BOOK III

“THE OAK OF MIVOIE”

XVII

ONE March day a man wrapped in a heavy riding-cloak with the hood turned back over his shoulders sat looking out over the sea from the cliffs of Cancale. Behind him a shaggy pony was cropping the grass, lifting its head to gaze ever and again at its master, motionless against the gray March sky. A northeast wind blustered over the cliffs, the sea, sullen and venomous, running high about the islands off Cancale. The great waves came swinging in to fly in white clouds of spray over the glistening black rocks that came and went like huge sea-monsters spouting in the water. Across the bay St. Michael’s glimmered beneath a chance storm-beam of the sun, while the shores of Normandy were dim and gray between sea and sky.

It was Bertrand, throned like some old Breton saint, with the waves thundering on the rocks beneath him and the gulls wailing about the cliffs. He sat there motionless, fronting the wind, his sword across his knees, as though watching and waiting for some sail he knew would come. The strong and ugly face might have caught the spirit of the granite land. Rock, sea spume, and the storm wind everywhere; a few twisted trees struggling in the grip of the wind. Bertrand, solemn, gray-eyed, motionless, akin to the rocks that lay around.

Two months had passed since Bertrand had come to Gleaquim by the northern sea, where his kinsfolk had kept Christmas in the old house where the Du Guesclins had had their rise. He had disbanded his free companions at Rennes, maugre their dismay and their unwillingness to leave him. The men’s rough loyalty had touched Bertrand, and taught him that even the saddest dogs could love their master. Guicheaux had even cast himself at Bertrand’s feet, swearing that he would go with him to the ends of the earth. It was with a husky voice that Bertrand had answered them, bade them choose a new captain and fight for Blois. He had left them bemoaning the obstinacy of his will, to discover, some twenty miles from Rennes, that Guicheaux and Hopart were following on his heels. Moved by their homage, he had taken them with him to Plessis-Bertrand, in Hakims valley by the sea.

There had been no great joy in Bertrand’s home-coming. His father, failing in years and health, had grown querulous and miserly, while Dame Jeanne adored Olivier as foolishly as ever. Julienne and the other girls were at a convent in Rennes. Two of the boys were lodged with their aunt in the same town, and Gaheris had gone as a page into the Sieur de Rohan’s household. There had been but a poor welcome for the prodigal, who brought no spoil or honor with him—nothing but a solemn face and two hungry followers. Sieur Robert had received him with no outburst of pride. His mother pursed up her lips, and questioned him as to what he had done with the money he had had to start him in the wars. Olivier strutted and swaggered in his finer clothes, made love to his mother’s serving-women, and sneered openly at his brother, asking him how many ale-houses he had captured and how many millers’ ransoms he had won. Even in the kitchen there were brawlings and discord, for Hopart and Guicheaux drubbed Olivier’s men for lauding up their master and belittling Bertrand’s courage.

As for the Champion of Rennes, he kept a tight mouth and a flinty face, took all the trivial taunts without a word, feeling it good that life should run roughly with him for a season. Vain, vaporing Olivier and proud, cold-eyed Jeanne knew nothing of the deep workings of that quiet man’s heart. He never spoke to them of the near past, and told them nothing of what he had learned and suffered. They thought him sour, surly, dull in the head. Thus, even in a home, kinsfolk are as strangers and outlanders together, and the mother knows not the heart of the son.

A great change was working in Bertrand—one of those uprisings that occur, perhaps, but once in the course of a strong man’s life. The recklessness, the passionate abandonment of youth were past—likewise the first peevish curses of disappointed manhood. Bertrand had learned to humble himself, to look round him, and to think. He had grappled with the truths and falsities of life, and searched out the flaws in his own heart with that dogged devotedness that was part of his nature. No easy and emotional religiosity inspired him, but rather the grim spirit of an old Stoic, striving after the best for the nobleness thereof. Yet the change was not without its tender tones. Almost unconsciously Bertrand had set up Tiphaïne in his heart, while beside her, yet more in the shadow, Arletta’s white and wistful face seemed to plead with him out of the past. Those who had known him of old, saving Olivier and his mother, wondered at the new gentleness, the air of patience, that had mellowed the rough and violent boy whom they remembered.

Bertrand was much alone that winter. It was a season of rest for him, a girding up of the loins, a tightening of the muscles of the heart. Nearly every day, in rain and sunshine, he would ride down to the sea, and sit there on the cliffs, with the ever-changing sky above him and the ever-restless waters at his feet. To Bertrand there was something bracing in this solitude and in the unbelittled magnificence of sea and shore. It was in those lonely days that he learned to know the true courage, that nobler quietude that smiles at defeat. And with the humility that had come upon him a deep and solemn peace seemed poured like divine wine into his mouth. The conviction grew in him that the higher life was yet before his face. Even as the grand old Hebrews trusted in the Eternal One with a faith that made them terrible, so Bertrand believed, with all the simple instinctiveness of his soul, that the powers above had work for him to do. The day would come for him, when or how he knew not yet. He was content to rest and tarry for a season, perfecting the self-mastery that was to make of him a man.

Bertrand mounted his rough pony and rode homeward that March day with the sun going down amid a mass of burning clouds. His heart was tranquil in him despite the wailing of the wind, the moaning of the trees, and the bleak stretch of moorland and of waste. He saw the peasants returning from their labor, and smiled at the sight. The patience of these lowly tillers of the fields seemed to comfort him. He had begun to think more of them of late than the mere pomp of chivalry and the glamour of arms. They suffered, these brown-faced, round-backed peasants, and Bertrand’s heart went out to them as he thought of their hard lives and the heaviness they bore.

The servants were trooping into supper when Bertrand rode into the old court-yard and saw the hall windows warm with torch-light. He stabled his pony, fed the beast with his own hands, and washed at the laver in the screens before going in to supper. Sieur Robert and his wife were already at the high table, with Olivier, the young fop, lolling against the wall. His lips curled as he saw Bertrand enter, for he hated his brother, and feared him in his heart.

Bertrand went to serve and carve at the high table. He had taken the task on him of late with that quiet thoroughness that made him what he was. It was proper, he thought, for him to serve before those who had begotten him, even though he had known no great kindness at their hands. Olivier would sneer and smile at Bertrand’s newly inspired filial courtesy. He was a selfish fool himself, and loathed stirring himself, even for the mother who would have given him her head.

“Hallo there! those roast partridges look fat. Bring the dish, brother; this north wind blows hunger into a man.”

Bertrand brought the dish without a word, and Olivier helped himself, pleased with the honor of being waited on by his brother.

“Give us some Grenarde, Bertrand. Thanks. And the spice-plate. Ah, madame, you keep to ypocrasse. Bertrand, my mother would drink ypocrasse.”

Olivier had long lorded it over both his parents with the easy insolence of a favored son. Bertrand poured out a cup of ypocrasse for Dame Jeanne, and, having carved for his father, and given him a tankard of cider, sat down to eat in turn. Olivier, who was greedy despite his daintiness, left Bertrand in peace awhile, only deigning to talk when he had ended his hunger.

“Well, Brother Bertrand, how are the pigs to-day?”

This question had become a nightly witticism with Olivier since a certain morning two weeks ago, when he had found his brother helping the swineherd to drive his hogs.

Bertrand kept silence and went on with his supper. Olivier, after staring at him, took a draught of wine, wiped his mouth, and called for water and a napkin that he might wash. Bertrand rose and brought them from the buffet below the great window.

“Thanks, good brother.”

The patronage would have set Bertrand’s face aflame not many months ago. He left Olivier waving his white hands in the air, and carried the bowl and napkin to his father, and then to Dame Jeanne, who thanked him with a slight nod of the head.

“Mother, I am thinking of joining the Countess at Rennes this year.”

Olivier was forever on the point of sallying on imaginary quests, and thrilling his mother’s heart with the threat of daring untold perils. He had been to the wars but once in his life, when an English spear-thrust had excused many months of unheroic idleness.

“They must miss you,” said Jeanne, with a jealous look.

Olivier spread his shoulders but did not see that Bertrand smiled.

“True,” he confessed, with divine self-unction; “I am a good man at my arms. This cursed spear-wound still smarts a little and chafes under the harness. How many men, mother, can you spare me in the spring?”

Jeanne du Guesclin considered the demand with the fondness of an unwilling fool. Olivier’s vaporings never rang false in her maternal ears. Like many a shrewd, cold-hearted woman, she was deceived pitifully by the one thing that she loved.

“Wait till the summer, child,” she said.

“Child!” And Olivier stood upon his dignity and showed temper. “You are blind, madame; you never see that I am a man. You women are made of butter. We men are of sterner stuff.”

His mother’s meekness was wonderful in one so proud.

“Ah, Olivier, you have the soldier’s spirit! I must not try to curb your courage.”

The hero smoothed his diminutive peak of a beard, and deigned to suffer her carefulness, like the inimitable peacock that he was.

“Honor is honor, madame. We men cannot sit at embroidery frames and make simples. It is the nature of man that he should thirst for war.”

A sudden stir among the servants at the lower end of the hall drew Bertrand’s attention from his brother’s boasting. His ear had caught the sound of hoofs and the pealing of a trumpet before the court-yard gate. The clattering of dishes and the babbling of tongues ceased in the great hall, for Plessis-Bertrand was a lonely house and travellers rarely came that way. Hopart and Guicheaux, taught caution by long, experienced exposure to all manner of hazards, took down their swords from the wall and went out into the court-yard, followed by some of Olivier’s men with torches. Olivier scoffed at the free companions’ carefulness.

“Some dirty beggar,” he said, “or a couple of strolling friars. Hi, Jacques, if they are players—and there be any wenches—show them in.”

Bertrand, who was wiser, and had no vanity to consider, saw that his sword was loose in its sheath.

They could hear Guicheaux shouting and a voice answering him. Then came the unbarring of the gate and the ring of hoofs upon the court-yard stones. The men were shouting and cheering in the court. Hopart’s hairy face appeared at the doorway of the hall. He so far forgot his manners for the moment as to bawl at his master on the dais.

“Beaumanoir’s herald, Messire Jean de Xaintré. They are going to maul the English at Mivoie’s Oak. The eagle must look to his claws!”

In came the servants, shouting and elbowing beneath a flare of torches, old Jean, the butler, flourishing his staff and trying to keep order and clear a passage. Hopart and Guicheaux were treading on the toes of Olivier’s men, spreading their fingers and grinning from ear to ear. Bertrand saw the flashing of a bassinet, the gay colors of a herald’s jupon, the Sieur de Beaumanoir’s arms quartered with those of Brittany. Some dozen men-at-arms followed in full harness, shouldering back the cook-boys and scullions.

The herald, an esquire of the Marshal’s, Jean de Xaintré by name, marched up the hall and saluted those at the high table.

“Greeting, madame and messires all; God’s grace be with you. I come from the Sieur de Beaumanoir, Marshal of Brittany. Thirty champions are to fight thirty English at the Oak of Mivoie on Passion Sunday. We need the Sieur de Guesclin’s son with us.”

Dame Jeanne looked at Olivier and beckoned him forward.

“Here is your champion, herald,” she said. “Olivier, the Sieur de Beaumanoir needs your sword.”

Jean de Xaintré stared at the lady and glanced, with a grim twinkle, at Olivier, who looked as though he were not so ready to deserve his mother’s pride.

“Your pardon, madame”—and Xaintré laughed—“Bertrand du Guesclin is our man. Greeting, old friend; you have not forgotten Jean de Xaintré.”

Jeanne du Guesclin bit her lips.

“What—Bertrand!”

“Madame, who but Bertrand, the best son you ever bore!”

Bertrand had risen and was standing with one hand on his father’s shoulder, knowing that his chance had come at last. The hall, with its crowd of faces, seemed blurred to him for the moment. Yet he saw Hopart and Guicheaux squealing and flapping their caps in the faces of Olivier’s men.

“I am here, old comrade. Give me the Marshal’s orders.”

Jeanne, white and angry, glared at him, and put her arm about Olivier.

“To choose the clumsy fool!” she said.

Jean de Xaintré had drawn his sword, and was holding the hilt crosswise before him.

“Swear, brother in arms, swear on the cross.”

“Ay, Jean, give me the oath.”

“Swear by Christ’s cross. The Oak of Mivoie on Josselin Moors, to fight Bamborough and his English on Passion Sunday.”

Bertrand lifted his hand, crossed himself, and took the oath.

“Before God—and our Lord—I swear,” he said.

Xaintré thrust his sword back into its sheath.

“Bertrand du Guesclin will not fail.”

Sieur Robert, sleepy and querulous, sat staring about him, and looking weakly at his wife. Jeanne du Guesclin had sunk back heavily in her chair, and was still biting her lips, and looking bitterly at Bertrand. Olivier had tossed down a cup of wine, and was braving it out as though the whole matter were the choicest farce. Guicheaux and Hopart were still stamping and shouting till Dame Jeanne started up in a blaze of fury, and shouted to her men, who crowded by the door:

“Take the fools out and have them whipped!”

But Bertrand cowed his mother for the once, and swore that no one should lay hands upon his men.

“Quiet, dogs,” he said, shaking his fist at them, “you have barked enough; let us have peace.”

He sprang down from the dais and gripped Jean de Xaintré’s hands.

“Old friend, you have not forgotten me?”

“No, no. Come, give me wine. Here’s to you with all my heart.”

XVIII

IT was seven in the morning on the day of his riding to join the Marshal of Brittany at the Oak of Mivoie, and Bertrand stood warming himself before the great hall fire. He was in full harness—harness that he had burnished lovingly with his own hands, and the raised vizor of his bassinet showed a calm face and the eyes of a man who listened. Bertrand had broken fast alone in the hall, after keeping a vigil in the chapel with his sword and shield before him on the altar steps. He was to ride towards Dinan that day, for Xaintré had told him that Robin Raguenel had been chosen among the thirty, and Bertrand rode to seek him at La Bellière, and perhaps win a glimpse of Tiphaïne herself. His heart felt full of joy that morning, the joy of a man to whom life offers stirring days again.

Jean, the old butler, appeared at the door that closed the stairway leading to the private rooms. He looked half timidly at Bertrand, a tower of steel before the fire, and came forward slowly, coughing behind his hand.

“Well, Jean, how long will they keep me waiting? The days are short in March.”

“Your servant, messire—”

“Well?”

“My master has bidden me carry you his good grace—and blessing—”

“What! My father is not out of bed?”

“He prays you to pardon him, messire. He feels the cold, and these raw mornings—”

Bertrand silenced him with a gesture of the hand. His face had lost its brightness for the moment, and there was a frown as of pain upon his forehead.

“Ah, of course, Jean, say no more. And madame?”

“Madame, messire, is at her devotions; she would not be disturbed. In an hour—”

Bertrand turned with a shrug of impatience, picked up his sword, and buckled it on.

“My time is God’s time, Jean,” he said; “carry my respects to my father and my mother—”

He winced over the words, frowning, and looking sorrowful about the eyes.

“Tell them I could not tarry. And my brother Olivier? Curling his pretty beard?”

“I will go and see, messire.”

“No, no; never trouble the sweet lad. It is a mere nothing, man, to the parting of his hair. Good-bye, Jean; forget the mad tricks I played you as a boy.”

He turned, took up his shield, and strode out from the hall, a sense of forlornness chilling his ardor for the moment. Hopart and Guicheaux were waiting for him in the court-yard, holding his horse and spear. Bertrand had refused to take the men with him, preferring solitude, content with his own thoughts. Guicheaux and Hopart ran up to him, still hoping that he would change his purpose.

“Ah, lording, you will crack the English bassinets!”

“Good luck, good luck!”

“Take us, too, messire. We can live on rust and leather.”

Bertrand was glad even of their rude affection. He took out an old brooch and a ring of silver from his shrunken purse, and thrust the largesse into their hands.

“No, no, sirs, I ride alone. Keep these things, and think of Bertrand du Guesclin if he comes not back again.”

They hung round him like a couple of great children, eager and devoted.

“Messire, courage, you are too tough for the English dogs.”

“Keep up your heart, captain, and give them the clean edge.”

They ran for a mile along the road beside him, holding his stirrup-straps and looking up into his face. And theirs was the only heartening Bertrand had when he rode out to fight for the Breton poor at the Oak of Mivoie on Josselin Moors.

Bertrand’s courage warmed again as he mounted the moors and felt the blue sky over him and the broad Breton lands before his face. He forgot Olivier’s sneers and his mother’s coldness, and the way they had let him go uncheered. The truth remained that Beaumanoir had chosen him, and that the chance had come for which he had waited. That day, also, he might see Tiphaïne again, give her the good news, and tell her of the change that had been working in his manhood.

Bertrand was in fine fettle by the time he struck the windings of the Rance, and saw the river flashing below the cliffs and glimmering amid the green. He tossed his spear and sang as the towers of Dinan came in view, the gray walls girding the little town, with the Ranee running in the narrow meads below. All the thickets were purpling with the spring. The bare aspens glittered, the clouds sailed white over the wind-swept Breton town.

But Dinan had no call for Bertrand that March day. He rode on, still singing, happy at heart, watching for the tall chimneys of the Vicomte’s house, finding a quick, strange joy at the thought of seeing Tiphaïne again. Bertrand was not a Provençal rhapsodist. He could not write love songs to a woman’s lips, but look bravely into her face he could, and crown her with the homage that only great hearts know.

Soon the turrets and carved chimneys rose up amid the trees, smoke floating with the wind, the Vicomte’s banner slanting from its staff. Bertrand rode up amid a swirl of March-blown leaves and blew his horn before the gate. The servants who came out to him knew the eagle on his shield, and Robin himself met Bertrand in the court.

“Messire du Guesclin, welcome indeed!” and he held out his hands to take Bertrand’s spear and shield, his beaming face a greeting in itself.

“Xaintré told me you were chosen.”

“To be sure, he passed this way on the road to Concale. Mother of God, but I am glad you are come! Tiphaïne is above, playing chess with my father.”

Robin gave the spear and shield to one of the servants and embraced Bertrand when he dismounted. There was something comforting to the lad in having this strong man to bear him company.

“It will be a grim business, Bertrand. Croquart is to fight on Bamborough’s side, and Knowles and Calverly. Pssh! but who is afraid of the Flemish butcher? Come to my room; I will help you to disarm.”

He led Bertrand through the garden to his bedchamber joining the chapel, chattering all the way, with a restless smile on his boyish face. There was an exaggerated fervor in the lad’s gayety, and his eyes looked tired as though he had not slept. Bertrand saw that his hands trembled as he helped to unbuckle the harness, and that his mouth drooped when he was not talking.

“What a day for us, brother in arms!” he babbled, drawing out Bertrand’s sword and feeling the edge thereof with his thumb. “Croquart is a terrible fellow. But then Beaumanoir is as brave as a lion, and Tinteniac a powerful smiter, and you, Bertrand, are as good a man at your weapons as any.”

Bertrand looked hard at Robin, and forced a smile.

“We shall hold our own,” he said.

“You think so?” and the lad’s face brightened. “I have been running two miles each morning to better my wind. Look at my new armor, yonder. It is the cleverest German work. See the kneecaps, and the pallets to guard the armpits. It will take a good sword, Bertrand, to pierce it, eh?”

He seemed so eager to be cheered, despite his vivacity, that Bertrand felt troubled for the lad, and pitied him in his heart. He was wondering why Beaumanoir had chosen young Raguenel. He was tall and strong enough, but he had not the dogged look of a born fighter.

“You will do bravely enough, Robin,” he said. “Why, I have seen these English beaten many a day. We Bretons are the better men.”

“Good, good indeed! Why, man, you are thirsting for Passion Sunday to come round.”

“Because we shall win,” said Bertrand, quietly, smiling at the lad and eager to hearten him.

Bertrand had finished his disarming, and, having washed his face and hands in Robin’s laver, stood for him to lead on to the Vicomte’s room. He was troubled now that he was to meet Tiphaïne again, wondering how she would greet him, and whether her father knew what had passed within the Aspen Tower. He followed Robin through the oriel, stroking his chin and bracing his manhood for the meeting.

Tiphaïne was seated before the solar window, with the chess-board between her and the Vicomte. She rose up at once when Bertrand entered, and held out her hands to him with a readiness that made him color.

“Messire, we meet again.”

To Bertrand her voice brought back a hundred memories that gave him pain. He winced a little as he took her hand and felt her clear eyes searching his face. It meant more to Bertrand to meet those eyes than an enemy’s sword would cost him at Mivoie.

