BOOK II

“HOW A MAN MAY FIND HIS SOUL AGAIN”

VI

AN autumn evening, with a flare of red and gold in the west, white mists rising in the hollows, and a sky above streaked and banded with burning clouds. On every hand the rust-red slopes of a wild moor, gilded with dwarf gorse and splashed with knots of tawny bracken. Everywhere emptiness and silence, a raw and pungent solitude that seemed to welcome the coming of the night.

Straggling along a ridge of the moor and outlined against the sky-line came a company of “spears,” with one solitary rider twenty paces in the van. The sunlight glittered on their shoulder-plates and bassinets, and beamed a last benediction on their baggage-cattle hobbling in the rear. They were rough gentlemen, shaggy and none too clean, with an air of devil’s philosophy about them that spoke of rough living and of rougher speaking.

Several pack-horses followed the main body, and a couple of peasants, who trudged along as though they lived in constant fear of a whip or a spear-staff falling across their shoulders. Many of the riders carried sacks slung across their saddle-bows, one the carcass of a dead pig, a second a couple of stone bottles, another some half-dozen loaves of rye bread, strung together on a cord like beads. Last of all came three tired hacks, stumping along over the tough heather and ridden by three gaudily dressed women, who were laughing and chattering like starlings on a chimney. One, black of hair and black of eye, with a red mouth and a patch of color on either cheek, wore a garland of bracken, and seemed to consider herself of more worth than the others. She wore a red cloak, and a green tunic laced loosely over her plump bosom. A girdle of leather covered with gold filigree work ran about her hips, with a poniard buckled to it in a silver sheath. She was a Norman, Arletta, a smith’s daughter, and had run away from Ancenis when the French army had passed through it seven years before on the march for Nantes.

Some twenty paces ahead of this company of vagabonds rode their captain, a man with immense shoulders, long arms, and an ugly and dogged face. His bassinet hung at his saddle-bow, his spear was slung behind him, and the shabbiness of his blue surcoat and the rust on his armor suggested that personal vanity had no great hold on him. He had a hunch of brown bread in his hand, and was munching it solemnly as he rode along, keeping an alert watch upon the darkening moor. He had thrust the last corner of the loaf into his mouth, when an outrider came cantering back towards the troop, bawling a tavern song, as though to keep himself in humor on such a raw and hungry evening. He drew near over the heather, and, saluting the man in the blue surcoat, broke at once into petulant cursing.

“Pest on it, captain, I can see no stick of a house and not the trail of a chimney; nothing but the moor and thickets of Broceliande.”

The man in the rusty harness received the news sullenly.

“Ives swore he knew these parts,” he said.

“He knows them, Messire Bertrand, about as well as he knows the inside of a missal.”

“Then have him hided for being a liar.”

“With a good grace, captain.”

And, cantering off, he joined the main company, their spears black against the evening sky; and, pouncing upon one of the wretched peasants, drubbed him mercilessly till the fellow lay flat and would not move.

Bertrand gave no heed to the serf’s cries, but rode on alone under the flaming sky towards the thickets of Broceliande, flashing with misty and autumnal gold. He felt miserable that night, savage and sour, disgusted with his lot. Seven years he had been serving in the wars, and here he trotted at the head of thirty thieves, called by pure courtesy free riders for the rights of Charles of Blois. He had done no great deed since the siege of Vannes, and it was bitterness to Bertrand to be reminded of that day. He had hoped much from that exploit at the siege of Vannes. It had lifted him up in the sight of all men, for, like a young falcon, he had flown his first flight into the welkin of war.

Then, what had followed? Had Bertrand been questioned he would have pointed to his rusty harness and the plundering vagabonds who rode at his heels over the moor. He would have smiled grimly and very bitterly, spoken of the ingratitude of princes and the jealousy of men better born and more richly circumstanced than a round legged-fellow who trusted only to the strength of his own right arm. He had fought at Vannes, at Nantes, at Hennebon, a hundred and one places, but no great captain had ever cared to mark his deeds. Young squires had been honored before him, mere boys whom Bertrand could have killed with a single blow. Fortune and the favor of the great ones had been against him. He would cringe to no seigneur, say soft things to no man, or lure fame to him with a courteous lie.

Then had come the last trying of Bertrand’s temper, for it is a rare prince who can take the truth from an inferior and not feel the twinge of malice in return. It had happened at the siege of Guy la Foret, a strong castle towards Nantes. Bertrand had been set to lead a storming party that was to assault at the breach while the main strength of the leaguers skirmished at the gate. A hundred men had been given him, a mere handful, insufficient for the forcing of the broken wall. Bertrand had stood forward and spoken the truth to Lord Luis of Spain, who commanded the besiegers.

“Sire,” he had said, “fivescore men cannot make good their footing in the breach. If I am to lead—then I must lead at my own price.”

Luis of Spain, sensitive as to the dignity of his own discretion, had rallied Bertrand upon his courage.

“God see to it, sire,” the Breton had answered him, “I am no coward, but I tell you the assault will fail.”

And fail it did with the loss of thirty of Lord Luis’s best men. Bertrand had been taken up for dead out of the ditch and dragged back to the camp, under the very spears of the English when they made their sally. As for the Spaniard, he had been the more savage at the repulse, since he himself had staked his three best horses in a wager on the success thereof. And, like many a captain, he had taken to abusing those who served him, and in shaming the men who had risked their lives at his command.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, the fault was yours—”

Bertrand, with his head in bandages and his face white as a sick girl’s, had tottered into Lord Luis’s tent to hear the whole blame laid to his lack of spirit.

“Sire,” he had said, “did I not warn you?”

“Too well, messire. I think my own thoughts and hold to my own reasons. When the hawk flies ill the quarry need not take the air.”

Bertrand had sworn a great oath, red with shame at such curt handling.

“Before God, sire, do you accuse me of cowardice?”

Lord Luis had shrugged his shoulders.

“I will not twist your words, messire, into their true meaning. You may know that I shall place my commands elsewhere in the future. It has been said that the hands of half our captains smell of English gold.”

What more could Bertrand have done than march grimly out of Lord Luis’s tent, cursing his own luck and the malice of the man whose meanness had dishonored him. His good name had seemed torn from him, and, like a rough and angry boy, he had been ready to take Fortune at her word. Why should he strive after an empty shadow when there was work enough for the free lance and the adventurer? Had not Croquart the Fleming made the land murmur at the audacity of his forays and the daring of his captures? Half the castles in the dukedom had paid ransom to the Flemish freebooter. He fought for De Montfort and the English, but he fought for his own hand and plundered all.

They were sad days for Brittany, with her seigneurs and gentlemen divided among themselves, some standing for Montfort, others for Charles of Blois. The English and the French burned and plundered against each other. The peasants fled to the woods, leaving their crops to the foragers, their poor hamlets to the fire. The burghers kept close within their walls and barriers, ready to surrender and resurrender to the party whose banners blew more bravely for the moment. No strong place was safe from surprise and treachery. The whole land shuddered, from the granite west to marshy Dol, from the White Wood by Dinan even to the Loire. It was a war of sieges and of counter-sieges, plunderings, fierce tussles on the bleeding moors, ruin and misery untold. No man could rest even in the deeps of dark Broceliande or in the islands set in the foam of the sea.

Bertrand, bitter and savage at heart, had ridden from Guy la Foret, knowing not whither fate might lead him. When some such temper as this had been upon him, he had fallen in near Josslin with a company of mercenaries who had lost their captain in a skirmish. Bertrand had met the chief among them in a roadside tavern, taken them as his men, and promised them three-quarters of all the plunder that they gathered. To prove his spirit, wounded as he was, he had fought the best fellow at his weapons among them, and thrashed him soundly, to the delight of his brother thieves. Bertrand had been their cock and captain from that moment, and thus it was that he rode that autumn evening over the moors with thirty free companions and three harlots at his back.

Bertrand drew in his horse suddenly, and, standing in the stirrups, looked under his hand towards the woods rising in the east to touch the coming night. Yonder, amid the outstanding thickets of Broceliande, he saw a light gleam out, a faint spark in the black unknown. Bertrand and his men were tired and hungry, and for three nights they had slept under the open sky.

The “free companions” had seen it also, and were shouting and calling to one another. The three women on the hacks had mingled with the main troop, their tired faces lighting up at the thought of a fire and supper. The one with the bracken in her hair was pulling her nag through the press towards Bertrand, when the man with the pig slung across his saddle-bow reached out and caught her bridle.

“Come, sirs, Letta laid me a fair wager.”

The girl tugged at her bridle, and cast a fierce look into the fellow’s grinning face.

“Let me be, you fool!”

“There—she disowns it! I call Lame Jean to witness—”

“Yes, yes, three kisses—I’ll swear she promised them.”

There was much loud laughter from the rest. The woman Arletta had plucked out her knife and made a stab at the man’s wrist. He let go the bridle to avoid the blow, cursing her for a spitfire as she drew clear.

“Keep your pig,” she said, viciously.

“Gaston can kiss the pig,” shouted a facetious comrade, and they all laughed and twitted the pig-bearer till he lost his temper and threatened to let blood.

Arletta, smoothing out the petulance from her face, heeled her hackney forward and approached Bertrand, who had halted his horse on the brow of a slope. He was staring morosely at the light shining amid the thickets, but turned his head as Arletta joined him.

“The saints send us a good lodging to-night, lording,” she said, with a giggle and a toss of the head.

Bertrand looked at her, but did not smile.

“We must beat the bushes first,” he answered, sullenly.

Arletta, shirking his surliness, threw him a bold look out of her black eyes and touched her bosom with her hand.

“Ah, lording, I am tired,” she said; “I should like to sleep in a bed once more. As for that pig Gaston, I’ll give him the knife if he makes a mock of me.”

She was watching Bertrand, her sharp lips parted over her teeth.

“Am I not your servant, lording?” she asked.

“Confound you, then, be quiet!”

“Messire is tired and out of temper.”

“You should know—” and he rode on down the slope with the rest following him.

Bertrand sent some of his light-riding gentlemen in advance to reconnoitre, for it was the duty of a captain of free lances to treat every strange place as the harbor of an enemy. He and his men were ready to plunder even their own friends, but they took shrewd care not to be caught and fleeced by rivals in the grim maze of war. Bertrand’s riders went trotting cautiously over the moor, avoiding the sky-line and heading for the scattered thickets that fringed the forest.

The woman Arletta still kept close to Bertrand, throwing sharp glances from time to time into his face. It was as though she watched to read his humor, even as a dog watches the face of her master, and fawns for a caress or cringes from a blow. Bertrand seemed surly and reticent that night. He rode along with his chin on his chest, wrapped in his own thoughts, forgetful of the woman at his side.

“Messire is troubled?”

She spoke almost humbly, insinuatingly, yet with a glint in her black eyes and a jealous alertness sharpening her face. Bertrand growled. Her persistence only annoyed him.

“Well, what now? Haven’t I given you enough spoil of late? You would not be content with all the crown jewels in your lap!”

Arletta’s mouth hardened viciously for the moment, but the expression passed and her face softened.

“Lording, am I not your servant?”

“Ten thousand devils, what is it now?”

“Gaston—”

“Well, what of Gaston? Must I cut the fellow’s throat for your sake?”

Arletta’s eyes glittered; she breathed rapidly and hung her head.

“Lording, am I not your servant?”

“Well, child, well?”

“Gaston—”

“Curse the fool! What are you at, Arletta?”

Suddenly and without reasonable warning she broke into passionate weeping, clinching her fingers over her face and bending her head down over her breast. Bertrand stared at her in honest wonder. The ways of women were beyond his ken.

“Come, come, child, what is it?” he asked, more gently.

Arletta rocked to and fro in the saddle.

“I am nothing—I am a mere drab. Men may mock at me; I am nothing—I have no honor.”

Bertrand grimaced.

“Am I not your servant, lording? Yet, but who cares what Gaston says to me?”

“Letta—”

“No, no; you only laugh at me, you do not care. I am a drab, a tavern woman.”

Bertrand looked at her and stroked his chin. Women were strange creatures, and their whims puzzled him, but he caught a glimpse of Arletta’s meaning. How much was artifice he could not tell. She wished to see him jealous; he was quick enough to gather that.

“Gaston shall have his tongue clipped,” he said at last.

“Ah, lording, you do not care!”

“Curses, wench, will you drive me silly!”

They had ridden down from the moorland and were nearing the beech thickets, the bluff headlands of Broceliande, old Merlin’s forest. The light was twinkling brightly through the trees, and the outline of a window stood black and clear about the glow. Bertrand’s scouts had reached the place. He heard them shouting and laughing, and saw several dark figures move across the lighted window. Then a shrill squeal rose, a frightened squeaking like that of a rat caught in a dog’s mouth. Bertrand frowned and clapped his heels into his horse’s flanks. He cantered forward towards the thickets, and saw a low, pitched roof and a ruined tower rising from a dark cleft in the woods. It looked like a manor, with the walls and out-houses in ruins, nothing but the hall and the low tower left.

The voice was still pleading, rising now and again into a trembling screech. Bertrand guessed what was happening within. He tumbled out of the saddle and, crossing the grass-grown court, made his entry into the hall.

The place was in an evil plight—plaster falling from the walls, the windows broken and shutterless, holes in the roof where the tiles had tumbled through. In one corner towards the screens an old sow was penned behind wood-work that had once wainscoted the walls. The floor was littered with rubbish, and in more than one spot a puddle testified to the leakiness of the roof, while there were green patches of damp upon the walls. A wood fire burned on the great hearth-stone in the centre of the hall, and round it Bertrand’s “free companions” were gathered, two of them holding up an old man by the arms, while another prodded him in the legs with a glowing fagot from the fire. A stench of singed wool arose from the old fellow’s stockings, and he was squirming to and fro, hopping and squealing, a look of grotesque terror upon his face.

“What devil’s game are you at now, you rogues? Guicheaux, drop that stick or I’ll break your head for you.”

The men gave back before Bertrand’s roar, and grinned sheepishly at one another.

“The old fool has money hidden somewhere, I’ll wager,” said Guicheaux, who had handled the fagot.

“That’s as it may be. I tell you I’ll have no torturing. Grandfather, hither. I’ll keep the dogs from biting you.”

And a poor, weak-eyed, wet-nosed thing it was that came cringing forward, pulling its gray forelock and looking up piteously into Bertrand’s face.

“What manor is this?”

The ragged creature cocked an ear and fingered a lower lip that was blue and drooping with age.

“If you please, lording, it is no man’s manor.”

“Nonsense; speak up; they shall not touch you.”

Arletta, the two women, and the rest of the troop came streaming in at the moment. Bertrand waved them back and kept his eyes on the old man’s veined and weathered face.

“If you please, lording, this was Yvon de Beaulieu’s house. But he is dead, messire, and all his people.”

“Well, and you?”

The grotesque head shook on its skinny neck.

“I was his pantler, lording, but they were all killed. Sir Yvon and his son, Jehan the falconer, and ten more. It was Croquart the Fleming who did it. Madame Gwen he took away with him, because she still had her looks, or might fetch a ransom. Ah, lording, they took everything, even the fowls out of the yard.”

Bertrand stroked his chin, looked steadfastly at the old man, turning over in his heart the brutalities of war.

“Give him a stool,” he said, suddenly. “Now, grandfather, sit you down; we’ll not disturb you. A lodging for the night—that is our need. And, men, mark me, Croquart has swept the place clean; we have food of our own; let no one thieve a crust or I’ll have my word with him. A bundle of sticks; grandfather, I’ll pay you for them out of my own purse.”

Soon the dusk had deepened into night, and men had thrown aside their arms and harness, picketed their horses, and piled up a large fire in the centre of the hall. They crowded round it, squatting on the floor and frizzling pieces of meat on their sword-points, the light playing upon their hard and weather-worn faces, the smoke curling upward to escape by the louvre in the roof. The man Gaston had brought in his pig with him, and was skinning it in a corner, with the help of two of his companions. They thrust a spear through the carcass for a spit, and, carrying it to the fire, set it upon two pronged stakes that they had driven into the floor. Their bloody hands did not prevent them from handling the stone flasks of wine that were passing from man to man. A devil-may-care spirit possessed them all. With war and the Black Death stalking the land, none knew when the end might come and when the worms and the earth would be taking dust from dust.

Bertrand, in no mood for their rough pleasantries, had drawn apart towards what had been the dais. The hall was full of smoke and the stench of cooking, while through the shutterless windows the bats flew squeaking in and out. He sat on a worm-eaten bench, bread and dried meat from a wallet on his knees, a pilgrim’s bottle, with a strap through the handles, hanging from a peg in the wall. He had his sword lying naked on the bench beside him, for he was ever forearmed against the fellows who followed him. Any one of them when drunk would have used his poniard against the pope.

