An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn towards the western gate where there still might have been a chance of safety; but by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad men, and the waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the dusk and the dust.  There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and in a moment she was surrounded, seized, her horse and her person, notwithstanding all resistance.  With cries of “Rendez vous,” and many an evil name, fierce faces and threatening weapons closed round her.  One of her assailants—­a Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the accounts differ—­caught her by her mantle and dragged her from her horse; no Englishman let us be thankful, though no doubt all were equally eager and ready.  Into the midst of that shouting mass of men, in the blinding cloud of dust, in the darkening of the night, the Maid of France disappeared for one terrible moment, and was lost to view.  And then, and not till then, came a clamour of bells into the night, and all the steeples of Compiegne trembled with the call to arms, a sally to save the deliverer.  Was it treachery?  Was it only a perception, too late, of the danger?  There are not wanting voices to say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne, and that it was quite within the power of the Governor and city had they chosen.  Who can answer so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame to human nature to believe it.  Perhaps within Compiegne as without, they were too slow to perceive the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to snatch any chance of rescue till it was too late.

Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her threatened doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which imagination must have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly her courage was sustained by the promise of succour from on high.  She had not been sent upon this mission as of old.  No heavenly voice had said to her “Go and deliver Compiegne.”  She had undertaken that warfare on her own charges with no promise to encourage her, only the certainty of being overthrown “before the St. Jean.”  But the St. Jean was still far off, a long month of summer days between her and that moment of fate!  So far as we can see Jeanne showed no unseemly weakness in this dark hour.  One account tells us that she held her sword high over her head declaring that it was given by a higher than any who could claim its surrender there.  But she neither struggled nor wept.  Not a word against her constancy and courage could any one, then or after, find to say.  The Burgundian chronicler tells us one thing, the French another.  “The Maid, easily recognised by her costume of crimson and by the standard which she carried in her hand, alone continued to defend herself,” says one; but that we are sure could not have been the case as