“God grant madame is well,” and he bowed to her clumsily and turned to Stephen Raguenel, who had pushed back the chess-table and was rising from his chair.

“Well met at last, Messire du Guesclin. I can thank you with my own lips for the great debt we owe your sword.”

Bertrand guessed that Tiphaïne had saved his honor. He flashed a look at her, and saw by the smile and the shake of the head she gave him that the Vicomte knew nothing of the first spoiling of the Aspen Tower. Bertrand blessed her, yet felt a hypocrite.

“If I have served you, sire, say no more of it.”

The Vicomte de Bellière, stately seigneur that he was, kissed Bertrand’s cheek after the quaint fashion of those days.

“My house is your house, lad,” he said, “my servants your servants. I hold myself your debtor.”

For Bertrand, La Bellière had a strange and saddened sense of peace that night as he sat before the log fire and talked to the Vicomte of the combat at the Oak of Mivoie. La Bellière contrasted with the memories of his own home, for here they loved one another and knew no discords. The solar, warm with the firelight, had something sacred and beautiful within its walls. Bertrand felt the quiet dignity of the Raguenels’ life, the charm, the mellowness that made home home.

Tiphaïne sat opposite to him, her embroidery in her lap—a mass of green and gold—her eyes shining in the firelight, her hair coiled above the curve of her shapely neck. Her father’s chair was turned towards the fire, and he could see both his children, for Robin stood leaning against the chimney-hood, his face drawn and pinched when in repose.

It was pathetic the way the old man gloried in his son. He did not grudge him to the Breton cause, but let his pride soar over the lad’s honor. He told Bertrand the deeds of his own youth, beneficently garrulous, and swore that Robin would outshine his father. His handsome face mellowed as he sipped his wine and looked from one child to the other. Bertrand, silent, yet very reverent, watched Tiphaïne’s hands, too conscious all the while of Robin’s strained and jerky gayety. The lad’s heart was not happy in him, of that Bertrand felt assured.

“Come, messire, you have not seen Robin fight as yet.”

Bertrand smiled, a little sadly, and shook his head.

“He had his christening when our Countess retook the castle of Roche-D’Errien. You were one of the first in the breach, Robin, eh? Yes, yes, and Beaumanoir heard of the spirit you showed in that tussle down in the south, Ancenis—was it? What a head I have for names!”

Tiphaïne looked up from her work and gave her father the word.

“Aurai, to be sure, where that rogue Dagworth had his quittance from Raoul de Cahours. Robin won his spurs there. You shall see how the lad can fight, messire, at the Oak of Mivoie.”

Robin laughed, blushed, and frowned at the fire. Tiphaïne was looking at him with almost a mother’s love in her eyes. Her brother’s restless gayety had no sinister significance for her sister’s pride in him. It was a solemn evening; Robin might be unnerved by the pathos of it, but nothing more.

“Robin will play his part,” she said, quietly.

“God’s grace, of course, he shall! More wine, messire; let us drink to brave Beaumanoir and to Brittany.”

Before the hour for sleep came round, Tiphaïne drew Bertrand aside towards the window, and stood looking keenly in his face. His eyes were happier than of old, and the sullen discontent had left him since Arletta’s burying in the garden of the Aspen Tower.

“Bertrand.”

“Yes, Tiphaïne?”

“How is it with you?”

He looked at her frankly, yet with a saddened smile.

“I am learning my lesson—letter by letter,” he answered.

“I am glad of it. We are the firmer friends, and—”

She hesitated, with a troubled light shining in her eyes. Bertrand saw her glance wistfully at Robin and her father.

“Bertrand.”

“I stand to serve you.”

“Take care of Robin for us, Bertrand; it would kill my father to lose the lad. And he is so young, though brave and strong enough. If—”

Bertrand reached for her hand and held it, his face transfigured as he looked into her eyes.

“Trust me,” he said.

“Ah!—”

“I will stand by the lad, and take the blows from him even with my own body. Tiphaïne, I have not forgotten.”

And Bertrand did not sleep that night with thinking of Tiphaïne and the Oak of Mivoie.

XIX

BERTRAND and Robin Raguenel rode southwest from Dinan, holding towards Montcontour, so that they should come on Josselin from the west. All about Ploermel, and even to the walls of Rennes, Bamborough’s English and Croquart’s ruffians were still burning and plundering, and driving the wretched peasantry like sheep before them. Montfort’s English had been very bitter against the Bretons since Dagworth’s death, vowing that he had fallen through treachery, and that Brittany should pay the price in blood.

The sun was setting on the Friday before Passion Sunday, when Bertrand and Robin came to the little town of Loudéac and sought out a lodging for the night. They were guided to an inn on the north of the market square, and given a private chamber, as befitted young Raguenel’s rank. The lad had shown a strange temper all the way from Dinan, his face like an April sky, now all sunshine, now all gloom. Moments of gusty gayety alternated with morose and restless silence. Bertrand had done what he could to humor the lad, without letting him suspect that he was troubled for the part he would play at the Oak of Mivoie.

Robin drifted into a reckless mood that night at Loudéac. He called for much wine and showed the innkeeper an open purse. The servants stirred themselves to honor “my lord,” who was to fight for Brittany on Josselin Moors. The innkeeper, a shrewd old pimp, who wished his guests to be amused, sent up a couple of dancing-girls to the chamber after supper. Bertrand looked black when the girls came in to them, giggling and twitching their bright-colored skirts. It was customary at many inns to keep such ladies, and young Robin laughed at them, his head half turned with wine.

“Hallo, wicked ones! Come and sit by me. You can dance and sing for a gentleman, eh? To be sure, Mistress Red-stockings, you have a pretty pair of ankles. Who calls for muscatel and good Bordeaux? Bertrand, fill up your cup.”

The women were ready enough to make play for Robin, seeing that he was a handsome fellow and two parts drunk. Bertrand, however, had no desire to see the lad preyed upon by such a pair of harpies. Ignoring their oglings and their tittering, he went to the door and shouted for the innkeeper, and gave the man a look that did not miscarry.

“None of your tricks, my friend; we have no purses to be picked. What we have ordered we have ordered, but these delicacies are not to our taste.”

The man looked at Robin, who had taken the girl with the red stockings on his knee.

“But, my lord yonder—seems satisfied.”

“Robin, let the girl go.”

The lad quailed before Bertrand’s eyes, and surrendered to him sheepishly, yet not without some show of spite.

“Now, Sir Shepherd, out with your sheep.”

The innkeeper saw that Bertrand was in no mood to be trifled with, and that he was the master of the situation so far as Robin was concerned. He beckoned the women out, pulling a wry face, yet outwardly obsequious as any son of Mammon. The women followed him, tossing their ribbons and looking saucily at Bertrand, whose ugly face was like a block of stone. Their insolence was nothing to him, for he had drunk the dregs of recklessness and thrown the cup away.

Robin was sitting sulkily before the fire, biting his nails and glancing at Bertrand out of the corners of his eyes. He knew that the elder man was in the right, and yet Bertrand’s mastery chafed his pride.

“You meddle rather much, messire,” he said.

Bertrand went up to him with the air of a brother, a good-humored smile softening his face.

“Nonsense, Robin; you are a little hot in the head. No more wine, lad; I ask it as a favor. Who kissed you last—was it not your sister?”

Robin shuddered, and sat staring at the fire.

“You are right, Bertrand,” he said. “By God, I was going to Mivoie with a harlot’s kisses on my mouth!”

“No, no, lad, you have the true stuff in you. Come to bed; we must not waste our sleep.”

It was some time after midnight when Bertrand woke with a start and lay listening in the darkness of the room. A voice was babbling in the silence of the night, making a hoarse whispering like dead leaves shivering in a frosty wind. Bertrand’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he could see Robin half kneeling, half lying upon the bed. The lad was praying like a man in the extremity of terror.

“Oh, Lady of Heaven, pardon all my sins. I am young, and I have erred often, and often I have prayed with a cold heart. Mea culpa! mea culpa! Lord Jesu watch over me at the Oak of Mivoie. It is terrible, very terrible, to be afraid, but I have taken the oath, and all men will mock me if I fail. St. Malo, hear me; I will build a chapel to thee if I come back safe from Mivoie.”

To such whimperings Bertrand listened as he lay motionless in bed. Robin’s whispering terror troubled him; he grieved for the lad, yet knew not what to do. If Robin had his sister’s heart, there would be no quailings, no shivering prayers at midnight, no grovelling on the floor. Bertrand lay listening, half tempted to speak to the lad. He held his words, however, and watched till Robin climbed back with chattering teeth to bed. Bertrand betrayed nothing of what he had seen or heard when they rose to dress and arm that morning, though his heart misgave him when he saw the lad’s red eyes and drooping mouth. He began to be keenly afraid for the lad’s courage, lest it should fail utterly and bring shame on Robin and on those who loved him.

They rode out through Loudeac after paying the reckoning at the inn. Robin’s spirits revived somewhat as they went through the narrow streets and the townsfolk cheered them and waved their caps.

“Grace to the Breton gentlemen!”

“God bless ye, sirs, at the Oak of Mivoie!”

The glory of it all brought a flush to Robin’s cheeks. He looked handsome enough in his new armor, his horse going proudly, with trappings of green and gold. His manhood stiffened; his blood came more blithely from his heart. Had he not a part to play, a cause to champion? Men looked for great things from him, trusted to his word. Robin’s pride kindled as he rode through the streets of Loudeac, and Bertrand, watching him, felt glad.

It was when they were free of the town and plunged into the woodlands that Robin’s courage began to wane once more. Loudeac had been full of life and the stir thereof, but here in the deeps of the mysterious woods there was nothing but silence and loneliness about him. The wind sighed in the beech-trees; the firs waved their solemn boughs. The damp grass and the sodden leaves were as yet unbrightened by many flowers. The pitiful thinness of the lad’s courage grew more plain as the hours went by.

Bertrand talked hard, and tried to make young Raguenel more ready for the morrow. He told him of the tussles he had come through unharmed and of the many times that he had seen the English beaten. And Croquart—what was Croquart the Fleming that they should talk so much of him? The fellow was only a butcher’s brat; he had learned to use the knife and the cleaver, and boasted the insolence of a scullion. Brittany had as good men as Croquart, Calverly, and all the gang of them. Bertrand took no heed of Robin’s frailty, but held forth strenuously, as though fired by his own convictions. Yet the more he talked the deeper grew the lad’s depression.

About noon they halted beside a stream where moor and woodland met, watered their horses, and made a meal. Robin ate but little, and seemed to have no heart to talk. Bertrand ignored his restless manner and the weak twitching of his lower lip. He gave the lad little time for reflection, feeling that Robin’s courage leaked like wine out of a cracked jar.

“Come, we must make Josselin before dark.”

Robin dragged himself up from the foot of a tree. He went slowly towards his horse, walking with no spring at the knees, his chin down upon his chest. Bertrand’s back was turned for the moment, for he was tightening his saddle-girths, that had worked slack since the morning. Robin glanced at him, with the look of a hunted thing in his eyes. He stooped, lifted up his horse’s left fore foot, and plunged the point of his poniard into the frog.

Bertrand turned to find Robin’s horse plunging and rearing, with his master hanging to the bridle.

“Hallo, lad, what’s amiss?”

Robin, fearful lest Bertrand should guess his treachery, patted the beast’s neck and coaxed him back into control.

“By the saints, Hoel is dead lame!”

He tugged at the bridle and walked the horse to and fro, gloating inwardly at the way the poor brute hobbled.

“What’s to be done?”

Bertrand marched up without a word, lifted the beast’s fore foot, and saw the bleeding hoof. His mouth hardened as he turned on Robin, grim but very quiet.

“Show me your poniard.”

The lad stared at him, his lower lip a-droop.

“My poniard?”

“Yes.”

“Upon my soul, messire—”

He had flushed crimson, and was shaking at the knees, nor did Bertrand need to press his guilt. He stood looking at Robin, contemptuous, yet moved to pity, debating inwardly what he should do.

“Well, messire, a nice trick this, laming your own horse! I will get you to Josselin to-night, even if I have to carry you.”

“Bertrand, I—My God, I cannot go, I am not fit!”

He broke down utterly of a sudden, and threw himself upon the grass, burying his face in his arms, and sobbing like a girl. Bertrand had never seen such cowardice before; it was new and strange to him, and the very pitiableness of it shocked his manhood.

“Come, lad, come,” and he bent down and tried to turn him over.

Robin squirmed away like a frightened cur.

“I can’t, I can’t! Don’t jeer at me; let me be!”

“What! You will break your oath?”

The lad’s shoulders only twitched the more, and he buried his face yet deeper in his arms.

“For God’s sake, lad, stand up and play the man. What will they say of you at Dinan?”

It was all useless, useless as trying to turn milk into wine. Robin lay snivelling on the grass, all the manhood gone from him, his fine armor a veritable mockery, his whole body palsied by abject fear. Even Bertrand’s taunts could sting no courage into him. Robin Raguenel was a coward; Bertrand knew the truth.

He stood looking at the lad, disgust and pity warring together on his face. Was this the brother Tiphaïne loved, and for whom he had promised to risk his life! Once more in despair he tried to rouse the lad, yet doubting in his heart that any good would come of it.

“So, Robin”—and he spoke gently—“you will let your father know that you are a coward?”

Robin groaned, but did not stir.

“Well—and your sister, she is proud of you?”

“Mercy, have mercy!” And the taunts only brought forth more snivellings and tears.

“Then you will break your oath to Beaumanoir, messire?”

“Yes, curse him, why did the fool choose me?”

Bertrand turned from Robin with a half-uttered oath, picked up his spear, and moved towards his horse. There was no help for it; he must leave the coward to his shame. They needed men, not girls, at Mivoie.

XX

BERTRAND faltered as he was about to mount his horse and stood irresolute, like a man who repents of parting in anger from a friend. He thrust his spear into the grass, buckled the bridle round it, and went back towards Robin with a frown of thought upon his face. His promise to Tiphaïne had dared him to desert the lad, however much he might despise him for a weakling and a coward.

“Stand up, messire, I have some last words to say to you.”

Robin turned on his side, his green surcoat dew-drenched and muddy, and, propping himself upon one elbow, plucked at the grass.

“Ride on,” he growled; “let me be.”

“For the last time, Robin, will you go with me to Mivoie?”

“What! to have my brains beaten out by that brute Croquart? He has a grudge against me. Xaintré warned me to beware of the fellow.”

“A cool confession, messire.”

“Cool! Why should I be butchered for the sake of a crowd of wretched serfs?”

Bertrand looked at him as though half minded to pick the lad up and shake the terror out of him by sheer strength. But even Bertrand saw how useless it was to argue with such a quivering and sulky tangle of nerves. Young Raguenel was too soft and sensitive a creature to bear the rubs of the age he lived in. The stark fear of death was on him, and he was worse than an hysterical woman for the moment. Even if he were dragged to Josselin that night he would only disgrace himself at Mivoie on the morrow.

Bertrand turned on his heel, and began to march to and fro under the trees. Now and again he looked grimly, yet sorrowfully, at Robin, his eyes full of reproachfulness as he began to realize what the lad’s cowardice might mean. The words that he had spoken to Tiphaïne were sounding in his ears: “Trust me, and I will shield the lad even with my own body.” There was no shirking such a promise, and argue as he would the rough candor of his own conscience had him baffled at every point. What would Tiphaïne think of him if he left this loved but weak-willed brother to be shamed and dishonored in the knowledge of all Brittany? And Stephen Raguenel, that generous old man? The blow would kill him, and bring his white head down into the grave. Bertrand ground his teeth as he realized the bitterness of it all, and felt his own honor tangled in the fatal web of Robin’s fear.

Bertrand trampled the sodden grass till he had worn a muddy track under the beech-trees between Robin and the place where his horse was tethered. Never did Bertrand fight a tougher fight than he fought with himself that day on the road to Josselin. Renunciation, the higher courage, triumphed. Bertrand dashed his hand across his eyes, looked bitterly at the sword he had sharpened so lovingly and at the shield with the Du Guesclin blazonings thereon. Well, there was no help for it; he would sacrifice himself for this miserable boy; he had given Tiphaïne his promise. And as for his oath to Beaumanoir, he would both keep it and break it, and God would know the truth.

With the tussle ended, doubt and indecision had no more power over Bertrand’s will. He made no boast of the deed he was about to do, but marched to it boldly with a set mouth and an unflinching face.

“Off with your armor, lad; there is no time to lose.”

Robin stared as though Bertrand had commanded him to crawl out of his skin.

“Up with you!” and there was a ring of fierceness in the voice. “Strip off your armor; we must change our coats.”

Robin leaned upon one hand, eying Bertrand furtively, and not grasping his meaning for the moment.

“What will you do, messire?” he asked.

“Do!” and Bertrand’s lips curled as he unbuckled his graves and cuishes; “save you from shaming the folk who love you by taking your place at the Oak of Mivoie.”

Had the veriest spark of nobleness been left alive in him that moment, Robin would have risen up with generous shame, compelled towards courage by Bertrand’s chivalry. But the meaner powers were in the ascendant, and the dread of death made him blind to his own littleness. Even Bertrand saw the look of relief upon his face as he scrambled up, evading Du Guesclin’s eyes.

“Messire Bertrand, this is too good of you—”

A contortion of contempt swept over Bertrand’s face. The lad was pleased to approve the sacrifice and mildly call it “good.”

“Don’t thank me, messire. Take off your armor. We are much of a size. The fesse of silver shall make a show at Mivoie.”

Robin obeyed him, secret exultation stifling shame.

“I shall not forget this, Bertrand.”

“Nor shall I!”

“Beaumanoir will think that something has hindered you.”

“Ah, no doubt.”

Bertrand’s brows contracted as he gave the lad a look that should have let light into his soul. Robin seemed glib enough with his excuses.

“Do not think that I am doing this for your sake, Messire Robin Raguenel.”

“No?” and the coward looked astonished at the words.

“I am thinking of your father and your sister at La Bellière. They love you, Robin, and God knows I am loved by no one. Therefore, I remember the love they have for you, for no one will grieve if Bertrand du Guesclin gathers shame.”

Robin looked at him vacantly. So wrapped up was he in his own troubles that he did not realize the greatness of Bertrand’s sacrifice.

“Oh, it will work very well,” he stammered.

“You think so? Thanks.”

“We can say that your horse fell lame. And if you keep your visor down no one will know you. Besides, you are strong enough to fight any man who gives you the lie.”

Bertrand ground his teeth over the ease with which the lad contrived it all. By the blood of God! did the fool think that it was easy for a strong man to throw away the chance he had longed and prayed for? Bertrand knew what men would say of him, and that the public tongue is as uncharitable as it is false.

“Unbuckle my arm pieces.”

He rapped the words out as though the uttering of them gave him relief. Robin skipped forward to complete the sacrifice. He was still possessed by a blind and selfish joy.

“I will help to make the tale sound honest for you,” he said.

Bertrand’s shoulders heaved.

“You are quick enough with your wits,” he answered. “Come, listen to me. I know this road; there is a low inn not five miles from here, set back in an empty quarry. Hide there till we have fought at Mivoie.”

Bertrand was curt and peremptory enough; Robin understood him, and looked sullenly at the grass.

“What if you are killed?” he asked.

The utter coolness of the question staggered Bertrand, despite the revelations of the last hour.

“Who thinks of being killed!”

“Croquart will strike at you.”

“And am I afraid of Croquart? If I were to fall the trick would be discovered. You have scented that out, eh, you little fox! No, lie quiet in your hole till I ride back.”

“And then?”

Bertrand bit his lips.

“God knows, so far as I am concerned!” he said.

In half an hour the transformation was complete. He took Robin’s shield upon his arm (the fesse argent on an azure ground), but kept his own horse and his heavy axe that hung at the saddle-bow. Robin melted somewhat when the time for parting came. He tried to embrace Du Guesclin, but Bertrand would have none of the lad’s gratitude.

“Off, sir, you owe me nothing; it is your father’s honor that I cherish, and the vow I made your sister. Keep up the mockery, messire: you are Bertrand du Guesclin, skulking in the woods of Loudeac.”

And with a grim face he climbed into the saddle and, pricking in the spurs, went off at a canter.