Bertrand was under a cloud that night. He looked grim and heavy about the eyes as he watched the fellows at their food, tearing the meat with their knives and stuffing their fingers into their mouths. What rough beasts they were! Bertrand was no courtier, but even he discovered some disgust at the men who called him “brother.” Arletta sat alone against the wall, crumbling a piece of bread and watching Bertrand with her restless eyes. The other two women were of the same temper as the men. They chattered, gobbled, wiped their mouths on the backs of their hands, hiccoughed, drank, and swore. Presently one of them stood up to sing. She was hot in the head, and her gown had been slit from the neck by the hand of one of the rough fellows who had been romping with her by the fire. She stood up, giggling and leering, a streak of grease upon one cheek. It was a low and bawdry ballad that she sang, one of the loose catches popular with the begging musicians who bawled in the common taverns. She felt no shame in the singing of it, and the men applauded her, hardly ceasing masticating to shout for more.

Bertrand grew weary of the scene—this poor drab with a dirty kirtle showing under her red gown, her face flushed and coarsened, her cheap trinkets shining in the light of the fire. He picked himself up from the bench, took his sword with him, and went out into the darkness of the yard. The men would probably be drunk before midnight; it was useless to meddle with them, and some one must needs keep guard.

A young moon was sinking in the west, and all about the ruined house rose the outstanding beech-trees of Broceliande. Their autumn panoply of gold was masked under the thousand stars, and even, the black slopes of the moor spread like a strange and night-wrapped sea. No wind was moving. In the manor court grass was growing ankle deep, and weeds and brambles flourished everywhere. The night air was sweet and pure after the sweat and beat of the crowded hall.

Bertrand stood leaning on his sword, his eyes fixed on the dim outline of the moor. A savage discontent was at work in him that night, a fierce melancholy that lay heavy upon his shoulders. The past rose up and spoke to him, spoke to him like some fair girl who had known neither sin nor shame. Purity and honor, what was he that he should think of such things? Had he not lost all the pride of life, that emulative madness that turns men into heroes? He was a thief, a bully, the lover of loose women, and for months he had been content to be nothing more. And yet the old youth cried in him at times, and a child’s face haunted him, half lost in a mist of shimmering gold. He remembered the pride he had taken in his armor, the nobleness he had striven for, the brave creed he had cherished. Great God, how he had changed since he had plucked Tiphaïne a white May-bough in the meadows at Motte Broon! She would be a woman now, and a great lady, and no doubt she had forgotten him, even as he had almost forgotten her.

There was a rustling of feet in the rank grass growing about the door. A hand touched Bertrand on the shoulder. He started, glanced round, and saw the girl Arletta standing by him.

“Lording,” she said, still touching him with her hands, “I am tired, and the beasts are drunk; they frighten me.”

Bertrand frowned and put away her hands.

“Let me be, Letta,” he said.

The girl was peering at him, her eyes dark and questioning; but there was no smell of wine upon her breath.

“See, lording, I have not touched the bottle. There is a room above; I have been there; there is dry bracken to make a bed.”

She tried to lay one hand upon his shoulder and to lean against him, but Bertrand shook her off and would not look into her face.

“I must keep watch,” he said. “Go up, child, and sleep.”

“You are wrath with me?”

“No, no; let me be, Arletta. I tell you I have the black-dog on my shoulders.”

She drew away from him, half fierce, half humbled, and, sitting down on the threshold, drew her skirts about her and curled herself against the door-post. Bertrand still leaned upon his sword. He paid no heed to the girl as she lay and watched him, jealously, yet with some of the homage of a dog within her eyes.

Bertrand turned on her at last, almost with an oath.

“Go up and sleep.”

She shivered, but did not stir.

“Lording, what is good enough for you is good enough for your servant.”

Bertrand tore his cloak from his shoulders and threw it to her, peevishly.

“Take it; cover yourself up.”

“But, lording—”

“Cover yourself up, I say! Am I to let you catch your death cold because you are a little fool?”

Arletta took the cloak and wrapped it about her body. Bertrand began to pace the court, his steel clogs ringing on the stones, his sword slanting over his shoulder. And thus they passed the night together, Bertrand on guard, the girl sleeping upon the threshold.

VII

IN the deeps of the forest of Broceliande stood a castle known in those parts as the Aspen Tower, from the trees that grew about the moat. The Lord of Tinteniac, who had held it long in fee, had surrendered it to the Sieur de Rohan in exchange for a manor near the western sea. The Sieur de Rohan had used the castle as a hunting-tower till some grim thing had happened in the place and a woman’s blood had dyed the flagstones of the chapel. The chattering aspens, the black moat, the rolling leagues of dark Broceliande had worked upon De Rohan’s conscience and smitten him with a dread of the lonely place. He had offered it to Stephen Raguenel, to whom he owed a certain favor. The Vicomte had taken it gladly, and garrisoned and regarnished the Aspen Tower when the Blois and Montfort wars began.

The aspen leaves were turning to gold, and their melancholy whisperings seemed to fill the valley, as though all the ghosts within Broceliande were flitting and shivering about the tower. The broad moat lay black and stagnant, reflecting the tall trees, streaked here and there with sunlight and dappled with showers of falling leaves. Though the sun was at noon, mists were hanging about the forest, a haze of faint gold dimming the red splendor of the beeches and the tawny magnificence of the oaks. A damp and melancholy stillness weighed upon the valley; even the trees seemed cold, as their gorgeous samites fluttered to decay.

There was something that suggested tragedy in the loneliness of the castle with its walls reflected in the black water and the woods rising like flame beyond its battlements. The spirit of autumn seemed to breathe in it, the spirit of sadness and of death, of mystery and of shadow. The gate was closed, the bridge up, the great grid, with its iron teeth, resting on the stones. No life stirred in the place. Nothing told that there were folk within save one thin plume of smoke that climbed feebly into the air.

Sadness and the sighing of the aspen-trees! Black water, mist-drenched grass, towering woodlands desolate under the blue! A melancholy that might have seemed beautiful had not the place been cursed with something more than sorrow! Such silence, such emptiness! The Black Death had supped in the Aspen Tower. That was why the place seemed terrible.

Many years had passed since the tournament at Rennes, and as for Tiphaïne of the May-bough—well, Bertrand would hardly have remembered her as she bent over the fire in the lord’s solar and stirred some concoction of herbs and wine that was steaming in a brazen pot. Tall, slim, yet broad across the bosom, her body seemed to take the wine-red tunic that she wore and mould it into curves that were rich in their simplicity. As for her face, it was not beautiful in the easy meaning, save for the blush of rose through the olive skin and the earnestness of the liquid eyes. The mouth was too large, the chin too prominent, the bones too massive. In repose, there was a sternness about it, a maturity of strength strange in one so young. It was as though the spirit had triumphed over matter, and that mere sensuousness could not flood forth the glow of the soul within.

A restless spirit possessed her as she bent over the wood fire, with no living thing save a wolf-hound to keep her company. With a deep intake of her breath she thrust her hands above her head and leaned against the stone hood that projected over the hearth. It was not the hysterical weakness of a girl that spoke in that one gesture, but the restrained anguish of a woman, a woman who felt the terror of the unseen strong about her in that lonely tower.

The dog whimpered and thrust his nose against Tiphaïne’s knee. She bent suddenly, with a melting of her whole figure into tenderness, the hard, staring misery gone from her face.

“Ah, ah, Brunet, how will it end? how will it end?”

The beast licked her hands and put up a huge paw.

“How you would bark, Brunet, if your master came! Yes. I would give my all to see his banner at the gate. They do not know how the Black Death serves us.”

She leaned again against the hood, staring into the fire, her hand still fondling the dog’s ears. It seemed to comfort her to touch something that was warm and real, something in which the blood flowed. She had seen man after man sicken and surrender to the pestilence. She still heard their delirious cries, the chattering terror of the women who had crowded round her clamoring to be let loose to starve in the woods. Was it all a dream? Were the graves in the garden real, the smell of death in the place nothing but a grim illusion? She remembered the swollen and disfigured faces, the cries for water, the sordid horror of each hour of the day. Yet it was all true, so true that she wondered why the pest had spared her.

Rousing herself at last, as though casting cowardice fiercely out of her heart, she set her teeth and took up a cup that stood on a stool before the fire.

“There are Jehanot and Guy,” she said, talking to the dog as though he understood her; “they are at work; we must remember them, Brunet; and poor Enid, who used to give you sops.”

She was ladling the posset from the brass pot into the cup, the dog watching her with his ears cocked, his tail beating the floor. When she had filled the cup she threw a gray cloak over her shoulders and passed out from the solar to the stairs that led into the hall. The great room was deserted, and had a cold, damp look. There were ashes and charred sticks upon the hearth, a pile of straw against one wall, and from one corner of the heap protruded a human foot. Tiphaïne saw it and gave a shudder. Loose straw littered the hall, and even in the court, where the sun streamed down as though something had been dragged out through the door.

From the court an open wicket led through a wall into the garden bounded on the far side by the palisades above the moat. Tiphaïne went in under the autumn trees, fruit and leaves rotting together on the grass, a few ghost flowers still blooming in the beds. Two men were at work in the far corner, flinging up earth out of a hole. Ten paces away a row of newly turfed mounds showed where Death had his autumn store.

Near the grave the men were digging lay a figure covered with a sheet. The two diggers had strips of cloth tied over their mouths and nostrils. They stood up and ceased work as Tiphaïne approached, carrying the silver cup, the dog following at her heels.

“Who is that, Jehanot?”

She was pointing to the sheet. Jehanot, an old cripple with a round back, wiped his forehead with his hand.

“That is Le Petit de Fougeres,” he said.

“Ah, ah; and he is dead?”

“This morning,” and the man sniffed. “There are Richard and the lad Berart in the hall. We have covered them up with straw.”

Tiphaïne called sharply to Brunet, who was snuffing at the sheet, and stood looking at the grave and the two diggers. They were all that the Black Death had left to her in the Aspen Tower out of a garrison of twenty men. She had had four women to serve her when the Vicomte had ridden out two months ago. Now but one was left, and she sick to death in the room above the gate.

“How are you, Jehanot, and you, Guy?” she asked.

The two men looked at each other as though to detect the first flush of fever on the other’s face. They smiled grimly. The intense silence of the castle, the mist lying stagnant over the valley, seemed to accord with the invisible horror that lurked in the air.

“I am sound, madame.”

“And I—as yet.”

They crossed themselves and muttered a prayer and the names of several saints. Tiphaïne held out the cup to them, her eyes wandering to the figure under the sheet.

“I have brought you a hot posset,” she said; “it will keep out the damp.”

Jehanot drank first, and then passed the cup to his comrade. The man drained it, and then gave it back to Tiphaïne with a crook of the knee.

“I am going to sit with Enid,” she said.

Jehanot, the cripple, looked at her through half-closed lids, for the misty sunlight was in his eyes.

“Leave her to me, madame?” he asked.

“No, no.”

“I have taken my chance; nothing more can matter.”

Her face lighted up of a sudden, and became beautiful as she gave the old man one of her smiles.

“The Holy Mother remember you, Jehanot,” she said; “you are a good fellow, and I have prayed for you, but Enid is in my hands.”

She turned and walked slowly back towards the court, holding the cup pressed against her bosom, the men looking after her in silence. Her gray cloak vanished under the brown domes of the fruit trees. Jehanot plunged his spade into the ground with an oath.

“The saints defend her!” he said, “How she drives the devil out of one with a look!”

His companion grunted and went on with his work.

“I would run for it, but—”

Jehanot glanced at him quickly over his shoulder.

“But for madame?”

“Yes.”

“That would be a coward’s trick. We should be shamed, even by her dog. God send the Vicomte back, I say, and keep all plundering devils from breaking down the gate.”

Tiphaïne crossed the court, shuddering inwardly as she thought of the dead men lying bloated and stiff under the straw in the hall. It was with an effort that she went in out of the sunlight and climbed the stairway to the lord’s solar. There was still the woman Enid to be looked to; and, refilling the cup from the brass pot on the hook, and ordering Brunet to lie down before the fire, she unlatched a small door in the wall that opened on a short gallery leading to the tower. At the back of the portcullis cell was a room known as the lesser solar, hung with red cloth, its windows opening upon the court. Books were ranged on a shelf beside the chimney and bundles of herbs dangled from the beams of the ceiling. In one corner stood a bed, with a water-pot and a crucifix on a stool beside it.

Tiphaïne set the cup down on the table, and, stealing across the room, drew the hangings back along the bed-rail. On the bed, under a coarse green quilt, lay the woman Enid, her sweet name belying her as she moaned and panted and plucked with her fingers at the clothes. Her face was as hideous as the face of a leper, blotched and swollen, the lips covered with brown scabs. Tiphaïne looked at her and shivered, remembering how she had kissed her as a child. The woman was wandering, thrusting out her dry tongue, blood on the quilt, her black hair in a noisome tangle.

“She will die to-night,” thought Tiphaïne, trying not to shrink from the bed and the tainted air of the room.

She took up the cup from the table, and, holding her breath, she bent over the bed, while the thing on it coughed and whimpered. She tried to pour some of the posset between the cracked lips, but the woman only choked, and the red wine dribbled down her chin. Tiphaïne put the cup back upon the table, and turned to the window-seat as though to wait and watch.

“What is the use,” she said to herself, fingering the rosary that hung about her neck. “I can do nothing, and I have prayed.”

Moved by some such simple thought as this, she left the woman to her moanings, hoping for pity’s sake that she might make a speedy end. It was more terrible to look on life than death, when life boasted so much horror. Lonely, very miserable, and sick at heart, she went to the little chapel beyond the solar and knelt down at the altar steps. Prayer was inarticulate in her, a blind up-rushing of the soul, a passionate desire for deliverance from the end. The sunlight had left the painted window, and everything was dim and indistinct and cold; the breath of the unseen seemed to fill the place and to chill her as she knelt before the cross.

“Ah, I cannot pray.”

She started up, half in petulance, half in despair, and went to her own bower that lay beyond the chapel. A hawk moped on the perch by the window, and even the bright colors on the walls seemed cold. Tiphaïne stood before the window and tried to remember how many days had passed since her father and Robin had ridden out. She strove to count them, taking her rosary and dropping a carved bead for each day. When would they return? And when they came they might find the Aspen Tower filled with the dead. Geoffrey the castellan and fifteen of the garrison lay buried with the three women under the apple-trees in the garden. Who would go next? Only crippled Jehanot, the man Guy, and the dog were left.

Mad with the silence of the place, she picked up a lute from the bed and tried to sing. Anything, even mockery, was better than this accursed stillness—

“When the thorns are white, and the larks sing High in the blue sky over the fields.”

Heavens! how cracked and shrill her voice sounded! She stopped as though the sound of it frightened her, and threw the lute aside in mute disgust. Ah, that something would happen, that a storm would come, anything but this autumn mist, this silence, these dripping trees! Why should she not take Fate by the throat and go forth into the darkness of Broceliande? There were wolves in the forest, but were they more horrible than the Black Death? There were thieves—and footpads. Yes, but even a knife would be better than the pest’s slow torture.

She turned suddenly to a table of carved oak that bore a small basin of black marble. The bowl was half filled with water, water that reflected the colored hangings and the beams and plaster-work of the ceiling. Tiphaïne bent over the bowl and looked into the spirit mirror. She knew something of magic, and had dabbled her white hands in the mysteries of the age. Muttering certain words that had some deep meaning according to the strange old book the girl kept locked in the chest at the bottom of her bed, and shading the water with her hands, she looked into it till the pupils of her eyes were wide as in the dark. For a long time she stood there gazing into the bowl, while it remained pictureless, showing nothing but her white face and her weary eyes. At last she seemed to be blessed with a vision, for her features sharpened and she breathed more rapidly, like one troubled by some sudden warning. In the bowl Tiphaïne could see the image of men riding, the glimmer of their armor like moonlight upon the sea.

VIII

“GUICHEAUX, you have ridden Broceliande before; is not that a tower yonder, rising above the trees?”

Guicheaux, a lean fellow with a face like a hatchet, heeled his horse forward and followed the pointing of Bertrand’s spear.

“It looks like stone, lording,” he said.

“Well, and what then?”

“Why, lording, it will be something to crack a nut upon,” and Guicheaux chuckled, unconverted ribald that he was and the quipster of the party.

Bertrand frowned at him.

“Come, leave your fooling. What place is it? Do you know this valley?”

“Pardon, lording,” and Guicheaux grinned till his creased face looked longer than ever; “I left a wife here once. I should know it.”

“Get on, get on.”

“It was the Sieur de Rohan’s hunting-tower, and many a good stag has he pulled down in these thickets. He loved the place, lording, and the ladies in it. I was a beater, and yet beaten in those days, for of all the washerwomen who ever handled a mop-stick my wife was the strongest in the arm.”

The men laughed; Guicheaux had flown his jest, and smirked as he gathered up the applause.

“Your servant, sires; and, seigneurs, you will not betray me if the woman is still alive?”

“No, no, Guicheaux; she has consoled herself, or swallowed her own stick.”

