llefranche
XXXI. How Five Men held the Keep of Villefranche
XXXII. How the Company took Counsel Round the Fallen Tree
XXXIII. How the Army made the Passage of Roncesvalles
XXXIV. How the Company Made Sport in the Vale of Pampeluna
XXXV. How Sir Nigel Hawked at an Eagle
XXXVI. How Sir Nigel Took the Patch from his Eye
XXXVII. How the White Company came to be Disbanded
XXXVIII. Of the Home-coming to Hampshire

CHAPTER I. HOW THE BLACK SHEEP CAME FORTH FROM THE FOLD.

The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest
might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown
and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling
upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts--as
common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet
the fishers and the peasants raised their heads and looked questions at
each other, for the angelus had already gone and vespers was still far
off. Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were
neither short nor long?

All round the Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long
green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the
white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yard and
the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and
salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley and the outlying
grange of St. Leonard's, they had all turned their steps homewards. It
had been no sudden call. A swift messenger had the night before sped
round to the outlying dependencies of the Abbey, and had left the
summons for every monk to be back in the cloisters by the third hour
after noontide. So urgent a message had not been issued within the
memory of old lay-brother Athanasius, who had cleaned the Abbey knocker
since the year after the Battle of Bannockburn.

A stranger who knew nothing either of the Abbey or of its immense
resources might have gathered from the appearance of the brothers some
conception of the varied duties which they were called upon to perform,
and of the busy, wide-spread life which centred in the old monastery.
As they swept gravely in by twos and by threes, with bended heads and
muttering lips there were few who did not bear upon them some signs of
their daily toil. Here were two with wrists and sleeves all spotted
with the ruddy grape juice. There again was a bearded brother with
a