When he had gone Robin sat down sullenly under a tree and watched Bertrand disappear over the open moor. He was beginning to hate himself, yet his gross cowardice still held him firmly by the throat. Rising at last, he took his lame horse and began to lead the beast wearily along the road, for Bertrand’s armor was heavy on him, and his heart sick over the whole coil. But Bertrand rode eastward over the moors, bearing Robin’s shield, and thinking of Tiphaïne and the shame she would hear of him.

XXI

THE Josselin Moors were golden with gorse and broom when Beaumanoir’s banner, with its eleven argent billets on an azure ground, was unfurled beneath the Oak of Mivoie. He had ridden out from Josselin with the seigneurs and mesne lords who had gathered to the place, the champions of Mivoie being marked out from the rest by wearing broom flower in their helmets. With the Marshal rode the Sieur de Tinteniac, as noble a gentleman as ever feutred a spear; Geoffroi Dubois, called by some “The Wolf”; Sir Yves de Charrual, Carro de Bodegat, and many more. A great rabble of peasantry followed them over the moors, beating up the dust from the highway with the tramp of their many feet. Along the road they were joined by knots of people—village flocks, each following its parish priest. The heart of all Brittany was in the combat, and the faint pealing of the bells of Josselin borne on the western wind seemed to speak forth the passion of the poor.

Beaumanoir’s trumpets were screaming when Bertrand came trotting over the moors towards the oak. He had tarried late in Josselin for the safeguarding of his deceit, meaning to take his place in the ranks at the last hour. Twice that morning he had nearly been discovered—once by a Breton captain who had recognized his voice, and again by one of his old free companions loitering outside an inn. Bertrand had taken to the open moors, passing the groups of hurrying peasant folk on his way, and waving his shield to them as they cheered Sir Robin of Dinan riding to keep troth with the Sieur de Beaumanoir.

There was much bracing of armor and handling of weapons when Bertrand pushed through the press towards the oak. He had left his horse close by with some peasants on the moor, and a herald was calling the roll of those chosen. Robin Raguenel’s name was shouted out as Bertrand came up with his visor down. He waved Robin’s shield above his head, so that the fesse of silver should speak for itself.

Bertrand drew back under the boughs of the oak, and pretended to be busy bracing up his armor. Over the moors he could see the English spears glinting in the sunlight along the road from Ploermel. They came on gallantly, these dreaded English, with Bamborough’s banner blowing in the van. Bertrand’s eyes wandered towards the silent peasant folk gathered like sheep upon the moors. He took heart as he thought how these men of the soil had suffered, and that he was not fighting for mere selfish fame. The broader issue quenched for the moment the smart and bitterness of his own self-sacrifice.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin.”

It was the herald’s voice calling his name, and Bertrand had been waiting for that cry for hours. He stood up and looked round calmly at the burnished bassinets and painted shields, feeling like a man who watches his own burial in a dream. A second time he heard the herald call his name, and saw the knights and squires look questioningly from man to man. Silence had fallen under the great oak. The Sieur de Beaumanoir was speaking to the gentlemen about him, and in the lull Bertrand could hear their words.

“I am loath to mistrust the man, yet he has failed us and sent no warning.”

“A mere spoil-hunting vagabond,” said Yves de Charrual. “I know the fellow.”

“The oath was given him by Xaintré.”

“True; then this is treachery.”

“The dog shall have the truth from me,” quoth Carro de Bodegat, a flamboyant gentleman whom Bertrand had once wounded in a duel.

Bertrand stood by in Robin’s armor, grinding his teeth as he listened to all they said. How ready they were to damn him as a traitor, these proud ones who had never known how long he had waited for such a chance as this! Even his doggedness could hardly take their taunts in silence; he longed to throw his visor up and give Charrual and Bodegat the lie. Only one lord spoke up for him before the rest, the Sieur de Tinteniac, asking why a brave man should be slandered without full knowledge of the truth. Bertrand loved Tinteniac for these words, and vowed in his heart that they should be repaid.

Meanwhile Beaumanoir had called an esquire forward, Guillaume de Montauban by name, and given him the honor that Du Guesclin had forfeited. Bertrand stood listening to the casual ignominy that was being flung by those about him at his courage. Even when challenged as Robin Raguenel, and asked for a judgment concerning his own honor, he grimaced behind his visor, and answered gruffly that he would not condemn a Breton man unheard.

The sacrament of the mass came to silence all these cavilling tongues. Bertrand knelt with the rest, grim and silent, wondering whether Robin guessed how much this ordeal meant to him. He covered the mezail of his bassinet with his hand when he lifted the visor and took the bread. His one prayer was that this dallying should not be long, for he was fierce and ready for the English swords. Soon the Gloria had been sung, and the priest, facing eastward under the oak, had offered the Gratio ad Complendum.

“Ite, missa est!” came the cry. And a hundred strong voices shouted, “Deo Gratias!”

The English were drawn up where the highway to Ploermel broadened into a smooth stretch of grass and sand. Croquart and five Netherlanders were to fight for Bamborough, also four Bretons, for the true-born English mustered but twenty. Bamborough, who had stood laughing and jesting while the Bretons were hearing mass, turned to his “thirty,” and gave them his last words.

“Sirs,” he said, “I have read in Merlin’s books that we shall have the victory. Let us kill or take Beaumanoir and his men and carry them prisoners to Edward our king.”

Beaumanoir, more devout and less boastful, kissed the cross of his sword, and held it high above his head.

“Friends, may God make us increase in virtue. Keep a good countenance, and hold fast together.”

The sun streamed out from behind a cloud when the two bristling banks of steel surged towards each other over the heather. St. George and St. Ives, good saints, were hailed perforce into the struggle. The dust smoked up into the sunlight so that those who watched the fight could see but vaguely how matters sped. Sword and axe, mace and bill, clashed and tossed like the play of counter-currents in some narrow strait. Shields were cloven, plumes shorn away, men thrown down and trampled underfoot. Through the drifting dust the armed figures flashed like flames struggling through a pall of smoke.

From the first rush the English party had the upper hand, being bigger men and more hardened to the trade of arms. Croquart the Fleming broke to and fro, charging like a boar, hurling men aside, and making the shields and steel plates ring with the thunder of his heavy mace. He hunted out Bertrand in the press, and beat him down with a side blow on the bassinet. It was the Sieur de Tinteniac who sprang forward over Bertrand’s body, and held Croquart back till the fesse of silver shone out again.

“Grace to you, sire!” And Bertrand flew at the Fleming with his axe, but lost his man in the shifting of the fight.

For two full hours the moil went on till sheer exhaustion forced the wolves of war apart. They drew back to gain breath, some dazed like men half drunk, leaning on each other, grasping and staggering over the heath. Two Bretons were dead, many wounded, and three prisoners under Bamborough’s banner. The honor as yet was with the English; even Bertrand confessed it grudgingly as he leaned upon his axe.

The Sieur de Tinteniac came stumbling up to him, his visor up, his face gray, his eyes glazed.

“Give me a prop, Robin,” he said; “I have no breath in me. Curse these English, they have the devil in their bodies.”

Bertrand put his arm about Tinteniac’s body, his heart warm towards the man who had spoken for him before the rest.

“Wait, sire,” he said, grinding his teeth, “we have not finished with Bamborough yet.”

Tinteniac leaned on him, looking curiously at the eyes that showed through the visor.

“You sound hoarse as an old hound, Robin,” he said.

“My throat is dry,” and Bertrand turned away his head.

On came the English, massed in a solid wedge of steel. Tinteniac roused himself, their shouts stirring him like the scream of a trumpet. Bertrand kept close to him, knowing that the strong man was weak and wounded, and that he could cover him with Robin’s shield.

In the thick of the fight Bamborough of Ploermel had grappled the Sieur de Beaumanoir, and was dragging him by sheer strength from the mêlée.

“Surrender, Beaumanoir! I’ll send you a prisoner to my lady love!”

Bertrand and Tinteniac sprang forward for a rescue, Du Guesclin bringing the governor of Ploermel to earth with a down stroke of his axe. Tinteniac’s sword ended the argument; Bamborough’s head fell away from the hacked and bleeding neck.

Beaumanoir had freed himself, and was up, shaking his sword.

“St. Ives,” he cried, “Bamborough is dead! Courage, Bretons, and the day is ours!”

Croquart the Fleming seized on Bamborough’s authority, and, closing up his men, charged the Bretons and bore them slowly back. Strive as they would, Bertrand and the stoutest of them were driven to the very shadow of the great oak. The crowd of watchers went swaying and scrambling back from the eddying ripples of that pool of death. The sweat and clangor awed the peasantry, though a hoarse shout of despair went up when the Sieur de Beaumanoir’s banner lurched down into the dust.

Then came a second pause for breath, the English waiting like dogs to make their last dash at the wounded stag. Beaumanoir, drenched with blood, his strength failing because of the fast he had kept before mass, leaned upon Bodegat and called for wine.

“Drink your own blood, Beaumanoir!” cried Dubois, half mad with his wounds. “Courage, sirs, there is hope in us yet!”

It was then that young Guillaume de Montauban, whom Beaumanoir had chosen, ran away towards his horse, his comrades cursing him for a coward as he stumbled over the moor.

“Take care of your own work,” shouted the youngster, as he scrambled into the saddle, “and I, before God, will take care of mine!”

He swung round and, thrusting in the spurs, rode for the English at a gallop. His heavy horse broke through with a crash, scattering the war dogs, and leaving many floundering, cumbered and weighed down by their heavy harness. Geoffroi Dubois sprang forward as he grasped the ruse. The Bretons, rallying together, charged down upon the English before they could recover. The wedge of steel was rent asunder, the men whom Montauban had overthrown made easy prisoners as they struggled to rise.

Croquart and a few fought on until the end, but, hemmed in and outnumbered, they surrendered sullenly to Beaumanoir.

“Well, sirs, you have won by treachery,” said Calverly, throwing down his sword. And though the Bretons shouted him into silence, there was the sting of truth in the “free companion’s” words.

Bertrand, bleeding from a sword-cut in the thigh, forced his way through the peasant folk who came crowding over the moors. Some of them clung round him, and kissed his shield and harness, even the bloody axe he carried in his hand. Bertrand forced them aside as gently as he could, and marched on towards the heather-clad knoll where two country fellows were holding his horse. He heard a voice calling him as he climbed into the saddle, and, turning, saw the Sieur de Tinteniac staggering over the heath. Bertrand had saved Tinteniac’s life more than once in the last struggle, and the brave fellow was eager to take the supposed Robin by the hand.

Bertrand wavered a moment as he remembered how Tinteniac had spoken up for him before them all. Then, waving his hand, he clapped in the spurs, and went at a canter over the moors to Josselin.

Hungry and weary as he was, he rode into the town to get food and wine at an inn. Men, women, and children, who had been watching on the walls, came crowding round him at the gate. A man-at-arms had read Bertrand’s shield, and it was noised from mouth to mouth that Sir Robin of Dinan had ridden back from Mivoie.

“News, messire! What news?”

Bertrand looked down at the eager, crowding faces, and saw the ripple of exultation that spread about him as he threw them the good news like a stone into a pool. Some went down on their knees and prayed; others jigged to and fro like roisterers at a fair; even the children shouted and clapped their hands.

Freeing himself with difficulty from the people, Bertrand broke away down a side street and drew up before a common tavern. The place was empty save for one old woman, who served Bertrand as he sat in the dirty room, pondering on the irony of it all—that he should be the man to bring the good news to Josselin. Begging linen from the old woman, he unbuckled the cuishe from his right thigh, poured in wine, and bound up the wound. Then he gave the dame some money, mounted his horse, and rode for the western gate.

All Josselin was in an uproar as Bertrand trotted through the streets. Mounted men had come in from Mivoie, cheering and waving branches of broom. Bells were pealing, townsfolk and peasantry shouting and crowding in the narrow streets. They thronged round Bertrand and nearly dragged him from his horse, striving to touch even his surcoat and armor, and shouting their blessings on Sir Robin of Dinan. Bertrand, facing the mockery of it all, won through them patiently, and came to the gate that led towards Loudeac.

“Du Guesclin played the coward” were the last words he heard as he rode from Josselin towards the west.

XXII

EVENING had come when Bertrand neared the quarry on the road to Loudeac, where Robin Raguenel lay hid. A path ran from the main track and wound through the woods, leaving the open moorland sweeping—a wave of gold into the west. It was one of those rare passings of the day in spring when strangeness and mystery were everywhere, brooding on the dream hills against the splendid sky, watching for the night in the windless woodways of the forest. The song of the birds went up towards the sunset, tumultuous, and borne upon the wings of joy. Yet to Bertrand the beauty of it all was but a mockery, even as the dawn mocks the eyes of a man dying in his youth.

The inn, a mere hovel with rotting thatch and sagging beams, stood at the mouth of the quarry with a dirty stable yard behind it. The greater part of the quarry was tangled with brushwood, a few patches of coarse grass closing in a strip of shallow soil where the inn folk grew their vegetables. A Breton lass, brown-legged and bare-armed, was hoeing in the garden when Bertrand rode up towards the inn. Robin, sitting on a block of stone, was talking to the girl, making love to her for lack of else to do. The girl’s black eyes and insolent mouth were charms that might make a man forget for the moment thoughts that were troubling to his conscience. She returned Robin as good as he gave, laughing, and tossing back her hair as she plied her hoe, her bare feet sinking into the soil.

Bertrand, riding into the dirty yard behind the inn, broke like an unwelcome elder brother upon Robin philandering with this Breton Hebe. A few ragged chickens scurried away from Bertrand’s horse. An ass brayed at him over the door of a byre, and a couple of pigs rooting in the offal went grunting surlily towards a dung heap.

Bertrand looked round him, saw the girl leaning on her hoe, one hand stretched out to slap the boyish face that had ventured near in quest of favors. She dropped her hoe on catching sight of the strange knight in the yard, and came forward to take his horse. An old woman appeared at the back door of the inn, and screamed peevishly at her daughter. Bertrand dismounted and let the girl tether his horse to a post in the yard.

Robin Raguenel had recognized his own shield with a start and a flush, the amorous glint gone from his eyes in a moment. His sulky face betrayed the meaner thoughts that had been working in his heart, and that he had dreaded the hour of Du Guesclin’s return. He had begun to hate Bertrand because Bertrand had been a witness of his shame. He hated him for the very sacrifice he had made, his ungenerous and thin-blooded nature revolting at the thought that Bertrand held him in his power. The debt had transformed Robin into a mean and grudging enemy. Self-pity and disgust at his own impotence had destroyed any feeling such as gratitude, and he was ready to quarrel with the man who had renounced so much to save him.

Bertrand left his horse with the girl and went towards Robin, who was digging his heels into the turf and looking as though he would have given much to escape the meeting. He made no pretence of welcome, but stood sulky and ill at ease, all the rebellious littleness of his soul puffing itself out against the man who had made him such a debtor.

Bertrand, puzzled, and suspecting nothing in the breadth and simplicity of his heart, scanned Robin’s face, finding no gladness thereon, no gratitude in the eyes.

“So you have come back?”

The antagonism was instinctive in those few curt words. Bertrand’s out-stretched hand dropped. He looked hard at Robin, as though baffled by the lad’s manner.

“We have beaten the English,” he said, quietly.

“Have you?”

“Yes; not a man discovered the trick. The honor of the De Bellières stands as it stood before.”

Probably it was the ring of reproach in Bertrand’s voice that stung the lad through his sullen reserve. He took five sharp paces forward, and stood grimacing, and beating one foot upon the grass.

“So, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, you flatter yourself that you have done a brave thing!”

Bertrand stared at him.

“I have saved your honor,” he said, bluntly.

“Of course! of course!”

“And heard myself cursed for a coward and a traitor.”

Robin swung round, and began to pad to and fro, his face dead white, his teeth working against his lips. He was mad with Bertrand, mad with himself, mad with fate for having twisted him into such a corner. It never entered his head for the moment that Bertrand had suffered, and would suffer yet more.

“You expect me to grovel at your feet, messire,” he blurted.

Bertrand flushed under his bassinet.

“I have not asked for your thanks, Robin.”

“No, and I tell you that I have cursed myself because, like a fool, I let you have my arms.”

Bertrand’s face went hard as stone. He looked at Robin, and understood of a sudden that the lad loathed him now that his honor had been saved at Mivoie. He felt himself in Bertrand’s power, and had not the magnanimity to confess that the whole tangled coil was of his own weaving. Bertrand gulped down his scorn as he realized the truth.

“Your courage comes two days late,” said Bertrand, holding his anger back.

Robin whipped round on him like a wild-cat at bay.

“Curse you! Why did you meddle with me? Curse Beaumanoir, curse Bamborough and his English! I should have fought at Mivoie if my damned horse had not fallen lame.”

Bertrand’s lips curled.

“Don’t blame the poor beast, Robin,” he said.

“Ha, you call me a liar! I tell you, messire, I never lamed my horse. It was your doubting me that cut me to the quick. And then when you had wounded me in the heart you scoffed and sneered. I tell you it was your taunts that took my strength away at Loudeac.”

He jigged to and fro in his hysterical fury, spluttering, snapping his teeth, jerking his arms about. It was plain enough to Bertrand whence all this froth and ferment came. The lad was mad with him for what he had done and also for what he knew.

“Come,” he said, quietly, bolting up his scorn. “Come, Robin, I never thought to hear you speak like this.”

Robin still chattered like an angry ape.

“No, no; you thought I should grovel and fall at your knees, eh! Yes, you are a fine fellow, Bertrand du Guesclin, but, by God, I am not going to wallow at your feet! Give me back my armor; give me back my armor, and be damned to you! Go and tell all the duchy that Robin Raguenel played the coward.”

Bertrand looked at him as Christ might have looked at Judas. The lad’s squealing passion filled him with bitterness and disgust. It was difficult to believe that this was Tiphaïne’s brother.

“Fool,” he said, speaking with a self-control that was fiercer than any clamor, “it is for those who love you that I have done this thing! What shame I bear, I bear it for their sakes, not for yours. Take back your arms. I shall suffer for them long enough.”

He took Robin’s shield, scarred and dented by the English swords at Mivoie, and threw it on its face at Robin’s feet. Then, without a word, he began to unbuckle the borrowed harness, piling it on the grass beside the shield. Robin watched him, biting his nails, the futile fury dying down in him like a fire built of straw. The scorn of Bertrand’s silence sobered him as he idled to and fro not daring to offer to help Bertrand to disarm.

The girl looked out at them inquisitively from the back door of the inn. Robin shouted to her, bidding her bring the armor that lay in his room. She drew her white face in, and returned anon with Bertrand’s shield slung about her neck, her arms and bosom full of steel. Bertrand glanced up at her, and at the sight of his ugly face, made more grim and terrible by its pent-up passion, she dropped the armor with a clatter on the grass and, throwing down the shield, skipped away, after darting out her tongue at Robin. Bertrand had put off the last piece of young Raguenel’s harness. He stood up and stretched himself, and tightened the bandage about his thigh.

Robin’s face had grown weak and irresolute once more. His blood had cooled, and he remembered how much he lay at Bertrand’s mercy.

“You are wounded,” he blurted, seizing the chance of breaking the reserve of this grim and silent man.

Bertrand picked up his hauberk, but did not look at Robin.

“Take my wallet,” he said, curtly.

The lad gave him a vacant stare.

“There, on the saddle. Get the folk within to fill it.”

Robin loitered a moment, but, finding that Bertrand paid no heed to him, he slunk away across the yard towards the place where Bertrand’s horse was tethered. When he returned, after having the wallet filled at the inn, Bertrand stood again in his own armor, with the eagle of the Du Guesclins on his arm. He pointed Robin back towards the horse.

“Strap the bag on; get water, and a feed of corn.”

“Messire Bertrand, I am not your groom.”

A look persuaded him. Robin parleyed no further, but turned to feed and water Du Guesclin’s horse. Bertrand came and watched him at the work, silent and unapproachable, ignoring Robin’s restless glances and his jerky and almost cringing manner.

“What am I to say to them at La Bellière?”

“What you will.”

Robin lifted up the bucket for the horse to drink. His eyes were half dim with tears, his mouth weak and petulant.

“Won’t you help me, Messire Bertrand?”

“To keep up the lie, eh!”

Robin hung his head.

“You must know how we won the day at Mivoie, and how Sir Robin Raguenel saved the honor of Brittany.”