Bertrand had halted his company on the edge of the wood, the great trees towering above them in their amber and green. Before them grass-land sloped, even to the thousand aspens that stood crowded about the tower. It was a desolate scene, even for Broceliande. Three days had Bertrand and his men been wandering in the forest, till they chanced upon the path that led to the Valley of Aspens.

Bertrand was smiling and stroking his chin, as though tickled by some thought that had occurred to him. He half wheeled his horse and looked keenly at the brown and wind-tanned faces drawn up before him under the trees.

“Listen.”

Every eye was on him.

“Do you remember how the Sieur de Rohan cheated us out of our spoil at Guingamp?”

“Curse him, captain! Are we likely to forget it?”

Their vindictiveness was full of mischief. They guessed what Bertrand had to say to them.

“Well, gentlemen and free companions, why should we not have our share of the bargain? It is possible that we can plunder the place, and make a bonfire of it for the sake of the seigneur’s soul.”

The suggestion had been seized even before it had passed Bertrand’s lips, and the men caught their leader’s spirit. Bertrand was in one of his reckless moods, when he was ready to lead his fellows into any mischief under the sun. They cheered him, and began tightening up their harness and looking to their arms. Bertrand was as grim and strenuous as any. The game pleased him that day, and Arletta had his smiles as he came to her to lace his bassinet.

“Give me a kiss, wench,” he said.

She gave him three, and a brave hug, laughing wickedly as he chucked her chin.

“The black dog has a holiday, lording,” she said.

“Little mistress, your eyes have scared him. Wait till we have our hands in some of De Rohan’s coffers! You shall have the baubles in your pretty lap to play with. Guicheaux, remember the axes. Some of you cut a young tree down; we may need it to break the gate.”

They set to work, and had a young oak down in a twinkling, and cleared the branches from the bole. The two women who were standing by straddled the trunk and made the men carry them, laughing, chattering, and making fun, till Bertrand, turning martinet, ordered them down to mind their business. The shorter of the two caught her skirts on a lopped bough, and had to be rescued amid roars of laughter.

“How you alarmed me!” quoth Guicheaux, as he helped her up. “I feared your linen had not been washed for a month!”

* * * * *

Tiphaïne was brooding before the fire in the solar the day after Le Petit de Fougeres had been buried, when she heard a voice calling to her from the hall.

“Madame Tiphaïne! Madame Tiphaïne!”

Rising, with a rush of hope from her heart, she slipped back the panel in the wall above the dais, through which the lord could look down on his people from the solar, and found Jehanot peering up at her with a cross-bow in his hand. She could see that the man was trembling, whether with joy or fear she could not tell.

“Madame, there are riders in the valley; I have seen them from the tower.”

Tiphaïne remembered the mystic pageant that had been shown her in the basin of black marble.

“Well, Jehanot, well?”

“I could see no banner or pennon. Maybe—”

He hesitated, thumbing the string of his cross-bow and looking up into the corners of the roof. Tiphaïne guessed what was passing in his mind. She shot the panel back and went down from the solar into the hall.

“Jehanot,” she said, very earnestly.

The man waited.

“It is not the Vicomte—no—I can read that on your face. There is no banner or pennon; and that means a ‘free company.’”

She was standing with one fist to her chin, looking vacantly at the pile of straw that covered the dead bodies, for Richard and the lad Berart had not yet been buried.

“Jehanot, go up into the portcullis-room and watch.”

The cripple nodded.

“They will summon us. If they are strangers, learn from them who they are. If friends, say that I will come out to them.”

“Yes, madame.”

“You understand, Jehanot? We are of the Blois party. Be careful; look for enemies—”

“If they are a rough crew,” the old man answered, “I will preach the Black Death’s sermon to them.”

“Yes, yes.”

“And lie if needs be.”

“Should they be Croquart’s ruffians—”

Jehanot grimaced as he limped away.

“God give us better luck!” he said; and then, turning at the door: “Stay in the chapel, madame. If they are for plunder, they may grant you sanctuary.”

Jehanot climbed up to the portcullis-cell and looked out through one of the squints across the moat. A faint breeze stirred in the aspen boughs, and the trees were muttering as though feeling the presence of some peril in their midst. Leaves were falling in golden showers, and through the crowded alley-ways of the wood the wet grass glistened in the sunlight. What was that? Jehanot’s head was straining forward on its skinny neck, his eyes fixed in a hard stare. He had seen a dim figure flit across the main path to the moat and take cover behind a tree. Another and yet another followed it. Still all was silent save for the chattering of the aspen leaves. They were reconnoitring the place, and their stealth did not comfort Jehanot’s fears.

Then he heard a deep voice sounding over the water.

“Forward, sirs—forward!”

Instantly the aspen wood seemed alive with steel, and Jehanot saw men swarming down towards the moat. Several of them carried the trunk of a tree, and at the sight of it Jehanot sucked in his breath expressively and whistled. There was no doubt as to their purpose as they headed for the causeway with a man in full armor on a black horse leading them. Jehanot saw Bertrand dismount, fling his bridle to a follower, and come clanging along the causeway till he reached the gap left by the raised drawbridge.

“Sound your horn, Hopart; we will challenge them to surrender.”

The horn’s scream echoed through the valley, while the men crowded the causeway at Bertrand’s back. The fierce, wolfish faces were turned this way and that as they scanned every wall and window. A sudden thought seized Jehanot as he crouched behind his squint. He put his hands to his mouth and broke out into a wailing cry.

“’Ware the Black Death! ’ware the Black Death!”

He waited, watching the men crowding the causeway from the darkness of the cell. They were looking at one another, gesticulating and pointing towards the squints of the portcullis-room.

“’Ware the Black Death! The plague is heavy on us!”

Jehanot could see that they wavered and were wrangling together. Bertrand, who was watching the windows, caught sight of Jehanot and shook his sword.

“It is a trick, sirs!” he shouted. “Back! back! they are cheating us to gain time. How could the pest reach such a place as this?”

“True, captain, true,” came the response.

Jehanot, white and terrified, put his face close to the squint and shouted to Bertrand:

“It is no trick, messire; it is no trick.”

Bertrand swore at him.

“Silence, you old liar. We want the Sieur de Rohan’s treasure-chest. Back, lads! back! We must cut down more trees to bridge the gap. Guicheaux, take five men and cover the squints; they will be playing on us with their cross-bows in the winking of an eye.”

The cripple shouted to them again, but his cries were unheeded in the bustle and uproar. The men had herded back over the causeway, leaving Bertrand leaning on his sword, confident in his armor to defy both bolt and arrow. Axes were soon swinging and the white chips flying from the trunks of several young trees. Guicheaux and three others had wound their cross-bows and posted themselves along the moat, and were waiting for archers to show themselves at the squints or on the battlements.

Jehanot was still squealing, repeating the same words in his unreasoning fear.

“Keep back!—the Black Death is with us! Keep back, for the mercy of God!”

Bertrand waved to Guicheaux with his sword.

“Silence the old fool!” he shouted.

The soldier trained his cross-bow on the squint where he could see Jehanot moving to and fro, waving his hands to them and shouting, like one gone mad. The string twanged, and the quarrel, glancing from the stone jamb, struck the old man in the face.

He fell back, squeaking like a mouse, his hand over his mouth, for the bolt had knocked his teeth away and broken his lower jaw. Trembling and panic-stricken, he stumbled back into the lesser solar, where Enid lay dead upon the bed. A woman’s figure stood outlined against the window; it was Tiphaïne’s.

“Jehanot! Jehanot!”

The old man mumbled through his bloody fingers:

“To the chapel, for God’s sake, madame; have a care, they are shooting at the windows.”

Tiphaïne held Jehanot by the shoulder.

“Ah—ah, the cowards! they have hurt you, my poor Jehanot. Come, come with me; we will go to the chapel, and I will hide you behind the hangings. Where is Guy?”

The old man was sick and faint with pain. Tiphaïne dragged him along the gallery to the lord’s solar, gave him wine, and bound up his bleeding mouth. The man Guy had jumped into the moat an hour ago, swum across, and fled into the woods. Jehanot confessed as much, moaning, and holding his broken jaw between his hands.

“Whose company is it—not Croquart’s?”

Jehanot shook his head, turning his whole body with it.

“They seem bad enough,” he said, “whoever they may be.”

Brunet was following them, growling and ruffling up his collar as the sound of the men battering at the gate echoed through every gallery and room. Tiphaïne half dragged Jehanot to the chapel, and hid him behind the hangings beside the altar. Then she ran back into the solar, took a burning brand from the fire with the iron tongs, and, returning, lit the candles on the altar and threw the flaming wood upon the floor. Beside the chalice, on the white altar cloth, stood the silver swan that Bertrand had given her at Rennes.

The great gate was down, and half a dozen sweating fellows were prising up the portcullis with spear-staves and the trunks of young trees. Inch by inch the great grid went up till Bertrand and two others had their shoulders under the teeth and held it till the rest wedged it up with timber. Shouting and swearing, they crowded pellmell like a drove of swine through the tower arch. Some turned into the guard-room, to find it empty. Others made for the hall across the court, expecting resistance and finding none.

The man Guicheaux was at the head of those who made for the hall. With them were the two women, as wild and keen as any of the men. They found the hall empty, but spread this way and that, some towards the screens, others towards the high table and the place where the buffet stood.

A brisk shout startled the whole rabble. Guicheaux, who had been turning over the straw with the truncheon of a spear he had broken under the grid, had started back and stood pointing at the straw, white and abashed, like a man who has found a snake curled in the grass.

The rest crowded round him, querulous and wondering. Then a blank silence fell. They stood staring at one another and at the blackened body Guicheaux had uncovered with his spear. One of the women, who had been peering over a man’s shoulder, clapped her hands over her face and broke into hysterical screaming.

“The murrain, the black murrain! We shall all die of it!”

Guicheaux cursed her, tossed the straw back over the body, and looked at his companions. They were huddling away from the spot like a pack of sheep, the lust of plunder out of them for the moment.

“Let us be off!” quoth a young Poitevin, holding a hand over his nose and mouth.

“Quiet, you fool!” and the big fellow Hopart, with the red beard and angry eyes, cuffed the lad with his gadded glove. “Out with you, milksop! We have taken our chance, and the devil’s with us. Let us have our spoil. Who’s afraid of a dirty corpse?”

He strode up, kicked the body under the straw, and turned a bloated face to Guicheaux and the rest.

“To the chambers first, sirs, and then for the wine.”

Hopart’s recklessness persuaded them in a moment. They broke away, all the fiercer for the fright, and raced for the stairway leading to the solar and the chapel. Bertrand joined them as they reached the dais, Arletta hanging on his arm, her face flushed, her eyes shining.

The men were jostling and crowding on the stairs, pulling one another back in the scramble, cursing and shouting—a mad crew. Guicheaux was the first to reach the solar. He ran to the hutch at the bottom of the Vicomte’s bed, beat his spear-staff through the lid, and wrenched up the splintered panels. They were all scrambling over the hutch like pigs over a trough. One man pulled out a silver mug, another a bag of money, a third an ivory crucifix set with stones.

“To the chapel!”

It was the big fellow, Hopart, who had kicked the dead body in the hall who gave the cry. A dozen men followed him, leaving Guicheaux and the rest to plunder the ambreys on either side of the fireplace, while Arletta unlaced Bertrand’s bassinet, laughing all the while at the way the men showed their greed.

They had forced the doorway of the chapel, when there was a sudden scuffle, a swaying back of the press, the loud bay of a dog. Hopart was rolling on the floor, stabbing at Brunet, who had him by the throat. The men who had fallen back rushed in and slashed at the dog with their swords and poniards. Hopart freed himself, hurled the hound aside, and began to kick the beast as it lay dying upon the floor.

“Cowards!”

Hopart and his comrades were crowding together and staring at the lady in the red tunic who stood upon the altar steps. The candles flickered above her, their light glimmering on the silver upon the altar and on the golden sheen in Tiphaïne’s hair. She was white and furious, moved to the depths by Brunet’s death.

“Cowards!”

It would have been difficult to compress more scorn in one single word. The rough thieves held back before her, even the great blackguard of a Hopart looking clumsy and abashed. It needed another woman, and one of a coarser type, to break the spell this white-faced madame had cast upon the men.

“Ho, ho! the fine she-leopard. See—she has jewels on her! What, sirs, are you afraid of a fine lady? Let me pass; I’ll show ye how to pull out hair.”

It was Gwen, the broad-hipped wench who had caught her clothes on the stump of the tree. She was shaking her fists and urging on the men with the instinctive hatred of a veritable drab for a sister whose face was as clean as her clothes. The men swayed forward towards the altar. Hopart, his throat bloody from Brunet’s fangs, had his eyes on the jewelled girdle that Tiphaïne wore. He shouldered the rest aside only to be plucked back by a strong hand from the altar steps and sent staggering against the wall.

“Back! back!”

Bertrand was before them, his sword out, his hair bristling, a look on his face that the men had learned to fear. They gave ground as the white blade whistled to and fro, huddling together, each man trying to get behind his neighbor.

Bertrand drove them back towards the door, and then turned to the altar, where Tiphaïne still stood. His bassinet was off, for Arletta had unlaced it in the solar, and the light from the candles fell full upon his face.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin!”

Tiphaïne’s hands were at her bosom. She was staring at the man before her, incredulous scorn blazing in her eyes. Bertrand went back three full paces and stood looking at Tiphaïne with his mouth agape.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin!”

“Madame, who are you?”

For answer she took up the silver swan and held it in her hands before them all.

“Who was it who gave me this, messire, at the tournament at Rennes?”

IX

THE one pure thing in that little chapel, Tiphaïne, stood there on the altar steps, looking down on Bertrand, the swan of silver in her hands. Behind her burned the candles, above rose the eastern window with its painted glass: azure, purple, and green. She seemed strangely high above them all, a being apart, one in whom no selfish cowardice dimmed the glow of her woman’s scorn. For the common herd, the mere pawns in the game of plunder and of war, she had no remembrance for the moment. It was at Bertrand that she looked, sternly, wonderingly, yet with a sadness that shadowed her whole face.

As for Bertrand, he stood with his sword held crosswise in his hands, his head bowed down a little, his brows contracted like a man facing a cloud of dust. He looked at Tiphaïne as though confident that he had no cause for shame, but failed in the deceit, as a man who was not utterly a blackguard should. The girl’s eyes made him feel hot from head to heel. She was so calm, so proud, so uncompromising, so pure. To Bertrand she was as a being who had stepped by magic out of a golden past. He found himself shuddering at the thought of what might have befallen her had Hopart and the rest laid their rough hands upon her body.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, have you nothing to say to me?”

Bertrand was squaring his shoulders and trying to look her frankly in the face.

“We took this for the Sieur de Rohan’s place,” he said.

Tiphaïne’s eyes held his.

“How much honor is there in the excuse, messire?”

“Honor?”

“To take the castles of one’s friends, castles that have no garrisons, where the Black Death conquered before you came?”

The men and women were crowding the far end of the chapel, grinning and giggling, and not a little astonished at the way that Bertrand had his tail between his legs. It was a new thing for them to see their captain bearded, and bearded successfully, by a mere woman.

The truth was plain to Tiphaïne as she looked at the man’s sullen and silent face, and at the rough plunderers who called him leader. She had no fear either of Bertrand or his men. The plague had taught her to look on death without a tremor.

“Then you are no longer of the Blois party, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin.”

“I—madame?”

“Yes.”

He gnawed his lip, with the air of a man wishing himself saved from some merciless scourging.

“The Sieur de Rohan is for the Count of Blois.”

“It is so.”

“Therefore, messire”—and she looked down at him from her full height—“therefore—I do not understand.”

The woman Gwen, who had torn her skirts on the trunk of the tree, began to laugh and declaim:

“Lord help us, what has come to the captain? Did ye ever see such a meek gentleman?”

The men chuckled. Bertrand whipped round with a devil’s look in his eyes, and made at them, making mighty sweeps with his sword.

“Out! out!”

His wrath sobered them. There was something terrible in it, something so grim that they quailed and went back before him, pushing one against another. Few of the men were cowards, but none wished to tempt the whistling fierceness of Bertrand’s sword.

“Out! out!”

They crowded through the doorway, flinching, and covering their faces with their arms. In a minute the chapel was empty, but Bertrand still followed them. He drove them through the solar and down the stairway into the hall, thrusting Arletta out last, and barring the door. Huddling together like a flock of silly sheep, they stood gaping at the blank wall and the closed door.

Bertrand lingered a moment in the solar, listening, one hand gripping the handle of his sword, the other stroking his strong chin. It was even as though this great, grim-faced fellow, who had driven twenty men before him by sheer strength of will, shrank from facing the woman waiting for him in the chapel. After pacing the solar, he shook himself and recrossed the threshold. Tiphaïne was standing where he had left her. Her eyes looked straight at Bertrand as he moved towards her, trying not to slouch or shirk her gaze.

“Well, messire?”

She challenged him curtly with those two words. It was no mere question, but the call to an ordeal that he could not shirk.

