern verge of the horizon, the ruins of Nieuwenhove lay reposing in their dim shadow, and the face of the still slumbering earth showed itself only under uncertain tints—they could not yet be called colors—while the heavens had already begun to don their mantle of blue. Here and there a night-bird was still on the wing, screeching as it sought its hiding-place before the coming light.
The figure of a man was seated amid the ruins, upon one of the heaps of rubbish. A plumeless helmet covered his head, and the rest of his person was clothed in complete armor. His steel gauntlet rested upon a shield, of which the cognizance would have been sought in vain, so completely was it obliterated by a broad transverse stripe of some non-heraldic color. All his armor was black; even the shaft of the long spear which lay on the ground beside him was stained of the same funereal hue, as if to betoken the deep and hopeless sadness of the wearer's heart. At a little distance stood a horse as black as his rider, so completely barded with steel plates that it was only with difficulty the animal could bow its head so as to crop the tops of the tall herbage. The sword that hung at the saddle-bow was of extraordinary size, and seemed as if suited only for the hand of a giant.
The silence which reigned in the ruins was broken by the knight's deep-drawn