Robin winced, flushed like a girl, but stood listening while Bertrand told him all that had passed at Mivoie: who were slain, who were wounded and taken prisoners, how Tinteniac and Beaumanoir fought, and how Montauban broke the English ranks. Robin heard all without one flash of pride or gladness. Humiliation was heavy on him, and he had no joy in this Breton victory. When Bertrand had made an end, he stood with the empty bucket dangling in his hand, listless, and without will.

“Bertrand”—Du Guesclin’s foot was in the stirrup—“where—where are you going?”

The strong man drew a deep breath, but mastered himself in an instant.

“Where God wills,” he said.

He lifted himself into the saddle, setting his teeth as his wound twinged, and, turning his horse, rode out from the yard. Robin stood like one in a stupor. It was only when the eagle of the Du Guesclins flashed out to meet the sunset that he gave a shrill cry and sprang after Bertrand, holding out his hands.

“Bertrand! Bertrand!”

Du Guesclin did not turn his head. Robin ran on and caught him by the stirrup.

“Bertrand, forgive me; I will tell the truth—”

“Back, lad, back.”

“Bertrand!”

Du Guesclin clapped in the spurs, and, bending down, tore Robin’s hand from the stirrup.

“We have thrown the dice,” he said, “and the throw must count. Go back to La Bellière; the truth is safe with me.”

He cantered off, leaving Robin alone before the inn, mute and miserable as he thought of the lies he had made for his own mouth.

XXIII

AT La Bellière the Vicomte’s trumpeters stood in the great court betwixt the hall and the gate-house, and set the walls and turrets ringing.

“Mivoie! Mivoie! Mivoie!” the echoes wailed. “Mivoie! Mivoie!” croaked the jackdaws that roosted in the great octagonal chimneys. “Mivoie!” cried the serving-men, as they carried the lavers and napkins into the hall. La Bellière kept festival in Robin’s honor, and every scullion in the kitchen had pieces of silver in his pocket.

The Vicomte’s neighbors, unlike the folk in Biblical history, had ridden in to give the old man joy of his son. There was much washing of hands in the great hall, where the basins were being carried round before the meal by the Vicomte’s servants. The tables were covered with white napery, the walls hung with rich cloth and embroidered hangings, the floor strewn with fresh rushes, primroses, wind flowers, and wild violets. Robin, dressed in a surcoat of green stuff threaded through with gold and with a posy of bay leaves tucked into his girdle, sat in the place of honor at the high table. Tiphaïne, in white samite worked with gold, had come down the stairway from the solar, looking joyous and splendid, with the dames and maidens following in their silks and sarcenets. There were lute-players and men with viols and citherns in the gallery. The trumpets rang out as the servants came in from the screens, bearing the dishes garnished with bays and herbs to the tables.

The Breton gentry had pressed about Robin and his father, pleasing old Stephen in the praising of his son. Robin, feeling like a thief, had made light of the whole matter, meeting almost with impatience the flattery they gave him. He was glad when Father Guillaume stood up to say grace, pattering out his Latin to the edification of few. Stephen Raguenel stood with his hand upon Robin’s shoulder. When Father Guillaume had blessed the puddings—and craved a lively appetite from heaven—the Vicomte lifted his son’s shield, and showed the battered fesse of silver with all the pride of a paternal Jove.

“The grace of our Lady and the blessings of the saints be with you, kinsmen and friends,” he said. “Look at this shield, and you may see how God has blessed me in sending my lad safe through such a shower of blows.”

Robin, fidgeting from foot to foot, felt the eyes of all fixed upon his face. What a terror it was to fear the glances of his fellows and to imagine doubt in every heart! He passed for a modest fellow by reason of his blushes, the men liking him no less because he seemed not to relish the way the Vicomte trumpeted his valor. Robin frowned when his father called for the mazer bowl, enamelled with the arms of the De Bellières and banded with silver. Stephen Raguenel held it in both hands and pledged Robin, and sent the mazer round the tables that the guests might drink good luck to his son. On the silver band of the mazer were engraved the words, “Keep troth,” and Robin remembered them, to his cost.

The devil mocked Robin Raguenel that day, taunting him even from his father’s happy face, and turning to scorn the pride in Tiphaïne’s eyes. “Mivoie! Mivoie! Mivoie!” screamed the trumpets in the court, till Robin sent a servant to tell the men to cease their din. Wine came to him, and he drank it, feverishly, fiercely, yet feeling his tongue dry with the lies he had poured into his father’s ears. Behind him, held by a man-at-arms, shone the shield that Bertrand du Guesclin had carried.

Yeolande of Lehon, Robin’s betrothed, sat next him at the high table and ate from the same plate. The girl was very proud of her man before them all, and took no pains to disguise her pride. Her very enthusiasm refined Robin’s torture, for she could not hear enough of the fight at Mivoie, and pestered the lad till he could have cursed her to her face. “How many men had he killed?” “Who were the bravest among the Bretons?” “Who were knighted?” “Would the Sieur de Beaumanoir die of his wounds?” Robin, half mad with inward terror and vexation, described twenty things he had never seen, and tangled his wits in a veritable web of fiction.

The great “ship” was rolling along the table on its gilt wheels, ladened with sweetmeats and spices, when Sir Raoul de Resay, a kinsman of Robin’s, leaned forward across Yeolande’s bosom, and touched Robin’s arm with the silver handle of his knife.

“Messire, a word with you,” he said.

Robin turned to him, ready to be accused at any moment of being a liar and a coward.

“Is it true what they are saying of Bertrand du Guesclin?”

“True! What are they saying, messire?”

Robin was as red as the wine in his cup.

“Why, that Bertrand played the coward and never came to Mivoie.”

Raoul de Resay’s eyes marked Robin’s flushed cheeks and the tremulous movement of his lips. He misread the meaning of the lad’s hot color, thinking that it was the badge royal of a generous heart.

“No, by God, Raoul, Bertrand du Guesclin did not play the coward! His horse fell lame near Loudeac. I left him in the woods there, and have not seen him since.”

Yeolande of Lehon touched Robin’s arms.

“I like to see you flush up like that,” she said, “when a brother in arms is slandered.”

“Slandered! Who spoke of slander, madame?” And Raoul de Resay took the taunt to heart. “I have known cowards, but Bertrand du Guesclin is not one of them.”

For three long hours Robin suffered from the good-will of his friends, and even when La Bellière was free of them, the lad still had his father to torment him with affection. Stephen Raguenel had the ways and whims of an old man. Like a child, he was never tired of hearing the same tale retold. Robin was dragged into the solar, held at bay in the broad window-seat, and catechised tenderly till the truth itself was torn to tatters. The lad writhed inwardly under the ordeal, finding each lie the more bitter to his lips. He escaped from the old man at last, and went out into the orchard, letting his hot face cool in the wind.

It was under the apple-trees that Tiphaïne found him, tossing twigs into the pool that reflected the budding bloom above. Robin had said no word to her of Bertrand’s breaking of his oath. She had heard it spoken of for the first time at the high table by Raoul de Resay and others. Hot and angry, she had given the lie to young Prosper of Dinan, who had called Bertrand a coward, and had silenced those who cavilled thoughtlessly at Du Guesclin’s honor.

Robin saw her through the trees and cursed her to himself, guessing that his hypocrisy was to be tested once more. Tiphaïne did not see the spasm of pain that passed across her brother’s face. She was troubled for Bertrand, and angry when she remembered how the spruce young squires had sat in lordly and complacent judgment on a man whom not one of them would have dared to face in arms.

“Robin, they tell me Bertrand did not fight at Mivoie.”

Robin groaned in spirit, and marched out the weary troop of lies once more, watching his sister’s face as she stood leaning against the trunk of an apple-tree. He saw that she was troubled, and, like the guilty coward that he was, began to wonder whether she suspected him.

“Robin, this is bad news to me.”

The lad was breaking twigs from a bough above his head.

“You do not know how much this meant to Bertrand! He had prayed for such honor—prayed for it night and day.”

So absorbed was she for the moment that the rush of shame into her brother’s eyes passed unnoticed. Tiphaïne had turned and stood looking at the pool, whose still waters reflected the apple-boughs and the burning clouds above.

Robin recovered himself and began to whistle.

“A man cannot help a lame horse,” he said.

“A lame horse would not keep Bertrand from Mivoie.”

Robin stopped his whistling, and appeared absorbed in watching the hovering of a hawk above the fields. The bird’s wings were palpitating in the light of the setting sun. She swooped suddenly and dropped from sight below the trees.

“Something has happened to Bertrand.”

Robin started, and pretended not to have understood her.

“Happened!”

“Yes. Bertrand would rather have died than break troth at such an hour.”

The tortures of the day seemed to culminate for Robin at that moment. He had always feared his sister in a measure, and stood half in awe of her stronger will and the unflinching candor of her eyes. Her words were innocent enough, and yet they seemed like knots of steel that wring the truth from some wretch judged to the torture.

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“Perhaps. How should I know? I have had no news of Bertrand since I left him in the woods by Loudeac.”

For the first time Tiphaïne noticed the curious restlessness of her brother’s eyes.

“Robin, you are not yourself.”

He laughed and swept his hand through his hair.

“I spent too much of myself at Mivoie. I am dead tired. What can you expect?”

She looked at him keenly, knitting her brows a little, as though she had caught a falseness in his words.

“Robin, are you hiding anything from me?”

“Hiding! What should I hide?” and his eyes flashed out at her.

“How did Bertrand’s horse fall lame?”

“Stabbed in the foot by a stake.”

“And then?”

“I had to leave him. On my soul, Tiphaïne, I am not a prophet. I cannot tell you what I do not know.”

They heard the Vicomte’s voice calling them from the house, and Robin, trembling like a man saved from death, clutched at the reprieve, and walked back through the orchard. Tiphaïne followed him, slowly, thoughtfully, playing with her silver-sheathed poniard, her eyes fixed upon the ground. Some instinct warned her that Robin had not given her the truth, and she was troubled for Bertrand, wondering what had hindered him from keeping troth with Beaumanoir.

* * * * *

It was the third night after he had left Robin that Bertrand, who had eaten nothing all day, saw the flicker of a fire shining through the trees before him. The cloud of fatalism had thickened about him as the night came down over the tangled woodways of the forest. All the past had risen up before him: the savage sorrows of his boyhood, the coming of Tiphaïne the child, the tournament at Rennes. The years of rough adventure he had spent had seemed only to taunt him with failure and with bitterness. He had thought also of dead Arletta, and how the poor child had died in the autumn deeps of dark Broceliande. Brooding on the past, he had come to think that God’s wrath was heavy on him, and that he was cursed, like Cain, because of his stubborn heart. He had ridden on and on, letting his horse bear him where it would, feeling neither thirst nor hunger nor the weight of his heavy harness. He had drawn out his poniard and felt the point thereof calmly, sullenly, with a balancing of the evils of life and death. He still held the knife in his hand when he sighted the fire, the flames upcurled like the petals of a great flower.

Bertrand reined in and sat motionless in the saddle, his eyes fixed upon the fire. Possibly there was something elemental in the red and restless play thereof, something that flashed comfort into Bertrand’s heart. He clapped his poniard back into its sheath and rode on slowly, his jaded horse pricking up his ears and tugging at the bridle as though scenting water.

Three figures started up from about the fire as Bertrand rode out from under the shadows of the trees. He could see that they were peasants, two men and a girl, and that they were as shy and timid as hunted deer. The younger of the two men brandished a short cudgel, but there was no fight in the poor devils; the English wars had broken the spirit of the Breton poor.

Bertrand shouted to them and waved his hand, wondering at the hoarseness of his own voice.

“A friend! a friend!”

He rode up towards the fire, the light flashing on his armor and weaving giant shadows about his horse. The peasants kept their distance, dread of the mailed fist inbred in their hearts.

Bertrand showed them the eagle on his shield.

“Come, I am a Breton man; you need not run from me. I want food and a place by your fire.”

They came forward grudgingly, one to hold his horse, the other to help him from the saddle. So stiff and faint was he that Bertrand staggered when he touched the earth, and sank down with a groan beside the fire.

The two men stood staring at him stupidly, and it was the girl whose instinct answered to the appeal. She knelt down by Bertrand, to find that he had fainted, his face showing gray and haggard through the mezail of his bassinet. She called to the two men, and they brought her a stone flask full of cider, and helped her to unfasten the laces of Bertrand’s helmet. The girl sat down and lifted Bertrand’s head into her lap. She poured some of the cider between his lips, the woman in her pitying him and taking charge of his wounded manhood. She was still bending over him when Bertrand recovered consciousness, and he felt her hands smoothing back his hair. Rough and toil-lined as her face was, there was something soft and gentle in the eyes. Above him hung this peasant woman’s face—one warm touch against the stolid darkness of the forest. And what did Bertrand do but break down and weep.

The girl held his head in her lap awhile, wonderingly and in silence, till he struggled up, and, looking round him shamefacedly, asked surlily for food. They gave him coarse bread, swine’s flesh, and more cider. He ate ravenously, saying nothing, the peasants watching him, awed by a something they did not understand. Presently Bertrand pointed to his horse; the men caught his meaning, and went to unsaddle the beast and give him water. The girl had turned away, and was throwing sticks upon the fire.

Bertrand called to her when he had finished the last crust that they had given him.

“Child, come hither.”

She turned and stood silent before him, while Bertrand fumbled for the purse he carried at his belt.

“Your name; tell it me.”

“Marie, lording—Marie of the Marshes.”

Bertrand threw her money, with a twist of the hand.

“Take it for the food; God’s blessing go with it. You have done me good, child; now let me sleep.”

And sleep he did, like one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.

The dawn was breaking when Bertrand woke beside the peasant’s fire and heard the birds singing in the thickets. A soft haze of light filled the east, and there were mottlings of crimson above the trees. Bertrand lay still awhile, watching the gold glint of the sunrise through the crowded trunks, while the dew glittered on the green turf and the birds sang lustily. He found that the peasant folk had covered him with an old cloak, and that simple touch of sympathy went to Bertrand’s heart.

The girl Marie came out of the woods singing a Breton song and carrying a bundle of sticks in her bosom. She threw them on the fire, and looked at Bertrand as he sat up and felt his wounded thigh. The night’s rest had put new strength and courage into him. He was no longer the fatalist drugged with the opiate of despair. The golden splendor of the woods, the blue sky, the glistening dew gave a sparkle to life and stirred the joy of being in him.

Scrambling up, he thanked the girl for the cloak, and, looking round him, asked for his horse. Marie of the Marshes pointed to where the beast was tethered, under the shadow of a great beech. Some fifty yards away Bertrand saw a stream flashing through clumps of rushes and tufts of waving sedge. He went down to it and dashed water over his face and neck, finding his wound less painful and the muscles less stiff and sore.

As he walked back to the fire the two peasants came out of the woods with a couple of rabbits they had snared. Bertrand turned to them like an old campaigner and helped the fellows to skin the rabbits and sling an iron pot over the fire. They lost their shyness as he worked with them, for there was a frankness in Bertrand’s manner that appealed to these men of the soil.

They were in the middle of the meal, seated round the fire, with the girl Marie next to Bertrand, when they heard a shout from the woods and saw a bandy-legged old fellow, very ragged and dirty, running towards them over the grass. He had a holly-wood cudgel in his hand, and was followed by a dog that looked more like a wolf, with its long snout, lean build, and bristling coat. The girl started up and kissed the old man on the mouth, a duty that Bertrand did not envy her. After bobbing his head to Bertrand, he came and sat himself down by the fire, while Marie fished a rabbit’s leg out of the pot for him.

When he had gnawed away the flesh in very primitive fashion, he threw the bone to the dog and wiped his greasy beard on the back of his hand. The dog, after crunching the bone, came snuffing round Bertrand, his ears back, his tawny eyes fixed suspiciously on Du Guesclin’s face.

“Ban, you devil, down! down! Pardon, lording, the dog must have his smell at strangers.”

Bertrand held out his hand to the beast, snapping his fingers and looking straight in the dog’s eyes. His absolute fearlessness satisfied the animal, for he gave a wag of the tail, grinned, and wrinkled up his snout, and curled himself complacently against Bertrand’s legs.

“He scents a true Breton,” said Du Guesclin, with a laugh. “Any news on the road, friend?”

The old man was studying Bertrand.

“Well, lording, the broom flower is in bloom, and little Kate, the ermine, is skipping and chuckling over the fight at Mivoie.”

Bertrand never flinched, but looked the peasant straight in the face.

“That is old news to me, friend,” he said.

The man grinned, and nodded his head mysteriously, with quaint sententiousness.

“Maybe, lording, you have not heard that the devil is loose again.”

“There are many devils in Brittany, father; we are possessed like the pigs in the Bible.”

“Eh, yes, but none so bad as Croquart. He has broken out of Josselin, they tell me, and is at Pontivy, with his free lances, swearing blood and burnings for Bamborough’s death.”

Bertrand straightened up, and took the news for its solid worth.

“I thought the Sieur de Beaumanoir had the fellow safe for a while,” he said.

“Ah, no doubt, lording, but Croquart is at Pontivy, and mad as an old wolf dam that has lost her cubs.”

The sun was well up when Bertrand took leave of the peasant folk, and, learning the way from them, mounted his horse and rode off into the woods. He had given the girl Marie a kiss before going, feeling grateful to her, even though she had seen him weep. New courage stirred in his heart, and his eyes were keen as he rode under the great trees, thinking of what the old man had told him concerning Croquart. A curious smile hovered about his mouth. Presently he dismounted, tethered his horse, knelt down on the grass, and prayed.

When he had ended his praying he took his shield upon his knees, and, drawing his poniard, began to batter at it with the hilt. The blows rang out through the silence of the woods till the eagle of the Du Guesclins was beaten from the shield.

XXIV

THE sun was setting at La Bellière when a couple of men-at-arms wearing the Sieur de Tinteniac’s badge upon their sleeves came cantering along the road from Dinan. They wound through the poplar-trees and the beech thickets, flashing back the sunlight from their harness and raising a slight haze of dust that was turned to gold by the glow from the west. Riding up to the bridge, they hailed the porter who was closing the great gate and asked whether Sir Robin Raguenel had returned from Mivoie.

“For,” quoth the bulkier of the twain, “we are the Sieur de Tinteniac’s men, who has sent us jogging all the way from Montcontour with the news that he will try your master’s wine to-morrow.”

And so the Vicomte’s porter put back the gate for them, and Tinteniac’s men smelt the savory scent of the La Bellière kitchens. Nor was the news long in reaching the great salon where Tiphaïne and her father were playing chess, with Robin reading at the window. The lad went white when he heard the news and slunk out into the garden, sick at heart.

Heaven curse Tinteniac! What possessed him to come to La Bellière! Robin marched up and down under the apple-trees, biting his nails and smoothing his weak, round chin with the palm of his hand. The incubus of dread and remorse had grown heavier for him day by day he had lost both flesh and color, though a restless and feverish cheerfulness simulated the hectic confidence of a man who refuses to believe that death has him by the throat. And now the Sieur de Tinteniac was coming to La Bellière, and the lad’s guilty conscience fluttered like a girl in terror of a ghost.

At supper Robin saw the two men-at-arms seated among his father’s servants. They stared at him in all innocence, even as men stare at a fellow-mortal who has been blessed with the attributes of a hero. But to Robin, scared and suspicious, and ready to tread upon a snake in every corner, their interest in him suggested thoughts more sinister. Had Bertrand betrayed him, or had Beaumanoir and his lords discovered how the fesse of silver had played a double part? Robin sat in spiritual torment all through the meal, watching Tinteniac’s men much as a rabbit in the grass watches a falcon hovering for a swoop. When it happened that the fellows whispered together, he created their words out of the terror of his heart, and figured them out into ignominy and shame. Stephen Raguenel could make nothing of his son that night, and Tiphaïne, who had watched Robin jealously for many days, set the news of Tinteniac’s coming beside her brother’s moody face. The lad’s look troubled her, and she was filled with a vague dread of something she could not yet foreshadow.

Robin went to his bed in the room beside the chapel, but not to sleep. The darkness and the silence of the night intensified the misery of his moral loneliness and held him yet more at the mercy of his conscience. Toss and turn as he would, he could not escape from the conviction that his cowardice had been discovered and that the Sieur de Tinteniac was coming, like some stern St. Michael, to smite and to condemn. Even as a man upon the mountains may see the image of his own body magnified and distorted by the mist, so the lad’s conscious guilt took fright at its own fear. He sat shivering in bed, his teeth chattering, his face white with the moonlight that poured into the room. Alone, in the silence of the night, he was like a frightened child, who yearns for a mother’s warm arms and words of comfort.