“I am sorry—” he began.

“Sorry! That is generous—indeed! See, there lies my best friend, my dog Brunet, slashed to death by the swords of your men. My castle gate has been broken by you, my father’s house pillaged!”

Her words came quickly, yet with the clear ring of an armorer’s hammer upon steel. She was still wroth with him, and, with good reason, grieved also by the falling of his manhood into such a life.

Bertrand could not meet her eyes.

“What can I say to you, madame?”

She dropped her arm and looked at him in silence, her face aglow, her breath drawn deeply.

“Messire Bertrand! Messire Bertrand!”

The change of tone was wonderful, piercing through to the man’s heart. He hung his head, knowing too well what was passing in her mind.

“I am what I am,” he said, sullenly.

“Yet—you remember Rennes?”

“What good is it, madame, to remember what one cannot keep.”

“What good, messire! Have you, then, fallen so much from your own heart?”

He flung back his head suddenly and looked her in the face.

“Why should I shirk it?” he said. “I am what I am—a captain of free companions, a beast, a ruffian—God knows what! Where is my honor? Ask those great lords who made me what I am.”

He seemed to recover his dignity of a sudden, a dignity that, though bitter and rebellious, boasted sincerity and truth. He rested his sword-point on the floor, crossed his two hands on the pommel, and waited like a man who has thrown down the gage.

Tiphaïne stood above him on the altar steps.

“Then you have forgotten Rennes?” she said.

“I—madame?”

“How, then, should Bertrand du Guesclin have fallen to leading these poor fools to the plunder of Breton homes? I should not have dreamed it when—I was a child—at Rennes.”

Her words moved him, and he bent his head.

“Men fail—sometimes,” he said, sullenly.

“Sometimes; but you—”

“I?”

“You—who were so strong, messire; you—who feared nothing!”

He stretched out his arms before her, the sword sweeping the air.

“Before God—the whole fault was not mine!”

“And why not yours, Bertrand du Guesclin?”

“They were against me—those great captains; what was I to them?—a dog to be kicked when the meat scorched on the spit.”

“And then?”

“They took my honor from me. Was not that enough?”

“No man need lose his honor, even though the whole world calls him liar.”

He looked at her steadfastly a moment, noting her queenliness and the sadness of her eyes.

“I am what I am; the how, or why, neither mends—nor matters. Give me your commands.”

She turned to the altar, and, lifting the silver swan, held it out to him with both her hands.

“Take it, messire.”

He glanced up at her and frowned.

“Not that!”

“And yet you remember Rennes?”

He caught her meaning, and understood—to his own cost—the significance of the thing she wished.

“You strike hard, but the blows are true,” he said. “I have lost what once was mine; I acknowledge it; a man can do no more.”

He sheathed his sword and took the swan from Tiphaïne, looking at her hands and nothing else. For Bertrand there was a bitter symbolism in the scene. The few pure memories he had given to the past were flung back to him like the dry petals of a cherished flower.

He thrust the silver swan under his surcoat, so that it was held there by his belt.

“And now?”

She stood silent a moment, as though considering.

“Am I to be obeyed?”

He crossed himself.

“Before God, yes.”

He looked up at her and waited.

“These are my commands,” she said: “return your plunder; bury the two dead men—in the hall. Mend the gate that you have broken; then leave us to our liberty.”

“Here—alone?”

“I have said it.”

“But—madame!”

“Madness—you would say?”

“Only command me, and I will see you safe to Rennes, or Josselin, or Dinan.”

She was calm and determined, for she had made her plans.

“Messire, I have said it. I am not alone,” and she drew back the hangings and showed him Jehanot, cowering against the wall.

Bertrand looked at her, baffled, yet realizing that she wished to be obeyed.

“I would have had it otherwise, madame.”

“And I—had it been different.”

He turned and pointed towards Brunet’s body.

“And the hound?”

“Ah, poor Brunet, leave him; Jehanot and I will bury him. But for the rest—”

“You shall be obeyed.”

She turned suddenly, as though she had ended her meeting with him, and knelt down before the altar, her hands folded over her bosom. Jehanot was kneeling also, while from poor Brunet’s body the blood still curled across the stones. Bertrand stood motionless for a moment at the chapel door, looking at Tiphaïne as though he were being banished from light and warmth into the night. Perhaps she did not trust him. Why should she? Had he not broken the child’s faith she had kept for him from the past?

He went out into the solar and closed the chapel door. A fierce gloom had fallen on him, the gloom of a proud man who has had the cold truth flung in his face. Great God, was he so vile a fellow that Tiphaïne held the Black Death’s terror to be more merciful than his kindness? Yes, he was a beast, a bully, a common thief. Bertrand humbled himself with all the passionate thoroughness of his nature.

Tiphaïne had given him her commands. Good! He would at least show her that he could obey. Striding through the solar and down the stairs, he found his fellows still loitering in the hall. They were whispering together with the restless air of men vaguely afraid of the days before them. Some were counting money on one of the long tables, others gloating over the spoil they had taken, and making coarse jests at Bertrand’s lingering in the chapel.

Bertrand came down into the hall, his naked sword over one shoulder, his mouth set. He looked the men over with that searching stare that seemed to fix itself on every one in turn. Bertrand was in one of his silent, tight-lipped moods. The men waited, watching him and wondering what was to follow.

“Guicheaux, hither!”

The words were sharp and vicious. Guicheaux started, colored, and came forward nimbly.

“You have a silver mug under your surcoat.”

The quipster would have lied had he dared, but Bertrand’s eyes were on him.

“Come, do you hear me? Disgorge, all of you. Guicheaux, put your mug down on the floor at my feet.”

They began to murmur, to grumble, to nudge one another. Guicheaux hesitated. Bertrand’s lion’s roar set the rafters ringing.

“Come, all of you; let me have no grumbling! Hopart, you have money on you. Bring it here, I say, or, by God, I will break your neck!”

The men had seen him fierce, but never in such a mood as this before. They obeyed, grudgingly, sullenly, each man knowing Bertrand for his master, and fearing to be the first to feel his wrath. Cups, money, ewers, a silver “ship,” a rich girdle or two were lying in a heap at Bertrand’s feet. His face softened as he took the swan of silver from under his surcoat and added it to the pile of spoil.

“Men,” he said, with a keen look.

They stood watching him; no grumbling was to be heard.

“I have sought a favor from you, and you have obeyed me. I give you thanks.”

Guicheaux grinned at the coolness of the speech. He had an inveterate love of insolent address, and he could have licked Bertrand’s shoes for homage at that moment.

“Men, I have some share of plunder on the pack-horses. Divide it among yourselves. I make a gift of it.”

The change that swept over the rough faces was significant. Satisfaction succeeded surliness, and they cheered him as though he had won some great fight and driven the English into the sea.

Bertrand, who knew their hearts, held up his sword for silence. How different the applause of the fellows seemed to him from what it would have seemed an hour ago.

“Guicheaux, take ten men, find tools and timber, and repair the gate.”

Guicheaux grimaced, but prepared to see the whim obeyed.

“The rest of you go out over the moat and pile your arms in the aspen wood. We shall march as soon as the gate is mended.”

Never had Bertrand’s free companions met with such strange strategy before. To take plunder—only to return it; to break down a gate—only to rear it up again! They could make nothing of the riddle, save that the lady in the chapel had bearded Bertrand as though she had been a queen of France. They poured out from the hall, leaving Bertrand standing before the pile of metal, the silver swan glistening in the sunlight that slanted from one of the narrow windows. He stood there a long while, leaning on his sword, his face dark and expressionless, his eyes sad. At last he turned to the penance he had taken upon himself, the burying of the bodies that lay stiff under the straw.

Alone he buried them, digging a shallow grave in the orchard, while Guicheaux and his comrades hammered at the gate. There was heroism in the deed, but Bertrand hardly felt it at the moment. The responsibility was his, and he took it, lest his men should suffer.

The gate was patched and firm upon its hinges, Richard and the lad Berart stretched in their last resting-place under the apple-trees. The “free companions” had built a fire in the aspen wood, and were cooking meat and making a meal. They had joined their sagacities in unravelling the mystery of their captain’s orders, but none save the women came near discovering the truth.

“I will tell ye how it is,” and fat Gwen wiped her mouth and looked at Arletta, of whom she was jealous: “madame, yonder, was once the captain’s lady love; that is why the brave fellow looked so meek.”

Meanwhile Bertrand had passed once more into the empty hall, and was standing staring at the swan of silver crowning the untaken spoil. No sound came from the chapel, where Tiphaïne and old Jehanot kept sanctuary till the troop had gone. Bertrand was smiling sorrowfully and fingering his chin. Suddenly he took his poniard from its sheath and went to the high table on the dais. Bending over it, he carved a rude cross thereon, and, taking the swan of silver, set it on the board beside the cross.

Then he saluted the closed door of the solar and went out of the Aspen Tower to join his men.

X

A WIND had risen when Bertrand and his men rode forward into the woodways of Broceliande. Falling leaves were flickering everywhere, drifting in showers, dyeing the green grass bronze and gold. The forest was full of the murmuring of the crisp foliage of autumn. Deep in the inner gloom the rust-red masses of the dead beech leaves glowed like metal at dull heat. The western sky had taken its winter tones, that flush of orange and of maroon that backs the purple of the misty hills.

Bertrand loitered behind his men, slouching in the saddle and looking straight before him into the forest. The emotions in him were complex for the moment, so much so that they might have taken their temper from Broceliande itself. The rustling of leaves, for falling memories; the shrill piping of the wind, all human in its infinite anxiousness and dread. Humiliation and gloom were heavy on Bertrand’s soul. He had been shown his own likeness in the mirror of Tiphaïne’s honor, and the ugliness thereof had made him consider what manner of man he was.

He awoke at last to find Arletta watching him as she trotted beside him on her half-starved nag. There was a jealous look in the girl’s black eyes, a sharp petulance about her face. Bertrand’s quixotry had puzzled her not a little, and Gwen’s words were still sounding in her ears.

“Lording,” she said, “is the black dog back upon your shoulders?”

Bertrand frowned, and swore at his horse as the beast stumbled over a piece of dead-wood. He was in no mood for Arletta’s questions.

“Mind your business, wench,” he said, “and I will mind my own.”

Arletta’s curiosity was aroused; moreover, it was not in her woman’s nature to be driven from the truth with a snub.

“You have had these moods and whimsies of late, lording.”

“Ah, have I?”

“Yes, often and often, and to-night you look blacker than a Moor. Who is the lady who scolded you in the chapel?”

She affected innocence, but the pretence could not hide the hardness of her voice.

“What is that to you?” quoth Bertrand, digging his knees into his horse’s flanks.

“Nothing, lording, nothing.”

“Nothing, eh? Then leave well alone.”

“Ah—ah—”

“What ails you now?”

“To-day you kissed me and were gay. What has happened?—what have I done? Dear Heaven, I am always vexing you!”

Bertrand lost patience, and was turning on her with a snarl and a curse, when something seemed to stay his temper. Tiphaïne’s face had risen before him. She had told him the truth? Yes, he was a rough beast and a bully.

“Let me be, child,” he said, even gently.

Arletta’s lips quivered, but she took his kindness into her heart and looked less peevish and jealous about the eyes.

“Lording, maybe you are tired and hungry.”

She rummaged in the bag that hung on her saddle, and brought out a piece of bread and a few olives.

“Take them, lording,” she said, holding out her hands.

Bertrand was touched. He took the food and ate it.

“Thanks, child,” he said, “you must put up with my rough temper, and close your ears when I take to growling.”

* * * * *

In the Aspen Tower, Tiphaïne had come from the chapel, after covering Brunet’s body with the cloth from the altar. She had made Jehanot sit by the solar fire, for the pain of his broken jaw and the terror he had borne had brought the old man near to a collapse. The pillaged chest, the rifled ambreys, the scanty furniture, tossed pellmell into the corners, made Tiphaïne wonder whether Bertrand had kept his vow.

She left Jehanot in the solar, and, going down into the hall, found the pelf piled on the floor, even as Bertrand had promised. The straw had been thrown aside, and the bodies of Richard and the lad Berart were no longer there. Then Tiphaïne’s eyes fell upon the swan of silver, swimming beside the rough cross cut by Bertrand on the high table.

However proud a woman may be, she can rarely cast past kindness wholly from her heart. Her sweetness, if she be a good woman, persists in trying to sanctify a friendship threatened by all the influences of fate. Tiphaïne had tried her power on Bertrand that day. Her courage, like a bold haggard, had flown at the man’s rough pride and brought it tumbling out of the blue. Bertrand had obeyed her, save in one respect. He had left the prize he had won for her at Rennes, and had cut a cross beside it, to symbolize some thought that had been working in his heart.

Tiphaïne’s face softened as she stood looking at the swan. She was not without vanity, the true vanity of the soul that cries out with joy when some great deed has been inspired; some evil pass prevented. Bertrand had disobeyed her in one thing, and she grasped the thought that had made him carve the cross upon the table. Her words had gone home to the man’s heart; he was not dead to scorn; he could react still to the cry of his own conscience.

Would the mood last? Tiphaïne hung her head and wondered. There were so many powers behind the man, dragging him back from the prouder life. He had been wronged, perhaps treated unjustly, driven to recklessness by some undeserved disgrace. She remembered Bertrand’s passionate nature as a child. He was quickly wounded, and stubborn over the smart thereof.

“Ah, Bertrand du Guesclin,” she thought, “how long will my words ring within your ears? Will you hate me when your humbleness has gone? Will you hold to the old life, or break from it like a brave man, turning shame to good account? Who knows?—who knows? Yet I will keep this gift of yours, to prove or condemn you as the days may show. Will it be the smelting-pot for the silver swan, messire, or God’s altar again, towards which the hearts of true men turn?”

* * * * *

Bertrand was fighting out the same question in his heart as he rode with Arletta through the darkening woodways of Broceliande. Dusk was falling, and the heavy silence of the forest was broken only by the trampling of hoofs and the voices of his men. Mist and gloom were everywhere. The falling of the leaves was very ghostly in the twilight, and the piping of the wind grew more plaintive as the red flush dwindled in the west.

A sense of loneliness and of nothingness had fallen on Bertrand, a savage spirit of self-abasement that took him by the shoulders and thrust him down into the deeps. Of what use were Tiphaïne’s words to him? Defeat was heavy on him, fate against him, and wherefore should he swim against the tide? How could a mere freebooter, a beggarly captain among thieves, hope to retrieve the failures of the past? He had chosen his part in life, and he must abide by it, without clutching at the golden fruit that hung above his reach. The past was beyond him, with its memories. Nothing could flush his soul once more with the boyish ardor he had felt at Rennes.

It is strange to what poltroonery even a brave man will fall, and how the stoutest heart can flag, the most strenuous spirit fall into the mopes. Men are not demi-gods, and their very fibres are fashioned out of clay. Physical starvation can bring the strutting hero low, while soul hunger is the most paralytic misery of all. The truest courage is that which meets fate in the mists of twilight, and passes the valley of shadows with set mouth and dogged will. It is easy to be brave when trumpets scream and the flush of fame burns upon the clouds. To defeat defeat, alone, and with the bitterness of failure in the heart—then is it that the iron in the man must prove its temper. As yet Bertrand had not learned the highest courage. He was as a petulant boy who cries “Shame! Shame!” when the world baffles his first venture.

The man Guicheaux came cantering back from the main company, for it was growing dark, and they would have to lodge as best they might under the autumn shelter of Broceliande.

“Shall I call a halt, captain?”

Bertrand glanced at him like a man waking unwillingly from sleep, and nodded.

“Make me a fire apart, Guicheaux,” he said.

The quipster grinned, and glanced at Arletta.

“There are some big beeches yonder, lording,” he said, flourishing his hand as a signal to the men to halt.

“The leaves are dry as shavings, and there is bracken waiting to be cut. We shall find plenty of dead wood about, and a good beech-tree will make Dame Arletta a fine bower.”

Guicheaux trotted away, and the men were seen off-saddling under the trees—huge spreading beeches that stood on a low ridge between two valleys. The free companions piled their arms about the tree-trunks, and used the boughs as pegs to hang their harness on. Some of them picketed the horses, after watering them at a stagnant pool, some fifty yards down the slope. Others cut down bracken with their swords, and gathered dead-wood to make a fire. The two women, Gwen and Barbe, chattered and bandied their coarse jests with the men as they looked to the serving of the evening meal.

Bertrand had unsaddled his horse, tethered the beast, and sat himself down at the foot of one of the trees with his shoulders resting against the trunk. He let Arletta look to her own nag, and did not rouse himself to give her a helping hand. His morose mood was selfish in its obstinate self-pity. He hardly heeded the girl as she came and knelt beside him on the beech leaves and began to search her wallet for food.