It was past midnight when Tiphaïne was awakened by hearing some one knocking at her door. She sat up in bed and listened, the moonlight falling across the coverlet and touching her white arms and bosom.

Again she heard a hand knocking on the carved panels of the door.

“Who’s there?”

Since no voice answered her, she slipped out of bed, and, throwing a long cloak about her, opened the door and looked out into the passage. Leaning against the wall, with its hands over its face, Tiphaïne saw a dim and shrinking figure, the figure of her brother.

“Robin!”

She stood with one hand on the door, looking at Robin, a strained wonder on her face.

“Robin, what is it?—are you ill?”

She heard him groan as though in pain.

“Tiphaïne, my God, what shall I do? It is all a lie—a miserable lie!”

She leaned forward, seized Robin’s hands, drew them down, and looked into his face.

“You have lied to us?”

“Yes—”

“Of what?”

“I never fought at Mivoie; I was afraid; Bertrand took my arms.”

Tiphaïne dropped his hands and started back from him, a look—almost of fierceness—on her face.

“Robin, is this the truth?”

The misery of his silence answered her.

“What! You played the coward!—you let Bertrand make this sacrifice!”

Her clear voice rang along the gallery, calling echoes from the sleeping house. Robin, terrified, sprang forward and gripped her arm.

“Tiphaïne, you will wake every one; listen to me—”

She shook him off, cold as the moonlight for the moment, the shock of her brother’s shame making her hard and pitiless.

“You think that I shall help you to act this lie?”

His hands leaped out to her with futile pathos in the darkness.

“Tiphaïne, I cannot bear it; Tinteniac comes to-morrow.”

“Well, what then?”

“He may know everything. They will strike off my spurs, and I can never show my face in Brittany again. Tiphaïne, for God’s sake—help me!”

She unbent nothing to him, the pitifulness of his weakness filling her with a sense of overmastering scorn and anger.

“No, no.”

“But my father!”

“And you will let Bertrand suffer?”

“He made me promise.”

“Yes, and you kept the promise! My God, to think that you should be so mean!”

She leaned against the door-post, one hand at her throat, her eyes blazing even in the dim mingling of moonlight and of gloom. Robin was standing with his hands clasped about his head like a man frightened by the lightning in a storm.

“What can I do?—what can I do?—”

He repeated the words again and again, hardly knowing what he said. The very reiteration of the cry seemed to anger his sister, as the prattling of a child may anger a woman who is in trouble.

“Fool, keep quiet; let me think.”

Robin ceased his babbling and leaned against the wall, watching Tiphaïne, his face vacuous and flaccid about the mouth. For some minutes there was silence between them, a silence that seemed spaced by the rapid beating of the man’s heart.

Tiphaïne stirred herself at last and stepped back over the threshold into her room.

“Go back to bed,” she said, quietly.

Robin did not parley with her.

“You will help me?” he asked, with quivering mouth.

“To tell the truth, yes,” and she closed the door on him and left him shivering in the dark.

It happened that morning soon after dawn that two of the brothers of the abbey of Lehon, who had gone out to work in the fields, saw a man running along the road that wound between poplar-trees towards the abbey. They stood and waited for the man to approach, struck by his strange look and the way he reeled from side to side. He came on like one half-dead with running, his mouth open, his eyes glazed. Not at first did they recognize his face, so drawn and distorted was it with suffering and despair.

“The abbey?—the abbey?”

He stood panting, waving his hand vaguely down the road, his knees giving under him so that he rocked like a young tree in a wind.

“By the love of Our Lady, it is Messire Robin!”

They moved towards him, thinking him mad, but the man dodged them and ran on down the road. The two brothers stood looking after him, wondering what ill news was in the wind that the young lord of La Bellière ran half naked along the highway to Lehon.

Master Stephen, the abbot, knelt at his prayers in the parlor when the brother who served as porter came to him with a grave face and told how Messire Robin Raguenel had run half naked into the abbey church and was lying like one dead before the altar. Master Stephen, who was a man of substance and circumspection, dismissed the brother and went alone into the church. On the altar steps he found Robin lying, weeping like a child, his face hidden in his arms.

“Messire Robin! Messire Robin!”

A pitiful face met the abbot’s astonished eyes. It was sharp and sallow, like the face of a man who had come through some great sickness. Before he could prevent him the lad had clasped Stephen by the knees.

“Father, take me in, I will take the vows, I—”

He sank down in a dead faint, his hands still clutching the hem of the old man’s robe. Some of the brothers who were in the cloisters came when the abbot called them. Together they lifted Robin up, and, wondering, carried him from the church.

XXV

AT Pontivy, Croquart the Fleming had established himself in the best hostel the town could boast, his free lances and adventurers swarming in the streets and quartering themselves at will on the townsfolk, who dared not grumble. Half the mercenaries in Brittany seemed to have poured into the place, drawn thither by the high pay Croquart offered. The Fleming had sworn to avenge the fight at Mivoie, boasting that he would wipe out Breton treachery with the spoil of Breton towns. He had offered a hundred gold-pieces to any man who would bring William de Montauban to him alive, threatening to strangle the esquire and set up his head over one of the gates of Pontivy.

To the townsfolk it might well appear that the Sieur de Beaumanoir had only wounded and not scotched the devil, and made him madder than of yore. Bamborough of Ploermel was dead, and the rabble of English, Gascons, and Flemings were not likely to abide by the shadowy oaths that Bamborough had sworn before the fight at Mivoie. All the sweat and strife of the struggle at the Oak had not bettered the prospects of the Breton poor. The Sieur de Beaumanoir was still at Josselin, wroth at the thought that Breton blood had been spilled for nothing, knowing too well that they of the Blois party were not strong enough to drive Montfort’s English into the sea.

Pontivy was at Croquart’s mercy, a truth that the townsfolk took bitterly to heart. The little place was like a sponge in the Fleming’s hand; he could squeeze what he would from it, till every hole and purse were dry. And the mercy of a captain of free lances meant also the mercy of his men, and what such mercy meant a hundred towns in France learned to their cost through those grim English wars so full of “chivalry.” After the Poitiers fight the Black Prince served King John as cupbearer at Bordeaux, yet for the picturesque princeliness of that single deed there were a thousand miseries hidden from the pages of romance. A king may pick up a lady’s garter at a dance, and great fame come of it, and live in the pageant of the world. Yet behind the dawn-flash of some such splendid trifle a multitude of the dead lift their white hands in the night of the unknown. The blood of the common folk sinks down into the earth they tilled, but the froth from a prince’s wine-cup clings to the lips of men.

It was late one April day when Bertrand rode towards Pontivy, meeting many who had turned their backs on the place rather than live at Croquart’s mercy. The gates were well guarded, for the Fleming was no fool, and knew that he was as well hated as any man in Brittany. Bertrand, who rode as a common free-lance, and looked the part, with his rusty harness and battered shield, was suffered to pass with a few questions, and directed to the hostel where Croquart’s captains were enlisting men. Bertrand, knowing Pontivy well, made his way up a narrow street to the house of a merchant named Pierre Gomon, but found the gate barred and all the windows closely shuttered.

After thundering at the door awhile, he heard the sound of footsteps in the passage and the harsh grating of the rusty grill. A face showed behind the iron-work, peering at him suspiciously, for it was growing dark, and the narrow street caught but little light.

“Who’s there? What may you want?”

Bertrand asked for Pierre Gomon, and discovered that it was Pierre Gomon himself who looked at him through the iron lattice.

“Hello, sir, have you a quiet attic for Bertrand du Guesclin?”

The voice was familiar to the merchant, but, like his neighbors, he lived in perpetual terror of Croquart’s men. Anything that walked the streets with a clank of steel made the burghers of Pontivy shiver behind their bolted doors.

“I will wager, sir, that Messire Bertrand du Guesclin is not within ten miles of Pontivy.”

“How, Pierre Gomon, will you tell me I am not myself? Come, I am here on my own errand, and heed a quiet hole to sleep in. Here is my hand, with the ring I had from you two years ago.”

He put his hand close to the grill, but Master Pierre Gomon was not to be satisfied with any such cursory inspection. He left Bertrand standing outside the gate, and, bringing a lantern, flashed the light upon the ring Du Guesclin wore.

“Yes, it is the same. And your face, messire?”

Bertrand had put his visor up.

“Ugly enough to be remembered,” he said, with a laugh. “Come, Pierre Gomon, we are both Breton men. Do you think I am here in Pontivy to screw money out of you with Croquart and his rabble?”

The merchant’s face betrayed ineffable relief. He unbarred the gate and let Bertrand in, shooting back the bolts again with the feverish haste of a man shutting out some wild beast.

“Pardon, messire,” he said, taking the bridle of Bertrand’s horse; “we are being bled to death by these English barbers. Twice that devil Croquart has sent men to me for food and money. They broke open my strongbox and half emptied my cellars. God bless the day when we of Pontivy see the last of them!”

Bertrand could have laughed at Pierre Gomon’s lugubrious face had he not known what war was and what manner of wolves herded round Croquart in the town.

“Lend me one of your attics, friend,” he said, “and give my horse a stall in your stable.”

“They’ll take the beast, messire, as sure as I’m a ruined man.”

“Let well alone,” said Bertrand, unbuckling his sword.

When night had fallen, Bertrand found himself in one of Pierre Gomon’s attics, with food and a flask of wine on a table near him. The moon’s light shone full upon the dormer-window, so that he had no need of the candle the merchant had brought him. Bertrand stripped off his harness and made a meal, and then, drawing the stool up to the window, sat leaning his arms on the low sill and looking out over the little town.

From amid the jumble of roofs, sharp-peaked, like waves in a choppy sea, Bertrand could hear the shouting of the soldiery who idled in the streets. In the east a full moon was rising, a huge buckler of burnished bronze, its light glimmering on the little river that wound about the town, and making the roofs and steeples white like glass. Between two houses Bertrand could get a glimpse of the market square and of the hostel where Croquart had his quarters. The fretted windows were red with torchlight, and Bertrand could see figures moving to and fro in the rooms within. Croquart and his comrades in arms were making merry, while in the market square a crowd of soldiery drank and warmed themselves about two great fires.

Bertrand’s thoughts went back from Pontivy, lighted by the moonlight, to his home and to La Bellière by the northern sea. He was wondering whether Jeanne, his mother, had heard the news of Mivoie. How Olivier would curl his dainty mustachios, shrug those padded shoulders of his, and dismiss his brother from all creditable remembrance with a sneer! Bertrand’s thoughts turned from his own home, where they loved him little, to La Bellière and to Robin. They would know now that he had failed to keep troth at Mivoie, and he would have given much to learn whether Tiphaïne believed him worthless and without honor. Unconsciously Bertrand had come to set much store on the girl’s goodwill. He judged his thoughts by the fearless purity of her face, and kept her words locked in his heart.

Bertrand heard loud shouts and a burst of laughter as a knot of half-drunken English came staggering and shouldering along the street. They were shouting a catch-cry that Croquart had given them, and singing some doggerel that had the Sieur de Beaumanoir for its victim. Bertrand leaned out and watched them pass, lusting greatly to throw the stool down on their heads.

One fellow gave a loud screech, jumped on to a comrade’s back, and began to thump him with his heels.

“Whoa ho, Dobbin! to Josselin we go, To hang the marshal and his Bretons in a row.”

The men took up the snatch and went bawling down the street, the mock horse prancing and curvetting with the rhymester on his back. Such peace-loving people as were abroad went scuttling down alleys, and into corners like mice running from a cat. Bertrand watched the gentry disappear down a passage that led into the market square. Their drunken shouting had given him a cud to chew, for, if Croquart struck a blow at Josselin, he—Bertrand du Guesclin—might yet have a part to play.

* * * * *

At La Bellière the Sieur de Tinteniac sat at the window of the great solar, looking out upon the orchard-trees, whose boughs were white against the blue. He had ridden in about noon from Dinan, to find an atmosphere of tragic awe filling the house, a sadness that seemed strange when the woods and meadows blazed with the spring. Dinner had been set for him at the high table, yet to his questions the old major-domo had given short and vague replies: “The Vicomte kept his bed, and Madame Tiphaïne was anxious for her father. Craving the seigneur’s patience, she would speak with him in the solar when he had dined. No, Messire Robin was not at home.” Tinteniac had forborne to question the old man further, for there were tears in the man’s eyes, and the very servants looked like mutes, going about their work as though death were in the place. Tinteniac had finished his meal in silence, feeling the shadow of some great sorrow over the house. Stephen of Lehon had been at La Bellière that morning, and had ridden back on his white mule to the abbey, shocked at heart by what he had seen and heard.

The curtain of green cloth, embroidered with gold martlets, that covered the door leading to the Vicomte’s bedchamber was swept aside by the white curve of a woman’s hand and wrist. Tinteniac, drumming on the window-ledge with his fingers, turned with a start and rose to make a very stately kissing of madame’s hands. Tiphaïne, upon whom the brunt of the day’s bitterness had fallen, looked white of face and shadowy about the eyes.

“I am glad, Sieur de Tinteniac, that you have come, for you can help me more than any man on earth.”

She was looking straight into Tinteniac’s eyes, liking their quiet braveness and the almost ascetic refinement of his face. He was verging on middle age, and carried himself with that simple stateliness that comes to men who have moved in high places and taken the measure of the world.

“Madame, I have been reproaching myself for burdening you at such a time. Your father is ill; yet you say that I can help you; good. I had ordered my horses out for Dinan, but if you would have me stay—”

“Stay, sire,” she said; “I have such a tangle to unravel that I shall need your wisdom to help me through.”

Tinteniac, grave and restrained, put a chair for her before the window and turned the shutter so as to keep the sun from shining on her face.

“You do me honor,” he said; “if I can help you, show me how.”

He moved back to the cushioned seat in the broad window, the sunlight shining on the richness of his dress and showing the silver in his hair. He was a man who a woman would come to when in trouble, for, of all the knights of Brittany, Tinteniac held the noblest record.

“Sire, let me tell the truth to you: my father lies half dead in the room beyond us, and my brother Robin has hid himself in the cloisters of Lehon.”

She was looking steadily at Tinteniac, trying to read how much he knew, but his face was a sympathetic blank to her, devoid of subtlety or pretended innocence.

“Pardon me, madame, you seem to think me wiser than I am.”

“You fought, sir, at Mivoie.”

“True, and your brother Robin saved my life.”

“It was not my brother, sire.”

Tinteniac started.

“No, but Bertrand du Guesclin, who fought in my brother’s arms.”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment, each trying to shadow forth the other’s thoughts. To Tinteniac there was a magnetic strength shining in the eyes of the girl before him. He felt that each word meant a stab of the heart to her, and that she suffered, though pain was hidden by her pride.

“Madame, what are you telling me?”

“Telling you the truth of this great sorrow that has come upon us. My brother Robin played the coward, God help the lad! for the shame of it has driven him to take the vows. Bertrand du Guesclin had promised me to care for the lad. He took Robin’s arms and fought at Mivoie in his stead, bearing the shame to save a coward.”

She confessed the truth with a strength that mingled pride with pathos. Tinteniac had risen, and stood leaning against the window-jamb, conscious of the trust she was laying upon his manhood. Her words had astonished him, yet he showed no fluster over her confession, respecting her pride too much to wound her with useless questions.

“Madame,” he said, gravely, “what can I say to you but that I am here to help you—if it is possible.”

Her heart went out to him for the delicate courtesy of his restraint.

“Sire, the truth must be told.”

Tinteniac turned away his head.

“We are too proud, pray God, to let a brave man suffer for one we love. Bertrand has done for us what few men would ever do. I know the bitterness of the sacrifice to him, and those who would slander him shall have the truth.”

Tinteniac’s eyes flashed as she spoke.

“Madame, I am glad,” he said, “that I stood out for Du Guesclin at the Oak of Mivoie, and you are right in telling me the truth. Both men were friends to me, and I know not how to place my pity.”

“Sire, Robin is dead to us, poor lad! God has taken him; he will not see the scorn that Bertrand might have borne.”

Even her great strength failed her for the moment, and she rose, turning aside, with one hand covering her face. Tinteniac, touched to the heart, remained by the window, suffering her bitterness to pass in silence. The pathos of life seemed very keen to him, held as it was in the proud walls of this noble house. He thought of Robin as he had known the lad of old, and pictured him now, cowering in the cloisters of Lehon.

“Sire, I have one more thing to ask of you.”

She had mastered her weakness, and her eyes shone out on him from the determined pallor of her face.

“Take me to Beaumanoir; let there be no delay. Bertrand du Guesclin shall be cleared from shame.”

Tinteniac went to her and took her hands.

“Child,” he said, “you have chosen the nobler part. Would to God that I could mend this sorrow.”

He kissed her hands and stood back, looking sadly into her face.

“The marshal is at Josselin,” he said.

“Then, sire, I shall ride to Josselin. I shall not rest until the truth is told.”

The next dawn saw them on the road, while at La Bellière an old man sat before the fire, dazed and stricken, muttering the name of his only son. And amid the aspens on the Lehon lands young Yeolande wept at the window of her room, looking towards the tall towers of the abbey, and wondering why God had stricken Robin’s heart and taken his love from her to make of him a priest.

XXVI

CROQUART the Fleming had marched from Pontivy to take Josselin by surprise at the breaking of a summer dawn. The little town, with its gate-houses and spires, its high roofs and timber-capped turrets, had stood black and silent against the gold of the east when Croquart’s stormers crept up to set their ladders against the walls. Unluckily for the Fleming and his men, the Sieur de Beaumanoir had been forewarned as to their coming, and their welcome that May morning came in the shape of stones, molten lead, pitch, and a rain of quarrels from the walls. They had been beaten back, to flounder, many of them, like great black cockroaches in the mud of the town ditch. And, to complete the thoroughness of the repulse, the gates of Josselin had opened wide to pour columns of armed men into the town meadows.

The cocks of Josselin were still crowing when Geoffroi Dubois and his Breton gentlemen and men-at-arms rode through and through the disordered companies of the Fleming’s “horse.” Many debts were waiting for dismissal on the green slopes under the walls of Josselin town. Every man who could carry a sword or bill swarmed out by the gates to strike a blow against these plunderers of Breton towns. Butchers with their cleavers, smiths with their hammers, armorers’ apprentices with arms fresh from the forge followed in the track of the Sieur de Beaumanoir’s columns of steel. There was no taking of prisoners that morning in the Josselin meadows. The townsmen rushed in among the disordered free-lances, stabbing the horses and bringing the men-at-arms to earth. John Hamlin, an Englishman, and the Fleming’s brother in arms, was battered to death by the hammers of two smiths as he lay helpless in his heavy harness. Before the sun had topped the steeples the broken companies were streaming for the open moors, with Geoffroi Dubois and his Bretons in pursuit.

It was past noon that same day when Croquart reined in his black horse on the last sweep of moorland beneath the crests of the Loudeac woods. The Fleming wore a red surcoat covered with gold diapering, carried a fox’s brush in his gilded bassinet, and was armed in harness that any great lord might have coveted. The coxcombry of the adventurer showed itself even in the trappings of his horse, for the butcher-boy of Flanders, gay as any popinjay, had the love of a risen man for jewels, color, and the pomp of life.

Croquart stood in the stirrups and scanned the moorland under his hand. Hard galloping alone had saved him from the glitter of Dubois’s spears, and, as for his own mercenaries, he had left the fellows to look after their own souls. Three solitary riders were forcing their jaded horses up the slope towards him, the last and best mounted of his free lances, who had been able to keep sight of the black stern of Croquart’s horse.

Though still young, the Fleming had the coarse and florid features of a man whose appetites had been pampered by success. Vulgar, vain, supremely cunning, with a chest like a barrel, hands and throat like an Esau’s, he looked a heavy man, even on the big horse he rode. His broad, flat face mingled a snub-nosed audacity with the cheerful arrogance of sensual strength. The cheek-bones were high, the eyes small, deep set, and quick with the glint of a bird of prey. Even in defeat the man’s unbounded impudence had not deserted him, and his eyes twinkled as he watched the laboring approach of the survivors of his “free company,” a company that had dwindled to the ludicrous muster-roll of three.

“Hallo, sirs!” and he laughed in their faces; “Beaumanoir has made us hurry a little. Why, Tête Bois, you have the lives of a cat. Pluck up heart, man; why so white about the mouth?”

He raised himself again in the stirrups and scanned the moors for any showing of pursuit. Save for a solitary figure on horseback that had appeared like a black speck on the brow of a low hill, the moorland appeared innocent of Dubois’s pursuing spears.

Croquart sat back in the saddle with a grunt of relief, and turned his eyes to the faces of his men. He had had sufficient experience of such gentry to know that he could trust their loyalty just as long as he could rely upon his purse.

“Tête Bois, my sweet scoundrel, tell me how much Beaumanoir has promised to any man who shall bring him my head. You heard of it at Pontivy, eh?”

The man looked uneasily at the Fleming. There was an ironical glint in Croquart’s eyes that was disconcerting to a fellow with so sensitive a conscience.

“I never heard of the money, captain.”

Croquart’s lids contracted a little.

“Well, how much was it?”

“Sang de Dieu, captain—”

The Fleming laughed.

“Speak up, dear comrade. I see by your snout that you know as much as I do. Was it not five thousand crowns?”

He watched the men narrowly, yet with the cool confidence of one sure of his own strength.

“Five thousand crowns, sirs, for the head of Croquart the Fleming! Come, friend Tête Bois, five thousand crown-pieces would give you many merry months in the taverns, eh?”

The tanned war-dog looked restless, as though Croquart’s raillery was too cunning to be pleasant.

“We are your men, captain.”

“Good fellows! good fellows! You love me about as well as a whore loves a gentleman with a pocketful of gold. I shall take care, sirs, not to sleep till we unsaddle in the west. Five hundred gold pieces are easily earned by a stab in the dark, Tête Bois, eh? And, then, I am such a gay devil—my rings are worth a duke’s ransom,” and he glanced at his huge hands and then at the faces of his men.

“By St. George, captain—”

“Hallo, you are wondering how much money I have in my coffers at Morlaix. Good lads! I will remember to be generous.”

He understood the men and they him. It was a matter of money between them, a bribe that should out-bribe Beaumanoir’s bounty. Given fair play, the Fleming was more than a match for the three of them, and they knew it.

“No rat’s tricks, captain; we’ll take our oath on it.”

Croquart laid a hand significantly on his sword.

“The woods will serve us best,” he said. “We will take the forest way towards Loudeac. Dubois will not press too far into the west. After Loudeac we can take our time, for young Bamborough is at Guingamp.”

Croquart turned his head with a last backward look over the moors. The solitary rider who had topped the hill had dropped again from sight. Probably, so thought the Fleming, it was only another of his men who had escaped from the bloody Josselin meadows.

“Forward!” and he gave the word with gusto, as though he still commanded five hundred spears.

His men waited for him to lead the way.

“No, by my blood, gentlemen!” and he laughed. “Go forward. I prefer to take care of my own back.”

The popinjay is known by his gay colors, and it was Croquart’s love of gaudy trappings that betrayed him to the Breton rider whom he had seen poised for a moment on the brow of the next hill. The man had reined in his horse, craned forward in the saddle, and scanned with the keenness of a hawk the four steel-clad figures covered by the shadows of the Loudeac woods. Messire Croquart’s red surcoat, with its gold diaperings, and his gilded bassinet showed clearly against the green. It was for such a chance as this that Bertrand had played the spy at Pontivy. And for such a boon he had loitered on the moors near Josselin, coveting Dubois his battle-cry, and yet believing in his heart that Croquart would break free. The thing had happened even as Bertrand had desired it should. He was on the track of the Fleming, the taking of whose head would bless Brittany more than the fight at Mivoie had ever done.

“Brother Croquart, Brother Croquart, you think too much of the women, my friend!” and yet Bertrand forgot the fact that he himself thought each hour of the day of a pair of brown eyes and hair that changed in the sunlight from bronze to ruddy gold.

The champion of the fox’s brush rode towards Loudeac, with Bertrand on his heels, and at Loudeac the Sieur de Tinteniac’s shield hung in the guest-hall of the little abbey of St. Paul. Tinteniac and Tiphaïne had ridden by Montcontour, following the same road that Bertrand and her brother had taken not a month before. They had passed the first night at Montcontour, the second at Loudeac, and at Loudeac they had heard that Croquart had escaped from Josselin and was enlisting men on the banks of the Blavet. Refugees had fled to Loudeac from Pontivy, and the little town already trembled amid its woods, dreading to hear the Fleming’s trumpets sounding a challenge at the gates.

Tinteniac’s two esquires were making the final moves in a game of chess in the guest-hall oriel, while Tiphaïne and her serving-woman were dressing in their bedchamber for the day’s journey. Horses and palfreys stood saddled in the court, Tinteniac’s men and the two La Bellière servants strapping such baggage as they had on the backs of a couple of bony and ill-tempered mules. It was not known at Loudeac that Croquart had made his dash on Josselin from Pontivy, and that he and his men were scattered in flight over the Breton moors.

In the abbey garden the Sieur de Tinteniac leaned over the rail of the abbot’s fish-pond and threw pieces of bread to the fat carp that teemed in the waters of the “stew.” His pose was one of reflection, of dignity upon the pedestal of thought, as he watched a dozen silvery snouts clash together for each white morsel of bread. The high forehead and the meditative eyes, the stateliness of many stately generations, made of Tinteniac a figure of mark among the Breton nobles who followed the banner of Charles of Blois. The very hands that fed the fish were typical of the seigneur’s nature, clean, refined, sinewy, virile. His manner had that simple graciousness that makes beauty in man admirable even to his uglier fellows.

The ladies of Jean de Penthièvre’s household had long despaired of making the Sieur de Tinteniac blush for them, yet a most palpable deepening of color overspread his face that morning as the mistress of La Bellière came towards him between the herb-beds of the abbot’s garden. Thyme, marjoram, lavender, basil, rosemary, and balm crowded about the lithe lightness of her figure. As she stood before Tinteniac in her gray riding-cloak, lined with crimson silk, her hair burning in the sunlight about her face, she seemed to recall to him the troubled tenderness of a green yet stormy June, long grass weary with the rain, pools brimming with the sunset, silent trees wrapped in a mysterious glory of gold. Beauty in woman should fire all the best beauty in the soul of man. And to such as Tinteniac, whose natural impulses towards nobleness were above mere religious and chivalric ordinances, the girl’s brave charm was a mystery and a romance.

“Are the horses ready?”

“Ready, if you are not afraid of being snapped up by some of Croquart’s plunderers.”

“No, I am not afraid,” and her eyes showed Tinteniac that she spoke the truth; “but your wounds, sire? How one’s own trouble makes one selfish towards others!”

Tinteniac looked at her as though he might imagine other woundings than those he had earned at the Oak of Mivoie.

“I am myself again, though I wear half-armor. We had better take the forest road.”

“As you will; I trust to you.”

She began to fasten her cloak with its loops of crimson cord, her hands moving slowly, her eyes looking past Tinteniac as though he were mere mist to her for the moment. She was thinking of Robin, her brother, buried in the abbey of Lehon, and of the old man, her father, sitting alone before the fire. From La Bellière her thoughts swept over Brittany with an impatient pity for the land that suffered.

“I had hoped that Mivoie would have ended all this misery,” she said.

Tinteniac was watching her as though her beauty had more meaning for him than her words.

“Montfort and Blois have the poor duchy by the horns and tail, while such a fellow as Croquart steals the milk.”

She looked at him with a slight frown and an impatient lifting of the head.

“Croquart, the butcher-boy from Flanders! And you nobles of Brittany, with all your chivalry, cannot match this fellow in the field.”

Tinteniac shrugged and smiled at her.

“What would you?”

“Why, were I a man—”

“Well—”

“And a Breton man—”

“Yes.”

“I should not rest till I had freed Brittany from such a brute.”

The seigneur spread his hands.

“But when the brute has a few hundred men behind him!—”

“Well, and no matter; Croquart is vain enough to take a challenge from a Breton noble.”

Tinteniac smiled, as though any mood of hers had magic for him.

“You trouble too much about this butcher-boy,” he said; “he will feel the rope like most of his brother thieves.”

“Ah, sire, I see, your hands are too white—”

“Too white?”

“To soil themselves with such as Croquart.”

Tinteniac’s stateliness appeared unruffled by the impatience in her voice. An aristocrat, he saw no great glory in hunting down this Flemish butcher-boy, who robbed towns and fed his men on the peasants’ corn, a fellow whose head was rancid with grease and whose breath stank of the nearest tavern. He would be taken and hanged in due season by the providence of God; but as for making an adventurous romance out of Croquart’s capture, Tinteniac, with his refined breeding, was not inspired to such a quest.

“The true chivalry”—and he spoke without haughtiness—“is of the heart, not of the arm.”

“They tell me Croquart has a giant’s arm.”

“Yes, from handling the butcher’s cleaver.”

“Then, sire, a gentleman would shame himself by taking blows from Croquart’s arm?”

Tinteniac’s eyes expressed amusement at the vehemence with which she spoke. It was good to see the child, so ran his stately reflection, flame up over the wrongs of the Breton poor.

“Madame, would you have me search from Dol to Nantes in order to break a butcher-boy’s skull?”

“Are you sure you would break it, sire?”

“No”—and he laughed with a generous frankness that could not be quarrelled with—“the butcher-boy might prove himself the better man. At Mivoie he was the best champion the English had.”

Tiphaïne flashed a look straight into Tinteniac’s eyes.

“Well, sire, I should honor the man who put an end to Croquart’s savagery.”

Tinteniac colored and gave her one of his most stately bows.

“Your words set a new price upon the fellow’s head.”

XXVII

THE walls of Loudeac melted away amid the green as the Sieur de Tinteniac’s party turned eastward along the forest-way to Josselin. They had taken a Loudeac shepherd with them as a guide, for there were many branching ways amid the woods, and it was easy to go astray amid that wilderness of oaks and beeches. Tinteniac sent his two esquires forward with the three men-at-arms, the two La Bellière servants coming next with the mules, and Tiphaïne’s woman upon her palfrey, while Tinteniac, the tall carack of the fleet, sailed beside the Vicomte’s daughter, his shield flashing gold and gules towards the morning sun.

No healthy male is without vanity, and Tinteniac, despite the serenity of his pride, had taken some of Tiphaïne’s words to heart. It was peculiar to her, this power of hers of establishing her ideals in the minds of others—foreign gods in a foreign sanctuary. A gesture, an expression of the eyes, a few movements of the lips, and her own intensity of soul poured out its inspiration upon others. She had all the passionate enthusiasm of youth, that fine fire that will not be damped by the cynicism of experience. And yet when she spoke it was without any intrusion of prejudice or self-will. Her heart force, her peerless sincerity, gave her this influence over the world about her.

Tinteniac was not a man to be dictated to by the tongue of a mere girl, and yet there was something so compelling in Tiphaïne’s nature that he discovered himself questioning the aristocratic niceness of his opinions. It was her courage, her great-heartedness, that had struck Tinteniac from the hour he had first spoken with her in the solar at La Bellière. Few women would have chosen so straight a path as Tiphaïne. Her courage appeared to brush formalities aside. When trouble came she might have sat dazed beside her father in the great house at La Bellière, or hurried to Lehon to reproach Robin, or taken to her room and made sorrow selfish by refusing to be comforted. One clear thought appeared to have dominated her mind, the thought that a brave man had sacrificed himself, perhaps because she was Robin’s sister. Tinteniac envied Bertrand the part he had played at Mivoie.

They spoke of Robin that morning as they rode towards Josselin through the dewy woods. The Sieur de Tinteniac would have made an admirable confessor, for he had the sympathetic self-effacement of the ideal priest, with the strength and sincerity of the soldier. Tiphaïne found him easy to trust. He helped her with his knowledge of the world without uncovering her sense of humiliation and regret.

“A lively imagination may be a treacherous blessing,” he confessed to her. “I remember being saved from playing—from forgetting my manhood—once.”

“You, sire, a coward!” and she used the word that he had avoided.

“All men are human—nerve, muscle, and blood. We build up character as our monks build a church. One loose stone in the tower arch and half the place may be in ruins.”

“How did it happen?”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.”

And he gave her the tale without affectation and without reserve.

Tiphaïne was silent when he had ended, watching the winding woodways of the forest. She was thinking of her brother Robin, and how Tinteniac’s trial compared with his. The one man had failed in the ordeal, the other risen to greater strength above the sense of his own self-shame.

“It was, then, your mother, sire?” she said, at last.

“Yes, my mother who saved me—”

“I can understand.”

“That a man would be a miserable rat who would play the coward under his mother’s eyes.”

Tiphaïne’s silence showed that she was thinking.

“And Robin had no mother, sire,” she said; “if I had been wiser—”

“And the lad less reticent.”

“My love would have sent him like a man to Mivoie.”

Tinteniac looked ahead between the dark boles of the trees.

“It is the waiting for danger that tires the courage,” he said. “Like the sounds of wolves following at night, when one can see nothing.”

“And the wolves?”

“May be a man’s own thoughts. Most of us are brave when we plunge into peril with no time given us to think.”

Had Tinteniac been able to see five furlongs through the forest, he might have put his philosophy to the test by watching the champion of the fox’s brush cantering on the same road towards Loudeac. About them were the quiet glades and woodways of the forest, green with the glamour and the mystery of spring. Wind flowers fluttering white as swan’s-down; wild hyacinths like the dust of lapis lazuli scattered on emerald cloth; the cuckoo flower with its lilac crosslets; primroses brilliant in the green gloom of coppice and of dell. The winding glades were paved with color and arched with tremulous foliage bathed in the sunlight. Through many a green cleft could be seen the golden splendor of the gorse in bloom, the white clouds moving over the azure of the sky.

Tinteniac and Tiphaïne had loitered as they talked, and the rest of the troop, with the two esquires leading, had disappeared round the shoulder of a beech wood, the great trunks rising out of the bronze flooring of leaves to spread into a delicate shimmer of green above. In a thicket of birches to the south of the road a cuckoo was calling, while the sunlight played on the white stems of the trees.

Tiphaïne was still thinking of all that Tinteniac had told her, her eyes looking into the distance, a sad smile hovering about her mouth. The wild woods and the brown birds darting and fluttering in the brakes made her pity the poor lad who was shutting himself in Lehon against such life as this. She was roused from her reverie by the sound of men shouting on the road beyond the beech wood. Tiphaïne’s horse pricked up its ears. The birds, those spirits of the solemn woods, came scudding fast over the tree-tops.

Tiphaïne’s eyes were turned to Tinteniac’s face. His fine profile, with its alert lines, showed that he had spoken of panic with the quiet smile of a man remembering a weakness long since dead.

“Listen, they are at blows yonder. Let us push forward. Hallo, what have we here?”

Round the edge of the beech wood came the two La Bellière men, whipping up their horses, with Tiphaïne’s woman on her palfrey between them. Hard at their heels cantered the two baggage mules, with halters dangling, a fair omen of an unquestionable rout.

Tinteniac’s sword was up. He put his horse across the road, a hint that the La Bellière men seemed too scared to accept.

“Steady! steady!!”

“Fly, sire, fly—”

They were up and past, maugre the seignorial sword, Tinteniac barely escaping the indignity of being rammed by the near man’s horse. To shout at them was as useless as hallooing after a rabble of frightened sheep. Tiphaïne had caught a glimpse of her serving-woman’s scared face as she was whirled past, clinging to the saddle with both hands. The woman had opened her lips to call to her mistress, but an inarticulate cry alone came from them. The two mules went cantering past with their packs slipping down under their bellies. In the taking of ten breaths the woods had swallowed men, woman, and beasts.

Tinteniac gave a contemptuous laugh.

“It seems that I am something of a prophet. What are we to look for next?”

He was as cool as though exchanging courtesies with a guest in the great hall of his own castle. Tiphaïne saw his lips grow thin, the pupils of his eyes contract like the eyes of a hawk on the hover for a stoop. He glanced this way and that into the woods, setting his shield forward and balancing his sword.

“What do you make of it, sire?” and she matched him for composure.

“Gilles and Gilbert are fighting. Listen! They are falling back towards us. Look, who goes there?”

There was a crackling of the underwood near them, and they had a glimpse of the white face of a man pushing through the brushwood into a little glade. He seemed to see neither Tiphaïne nor the knight on the great horse. And with the flash of a helmet he was gone, the green boughs closing on him like water over a diver’s body.

Tinteniac bit his lip.

“A bad omen”—and he reached for Tiphaïne’s bridle—“that fellow of mine has taken to his heels. Perhaps he is discreet. We, too, can take cover.”

He had already dragged Tiphaïne’s palfrey half across the road, when a man in red, riding a black horse, swerved round the beech wood into the sunlight. Three others followed him at a canter, shields forward, swords out. Tinteniac saw himself caught in the open. He wheeled briskly, covering Tiphaïne with his horse.

“Keep close to me, child.”

“Thanks, sire; do not risk anything for my sake.”

He answered her with a look that it was impossible for her to parry.

Croquart drew rein when he saw nothing more terrible on the forest road before him than a knight and a lady without escort and without servants. The Fleming had taken the two esquires and their men for the advance-guard of a company pushing forward to help in the defence of Josselin. He had not waited to ask questions, but had charged without a parley, and, since the two poor youngsters had made a gallant stand against him, the Fleming had used his tusks in his hurry to break through.

The first thing that Croquart noticed was the gold and gules upon Tinteniac’s shield; the second, Tiphaïne’s figure with its gray cloak lined with crimson silk, and the glitter of her hair under the boughs of the trees. Now Croquart was one of those insufferable creatures whose vanity takes fire at the first flash of a woman’s gown. Ugly and illiterate rascal that he was, he had conceived a fashionable fury for the French romances, and had even taken to modelling his behavior upon that of their aristocratic heroes. A renegade is always doubly bitter against the party he has deserted; so Croquart, hating the past, aspired to be the gay and flamboyant gentleman, tender and irresistible to women. Hard and grim in the business of life, the sex feeling made a fool of him, even so much as to make him one of those fulsome fops who cannot refrain from displaying their feathers to the poorest draggle-tail be she beneath the age of fifty. His gaudy clothes would have seemed wasted but for the women, and his successes among the bourgeoisie had made him ambitious of flying for nobler game.

When Croquart recognized the Sieur de Tinteniac by his shield, and also saw the lady beside him with hair that took a sheen from the sun, he dropped his ferocity as though it had been his butcher’s cleaver and assumed an air which he believed to possess all the aristocratic gentleness of those sentimental heroes who never existed.

“Halt, sirs!”

He waved his men back with his sword and rode on at a trot towards Tinteniac and the Vicomte’s daughter. The spirit of ostentation pervaded even the salute he gave them.

“God’s grace to you, madame, and to you—sire. Am I to be honored by taking you as my prisoners?”

Tinteniac was trying to fathom the new-comer’s identity, for Croquart carried no proper device upon his shield.

“There has been no word spoken of surrender,” he said.

The Fleming bowed in the saddle.

“Then the Sieur de Tinteniac will honor me by meeting me with his sword.”

Tinteniac’s handsome face betrayed no hesitation.

“I am known to you, messire?”

“I remember your shield, sire. I saw enough of it at Mivoie to make me respect its master.”

“At Mivoie?”

“Certainly, sire.”

“And you—your name?”

The Fleming threw up the visor of his bassinet with the unction of a hero discovering himself at the dramatic moment. He looked at Tiphaïne as though to watch how she received the impression of his magnificence.

“Sire, I am Croquart the Fleming.”

“Croquart! So; this is fortunate.”

Tinteniac’s face could express haughtiness with the perfect calmness of the aristocrat. Croquart had more looks for the lady than for the man. He saw her color deepen a little and a peculiar shadowiness pass across her eyes.

“No doubt, sire, you have heard of me,” and the fat hand seemed to insinuate the glitter of its rings into Tiphaïne’s notice.

“The Flemish butcher-boy.”

Tinteniac’s tone had the whistle of a whip.

“Sire, William the Norman’s mother was a tanner’s daughter, and yet he became a king.”

“I said, sir, the Flemish butcher-boy.”

Croquart’s eyes gleamed for the moment like a cat’s. Tinteniac’s face roused the plebeian passion in him.

“By your grace, sire, we will see whether the Sieur de Tinteniac or the Flemish butcher-boy is the better man.”

“That, perhaps, is too great an honor.”

“An honor, sire, that my sword will compel you to confer.”