Presently Guicheaux approached with an armful of sticks. He kicked the dry leaves together and began to build a fire, looking curiously at Bertrand from time to time, and smiling mischievously at Arletta. Crouching, he struck sparks with his flint and steel, and blew on the tinder till it flared up and set the dry leaves blazing. Guicheaux rubbed his hands before the flames with comfortable unction, and looked at the two women who were slinging a cooking-pot over the other fire. The men were trooping in with bundles of bracken, which they began to spread as bedding for the night.

Guicheaux glanced round at Bertrand moping against the tree. “Some of Gaston’s pig is to fatten us, lording,” he said.

Bertrand did not seem to hear him.

“Bread, boiled pork, and a mug of cider. Consult your stomach, messire, whether it be not hungry.”

Arletta darted an impatient look at the quipster, and ordered him away with a wave of the hand. The captain had the black-dog on his shoulders, and it was better for all that he should be left alone.

Presently she crept close to Bertrand and offered to unlace his bassinet. Her brown hands were quickly at their work, Bertrand letting her disarm him, piece by piece, staring sullenly into the fire, and not guessing how much he resembled a sour and surly child. Arletta gave him all her patience, keeping her lips shut and pestering him with no more questions. She took the rusty bassinet and laid it amid the beech leaves, and soon shoulder-plates, demi-brassarts, and greaves were lying beside it.

Arletta’s fingers were on the buckle of his sword-belt.

“Ha! what are you at? Let it be!”

He pushed her hands away, looking at her searchingly.

“Lording!”

“I trust no one with my sword; no one shall play tricks with it. Are you for treachery?”

The taunt was a mean one, and Arletta winced.

“Your sword is a true sword,” she said, “and do you not trust me also?”

She put her hands out to him as she knelt with a pleading tenderness on her face. Bertrand looked in her eyes, and hated his own soul. Poor, honorless wench that she was, she shamed him, and gave him a loyalty that he did not deserve.

“I trust you, Letta,” he said, touching her cheek.

Her sharp face mellowed, and seemed to catch warmth and color from the fire. Her black eyes glistened, and she looked handsome and desirable, with her nut-brown skin and raven hair, red lips pouting over her small teeth.

“Lording, I am only a woman.”

Guicheaux approached them again, carrying a slice of steaming pork on his poniard, a loaf of bread, and a stone flask of cider. Arletta took the food from him and nodded him back towards the fire, where the free companions were making a brave battle over their meal. She knelt down again beside Bertrand, and pressed him to eat, coaxing him half-playfully, half-wistfully, till she won her way. Food, drink, and the cheerfulness of the fire worked their spell on Bertrand’s spirits. He began to feel comforted in the inner man, warmer about the body, less befogged about the brain. Life had its satisfactions, after all, and what were glory and the frail fancies of chivalry compared with good food and a hale hunger? He began to smile at Arletta as she lay curled in the beech leaves, her green tunic tight about her figure, and held the stone bottle in her brown and rough-skinned hands.

“Drink deep, lording,” and she laughed; “it will keep the damp out. See how bravely the fire burns.”

She began to eat in turn, now that Bertrand had taken his fill, cutting the meat and bread with the knife she carried at her girdle. Her eyes caught the light from the fire, and her black hair enhanced the pale charm of her peevish face. Bertrand slouched lazily against the tree. He was content for the moment with Arletta’s comeliness.

Night had settled over Broceliande; leagues of darkness and of mystery wrapped them round, while the flames tongued the gloom and Guicheaux and his gossips drank and laughed about their fire.

Bertrand stretched his arms and yawned.

“Food puts new courage into a man.”

She bent towards him with a sinuous gliding of the body, pouted out her lips, and put her face close to his.

“You are yourself again, lording.”

Bertrand kissed her, thinking of Tiphaïne, and swearing stoutly in his heart that he was beyond her scorn and pity. Arletta, red and happy, started up, and began to pile leaves and bracken into a bed beneath the tree. She made a pillow by rolling leaves up in an old tunic, and threw more wood upon the fire.

“There, lording, I have made a bed.”

She took him by the hands and dragged him playfully from the tree.

The free companions were rolling themselves in their cloaks about their fire and half burying their bodies in the litter of bracken. Only one man stood to his arms, to take his watch while the others slept. One by one the voices died down and surrendered to the silence of the forest. The clouds had broken overhead, and a young moon was shining through and through, a patch of celestial silver above the black and half-leafless branches of the trees. The sentinel, after yawning for an hour, and rubbing his heavy eyes with his knuckles, looked cautiously at Bertrand, and slunk from his post to crawl into the bracken about the fire. Under the beech-trees there was naught but a tangle of bodies, arms, legs, and snoring faces crowded close about the flames. Broceliande’s stillness was supreme. Like some forest of dreams, she seemed to hold these sleepers in her magic power.

Three hours or more had passed when Arletta started awake with a low cry and sat up in terror, her hands on Bertrand’s chest. She had been dreaming, and had thought that in her sleep strange shapes had been crowding round her in the dark. She shivered, and crouched rigid and motionless, staring as though bewitched into the depths of the gloom about the fire.

“Bertrand, lording, wake—wake!”

She tugged in terror at Bertrand’s arms as he lay beside her on the leaves and bracken. The horses were whinnying, stamping, and snorting under the trees where the men had tethered them. Arletta’s eyes were fixed on two dots of light that stared eerily at her out of the dark.

Bertrand awoke, grumbling and yawning, and clutching at Arletta with his arms.

“What, the dawn already?”

“No, no! Look yonder; see—in the dark—there!”

Bertrand heard the horses screaming, started up, and found Arletta quivering beside him, her face white as linen, her eyes great with fear. The moon was behind a cloud, and as Bertrand followed the pointing of Arletta’s hand he understood in an instant the meaning of her terror. Out of the blackness of the forest circles of red crystal were shining on them, two by two. There was a padding and rustling of feet in the dead leaves, the vague flitting of dark figures to and fro, a forward movement of the blood-red eyes.

“Wolves, by God!”

There was a great plunging and screaming amid the horses as Bertrand sprang up, kicked the fire into a blaze, and, snatching a burning branch from it, made at the circle of eyes, roaring like a roused lion. The dark shapes swerved and scampered over the leaves, snarling and snapping their jaws, but flinching from Bertrand and his burning brand. The free companions were scrambling up from the litter of bracken. They saw Bertrand beating the darkness with his fiery flail, vague shadows flying before him like the evil spirits of the forest.

The moon came from behind the cloud at the same instant, showing the struggling, sweating horses, squealing and kicking, and ready to break loose.

“Wolves! wolves!”

They picked up brands from the fire, and charged this way and that, the beasts scattering before them and slinking away into the darkness. Hopart, Guicheaux, and several others ran to quiet the horses and to prevent them from breaking loose. The tumult ceased in due course, and the men came crowding back about the fire.

Bertrand strode towards them, carrying his burning branch.

“Guicheaux, Hopart, Simon, whose watch was it? Who the devil let these brutes up so near the fires?”

The free companions were jostling one another, trying to discover in the dusk the fellow who had stood on guard when they had lain down to sleep. It was the Poitevin lad who had shown such terror when the Black Death had startled them in the hall of the Aspen Tower. He was skulking behind a tree, ready to take to his heels had he not feared the wolves and the darkness. Hopart discovered him, and dragged him towards Bertrand before the fire.

“Pierre, is it? So, lad, you fell asleep. We’ll read thee a lesson.”

The Poitevin, scared to death, cringed as his comrades hustled and cuffed him. They were furious with the lad for having deserted his post and left them unguarded against the perils of the night.

“Mercy! Mercy! Messire Bertrand, Messire Bertrand, they are tearing my arms off!”

Hopart smote Pierre on the mouth with the back of his hand.

“Scullion! Crybaby! Jackass!”

“Let him be, men.”

They left him grudgingly, as though they had caught some of the savagery of Broceliande’s wolves. Pierre stood shaking before Bertrand. Then he dropped on his knees and began to snivel, his poltrooning drawing laughter and taunts from Hopart and the rest.

“Get up, man, get up!”

By way of being wisely foolish, the Poitevin grovelled the more, and tried to take Bertrand by the knees.

“Mercy, lording, mercy! I was tired, devilish tired—”

Bertrand looked at him, and then rolled the fellow backward with a thrust of the foot.

“Stand up, fool!” he said, sharply. “Stand up—like a man! Guicheaux, give him twenty cuts with your belt. We will let him off easily. Next time it shall be the rope.”

They took Pierre, stripped his back, and trounced him till the blood flowed. It was Arletta who pleaded with Bertrand for the lad, and saved him ten strokes out of the twenty, for Guicheaux would have beaten him till he fainted. They piled wood on the fires and retethered the horses, for there would be no more sleep for the free companions that night. Squatting round the fire, they talked and gossiped together, and shouted songs to frighten the wolves.

As for Bertrand, he lay his head on Arletta’s knees, staring at the flames, and listening to the howling of the beasts as they still padded round them in the darkness. He was thinking again of Tiphaïne, of the counsel she had given him, and of the cross he had cut on the high table with his poniard. What would she make of his remorse if she could see him lying with his head in Arletta’s lap? And yet the girl was as loyal as a dog, patient and gentle when her jealousy had no prick of passion.

Bertrand, as he lay, felt her hands upon his forehead.

“Sleep, lording,” she said, as she bent over him. “Nothing can harm you while I am watching.”

XI

THEY had been on the march an hour next morning, following the winding forest ways under Guicheaux’s guidance, when Hopart and several others who held the van came plump upon a couple of peasants squatting beside a miserable fire. In the centre of a clearing stood a rude hut built of logs and thatched with whin and heather. The grass was all trampled and muddy about the place, as though a number of horses had been tethered for the night.

At the first glimpse of the free lances and Hopart’s red face under its iron war-hat, the men by the fire skipped up like rabbits and bolted for the woods. The free companions gave chase, hallooing to the peasants to stop, and spattering them with maledictions as they still continued to run. The slimmer of the two gained the undergrowth and dived into it like a bird into a bush. Hopart, however, came thundering down on the other, who was lumbering along on a lame leg, toppled him over by thrusting his spear between his knees, and, rolling from the saddle, had the gentleman in hand. He was a stupid, hairy-faced clod, with a pendulous lower lip and a scar across one cheek. They brought him to Bertrand, who had ridden in with Arletta, and set him in the midst before the captain’s horse.

Bertrand, who had been struggling with his conscience since the rising of the sun, looked round the clearing, noticed the trampled grass, and promptly fell to questioning the lame boor Hopart had brought to earth.

“Hallo, Jacques Bonhomme, whose hut is that?”

The peasant indicated his own person with his thumb.

“Yours, eh? And who have you been lodging? A large party by the look of the grass. Speak up! We are Breton men, and we are not here to steal.”

The man’s face brightened a little as he scratched his chin and looked cunning.

“Maybe you are of the Montfort party, lording?”

“Maybe we are, maybe we are not. Who have you had camped here for the night?”

“Monk Hanotin, Croquart’s bully.”

“Who? Say that again.”

“Monk Hanotin, lording, and twenty men. They’ve thove my old sow, bad blood to them, burned my sticks of furniture, and taken all the meal I had in the tub.”

Bertrand was frowning at the man, while Hopart and the rest listened in silence.

“Thank the saints, Jacques, that they took nothing else. Croquart’s men! The devil! And how long have they been gone?”

The man pulled the hairs in his shaggy beard.

“Maybe an hour, maybe less.”

“We saw nothing of them. They are ahead of us, eh?”

“No, lording, they went west.”

“And we rode east. Well, what do you know, anything?”

There was more hair-pulling, more screwing up of the peasant’s sleepy but cunning eyes, as though he were trying to tune his wits to Bertrand’s temper.

“I heard something, lording, of the business they have in hand.”

“You did! Tell us.”

“When they were kicking me and making me burn my own stools and table I heard Monk Hanotin talking. They are for the Vicomte de Bellière’s tower, the Aspen Tower we call it in these parts. I reckon they mean to pluck it as they plucked my poor hens.”

Bertrand straightened in the saddle, a flash of fierceness crossing his face, as though one of his men had called him a coward. Bending forward, he held his poniard at the peasant’s throat, while Hopart and another gripped him by the arms and shoulders.

“Swear, Jacques Bonhomme! Swear, swear!”

The man looked stupidly into Bertrand’s eyes as though fascinated.

“Swear, lording?”

“That you have spoken the truth.”

The fellow shook off Hopart’s grip and crossed himself.

“By Holy Jesu, Our Lady, and St. Ives,” he said, “I swear!”

Bertrand clapped his poniard back into its sheath.

“Good,” he said. “God see to it, for your throat’s sake, that you are not a liar. How many men had Hanotin with him?”

“Twenty, I should say, lording—English, Flemings, Gascons—cut-purses enough.”

Bertrand’s upper lip tightened. He was alive again to the last sinew.

“Jacques, you know the forest ways?”

“Yes, lording.”

“Bring us to the Vicomte de Bellière’s tower before Hanotin and his rogues break in.”

“Lording, I will do my best if you will bring back my old sow.”

Bertrand stood in the stirrups and called his men round him.

“Come, who is for robbing a brother thief? Shout, all of you, for Bertrand du Guesclin and Brittany!”

And shout they did, ready as Bertrand to strike a blow at Hanotin, Croquart the Fleming’s man. Guicheaux gave tongue to the common will.

“Lead on, lording, we will follow.”

“Well said, comrade,” quoth Hopart, “I’d give a knight’s ransom to stick my poniard in Hanotin’s belly.”

There was stir and ardor everywhere. The men were down tightening up girths and looking to each other’s armor. Guicheaux and Hopart were unlading one of the pack-horses and hoisting up the peasant onto the beast’s back. Bertrand had drawn his sword and was feeling the edge thereof. Of a truth, God had given him his opportunity. He would save Tiphaïne—yes, or lose his life in the adventure.

A hand touched his bridle. It was Arletta’s. She was looking up wistfully, jealously, into Bertrand’s face.

“Take me with you, lording.”

“No, no, Letta, this is no woman’s business.”

“I can ride with the best—”

“Yes, you have spirit, child; but we shall have our stomachs full of fighting before night. Stay with Gwen and Barbe. You will be safe here.”

Arletta went white under her black hair, and then red as fire. Her eyes flashed, her bosom heaved.

“Lording, I will go with you—yes, yes, though you ride to save madame. I know your heart, I know your heart!”

A wave of color swept over Bertrand’s face. He looked hard at Arletta, who was clinging to his bridle with both hands.

“What! Jealous, Letta? For shame, for shame!”

She burst out weeping of a sudden, all her woman’s nature rushing out in tears.

“Take me, lording, I am your servant. No, I’ll not stay while you are fighting. Lording, lording!”

She leaned against his horse’s shoulder, and tried to clasp him with her arms. Bertrand was frowning and gnawing at his lip. His mood had changed; the sullen repinings of the night were past. He felt his sword sharp, his arm mighty.

“Well, you shall come,” he said.

“Lording, I am your servant.”

She kissed his hands and sprang away, smiling dimly through her tears. Yet her heart was not quiet despite her victory. Why was Bertrand so fierce and eager to fly at Hanotin’s throat? Was it because he was of the English party, or because—And Arletta clinched her fists and shivered.

So Bertrand and his men turned back towards the Aspen Tower, leaving the two women in the hut, with Simon and the Poitevin to guard them and the baggage-cattle. Bertrand took the lead once more, and loitered no longer like a sick stag behind the herd. Guicheaux had Jacques Bonhomme on a horse beside him, keeping a fast hold on the bridle, and improving the fellow’s loyalty by grimly reminding him that some one’s back would be the worse for their stirrup-straps if the Aspen Tower were not reached before night. The men were blithe and full of fettle. Monk Hanotin and his free lances were gentlemen of parts—brilliant rogues, so far as devilry could carry them. They did not ride with empty saddles. The peasant swore that they had the spoil of half a dozen castles and manors on their pack-horses.

As for Bertrand, the whole tone of life was changed in him since he had turned back from that patch of open land in Broceliande’s heart. The mopes had fallen away; he had a deed in view; the day was justified by its endeavor. Some strange stroke of chance had beaten him back towards the woman who had shown him his own soul. He was riding to save Tiphaïne—Tiphaïne, the child who had made a man of him at Rennes. He recalled her as he had known her then—sweet, winsome, passionate, generous in her championing of his ugliness. He saw her as she had stood but yesterday on the altar steps, brave, scornful, haloed round with a lustre of gold. All the deep pathos of the scene smote home to him—dead Brunet’s body, the pest-stricken home, old Jehanot shivering behind the hangings. Why, he had been no better then than this bully of Croquart’s, this Hanotin whom he was thirsting to slay! Great God, how a man might discover his true self in the likeness of another!

Bertrand awoke over the peril of the child he had loved of old. He was as hot to save her as though he were still her champion at Rennes. Tiphaïne in Hanotin’s ruffian hands! Bertrand set his teeth and raged at the thought of it. He must reach the Aspen Tower before the patched gate fell.