Tiphaïne looked anxiously at Tinteniac. He was but half armed, because the wounds he had won at Mivoie would not yet bear the weight of heavier harness, nor would his pride suffer him to confess the disadvantage. It was Tiphaïne who read his thoughts and said what Tinteniac would not say.

“Sire, you are but half armed, and Messire Croquart is in his battle harness.”

She glanced at the Fleming, and he felt the fearless influence of her eyes.

“Messire Croquart is gentleman enough to respect fair play.”

“Madame, you have read me right,” and he fell to her flattery without a question. “Hi, Tête Bois”—and he climbed out of the saddle—“take off my breastplate and my cuishes. The butcher-boy of Flanders will take no man at a disadvantage. Madame, I most reverently kiss your hands.”

Tiphaïne’s heart misgave her for Tinteniac, as she watched the man Tête Bois at work upon his master under the shadows of a great beech. The Fleming’s girth of chest and limb seemed almost monstrous when compared with Tinteniac’s Grecian stateliness. The one was like a Norman pillar, massive and ponderous, giving a sense of uncrushable strength; the other like a fluted shaft of a more decorative age, its lines the lines of well-balanced beauty, its power concealed by perfection of design. The faces of the men were as vividly in contrast as their bodies. The butcher had the face of a butcher, and, as Tiphaïne watched him, the very insolent superfluity of his strength made him appear as the champion of the brute world against the nobler ideals of the soul.

“Sire, shall we fight mounted or on foot?”

Tinteniac, with the courtly composure of an aristocrat, stood leaning on his sword.

“As you please.”

“On foot, then.”

“I am ready.”

They engaged each other on a broad strip of grass clear of the roots and the sweeping branches of the trees. Croquart had lived by his sword; the noble had drawn his only when the serenity of the seignorial honor was embroiled. From the first the Fleming had the upper hand. Tiphaïne could see his grinning mouth, the glint of his eyes as though insolently sure of his own strength. Tinteniac never flinched from him, despite his wounds, taking Croquart’s blows with shield forward and head thrown back.

In the first minute Tinteniac was wounded in the thigh; Tiphaïne could see blood on his green surcoat, but to have meddled would have been an insult that no true man would have forgiven. His own blows seemed to lack power against the Fleming’s greater bulk. He felt the wounds crack that the English had given him at Mivoie, and he was short in the wind, like a man who has been a week in bed.

Three minutes’ fighting found Croquart playing with his man. Tinteniac had not so much as flustered him. Strength and condition were all to the Fleming’s honor.

“Come, sire, surrender,” and he gave Tinteniac time to breathe.

The noble had faltered, more from faintness than from any failing of his courage. He saw Tiphaïne watching him and read the misgiving in her eyes. The pride of such a man was very sensitive. To be beaten, and to be beaten before her, by a butcher!

“Who asks for surrender?”

“In faith, sire, not I!”

“Come, then.”

And they went at it again with exuberant good-will.

An unparried blow on the right shoulder brought Tinteniac to earth at last. He struggled to his knees and tried to rise, but Croquart rolled him backward with a mere touch of the sword-point on the breast.

“Surrender, sire; I am in luck to-day.”

Tinteniac, with a last effort, turned sideways and broke his sword across his knee.

“You can take the pieces, Fleming,” and he dropped on his elbow, his face but a hand’s-breadth from the tangled grass.

A strong man’s anguish of exhaustion and defeat has some of the agony of hell in its expression, and to Tiphaïne the shock of Tinteniac’s dramatic overthrow was as vital as though he had been her brother. It wounded her woman’s pride to see this man of the finer fibre crushed at the feet of this brute mass of insolence and strength. She was out of the saddle and facing Croquart before that gentleman had had leisure to exult.

“Messire Croquart”—and her courtesy was sublime, the most perfect weapon she could have chosen—“a Tinteniac can never surrender, a woman can. We are your prisoners.”

The Fleming dropped his battle humor and made her a fat bow.

“I am at your service, madame.”

“That is well spoken, sir. There are wounds to be looked to.”

“Tête Bois, my saddle-bag.”

The man brought it. Croquart, who, despite his undoubted courage, had a peculiar loathing for seeing his own blood flow, always carried wine, oil, and linen with him in the wars.

“Thanks, messire.”

“Madame, it is a privilege to please.”

Tiphaïne understood the possible significance of the privilege, and hated the fawning bully with all the energy of her distrust. He gave her the wine and linen with his own hands, making the exchange slowly, that he might touch her fingers and discover the color and temper of her eyes. The self-same eyes were brown and full of flashes of sunlight, flashes that made Croquart mutter “vixen” under his breath.

Tinteniac was still lying propped on one elbow and hanging his head like a man bleeding in pride as well as in body. That one of the first knights in Brittany should have been trampled under foot by a butcher-boy from Flanders was an indignity that needed superhuman courage to rescue it from contempt. And yet the fine fortitude of the man triumphed. He retrieved his respect by meeting Tiphaïne with a smile.

“You see, child, the boaster has had his beating.”

She knelt down by him, knowing how much that smile and those few words had cost him.

“It was your wounds from Mivoie.”

“Perhaps,” and he looked at his broken sword, “I am beaten for the moment. Wine and linen! My shoulder feels like a piece of red-hot iron. Child, listen,” and he spoke in a whisper, “we are in this fellow’s power.”

Croquart had turned and moved away a few paces to shout orders to his men. Tiphaïne was supporting Tinteniac’s head and holding the wine-flask to his lips. As she bent over him he continued his whisperings in her ear, taking a drink from the wine-flask between each few words.

She colored and looked at him unwillingly, yet reading the honorable purpose in his eyes.

“I know this whelp’s ways, child. You are Tiphaïne de Tinteniac. Remember. It will make for your safety.”

“But, sire—”

“Let Croquart think you are my wife.”

“I have no ring.”

“Take this.”

And the exchange was made while the Fleming’s back was turned, the circlet of gold slipping along the girl’s finger.

Croquart had turned on them, and Tinteniac’s discretion prompted him to show no temper to the Fleming. His natural serenity returned. He even smiled at Croquart as he knelt beside him.

“You have broken me, sir, and now you must help to mend me for madame, my wife—here. We had heard that you were at Pontivy.”

Croquart was busy with Tiphaïne uncovering Tinteniac’s wounded shoulder. Gilded bassinet and golden head were nearly touching. At the word “wife,” Tiphaïne felt the Fleming’s breath upon her cheek. She knew that he was looking at her, but she kept her eyes on Tinteniac’s face.

“I was at Pontivy, sire.”

“Grace de Dieu, you are everywhere. We thought the Josselin road safe to-day.”

Croquart grinned, but said nothing of his defeat.

“And my two esquires, Messire Croquart?” and Tinteniac tried not to wince as the wound smarted.

“I have sent two of my men, sire, to bury them.”

Tinteniac started, but restrained any show of feeling. He had caught the shocked pity in Tiphaïne’s eyes, and, though the poor lads were dead, he remembered for Tiphaïne’s sake the need for dissembling.

“Thanks, Messire Croquart,” he said, vowing many solemn things in his heart.

“The lads fought well, sire. It was a pity.”

“A pity, most certainly a pity. Poor Gilbert!—poor Gilles! We cannot have war, sir, without death. Madame—wife, you look troubled; leave us awhile. Messire Croquart will feel for you over these poor lads’ death.”

Tiphaïne understood him, and, rising, moved away with her face between her hands. It was no mere piece of acting, for there were tears upon her cheeks—tears of pity and of passionate impatience that all this brutal work should be done under God’s sun.

Croquart looked after her with a glint of the eyes. He noticed the fineness of her figure, despite her riding-cloak; the sweeping curves of bosom and of hips were not to be hid. He began binding up Tinteniac’s wound, thinking the while that the aristocrat had excellent taste.

“Come, my friend, let us be frank. How much do you want from me?”

Their eyes met. Croquart laughed.

“Ten thousand crowns.”

“What, sir?”

“For you, sire. Also ten thousand for madame.”

“Twenty thousand crowns!”

The Fleming’s eyes were full of cunning impudence.

“You are the Sieur de Tinteniac,” he said.

“True.”

“And courtesy would not permit you, sire, to value yourself more highly than madame—your wife.”

Tinteniac looked at his broken sword.

“Well, friend, you will have to wait.”

“Content, sire, content.”

“What road do you take us?”

“The road to Morlaix, sire. I shall join young Bamborough there.”

XXVIII

IN the underwood that topped a high bank overhanging the road where it swept round the beech wood a man in black harness crouched behind the twisting roots and stems of a clump of hazels. The black shell of steel was almost indistinguishable in the shadows. Snakelike it had crawled through a bank of gorse and reached the hazels overhanging the road.

Bertrand, with his sword naked at his side, had lifted his head cautiously and looked down into the road through a loop left by the twisting roots. The first glance had shown him Tiphaïne seated on her palfrey under the trees, watching Tinteniac weakening before the Fleming’s sword. Bertrand was not a man easily astonished, but his heart gave a great leap in him as he saw the Lady of the Aspen Tower with the sunlight shining through the branches on her face. Bertrand’s thoughts were in a tangle for the moment. The Sieur de Tinteniac fighting with Croquart the Fleming, and the Vicomte de Bellière’s daughter waiting to be claimed as the better man’s prize! Bertrand felt dazed for the moment by the utter unexpectedness of the scene before him. The whole tone of the adventure had changed on the instant. Had a miracle been performed before him the man amid the grass and hazels, with bluebells nodding about his body, could not have been more struck than by this strange interweaving of the threads of fate.

When Tinteniac fell, Bertrand was on his knees, teeth set, sword ready, on the brink of a battle with the Fleming. The three men-at-arms watching the fight had not seen the black figure poised amid the hazel boughs. It hung there a moment as though hesitating, and then dropped back again into the grass and leaves.

Tiphaïne was facing Croquart, while Tinteniac grovelled on his elbow, and this new grouping of the characters had sent Bertrand back to cover. He lay like a fallen bough, almost invisible, his body sunk in the dead leaves and the grass tussocks, hearing Tiphaïne speak, yet unable to catch her words. Her face, clear before him in the sunlight, had that look that was peculiar to her when her courage was in arms. She was speaking for Tinteniac, and Bertrand watched her, noting the play of feeling on her face with the intentness of a man who watches the face of one he loves. It hurt him to see her speaking for Tinteniac, so sensitive is the strongest heart when a woman’s eyes have power to wound or heal. The old blind feeling of bitterness that had been bred in him at Motte Broon rushed up to tantalize him with the imagined meaning his instinct set upon the scene.

Croquart gave her the wine-flask and the linen, and she knelt beside Tinteniac, one arm about his shoulders, her face very close to his. Bertrand winced, drove one knee into the grass, and yet cursed himself for a credulous fool. Would any woman stand by and see a wounded man bleed to death, and would that woman be Tiphaïne of La Bellière?

Croquart had moved away, and was shouting orders to his men. Bertrand heard them, though his eyes never left Tinteniac, with his head upon Tiphaïne’s knee. They seemed to be speaking together in low tones, and watching the broad back the Fleming had turned to them for the moment. Bertrand saw their hands touch, and looks that were alive with a subtle significance pass between them. Bertrand would have given all he had to have heard the words they had spoken.

The little picture was broken at last, though it seemed to the man among the hazels that Tinteniac had had hours at his disposal. They were binding up the wounded shoulder, and there was blood, Tinteniac’s blood, on Tiphaïne’s hands. With some trick of the memory the sight of it brought back to Bertrand the vision of Arletta dying with red hands in that dark tower amid the beeches of Broceliande. It was as though God’s voice had called to him—a still, small voice amid the silence of the mysterious woods. The perfervid selfishness went out of him like the lust out of the man who remembers the womanhood of his mother.

Bertrand’s hands gripped the blade of his sword as he lay with it crosswise under his throat. He saw Tiphaïne rise, draw aside, her face hidden by her hands. Bertrand felt numb at the sight of it, yet very humble. If she wept for Tinteniac, then Tinteniac was of all men the most to be honored. Honored? And Bertrand’s face burned with the hot memories of many unclean years—years when he had bartered his manhood for harlots’ kisses.

He drew back slowly from under the hazels, and, crawling through the gorse and underwood, reached the place where he had left his horse. A dead tree lay there that had fallen in a winter gale, and Bertrand sat down on the trunk with his drawn sword across his knees. He was humbled, but the struggle was not over with him yet. His heart was still full of the bitterness of the man who covets what he imagines another man to possess.

Bertrand sat on his tree-trunk with the sword across his knees and stared at his horse, that was trying to crop the grass, though the bridle was hitched over the bough of a tree. The oak bough would not bend, nor would the grass spring up to the hungry beast’s muzzle. Bertrand, with a wry twist of the mouth, saw that he and his horse were the victims of a somewhat similar dilemma.

Jealousy is the great distorter of justice, and Bertrand had the devil at his elbow for fully ten minutes on the trunk of the dead tree. The imp shouted every imaginable grievance in his ear, exaggerating possibilities into facts and creating reality from conjecture. Had not he, Bertrand du Guesclin, sacrificed himself for Robin Raguenel’s sake, and accepted shame to save a coward? If Tiphaïne was so tender for Tinteniac’s sake, then, by God, let Tinteniac look to the guarding of his own petticoats!

But that great advocate whose irony slashes to shreds the special pleading of the meaner spirit, the sense of chivalry, that great chastener of manhood, took up the argument in Bertrand’s cause. All ethical struggles are fierce in powerful natures, fierce in their climax, but sure in their decision. Bertrand’s honesty was not to be cajoled. He sat in judgment on himself, the self-asking of a few pitiless questions baring that sincerity that makes true strength.

When he carried Robin’s arms at Mivoie, had he not hoped that some day Tiphaïne might know what he had done?

Had Tiphaïne ever given him the promise of any deeper thing than friendship?

Whose past was the cleaner, the Sieur de Tinteniac’s or his own?

Bertrand knotted his brows over these accusations, and confessed that the spirit of justice had him at its mercy.

He rose, stood irresolute a moment, and then moved towards his horse. The imp of jealousy made a last leap for his shoulders. Bertrand shook them, and was a free man, breathing in new inspiration for the days to come.

Now Croquart had ordered two men-at-arms to go and cover the bodies of Tinteniac’s esquires, who lay dead together in the middle of the forest road. Bertrand was no hot-headed fool. He knew enough of the Fleming and his men to realize that a mere free lance such as he seemed would be treated to no such courtesy as had been given to Tinteniac. He was worth no ransom. If worsted, the point of a spear or the edge of a sword would give him his quittance in the Loudeac woods.

Bertrand knew, also, that he would have no chance with Croquart and his three men, one against four, and that Croquart would not trouble to engage him singly as he had engaged Tinteniac. For one moment Bertrand thought of returning towards Josselin, in the hope of meeting some of Dubois’s men. But the plan did not please him. He had marked down Croquart as his own stag.

Unhitching his bridle from the bough of the tree, he took his spear, that rested against the trunk, and, making a détour through the woods, bore towards the place where the two esquires lay dead.

Croquart, meanwhile, was preparing to resume his march on Loudeac. He had dressed and bound Tinteniac’s wounds, and lifted that gentleman back to the saddle.

“I take your word, sire, as a knight—and a Breton.”

“Be easy, friend, I have not enough blood in me to give you trouble.”

Croquart turned to hold Tiphaïne’s stirrup. She had ceased her anger of weeping, and her face had the white sternness of one whose courage has cooled from the heat of passion. Croquart’s smile was as powerless as a feeble sun upon the winter of her face. She mounted, took the bridle, and looked into the distance to avoid meeting the Fleming’s eyes.

Croquart and Tête Bois got to horse. The two men who were covering the dead bodies with sods and leaves were to follow the Fleming as soon as their work was done. Croquart placed himself between Tiphaïne and Tinteniac. He had rearmed himself in all his heavy harness. No more courtesies were to be expected from him that day.

They had hardly gone a hundred yards when a cry came stealing through the silence of the woods. It held a moment, quivered, to end in a last up-leap like the last flash of a gutted candle. Croquart reined in and set his hand upon his sword. His face, ugly in repose, grew doubly sinister as he glanced back under the boughs of the trees.

A single man-at-arms came cantering over the grass, crouching in the saddle and looking back nervously over his shoulder. Croquart swore at him as he pulled up his horse.

“Hallo, cur!—where is Guymon?”

The man straightened in the saddle and pointed towards Josselin.

“A fellow ran at us out of the woods, struck down Guymon with his spear—”

“And you used the spurs.”

The man agreed, as though Croquart’s anger was preferable to the stranger’s spear.

“Well, what next?”

“The man turned back into the woods, captain.”

“What! He did not follow you?”

“No.”

“How was he armed?”

“Rusty harness that had been oiled and looked black.”

“And both of you ran away—he from you, and you from him.”

“Yes, captain.”

Croquart laughed, and turned again towards Loudeac.

“You must have looked fiercer than you are, fool, or else your brother coward has stopped behind to take the dead men’s rings.”

The free lance accepted the explanation. As a matter of fact, he had taken the dead men’s rings himself, but he did not trouble to tell Croquart so.

XXIX

THE thrushes were singing on the glimmering spires of the oaks as the crimson banner of the sunset waved to pale gold. In the deepening azure of the east the moon had lost the filmy thinness of a cloud and stood out in splendor over the black hills and the valleys faint with mist. Night came, and with it the bent figures of Croquart’s men, gathering sticks and kicking leaves together to make a fire.

The very brilliance of the night made the woods cold, and Tinteniac, stiff with his wounds, sat propped against a tree, trying to pretend that he was neither in pain nor cold. Tiphaïne stood near him, her eyes seeming to catch the melancholy of the dying afterglow.

Croquart turned his hands everywhere to help his men. Whistling, as he might have whistled as a boy when splitting carcasses in Flanders, he looked to the horses, cut down underwood, the fresh, green foam of the woods in spring, and built a screen between the trunks of two great oaks. A horse-cloth stretched across two poles gave some sort of shelter. Business was brisk and money forthcoming, despite the rout at Josselin and the loss of all his baggage. A ransom of twenty thousand crowns was not to be counted on every day of the week, and with the Sieur de Tinteniac as a hostage he could bargain with Beaumanoir should the marshal be discourteous enough to continue offering bribes for his head.

Croquart plunged down the slope of the hill where he had chosen ground for the night, to reappear with a bundle of freshly cut broom, which he tossed down under cover of the screen of boughs. His men’s cloaks were purloined to cover the litter; the fellows could go damp when a Tinteniac was to be kept dry. Tête Bois had already persuaded the fire to blaze, and Croquart turned to his prisoners with a smile that suggested supper.

“A bed, sire, for you and for madame.”

They saw, and avoided each other’s eyes. Croquart, officious in his courtesies, picked up Tinteniac and laid him on the pile of broom, with a saddle on which he might rest his shoulders.

“Room for two, sire,” and he looked at Tiphaïne as though it would have pleased him to lift her as he had lifted Tinteniac. Her immobility discouraged him, and the dusk covered the color on her face. She was watching the flames leap up through the crackling wood, and thinking of poor Gilbert and poor Gilles, left to be spoiled of their rings in the lonely Loudeac woods. Only that morning she had seen their two heads, tawny and black, bowed over the chess-board as they made, little knowing it, the last moves in the game of life. Croquart had killed them, yet stood there offering her the impertinences of his butcher’s tongue. The two lads might have been two sparrows caught in a trap and left with their necks wrung, for all the reflection the deed caused the Fleming.

She went and sat with Tinteniac on the bed Croquart had made for them. Her mock husband felt the unwillingness of her nearness to him, an antagonism, that he would have found in few ladies of the court.

“I remember we have a part to play,” she said, when the Fleming had moved away some paces.

“You trust me, child?”

“Yes, at all times. Yet to lie to this fellow makes me despise myself. I cannot forget the Breton blood he has upon his hands.”

“We shall remember it,” and his eyes grew alive with the firelight. “Mother of God, does a Tinteniac forget such things!”

Supper came, with Croquart ready to serve as their esquire. The man Tête Bois had been sent into a hamlet to the north of Loudeac, with orders to get food, wine, a horse-cloth, flint, steel and tinder, and an iron pot. A boiled chicken, eggs, brown bread, and a flask of cider had resulted from Tête Bois’s marketing. Hunger is a great leveller of prides and prejudices, yet Croquart, ravenous as he was, set his reputation for gallantry before the cravings of his stomach, and carved the chicken and broke the bread.