Arletta rode at Bertrand’s side that morning, biting her red lips, and tasting the bitterness of her own reflections. A woman is quick in the telling of a man’s moods, and his actions speak for him in lieu of words. With Arletta jealousy was an ever-smouldering passion. It lurked at all times behind her pale and sinful face, and in the restless deeps of her troubled eyes. She had been known to stab fat Gwen in the arm because the woman had dared to laugh at Bertrand before his men. Arletta could brook no rivalry in this poor, honorless conceit of hers. She loved Bertrand, loved him like a mother, a mistress, and a slave—was proud of his great strength and of the truth that he belonged to her.

Yet Arletta had kept a vision of madame of the Aspen Tower, concerning whom her lord had been so glum and silent. She hated Tiphaïne with her whole soul. A woman soon grasps the character of a sister woman, and to Arletta Tiphaïne stood for every contrast that could make Bertrand see her as she was. Untarnished pride and haughty purity! The thin, white-faced light of love, with her jet-black hair and sinuous ways, knew how steep was the slope between Tiphaïne and herself. She had seen her but for a moment, but that moment was sufficient. Bertrand, her master, had humbled himself before this lady of the tower, and to Arletta there had been a reflected bitterness in Bertrand’s homage. She was but a poor sparrow-hawk compared to this gerfalcon, whose splendid pinions had never been imped by the hand of man.

About noon they halted by a stream to water the horses and make a meal. Arletta could see how Bertrand chafed and fretted at the delay, how hot and fierce he was to come up with Hanotin and his free lances, whose tracks showed in the wet grass. Arletta would have rejoiced if half the horses had fallen lame; but no, there was to be no slackening of the chase that day. Bertrand was in the saddle, inexorably eager, and shouting to his men:

“Forward! forward!”

The brown thickets swam by them as they cantered on through shadow and through sunlight. The sun sank low, hurling his slanting showers of gold over the bosom of Broceliande. Every forest monarch seemed afire, touched with a glory that was not of earth. The pungent scent of the rotting leaves rose up like invisible incense before the reddening altar of the west. Another league and they would be on the brink of the valley, and near the tower that Arletta hated.

Bertrand called a halt. He was a man who never racked his wits for strategy or battle craft. Like a good hawk, he “waited on” till the quarry rose in view; courage and strength of pinion did the rest. The horses steamed in the frosty air. The men sat silent, images in steel, listening for any sound that might break the silence. They were close on the valley, close on Monk Hanotin and his scum of Gascons, English, and Flemings.

From afar came the faint crying of a horn, wild and wailing, like the voice of the dying day.

“Hear them, hear them, brave dogs!”

Hopart was biting at his beard and setting back his shoulders, as though to feel their weight.

“Blow, brother Hanotin!” he growled. “We will be with thee before dark.”

They drew together under the trees, their eyes on Bertrand, who was holding his breath and listening. The rough fellows had confidence in him. There would be no bungling where Bertrand led.

“Ready, sirs?”

A growl and a loosening of swords came in response.

“Good. Keep your tongues quiet. We must hold to the trees till we have the tower in sight.”

He was spurring on his horse when he remembered Arletta, and drew rein again with an impatient frown.

“Here, one of you look after the girl. Keep her safe in the woods till we have finished.”

Arletta, jealous and very miserable, held out her hands to him with a sharp cry.

“Lording, I am not afraid—”

“What devil’s nonsense now! Back, I say! Am I to be obeyed?”

Arletta looked at Bertrand’s face, and slunk away as though he had smitten her. Tiphaïne of the tower had all his tenderness. She only cumbered him, and his passionate impatience hurt her heart.

“Off! I can look to myself,” she said, as one of the men came to take her bridle. “Go forward and fight; I’ll be a clog on none of you.”

Another furlong and they neared the valley, pushing on cautiously under the trees. Bertrand and Guicheaux rode ahead, speaking not a word, but keeping their eyes fixed on the woodways before them. Soon the sky broadened into a pillared arch of gold. The great trees gave back, showing the valley and the aspens glimmering about the tower.

“Yonder are their horses.”

Guicheaux was pointing with his spear, his thin face working with excitement.

“We have them, lording! We have them on the hip!”

Bertrand peered down the valley under his hand. He saw some thirty horses picketed on the edge of the aspen wood. Only two men were guarding them. Where were the rest?

He gave a shout, and drew his sword.

“Listen, they are breaking in!”

From the valley came the confused cries of men hurrying to the assault, and Bertrand could hear the dull crash of blows given upon the gate. A confused shimmer of steel showed under the black bulk of the tower as Hanotin’s men thronged across the causeway.

“On—on!”

Bertrand was already galloping down the slope into the gold mist that drowned the meadows.

XII

HANOTIN’S men had already broken down the gate when Bertrand came galloping through the aspen wood. He had halted but a moment to cut down the two fellows who had been left to guard the horses, and who had drawn their swords on him and tried to give the alarm to their comrades on the causeway. Thanks to the din his own men were making, Hanotin had no warning of the rescue that was at hand.

Tiphaïne, who had climbed the tower with Jehanot when Hanotin’s horn had blown the first challenge, stood looking down in a species of stupor through the machicolations of the battlements at the mob of men struggling through the wreck of the twice-broken gate. They had forced up the portcullis, and were shouting with savage triumph, their shouts coming up to Tiphaïne like the snarling of wild beasts. She could see their bassinets and shoulder-plates and their thrust-out heels as they struggled to be first in through the entry.

The last men were still in view when she saw one of them clap his hand to the back of his neck, turn, and stare in astonishment across the moat. Tiphaïne, vividly receptive of all details in her dull terror, noticed a red patch of blood between the rim of the man’s steel cap and the edge of his gorget. He had been hit in the neck by a cross-bow bolt, and was shouting and gesticulating, calling back his comrades, who were crowding through the gate.

Tiphaïne was startled by a cry from old Jehanot. He was hopping from foot to foot, brandishing his cross-bow, his eyes shining out curiously above the bandage over his mouth and chin.

“Look! look!”

Tiphaïne followed the pointing of his hand, and understood whence the cross-bow bolt had flown. Through the aspen wood, with its last yellow leaves flickering in the sunlight, came Bertrand’s men, pressing forward on foot behind their captain, whose sword flashed as he cantered down on his great black horse. They came on in good order with their shields up, spears bristling, steady and silent.

Tiphaïne recognized the blue surcoat.

“It is Bertrand!” she said—“Bertrand du Guesclin!”

Jehanot was waving his cross-bow above his head.

“A rescue! a rescue! To the chapel, madame. There will be bloody work. Shut yourself in. I’ll bide here and watch.”

Hanotin’s men were crowding back under the arch of the gate, jostling each other, taken by surprise. Some were for meeting Bertrand upon the causeway, others for holding the tower and letting the portcullis fall. Hanotin, a giant with a face like raw meat, came pushing through the press, cursing his men, and shouldering them aside as a ship shoulders the waves.

“Out of the way! Out of the way! Let me get a glimpse at these gentlemen.”

He pushed through and had his desire—a vision of a wedge of shields and spears thrusting forward across the causeway.

Hanotin sprang back, brandishing his mace.

“Down with the grid! Curse these foul trees, the bridge is jammed.”

He swept his men back, and stood alone to hold the entry till they should have time to lower the portcullis. Bertrand saw that the need was imminent.

“St. Ives!—Du Guesclin!”

Hanotin snarled and swung his mace.

“Out, fools, out!”

There was a squeal of delight from the battlements above. Old Jehanot had toppled a loose stone over. It brushed Hanotin’s body, made him stagger, and broke in fragments at his feet. Before the free lance could recover Bertrand rushed on him, and knocked him over with a blow of the fist. Shouting, cursing, heaving, the whole rout went in over Hanotin as he struggled to rise. They drove the Monk’s men through the tower arch by sheer weight of numbers, burst into the court, and stood shouting and cheering as though gone mad.

Hanotin had picked himself up and was rallying his men. Furious at the way he had been wrested and trampled under foot, he stormed at his fellows, taunting them with having given way before a mob of footpads and boys. Bertrand’s free companions in their rush had carried the court-yard, but they had left the tower gate and guard-room in Hanotin’s hands.

The Monk, who was an inspired bully, and knew how to make the most of a situation, ordered the portcullis to be lowered—a piece of ostentatious bravado that he was soon to regret. The great grid came jerking down; they were to fight it out like cats in a cage. Hanotin bluffed beyond his powers when he thought to frighten Bertrand into a surrender.

“Steady, steady. Keep close together, and follow when I give the word. Let them drop the grid. They are stopping their own bolting-hole.”

Bertrand’s coolness heartened his men on the instant. They could see that he was smiling—smiling one of those grim and quiet smiles they had learned to treasure. Messire Bertrand knew his business. Guicheaux and Hopart watched him in silence, ready for the spring they knew was coming.

“Good-evening, brother. How is it to be—your mace against my sword?”

Hanotin ran his eyes over Bertrand’s figure, and shirked the challenge.

“Not so fast, sir,” he said; “I am too big for thee, and the game is ours. Throw down your arms, or—” And he drew the edge of his hand across his throat.

Bertrand laughed. His men were grinning and nudging one another, gloating at the way the free lance had shirked the challenge. Bertrand spoke a few words to them over his shoulder.

“As you will, brother,” he said, setting his sword swinging. “In, sirs, in! Notre Dame du Guesclin! Follow me!”

Hanotin’s men were the better armed, but Bertrand, who had the advantage of numbers, kept his fellows together, and broke Hanotin’s ranks at the first charge. It was rough-and-ready scrimmaging enough in the gathering darkness of the narrow court. Men shortened their swords, used poniards and gadded fists, grappling together, squirming and wriggling on the stones. Bertrand hunted out Hanotin, and hammered him while the sparks flew. The bully labored with his mace, puffing and grunting as he gave each blow. Twice wounded, he closed with Bertrand and tried to bear him down beneath his weight. Hanotin would have been wiser had he shirked the bear’s grip that had given Bertrand many a victory over the Breton wrestlers as a lad. The Monk went down with a crash that startled even the men who were struggling in the death grips round him. He lay still a moment, and then, heaving himself upon his hands and knees, wriggled away like a huge lizard into the thick of the press.

Bertrand sprang after him, but a sudden rush of his own men and a weakening of the Montfort party threw him sideways against the wall. Hopart, who was close at hand, helped Bertrand to his feet.

“Hurt, lording?”

“Hurt? Not a bit of it! On; they are losing heart!”

They were losing ground also, and had been driven back under the tower gateway. With the grid down there was no escape save into the guard-room, or up the newel stairway leading to the lesser solar, and by the gallery to the lord’s solar and the chapel. Hanotin, who had recovered his feet and picked up a fallen sword, shouted to his men to take to the stairway. There was a rush for the narrow entry, Hanotin and three others holding their ground while the rest tumbled pellmell up the stairs.

This was the very move Bertrand had dreaded, for he knew that Tiphaïne must be hidden somewhere in the rooms above. He had seen her head on the tower for an instant when he and his men had first charged for the gate. Hanotin’s free lances would be like wild beasts brought to bay in the place. They might kill the girl, or harm might come to her with men hunting one another through the darkening rooms. Calling off ten of his own fellows, he left Hopart and the rest to force the stairs, and doubled across the court-yard for the hall.

It had grown so dark that the great room was like a cavern. Bertrand groped through it, and climbed the stairs towards the solar. The door was slammed against him from within, and his shout of “Tiphaïne!” answered with curses. Setting his teeth, he threw his weight against the door, broke it, and went sprawling, with rattling harness, into the blackness of the room.

In an instant two of Hanotin’s men were on him, trying to stab him in the dark. Bertrand kicked out right and left, caught one gentleman by the ankle and brought him down backward with a crash. There was a rush and a great shouting of “Lights!—lights!” The room seemed full of tumbling, struggling shapes. Furniture was overturned, whirled away, and broken. Men were grappling and stabbing haphazard in the gloom, cursing the darkness and calling to one another.

Light streamed in suddenly. The chapel door had been burst open by two men who had fallen against it, and were now wrestling together on the floor. Bertrand, scrambling up, with a poniard wound in his forearm, stood back against the wall and looked round him. Three men were struggling on the bed, a confused tangle of arms and legs, while at the far end of the solar Guicheaux and several more were holding back the fellows whom they had driven into the gallery leading to the tower. Bertrand could hear Hopart and the rest fighting their way up the stairway to the lesser solar above the gate.

A den of horror, brute force, and death the place seemed as Bertrand leaned against the wall and recovered his breath. He turned and saw the two men struggling by the chapel door. The bigger of the pair had the other under him, and was driving his dagger into the agonized wretch’s throat. The victor scrambled up from the body, shook himself, and looked round with his teeth a-gleam like a dog at bay. Bertrand recognized Hanotin by the beard.

“Hallo, brother—you are there! Good!”

Hanotin snarled and darted through the chapel doorway, swinging the door to after him. Bertrand dashed it open, and stepped over the body of the man the Monk had stabbed. A woman’s cry rang out through the chapel. Before the altar stood Hanotin, holding Tiphaïne by the bosom with one great paw, and brandishing his poniard with the other.

“Off, dog, off!”

Hanotin spat like a cat, and forced Tiphaïne down across his thigh.

“A truce, or the knife goes home.”

Bertrand faltered in his fury and stood looking at Tiphaïne, Hanotin’s hand gripping her bosom, her hair falling down in disorder as he held her across his knee. Bertrand could not see her face. She was struggling a little, her bosom heaving under the man’s paw, her hands stretched out to catch the blow.

“Loose your hold!”

Hanotin showed his teeth and grinned. The ruse was a desperate one, but he had Bertrand baffled for the moment.

“No, no, messire. You see my terms. Curse you!—she-dog—”

Tiphaïne had seized her chance and twisted herself free from Hanotin’s grip. She slipped and fell upon the altar steps, and rolled down them to the floor. Hanotin sprang forward, but Bertrand was too quick for him. There was the whistling of a sword, the clang of a helmet, and the Monk’s bassinet ran blood. He staggered and fell, with Tiphaïne beneath him, and in his blind death agony tried to stab her as he lay. Bertrand, throwing down his sword, seized Hanotin by the sword-belt. He lifted him from Tiphaïne and swung him away upon the floor, and in the fury of his vengeance dashed his mailed heel again and again into the man’s face. Life was over for Hanotin. He had given his last blow.

Bertrand turned towards Tiphaïne, who was half lying below the steps, supporting herself upon her hands. She was dazed, shocked out of her senses for the moment, with the Monk’s blood dyeing her hair and clothes. She looked at Bertrand and gave a little gasp of pain.

He was bending over her on the instant, the distorting anger gone from his face. He took her in his arms and felt the quivering of her body. She clung to him for a moment like a frightened child, staring in his face, her eyes full of the horror of Hanotin’s death.

“Bertrand, my God! oh—let me breathe—air, air—”

He let her lean against the altar, all the savagery gone out of him, his face twitching.

“Are you hurt? Tiphaïne—”

She shook her head, and then pressed her hands over her ears as though to shut out the brutal babel that came from the dark rooms and passage-ways. Bertrand could hear Hopart shouting in the solar, “Kill! Kill!”

“Bertrand, Bertrand, for God’s sake, tell them to spare the wretches!”

She sank to her knees and laid her head against the cold stone-work of the altar, pressing her hands in horror over her ears.

Bertrand lifted a strand of her hair, kissed it, and then turned to end the slaughter.

XIII

A SUNNY morning, with white clouds banding the blue of the autumn sky, Broceliande, a sea of gold, glimmering over the silent hills. A sparkle of frost in the air, rime on the grass, brown leaves falling everywhere, the aspen leaves murmuring feebly about the black waters of the moat.

Grimness and horror still lingered about the place, despite the blue sky and the golden woods. Even the water in the moat seemed to hide within its depths dim visions of death that would make the eyes that gazed thereon dilate and harden. Memories haunted the Aspen Tower—memories of men hunting one another through dark passage-ways and chambers. Every black squint and window seemed to gape and whisper as though trying to tell of what had passed within.

Fires were burning in the aspen wood, horses cropping the grass, men building rude huts with boughs cut from the forest. Southward of the moat, in a hollow, where thorn-trees grew, three fellows, stripped half naked, were shovelling earth back into a long and shallow trench. Ever and again there was a splashing of something into the moat and a rush of water from the stone shoots draining the hall and tower. The guard-room door was barred, and two men with grounded spears were standing on duty under the arch of the gate. In the court lay piles of broken or blood-stained furniture, scraps of armor, trampled rushes. Men were going to and fro, carrying buckets which they filled at the moat.

Water in a miniature cascade was running down the stairway leading to the lord’s solar, to be sluiced about the hall with mops and brooms and swept out again into the court. In the solar itself, Bertrand, barelegged, his tunic turned up over his belt, was throwing water against the walls and swilling the floor. The whole place had a damp and sodden smell, like a house that has lain empty long after the masons and plasterers have done their work. From the gallery and the lesser solar above the gate came the sound of voices, the plash of water, the swishing of brooms.

Perched on the bed, that had been dragged into the middle of the room and stripped of coverlet and sheets, sat Arletta watching Bertrand with her restless eyes. She had her cloak over her shoulders, because of the cold, and her fingers were picking at the gaudy embroidery on her gown, as though she were brooding over some hidden grievance. There was something forlorn and pathetic in the bright colors of her clothes, the reds and greens, their superficial brilliancy. She was very miserable, was Arletta. Her heart ached as dully as her head, and her hands were blue and numb with cold. Bertrand paid no heed to her presence as he used his broom, strange weapon for his hands, and took the buckets Guicheaux and Hopart brought him.

He sluiced the last ripple of water down the stairs, stood up and stretched himself, as though cramped in the back. A strip of blood-stained linen was wrapped round his left forearm. Beside Arletta, on the bed, lay piled his armor, his shield, sword, and surcoat hanging from a peg near to the window.

Arletta opened her mouth and yawned.

“Lording,” she said.

She spoke almost in a whisper, her face pinched, her teeth ready to chatter.

“Lording!”

The appeal was a little louder, bringing Bertrand round upon his heel, to stare at her vacantly, as though his thoughts were far away.

“Yes, child, yes.”

“May I make a fire?”

Bertrand glanced at the wet hearth and the gloom of the great chimney.

“It would be as well,” he said; “the place is damp as a cellar. It is not fit—” and he halted, stroking his chin.

Arletta gave a little shiver, and a twinge of pain swept across her face. She shook her black hair, climbed down from the bed, and went and stood close by Bertrand.

“Lording, you are tired.”

She touched his arm and tried to slip her hand in his. Almost imperceptibly Bertrand shrank from her, yet with an instinctiveness she could not miss. He was listening, and glancing restlessly towards the chapel door.

“You will find wood in the shed by the kitchen.”

“Yes, lording.”

“Hopart will light a fire in the room over the gate. Gwen and Barbe can share it with you when they return. This is madame’s chamber—”

“Yes, lording,” she said, sullenly, ready to weep.

“And, Letta”—he looked guiltily shy of her, despite his courage—“madame is much troubled; she would see no one—as yet. The men will camp in the aspen wood, because of the Black Death. If you are afraid—”

“Afraid, lording?”

“Yes, of the plague.”

She flashed an indescribable look at him, her mouth quivering.

“No, lording, I am not afraid.”

Bertrand frowned, but said no more to her. The girl’s strained face troubled him. Everything was coming to Arletta, slowly, and by degrees. Bertrand was beginning to be ashamed of her; he would have her away while Tiphaïne was near.

She went out from the solar and stood shivering on the stairs, leaning her weight against the wall. Her knees felt weak under her, dread heavy on her shoulders, dread of this great lady and of the slipping away of her one poor pride. She beat her hand across her mouth, and went slowly and unsteadily down the stairway into the hall. Pools of water still covered the floor, and the damp emptiness of the place seemed to echo the beatings of her heart. Crossing the court in the quivering sunlight, and threading her way between dead men’s armor and broken wood, she came to the kitchen, where Hopart had already built a fire. He looked at Arletta and grinned, gave her the stuff she asked for, but held his banter, for the girl’s face sobered him. Returning, she climbed slowly to the solar and found it empty, Bertrand gone.

Throwing the wood down petulantly upon the hearth, she looked round the room, pressing her face between her hands. Bertrand’s surcoat had been taken from the peg beside his shield and sword. She guessed what drew him, and why he had wished to be rid of her for a while. Sullenly and with effort she knelt down and began to build a fire. There would be no warmth for her in its red, prophetic blaze. Her heart was cold—cold as the stone hearth she knelt upon.

When Arletta had left him, Bertrand had taken down his blue surcoat from the peg where his sword and shield were hanging, the blue surcoat that had once been blazoned over with eagles of gold, but was now wofully dim and threadbare. He had slipped into it, pulled on his hose and shoes, and felt the stubble on his chin, that had not been barbered for two days. Opening the chapel door, he found the place empty and the sun making a glorious mosaic of light of the eastern window above the altar. The Virgin’s robes gleamed like amber wine; the greens and purples were richer than the colors of the sea. Bertrand closed the chapel door, and, leaning against it, stood looking towards the altar and at the steps where Hanotin had fallen the night before.

It was here that Tiphaïne prayed, and yonder stood her prie-dieu, with a missal on the book-ledge. How quiet the chapel seemed, how full of sunlight and of peace after the brutal violence of yesterday! Bertrand went and stood by the prayer-desk, and, looking like a boy half fearful of being caught in mischief, opened the missal and turned over the pages. The book was beautifully illuminated, the vermilions, golds, and greens glowing with the freshness of young flowers, the quaint pictures and grotesque letters making the book a thing of beauty and of strangeness. Bertrand knew naught of Latin, save the few prayers he had been taught by Father Isidore at Motte Broon. In truth, he hardly knew his letters, and it was curious to see him running his finger under a word and trying to come to grips with the profundities of a pronoun.

But if Bertrand could not read its Latin, the missal itself spoke to him in a language of the heart that he could understand. How often had Tiphaïne’s hands turned these pages! How pure she was, how utterly unlike the poor drabs upon whom he had wasted his manhood! Bertrand stood fingering his unshaven chin and staring at the missal, with his brows wrinkled up in thought. He had come face to face with one of those barriers in life that mark off beauty from ugliness and deformity. Was character worth the building, worth every careful chisel-mark on the stone? Bertrand looked round the chapel; it was oracular to him that morning, eloquent of those higher truths he had lost in the rough petulance of his distemper. He felt himself a prodigal, an interloper, a foolish boy who had thrown away his birthright in a moment of peevish irritation.

There was much boyish simplicity in Bertrand still. He touched Tiphaïne’s missal with his great hands, and then knelt at the prie-dieu as though trying to experience some new sensation. He crossed himself, fixed his eyes on the book, and, great, broad-backed sworder that he was, tried to imagine how Tiphaïne felt when she knelt to pray before the Virgin. It seemed quite natural to Bertrand that Tiphaïne should pray. He would like to watch her fair, strong face turned up in adoration to the cross. It would do him good to look at her, drive the evil out of his heart, and perhaps teach him to pray in turn. What, Bertrand du Guesclin praying! He stumbled up with a rough and ingenuous burst of self-contempt. He was a fool to be kneeling at Tiphaïne’s prie-dieu. He had forgotten how to pray, and his one religious inspiration was the dread of ever playing the hypocrite.

“Bertrand!”

He started as though one of his own rough fellows had caught him on his knees. The door of Tiphaïne’s bedchamber had opened while Bertrand was kneeling before the missal. She was standing on the threshold, wearing her wine-red gown.

Bertrand faced her sheepishly.

“I was only looking at the missal,” he explained, bent on thoroughness and sincerity.

They stood considering each other, with something of the cautious coyness of a couple of strange children brought suddenly face to face. Both were embarrassed, both conscious of a sense of antagonism and discomfort, as though troubled by the thoughts imagined in the heart of the other.

“Bertrand, I have not thanked you—yet.”

He glanced at her keenly a moment, and rested one hand on the prie-dieu.

“It is nothing. We crossed Hanotin’s tracks, that was all. Besides, we owed them a grudge.”

Tiphaïne was struck by his dogged air of self-restraint, and yet there was something in his voice that touched her. The long, wakeful hours of the night had changed her mood towards him. She seemed to have been given sudden insight into the heart of this strong and rebellious man, whose arm had saved her from a thing that she dared not picture.

“We each have something to forgive,” she said.

“I disobeyed you in that one thing.”

“Yes.”

“I did it that I might still have the memory of Rennes.”

She was gazing at the altar steps, as though recalling how Hanotin had held her across his knee. She shuddered a little. It was something, after all, for a man to be grim and mighty in battle.

Bertrand stood by the prie-dieu, watching her.

“Do you remember, Tiphaïne, that night when you came to us at Motte Broon?”

She looked up at him and smiled.

“I was just such a rough dog then; it was sympathy I wanted, and the sympathy you gave me won me the prize at Rennes.”

If he had read her thoughts his words could not have touched the woman in her more.

“You are right in reproaching me,” she said.

“I? What reproach have I to make? You showed me my true self two days ago. I have learned to take hard blows—when they are given honestly.”

Their eyes met.

“Yet—there is the other self.”

He steadied himself against the prie-dieu.

“Let me tell you the whole truth, as I blurted it out to you at Motte Broon. I’ll not spare myself; it would do me good.”

She met him bravely with her eyes.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

And she knelt at the prayer-desk, her chin upon her hands, while Bertrand, leaning against the wall, told her the whole tale—all that had befallen him since the siege of Vannes.

There was silence between them when he had finished. Tiphaïne’s eyes were turned towards the altar, with no self-righteous pride upon her face.

“I can understand, Bertrand,” she said.

“Be rough with me.”

“Rough!”

He flushed and spread his arms.

“I am what I am; but, before God, I believe that there is something in me—yet. Do not flatter me; flattery did no man any good.”

She set herself to match his sincerity with equal truth.

“What right have I to preach to you? And yet—”

“Say what you will.”

“There is a courage above the mere courage of a man swinging a sword—the courage to suffer, to be patient, and to bide by one’s true self.”

He looked at her steadfastly, and bent his head.

“That is where I failed,” he said, slowly; “I see it now as plainly as I see your face.”

At the chapel door Arletta stood listening, her mouth twisted with jealousy and hate. She had heard all that had passed between the two. The great lady was taking away her one poor pride, her love. And Arletta shivered, gripping her bosom till her nails bruised the skin.

XIV

JEALOUSY is as the dark under world to the warm day of a woman’s love. It is peopled with phantoms and with shadows—a land of credulity, of whisperings, and of gloom.

Arletta, poor wench, was dwelling on this black sphere of her troubled life. A child of the soil, quick in her passions, hot of blood, she had had no schooling in the higher patience, or learned that world-wise nonchalance that shrugs its bland shoulders at despair. Impulse was law to her, the blind instincts of her body her counsellors, her hands her ministers of justice. She loved Bertrand—loved him with the zeal of a wild thing for its mate. She loved him because he was stronger than other men, because his strength had made him her master. Many a night she had lain awake, smiling over some bold trick of his, the plunder he had taken, the devil-may-care courage dear to the heart of such a woman as Arletta. She had never thought that she was holding him back from nobler things, and that her hands were strangling the ambitions of his manhood. Arletta would have been content to have him the most feared and fearless swashbuckler in all the Breton lands, and she would have taken pride in the rough triumphs of such a life.

Little wonder that she awakened with a start of dread when this white-faced madame with the calm and quiet eyes came sweeping royally across her path. It was as though some saint had stepped down out of a painted window, touched Bertrand on the breast, and disenchanted him with the light of love who had ridden over the moors and through the woodlands at his side. Arletta understood all that Tiphaïne’s influence portended. Her woman’s instinct tore out the truth of her own dethronement. Bertrand would be the gentleman once more, ashamed of a bed of bracken and of a poor quean who had no honor.

Hate found the door of the girl’s heart open, with jealousy beckoning from within. She hated Tiphaïne—hated her with a reasonableness that had its justification in the truth. Who had the silkier skin, the finer clothes, the more sweeping grace, the longer hair? Even in the mere physical rivalry the lady outshone the poor woman of the smithy and the moors. But it was for her birth that Arletta hated Tiphaïne most of all, and for the superiorities that went therewith—the grace, the presence, the clear, quiet voice, the beauty of completeness, the habit of command. Even hatred fed on its own humiliation, and jealousy confessed with bitterness the justice of its cause.

Arletta’s dreads were quickly justified. The “free companions” were to camp in the aspen wood, for madame was to be guarded till her father’s banner should come dancing through the woods. Arletta herself was sent to the kitchen to cook and scour with Barbe and Gwen. The women began to jeer at her before her face, seeing how the wind blew, and that Messire Bertrand du Guesclin had changed his coat. He served and carved at madame’s table, acted as seneschal, took her commands, and saw them followed.

As for the Black Death, it seemed to have spent its fury in the place, for it laid no hands on Bertrand’s men. Perhaps their wild life saved them, the sun and storm that had tanned and hardened them against disease. There was work and enough for them in regarnishing the Aspen Tower under Bertrand’s orders. He sent them hunting in Broceliande to bring back food for Tiphaïne’s larder. To keep the rest busy he ordered the building of a new gate from timber stored in one of the out-houses, and the strengthening of the palisades closing the garden from the moat. The men worked willingly, for Bertrand had given them all the plunder they had taken from Hanotin. Not a sou would he touch; the days of his thieving were at an end. Then there were the prisoners to be looked to in the guard-room, wounded men to be cared for, bread to be baked, strayed cattle to be sought out in the woods. A lord’s house in those days was a little town within itself, fitted for every common craft, supplying its own needs by the labor of its inmates’ hands.

Bertrand went about his duties with a shut mouth and a purposeful reserve. Even his rough fellows felt that he had changed, for he no longer laughed with them and joined in their jesting. Like a masker he had thrown off his buffoon’s dress and taken to the habit that was his by right. The men whispered together over Bertrand’s transfiguration, but took no liberties in his presence. Messire Bertrand was still their hero; his slaying of Hanotin was like to become an epic deed among them; moreover, the generous squandering of his share of the plunder had made his whims and moods respected.

As for Arletta, she went sullenly about her work, wincing at the sneers she had from Gwen and Barbe, and hating to be stared at by the men. Often she would creep away into some quiet corner and brood bitterly over her lost power. Bertrand but rarely spoke to her, and then the careful kindness of his words stung her more sharply than a whip. He was no longer rough and tender by turns, and Arletta would have welcomed blows only to feel his strong arms once more about her body. Bertrand avoided her, kept his distance when there was no escape, and even spoke to her of Ancenis, where her father was growing prosperous on forging armor for the wars. How easy it all seemed to Messire Bertrand! It was a man’s way, she imagined, to be able to forget everything in three days, and to turn his back upon the past.

Tiphaïne and Bertrand seemed often together. They walked in the garden, rode hunting in the woods or in the fields to give Tiphaïne’s hawks a flutter. Bertrand served madame at her table in the hall, and slept across the chapel door at night. Arletta exaggerated all these happenings in her heart.

The fourth morning after the saving of the tower she saw Bertrand cross the court as she stood in the kitchen entry half hidden by the door. Bertrand was alone, and, slipping out, she followed him, driven to dare his displeasure by the bitterness of neglect. Bertrand’s foot was on the first step of the solar stairway when he heard the rustle of a woman’s skirt.

“Lording, lording.”

He turned, half angry, half ashamed, and stood looking down into her white and passionate face.

“Why, Letta”—and he tried to smile—“what is it, wench?”

His coolness stung her. Why, Bertrand had loved her once—had told her so with his own lips! Desperate in her dread, she flung out her arms and clung about his neck.

“Lording, lording, why do you turn from me? Dear God, what have I done?”

She was panting, quivering, looking up into his face. Bertrand, conscious of the straining arms about his neck and of the questioning wildness of her eyes, stood helpless for a moment, betrayed by his own conscience.

“Gently, child, gently,” he said, trying to unfasten her hands, and dreading lest Tiphaïne should hear them—“gently. What ails you? Come, come, be a good wench!”

Arletta clung to him the more, quivering, and pleading with him in passionate whispers. Bertrand began to lose patience.

“Letta, Letta!”

He spoke hoarsely, forcing down her hands.

“Listen, Letta, I have words to speak to you.”

Repulsed, she sprang away, thrusting him back with her hands, her eyes miserable yet full of fury.

“Yes, yes, I know—I’ll not bear it. You are ashamed of me; you hate me; I see it clear enough.”

Bertrand tried to soothe her, holding out his hands.

“Letta!”

“No, no,” and she thrust him off, “I am nothing—a mere drab. You hate me; you would like to see me dead. Ah, yes, messire, I am no fool. Madame is not as I am. She is a great lady. Ah—ah—how can she take you from me!”

She burst out weeping, covering her face with her arms, her passion sinking into despair. Bertrand looked at her. What could he say? He felt tongue-tied, helpless, and ashamed.

“Letta!”

She stood sobbing, her arms before her face.

“Letta!” And he went near to her.

“No, don’t touch me, messire.”

“Come, be sensible—”

She flashed up again, her passion working through her misery like flames through wet wood.

“No, no! Hold off, messire! I am a woman; I have my pride; I can give as well as take.”

Bertrand said nothing.

“Yes, you would be rid of me, you would throw me away like an old shoe!”

She turned suddenly, threw up her arms, and ran unsteadily towards the door. Bertrand sprang after her, and then halted. What was the use of it? The wrench must come, the reckoning be paid. Perhaps the girl was only trying her woman’s tricks on him. He strove to comfort himself with the suspicion, and let her go, weak and wounded, like a winged bird.

Tiphaïne supped in the solar that night, Bertrand serving her, and old Jehanot carrying the dishes from the kitchen. Two torches were burning, one on either side of the great hooded chimney, and freshly cut rushes were strewn upon the floor.

Tiphaïne was in a silent mood, engrossed in her own thoughts. By chance she had overheard Arletta’s pleadings with Bertrand in the hall. Her heart was sad in her for the girl’s sake, though she was but learning the rough methods of the world.

Old Jehanot had gone to the kitchen with the empty dishes, and Bertrand stood filling Tiphaïne’s glass with ypocrasse.

“Enough,” and she raised her hand.

He let the lid of the beaker fall, and moved towards the door, for Jehanot had left it ajar, and the draught from the hall came in like a winter wind. Bertrand’s hand was on the latch when he heard the rattling of the curtain-rings along the bed-rails, as though some one had stood hidden and bided their time to sweep the curtains back. Tiphaïne’s chair was drawn up before the fire, and Bertrand, turning on his heel, saw Arletta swoop towards her with one arm raised.

It was all done in the taking of a breath. Arletta had struck her blow, and in her flurry snapped the knife-blade on the oak head-rail of the chair. Bertrand, forgetting the past utterly in the moment’s wrath, took Arletta by the throat and hurled her back against the bed.

“Mad beast!—murderess!”

She cowered before him, choking from the grip he had given her throat, and hiding her face behind her arm. Bertrand stood over her, as though tempted to strike again.

“No, not that!”

Tiphaïne, unhurt, her face pale, her eyes full of pity, came between Bertrand and the girl.

“Be careful, the cat is mad!”

“You are too rough—and blind.”

Arletta still cowered against the bed, as though Bertrand’s hands had throttled her last hope. The lust for revenge had flowed from her like wine from a broken jar.

Tiphaïne bent over Arletta, waving Bertrand aside when he sought to interfere. The significance of the scene had flashed suddenly before her eyes, moving her not to anger but to a spasm of pity.

There was no need for her to question Arletta. The flare of passion had died out of her, and she looked like a frightened child, ashamed and humbled.

“Come!”

Arletta writhed from her touch and hid her face.

“Come; the blow’s forgiven; you did not think. The wine-cup, Bertrand.”

He brought it her, a man whose conscience was crying within his heart.

“Drink some of the wine, child.”

But the girl only broke into bitter weeping and hid her face in the coverlet of the bed. Tiphaïne stood looking at her, her lips quivering, her eyes compassionate.

She turned to Bertrand, and gave the cup back into his hands.

“She is better alone, perhaps. Take one of the torches and light me to the chapel.”

Bertrand obeyed her without a word. The whole scene had been a revelation to him, as though the last glimpse of Arletta crouching by the bed had been a vision betraying his own shame. Carrying the torch, he went before Tiphaïne into the chapel, feeling himself guilty of the blow that had been aimed by Arletta at her heart.

Bertrand set the torch in one of the iron brackets on the wall. Tiphaïne went to kneel at her prie-dieu, her chin upon her hands, her face lifted towards the altar. She knelt there awhile, silent, motionless, while Bertrand watched her, wondering what her woman’s mind would weave out of the tangle.

She spoke at last.

“How long has the child been with you?”

“Two years; perhaps less. Her father was an armorer at Ancenis; she left him when the French marched through. I did not take her from her home. Besides, she is no longer a child.”

Bertrand’s face seemed furrowed with recollections, or as though he were asking himself some question that he could not answer. Tiphaïne did not move.

“How a man stores judgments for himself! The girl cannot be left to a life like this. I feel I have some duty by her. And yet I could swear she would be ready to throw herself into the moat if I told her I would send her home.”

“There is one other way, Bertrand.”

“How?” And his face appealed to her.

“She is a woman; she could be your wife.”

Bertrand’s jaw dropped.

“Marry her!”

“So you are too proud for that?”

He remained silent, staring at Tiphaïne, his hands opening and shutting, his forehead a knot of wrinkles.

“It is not pride in me,” he said, at last.

“Not pride?”

“No. What could we hope for, she—and I? Would she be happy with me? No, by Heaven, for we should hate each other in a week! What good could there be in such a life, for us?—one long tavern brawl till we grew more brutal and besotted, each dragging each deeper into the mire. How could Letta, poor wench, help me to gain what I have sworn in my heart to win? How could I give her all my homage in return? No, we should both sink; perhaps—in the end—she would stab me—or I—her.”

He had spoken rapidly, almost with fierceness, feeling the inevitable destiny beating within his heart. At the end he drew breath and leaned against the wall, still watching Tiphaïne at the prie-dieu.

“Yes, you are right,” she said; “one cannot mend life with a make-believe. And then—”

“There is her home at Ancenis.”

Tiphaïne thought a moment.

“Let me talk to her—alone. Perhaps she may listen.”

XV

A FAINT cry came stealing through the silence of the place, like the wail of a bird that passes on the night wind and is gone.

Tiphaïne heard it and stood listening, her eyes changing their intensity of purpose for a shadowy and vague unrest. Bertrand was still standing by the torch he had thrust into the iron bracket clamped to the wall. The flare flung darkness and light alternate upon his face.

Tiphaïne started up from the prie-dieu, and, opening the chapel door, called:

“Arletta, Arletta!”

No sounds came to them save the crackling and hissing of the wood upon the fire. Tiphaïne passed in, looking into the dark corners of the solar for a crouching figure or the white glimmer of a human face. The room was empty; Arletta had disappeared.

Tiphaïne stood for a moment like one taken with a sudden spasm of the heart. The broken knife-blade shone symbolically at her feet.

“Bertrand!”

The cry came sharply from her, as though inspired by fear.

“Bertrand!”

He followed her and looked round the room, not grasping the prophetic instinct of her dread.

“Hist!”

She stood silent again, her eyes fixed on Bertrand’s face.

“Quick! Search the tower! I am afraid for Arletta!”

Bertrand gave her one look, pushed past her without a word, took down the torch, and went out into the gallery leading to the tower. Tiphaïne’s foreboding had taken hold of his man’s heart. As he passed down the gallery with the torch flaring above his head he looked out from the narrow windows, and saw the moon rising huge and tawny over the forest. The night had built an eerie background before Bertrand’s eyes. He felt suddenly afraid, strong man that he was—afraid of what the dark tower might hide within its walls.

Coming to the newel stairway, black as a well, he stood listening, holding his breath. Before him was the door of the lesser solar. The darkness and silence seemed to come close about his heart. He opened his lips, and was startled by the harshness of his own voice.

“Letta, Letta!”

Still no sound.

“Letta, Letta, where are you? Come, you are forgiven.”

He stood listening till the echoes had died down the gallery where the moonlight streaked the floor. What was that! A sound as of weeping, a number of sharp-drawn breaths, and then a short cry, given as in pain. Bertrand started like a horse touched with the spur. He stumbled up the stairway, for the sounds came from above, the torchlight reddening the walls, the smoke driven down by the draught into his face.

A door barred his progress. He tore at the latch savagely, and felt something heavy against the door as he forced it back and slipped into the room. His foot touched a hand; the hand moved. A whispering moan came up to him out of the dark.

Bertrand was down on his knees with the torch flaring on the floor beside him. Behind the door, and half crushed between it and the wall, lay Arletta, her head sunk upon one shoulder. There was blood on her limp hands, blood soaking her bosom, the whiteness of death upon her face.

Bertrand, shocked to his heart’s depths, thrust his arms about her, and drew her to him out of the dark. He was babbling foolishly, calling her by name, bidding her take courage and forget his roughness. Arletta’s head lay heavy on his shoulder. She stirred a little, sighed, and lifted her hands. For a moment her lips moved, and her eyes looked into Bertrand’s face.

“Lording—”

“Letta, what have you done? My God—”

“Lording, I am dying.”

Bertrand burst out weeping, his man’s tears falling down upon her face. Arletta shuddered. Her mouth was close to Bertrand’s cheek, and he felt her warm blood soaking his surcoat.

“Lording, kiss me, forgive—”

He kissed her, his arms tightening about her body. She lifted her hand jerkily, unsteadily, and felt his hair. Then with a long sigh her head sank down, her mouth opened, and she was dead.

Bertrand knelt there holding her in his arms, stunned, incredulous, his hot tears falling down upon her lifeless face. He spoke to her, touched her lips, but she did not answer. It was thus that Tiphaïne found them, death and life together, with the torch setting fire to the wood-work of the floor.

Tiphaïne trod out the flame, and, standing with the candle in her hands she had taken from the chapel, looked down at Bertrand with Arletta lying in his arms. Her pity and her awe were too deep for tears. She turned to leave them, but paused before the door.

“Bertrand,” she said.

He groaned, kissed the dead face, and then laid Arletta gently upon the floor. Still kneeling, he watched her, the truth—and the irrevocable bitterness thereof—coming home to him slowly with a great sense of shame.

“Bertrand.”

“Don’t speak to me”—and he buried his face deep in his hands—“let me bear it out alone.”

Tiphaïne passed out, leaving the candle burning in a sconce upon the wall. She groped her way down to the moonlit gallery, and so to the chapel, where she knelt before the altar, her face turned to the figure upon the cross. But Bertrand watched all night beside Arletta’s body, holding the hands that were cold in death.

XVI

THE dawn was streaming up when Bertrand came down the stairway from the upper room in the tower and paused in the gallery leading to the solar. A bitter watch had it been for Bertrand, a long vigil with the relentless past condemning him with the thoughts of his own heart. He had knelt there, stunned and awed, with Arletta’s blood dyeing the floor and her white face shining on him from amid the dark wreathings of her hair. There had been no horror in her death for him, only a great revulsion of remorse, a moving of all his manhood. He had looked on the dead face hating himself, haunted by memories—memories poignant as a mother’s tears. How good the girl had been to him, even when he had been rough and petulant! She had often gone hungry that he might eat. And now he had killed her—killed her with his great blundering penitence that had trampled on her love in its struggles to be free. He had blood on his hands—the blood of the woman whose bosom had pillowed his head in sleep.

Bertrand stood in the gallery, miserable and cold, watching the dawn come up over the thickets of Broceliande. There was no joy for him in that splendor of gold, for the eyes of Arletta would open with the dawn no more. Ah, God, what a brute he had been, what a self-righteous coward! He had taken this woman’s heart, broken it, and thrown it back to her in this awakening of his, of which he had been so proud. Bertrand gripped the window-rail and stared at the moat. A glory of gold was streaming over the forest, and the black water beneath him caught the splendor and seemed glad.

The two women, Gwen and Barbe, were washing themselves in the water-butt before the kitchen entry when Bertrand went down into the court. They pulled their clothes up over their breasts on catching sight of him, and stood giggling and looking at each other.

“Good-morrow, lording.”

“Your servant, Messire Bertrand. Letta’s a proud woman again, I’m thinking—”

They burst out laughing, cawing like a couple of crows.

“S-s-h, Gwen, be decent!”

“Why shouldn’t I have my jest with the captain—”

She stopped, open-mouthed, for Bertrand’s white face shocked the insolence out of her. There was something more than fury on it, something more terrible than pain. There was blood, too, on his surcoat. The women shrank from him, holding their loose clothes, awed by the look in Bertrand’s eyes.

“Out, you fools!”

He pointed to the tower gate, and followed them like some inexorable spirit as they went before him like a couple of sheep. Guicheaux was sleeping on a pile of straw outside the guard-room door. Bertrand shook him, and pointed to Gwen and Barbe as the quipster sat up, rubbing his eyes.

“Turn them out!”

The women were ready enough to be deprived of Bertrand’s presence, and they scampered across the bridge when Guicheaux swung the gate open. The man watched them, then turned, and, looking curiously at Bertrand, put his lips together as though tempted to whistle.

“Shut the gate.”

Guicheaux obeyed him, wondering what was to follow.

“Arletta is dead.”

“Dead, captain!”

“She stabbed herself. I am going to bury her. Keep the men out of the place.”

He spoke curtly, fiercely, forcing out the words as though each one gave him pain. Guicheaux’s face was a white patch in the shadow—the mouth a black circle, the eyes two dots of light.

“Dead, captain!”

Bertrand looked as though he would have struck the man.

“Yes. The fault was mine. Arletta was jealous; she tried to stab madame, and, when balked, stabbed herself instead.”

Guicheaux said nothing. He stood pulling his peaked beard and frowning at the stones. The thing had shocked him, lewd-mouthed ruffian that he was. Bertrand watched him a moment, and then, turning on his heel, went to one of the out-houses where tools were kept.

The grass in the garden was crisped with fallen leaves and dusted with dew that twinkled, thousand-eyed, under the sheen of the dawn. All the pungent freshness of autumn was in the air. Bertrand chose his ground—a clean stretch of turf close to the steam of a great apple-tree, and far from the mounds the Black Death had built. He set to work with the look of a man who feels his heart helped by physical effort. Sweat ran from his forehead and his breath steamed up into the air, but he never paused till the grave lay finished.

Thrusting the spade into the pile of earth, he went into the court and climbed the tower stair to the room where Arletta lay dead. Bertrand stood and looked at her awhile, dry eyed, moved to the depths, his mouth twitching. Then he lifted her in his arms, feeling the solemn coldness of her body striking to his heart, and carried her down the stair and across the court into the garden. Very tenderly he laid her in the grave, and, kneeling, set her hair in a circle about her face and crossed her hands upon her bosom. Then he stood up and looked at her, the sunlight touching her face, as she lay in her last resting-place, her hands in the shadow that hid the blood-stains on her dress.

A foot-fall in the grass and a shadow stealing athwart the band of sunlight brought Bertrand round upon his heel. Tiphaïne had crossed the garden, her red gown sweeping the fallen leaves, her crucifix in her hands, and a few half-faded flowers. Her eyes were full of the sadness of deep thought.

“You have laid her there?”

He nodded, and stood twisting his hands together.

Tiphaïne went close to the grave and looked down at Arletta sleeping her last sleep, with her black hair about her face. How quiet and unhurt she looked, her jealousy dead with her, her hands folded upon her bosom! Tiphaïne knelt down and began to pray, holding her crucifix over the grave. The act brought Bertrand also to his knees by the pile of brown earth he had thrown up out of the trench. He looked at dead Arletta and then at Tiphaïne, whose hair shone like amber in the sun. He saw her lips move, saw her take her breath in deeply, her eyes fixed on Arletta’s face. Bertrand tried to pray also with the groping yet passionate instincts of a soul still half in the dark. He strove after the words that would not come, knowing full well what his heart desired.

“Bertrand.”

Tiphaïne was looking at him across the grave. Her mouth was soft and lovable, her eyes tremulous with pity. It was to be peace between them. Bertrand’s remorse pleaded for mercy.

“Bertrand, the child is asleep; she will know no more pain.”

Bertrand hung his head and stared into the grave.

“I have killed her,” he said; “yes, there is no escaping it. She was very good to me, poor wench, and I—I was often rough and selfish.”

He knelt there, gnawing his lip, twisting his hands into his surcoat, and trying to keep the tears from coming to his eyes. Tiphaïne watched him with a strange, sad smile. She was wondering whether Bertrand would forget.

“One cannot change the past,” she said.

He flung up his head and looked her in the face.

“I have done with the old life. This child’s blood shall make a new man of me.”

“Well spoken.”

“I mean it. Help me with your prayers.”

She held out her hands to him across the grave.

“There are brave men needed—yes, and you are brave enough. Take arms for our Breton homes, Bertrand, and help to drive the English into the sea.”

They knelt, looking steadfastly into each other’s eyes, no pride between them for the moment. It was then that a sudden thought came to Bertrand. He drew his poniard, and, bending over the grave, cut off a lock of Arletta’s hair. Reddening a little, he held it out to Tiphaïne, his eyes pleading with her like the eyes of a dog.

“Here is the poor child’s token. Give me a strand of your hair to bind with it. It is all I ask, and it will help me.”

She stood up without a word, let her hair fall from the net that held it, a cloud of gold and bronze about her pale face and over her wine-red dress. Taking Bertrand’s poniard, she cut off a lock and gave it him, content that the threads of gold should be twined with dead Arletta’s tresses.

“Take it, Bertrand, and I will pray for you.”

Bertrand was binding the black and bronze together, smiling to himself sadly, and thinking of Tiphaïne when she was a child.

“I shall not forget,” he said, simply.

“Nor I,” she answered, throwing the flowers and crucifix she had brought into Arletta’s grave.

And so Tiphaïne left him, and Bertrand turned to end his work. He covered Arletta with dead leaves, and threw in the few flowers he could find in the garden. Then he thrust back the earth very gently into the grave, growing ever sadder as the brown soil hid Arletta’s face from him forever.

And that same noontide young Robin Raguenel came riding in with twenty spears bristling at his back and English plunder on his pack-horses. Broceliande had given back Tiphaïne her own at last, after weeks of peril and despair. As for Bertrand, he took young Robin’s thanks in silence, and told the truth rather than play the hypocrite. The lad’s pleading could not hold him. Bertrand saw Tiphaïne alone no more, and, marching his men out, plunged into the deeps of Broceliande.