On a square manchet the white slices of the bird’s breast were proffered to the lady. Tiphaïne saw the two great hands loaded with rings. She thought of the dead esquires, and the food disgusted her, given by those butcher’s hands.

“Madame will eat?”

She took the bread and meat as though they smelled of blood. Tinteniac, less sensitive, and a veteran in the art of concealing his feelings, drew his knife and betrayed no disgust.

“Keep the fool in a good temper,” ran his counsel to Tiphaïne in a whisper.

“Must I eat this food?”

“Yes, though it choke you.”

Croquart watched her, as though his cunning had uncovered her pride. He came to her with the wine-flask, saw her touch it with her lips and hardly taste the wine. Tinteniac was less scrupulous. Croquart’s turn came next. He took a long pull, wiped the mouth on a corner of his surcoat, and smiled a smile that made his small eyes glitter.

“Madame, more wine?”

“Thanks to you, sir, no.”

He saw the repugnance on her face, as though the slime of some unclean reptile could not have made the flask more nauseous to her lips.

“Madame will not drink after me?”

“I am not thirsty.”

“And you do not eat? Well, as you will,” and he treated her as though she were a sulky child. “Sire, I drink to you, the champion of Mivoie.”

Tinteniac laughed.

“Women never know what is pleasant,” he said.

Croquart sprawled beside the fire.

“The battle makes men friends,” and he sucked at the flask till the wine dribbled down his chin.

“I remember, sire, when the Countess de Montfort gave me her own cup after the first taking of Roche d’Errien.”

“Ah, yes.”

“A great lady, sire, who can set courage before birth. I had this ring from her,” and he held a hand up in the light of the fire.

Tinteniac humored him.

“Rubies! I have no such stones in my strong-box.”

“Ah, sire, Jeanne de Montfort knows the value of a brave man when she is served by him. What say you, madame?”

Tiphaïne swept the crumbs from her lap with a quick gesture of the hand.

“No doubt the Countess had need of you,” she said.

Croquart’s watch-fire was the red eye of the night to Bertrand, the black shadow on the black horse stealing through the greenwood on the Fleming’s heels. Bertrand saw the flames waving through the trees as he sat amid the crooked roots of a great oak, cutting slices from a loaf of bread he had bought on the road, his bassinet full of brackish water that he had drawn from a woodland pool. Bertrand was not a sentimentalist, and he broke his dry bread in the dusk as though hungry from a sense of duty, knowing that Croquart was not the man to starve on the march, and that a full stomach makes a better soldier than a head stuffed full of Southern songs. Bertrand carried an amusing matter-of-factness into the current of his adventures. It was not that he did not feel or suffer, but rather the obstinacy of his strength that insisted on coolness and lack of flurry. Thoroughness was a passion with him, even to the masticating of a loaf of bread.

When the dusk had deepened into the white mystery of a moonlit night, Bertrand braced on his bassinet, saw that his horse was securely tethered, and began his advance on Croquart’s fire. Slipping from trunk to trunk and bush to bush, he made a mere moving shadow amid the trees. Croquart had chosen his ground on the slope of a low hill, a ridge of forest hiding the fire from the main track running to Loudeac town. Bertrand, by crawling along the farther slope of the knoll, got within twenty yards of the fire, and lay where a tree threw a black patch on the grass like a piece of ebony set in silver.

The figures were easily distinguishable to Bertrand. Tiphaïne, head held high, lids drooping, the whiteness of her throat rising out of the crimson stuffs beneath. Tinteniac, propped against a saddle, his handsome face looking thin and tired, his eyes restless like the eyes of a man in pain. Croquart, a burly patch of angry red, bassinet off, tanned throat showing, a wine-flask in one hand, a charred stake in the other for stirring the fire. The two men-at-arms stretched half asleep on the far side of the flames.

The setting of the picture gave Bertrand the chance of testing the sincerity of his renunciation. He saw the rough bed, the canopy, the screen of boughs; Tiphaïne close to Tinteniac, a space between them and the Fleming, as though the two were one by courtesy and by desire. Bertrand gnawed at his lips, despite the sternness of his self-repression. The group seemed typical of his own luck in life. Tiphaïne and the Sieur de Tinteniac shared the fire, while he, as ever, lurked in the dark, alone.

“I would say, sire, without making a boast of it, that I have found none of your Breton men a match for me in arms.”

Bertrand heard the words as a man who is half asleep hears a voice that wakes him in the morning. Croquart had been telling a few of his adventures, poking the fire with his stick and brandishing it like the baton of a master musician marshalling the lutanists and flute-players at a feast. The vanity of the Fleming was so inevitable a characteristic that one was no more surprised by it than by seeing a toad spit. Innocent egoism may be a delicate perfume, an essence that adds to the charm of the individual, admirably so in women when they are deserving of desire. But with Croquart his intemperate arrogance was a veritable stench, an effluvium of the flesh, a carrion conceit that nauseated and repelled.

To Bertrand, Tiphaïne’s face seemed tilted antagonistically towards the moon. Her throat lengthened, her lids drooped more over her eyes. She looked impatient over the bellowings of this bull. Tinteniac leaned on his elbow and watched the fire. His contempt, deep as it was, found no expression on his face.

“You cut a notch on your spear,” he said, “for every gentleman you have beaten in arms.”

Croquart prodded the embers with his stick.

“I have cut twenty notches, sire, already.”

“You will have no wood left to your spear soon, eh?”

“Room for more yet,” and he laughed. “I will tell you the names: Sir John de Montigny, Sir Aymery de la Barre, Geoffroi Dubois, Sir Gringoir of Angers, Lord Thomas Allison, whom I challenged at Brest—” And he ran on, mouthing the syllables with the air of a gourmet recalling the dishes at some great feast.

Tiphaïne drew her cloak about her as though she felt the cold.

“And to-day, sir, you have cut another notch,” she said.

“Ah, madame, it shall be one of the deepest, I assure you.”

Tinteniac was able to laugh.

“You flatter me, Fleming. We shared the fame at Mivoie.”

“Sire, madame your wife would break my spear at this last notch if she could.”

His eyes challenged Tiphaïne, and she did not deny him.

To the man lying in the shadow of the tree these words came like the blows of a passing bell. It seemed to him that he had heard all now that he could ever know, and that the silver swan of Rennes would be but a memory and a lost desire. He lay very still in the wet grass, looking at Tiphaïne with a dull aching of the heart, as a man might look at a lost love who has risen to trouble him beyond the waters of the river of death.

XXX

CROQUART yawned behind his arm. He rose, threw a bundle of sticks upon the fire, and called Tête Bois aside towards the horses. The free lance was a little bowlegged, brown-faced Gascon, very tough and wiry, with eyes like a hawk’s and a sharp nose and beard.

“Hello! can you keep awake to-night?” and Croquart shook him by the shoulder. “We are in the way of earning a lapful of crowns. I will give you a thousand crowns if we bring the Sieur de Tinteniac to Morlaix.”

Tête Bois’s eyes lost their sleepiness and twinkled like the eyes of a rat.

“A thousand crowns, captain?”

“I say it again. Take this ring as a pledge. No tricks, or I shall pay you in other coin.”

“Trust me,” and he took the ring; “you can go to sleep in peace. Madame and her gentleman are safe by the fire. Go to sleep, captain,” and he assumed the responsibility with an alert swagger.

“No tricks, little one.”

“A thousand crowns, captain!” and his eyes twinkled. “Curse me, I love you.”

Bertrand saw the Fleming turn back towards the fire, where Tiphaïne was helping Tinteniac to wrap himself in his cloak for the night. Bertrand buried his face in the grass, as though unable to watch them at such an hour as this. Tiphaïne, upon her bed of golden broom, had a sacredness for him, even though she slept at another man’s side. She was pure, irreproachable, herself still, and no carnal thoughts made his happier memories bleed.

When Bertrand lifted his face again from the grass, Tinteniac, muffled in his cloak, lay full length upon the bed of broom; while Tiphaïne, leaning against the screen of boughs, had unloosed her hair and was combing it with a little silver comb. Croquart, a mass of dusky red, sprawled by the fire, his naked sword under his arm and his shield propped against the saddle under his head. Tête Bois’s short and bow-legged figure went to and fro with a shimmer of steel, his shadowy face and the polished back of his bassinet turned alternately towards Bertrand as he kept his guard.

Bertrand, forgetting Croquart and the sentinel, watched Tiphaïne as she combed her hair. Her cloak, turned back a little, drew with its crimson lining rivers of color from the whiteness of her throat. Tossed by the comb, her hair glimmered in the firelight, rich whorls of mystery moving about her face. To Bertrand her eyes seemed to look far into the night, but what her thoughts were he could not tell.

He saw her put her comb away at last, turn and look at Tinteniac, who seemed ready to forget his wounds in sleep. She stretched a hand towards him, slowly, tentatively, but drew back sharply as Croquart found his bed uncharitable and shifted his body with much heaving of the shoulders. Tête Bois’s keen profile showed against the firelight, mustachios upturned, nose beaking out from under the rim of his open bassinet.

“Madame had better sleep. We travel early.”

The fellow had seen her stretch out her hand towards Tinteniac, and the words warned her that the Gascon was not to be cajoled. His strut was independent and alert as he turned his back on her abruptly and resumed his marching to and fro.

Tiphaïne lay down on the bed, so that, though her face was hidden from Bertrand, he could see the glitter of her hair. There was the length of a sword between her and Tinteniac, three feet of flowering broom between the green cloak and the gray. Bertrand in his heart thanked God that he could see her so, separate, untouched under the moon. He could not have looked at Tiphaïne if she had lain wrapped in Tinteniac’s arms. Twice he saw her lift her head and look at Croquart and the rest. An hour passed before weariness seemed to overpower distrust, and her stillness showed him that she was asleep.

Tête Bois, tired of pacing to and fro, had come to a halt some ten paces from the fire, and now leaned heavily upon his spear. The Gascon was amusing himself by calculating how far a thousand crowns would go to making him the master of a troop of horse. The pieces kept up a fantastic dance before his eyes. He handled them lovingly in anticipation, letting them slip through his fingers in glittering showers, pouring them upon a table and listening to the joyous clangor of the metal. The moon was but a great crown-piece so far as Tête Bois was concerned. He took off the ring Croquart had given him as a pledge, and held it out towards the fire to watch the flashing of the stones.

Unfortunately for Tête Bois, greed dulled the keenness of his senses, and he neither saw nor heard the stealthy and sinuous moving of a black shape across the moonlit grass. The Gascon might have swallowed his thousand crowns for supper to judge by the nightmare that leaped on him out of the mists of the silent woods.

Dawn came, and Croquart the Fleming was the first to wake. He yawned, stretched himself, and sat up sleepily, his red face suffused, his surcoat wet with the heavy dew. Gray mist hung everywhere over the forest, though in the east there was a faint flush of rose and of gold. The birds were piping in the thickets. Tinteniac and the lady were still asleep.

Croquart smiled at them as a farmer might smile over the fatness of two prize beasts. He scrambled up and looked round him for Tête Bois, thinking that the Gascon might have gone to cut fodder for the horses. The bow-legged paladin was nowhere to be seen. The watch-fire was out, though the embers still steamed in the cold air of the morning.

“Hallo, there, Tête Bois!”

The deep voice, resonant from the Fleming’s chest, woke echoes in the woods and silenced the birds singing in the thickets. Harduin, the second free lance, sat up and rubbed his eyes like a cat pawing its face. Tinteniac turned from sleep to find his wounds stiff and aching under the sodden bandages. Tiphaïne, propped upon one elbow, her hair falling down to touch the flowering broom, saw Croquart striding to and fro, flourishing a stick, restless and impatient.

“Tête Bois, rascal, hallo!”

A few rabbits scurried down the misty glades, and a couple of partridges went “burring” into cover. The Fleming’s voice brought back nothing.

Croquart looked grim.

“The little Gascon devil!” he thought. “That ring was worth a hundred crowns, and a ring on the finger, Messire Tête Bois, is worth a thousand crowns in my strong-box, eh? If I ever catch you, my friend, I will break your back. Let us see whether you have taken your own horse.”

But Tête Bois’s horse was standing quietly with the rest, and the frown on the Fleming’s face showed that he was puzzled. What had happened to the fellow? And if he had deserted, why had he left his horse?

Tête Bois’s disappearance opened the day ill-humoredly for the Fleming. The natural roughness of his temper broke to the surface, and he was sullen and abrupt, his affectations of refinement damp as his own finery with the night’s dew. Tiphaïne and her champion had never a smile from him as they made their morning meal and Croquart bustled them to horse, impatient as any merchant afraid of losing his silks and spices to footpads ambushed in the woods. Such baggage as they had was tied on the back of Tête Bois’s horse, and before the sun had been up an hour they were on the road towards Morlaix.

The mists rolled away, leaving a dappling of clouds over the blue of the May sky. The grass glittered with dew, and the scent of the woods was like the scent of some cedar chest filled with the perfumed robes of a queen. The beech-trees, with their splendor of misty green, towered up beside the embattled oaks, whose crockets and finials seemed of bronze and of gold. The grass was thick with many flowers, the robes of the earth wondrous with color.

Yet beauty cannot save a man from pain, and before they had gone two leagues that morning Tiphaïne saw that Tinteniac suffered. From white his face had changed to gray, and his eyes had the wistful look that one sees in the eyes of a wounded dog. He had lost much blood and needed rest, for his harness and each jolting of the saddle gave him pain. Pride kept Tinteniac silent—the pride of the man unwilling to ask favors in defeat. The cool air of the morning had its balm, but when the sun rose above the trees the heat of the day made his forehead burn.

Tiphaïne, looking up at him with pitying eyes, saw how he suffered, though he told her nothing. Croquart, sullen and out of temper, had forged on ahead, feeling the smart of the rout at Josselin. The man Harduin, leading Tête Bois’s horse, followed leisurely in the rear.

“Your wounds are too much for you.” And she drew her palfrey close to the great horse.

“No, child, no.”

“Tell the Fleming you must rest.”

Tinteniac straightened in the saddle with a slight shudder of pain.

“I can bear it longer,” he said, quietly.

“Why, sire, why? Croquart must let you rest.”

“Upon my soul, I will ask him no favor.”

“And upon my soul, sire, in ten minutes you will fall from your horse.”

She pushed past him without further parley and overtook the Fleming, who was biting his beard and looking as ill-tempered as it is possible for a man with an ugly jowl to look. Tiphaïne caught a glimpse of his solid and pugnacious profile before he turned to her with an impatient glint of the eyes.

“Well, madame, what now?”

“The Sieur de Tinteniac’s wounds are still open; he cannot travel farther without a rest.”

“Rest—a soldier asks for rest!”

Tiphaïne’s color deepened. The very arrogance of the man’s impatience fed her hate. She could have laid a whip across Croquart’s face with immense comfort to her self-respect.

“You answer me—that?”

“I command here, madame.”

“Then call a halt.”

“The Sieur de Tinteniac must hold on to the saddle till we reach the hills.”

“You have no pity!”

“I have no time to waste.”

“And I—no words.”

She reined in her palfrey, slipped from the saddle, and, leading the beast aside by the bridle, began to pick the flowers that grew in the long grass, as though she were at home in the La Bellière meadows. Croquart pulled up his horse, looking as black and threatening as a priest out-argued by a heretic. Tinteniac, guessing what had passed between them, reined up in turn and let his horse crop the grass.

Croquart’s veneer of chivalry cracked under the heat of the sun. Tiphaïne’s eyes had flattered him too little to persuade him to be pleased with a woman’s whims. He heeled his horse across the road, to see the Vicomte’s daughter retreating from him at her leisure, singing to herself and stooping to pick flowers.

“Madame!”

Tiphaïne went on with her singing.

“Devil take the woman!” And he pushed on after her, not knowing for the moment how to meet her tactics.

Tiphaïne stood in a pool of waving grass, where bluebells touched the hem of her gray gown. Great oaks, with tops of burnished gold, swept up beyond to touch the clouds. She reached out a white arm for the flowers, seeing the shadow of Croquart’s horse loom towards her over the grass. He was quite close before she turned and faced him, keeping her palfrey between her and the Fleming.

“Well, Messire Croquart,” and she gave him the title with a curl of the lip, “am I to believe that you have no manners?”

“A truce to this foolery.”

“I tell you, I am tired, sir, and I am going to rest.”

Croquart bit his beard.

“I shall have to dismount to you, madame.”

Her eyes blazed out at him, their splendor more visible now that she was angry.

“Dismount to me, you butcher boy from Flanders! No, that would be too gracious of you. Please continue to forget your manners.”

“Madame, I shall lose my temper with you.”

“It is lost already, Messire Croquart. Try the flat of your sword, or the edge thereof if it pleases you. I am not afraid.”

“I shall have to put you up into the saddle.”

“You cannot keep me from falling off.”

“Hands and feet can be tied, eh?”

“Yes, and I have a knife.”

“Pah, madame, am I a fool? I tell you I am in no temper to be bated.”

“Get down, then, sir, and see if you can run in your heavy harness. Meanwhile the Sire de Tinteniac might have his rest.”

Croquart opened his mouth to swear, but mastered himself with an effort, as though realizing that the species of dictatorship was not crowned with too much dignity.

“Come, madame, be reasonable.”

“Is it unreasonable, Messire Croquart, for a wife to fear that her husband may die of his wounds?”

“Oh—you exaggerate.”

“The weight of your blows? They were not too feeble.”

“Grace de Dieu, madame, have your way, or we shall be quarrelling here till midnight!”

“Then we rest for an hour?”

“I grant it.”

And he capitulated sulkily, with the air of a man giving way to the foibles of a woman.

Of all this by-play Bertrand had a distant view as he followed Tiphaïne through the green mystery of May. What were the golden meads to him, the winding woodways wonderful with spring, the dawn song of the birds, the scent of the wild flowers rising like incense out of the grass? To Bertrand that silent and unseen journey towards Morlaix seemed like a pilgrimage for the humbling of his heart. He followed, watched, planned, yet felt himself forgotten, reading into every incident that passed a woman’s tenderness for a man whom he himself could easily have loved.

Through the long watches of the night and the shining of the east at dawn Bertrand had wrestled with his loneliness. It was not easy for him to renounce so much, to accept forgetfulness, to look upon the past as a mere memory. And yet the very obstinacy of his new self-discipline helped him to throw his jealousy aside. What kind of creature would he find himself if he deserted Tiphaïne at such a pass, standing upon a mean punctilio, refusing to be generous save for his own ends? If he was to suffer, then let him serve and suffer like a man, remembering the old days when Tiphaïne had saved him from his shame.

XXXI

A DESOLATED homestead in a valley among the northern hills gave Croquart and his prisoners shelter the same night. The house, built of unfaced stone and thatched with straw and heather, had been plundered by some of Bamborough’s English, whose passion for thoroughness in their thieving moved them to burn what they could not carry.

Croquart rode into the grass-grown yard, where all the byres and out-houses had been destroyed by fire, nothing but a few charred posts rising above the weeds and nettles. The Fleming dismounted, after sounding his horn to see whether any of the farm folk still loitered about the place. They found the house itself to be full of filth, for the birds had roosted on the rafters, and the English used it as a stable, the droppings from their horses rotting upon the floor. It held nothing but the hall, a cellar, and the goodman’s parlor under the western gable—the last room being a little more cleanly than the hall, its single window, with the shutter broken, looking down upon the orchard. Pears and apples piled up their bloom above the rank splendor of the grass—a sea of snow flecked and shaded with rose and green. To the east of the orchard a great pool shimmered in the sunlight, its waters dusted with blown petals from the trees.

Tinteniac was so stiff and sore with his wounds after the day’s ride that Croquart had to help him from his horse. The Fleming, who had examined the house, took Tinteniac in his arms, and carried him to the upper room, where there was some mouldy straw piled in a corner. He laid Tinteniac on the straw, having made a show of his great strength by carrying a man taller than himself with the ease that he would have carried a child of five. Croquart had recovered his self-complacency since his skirmish with Tiphaïne in the morning, and she had had nothing to charge him with save with his insufferable boasting.

Tinteniac was so utterly weary that he had not sufficient mind-force left in him to resent his being treated as a dead weight for the exhibition of the Fleming’s strength. He drew a deep breath of relief when he felt his body sink into the straw—too faint to care whether the bed was one of swan’s-down or of dung. In five minutes he was fast asleep.

Harduin had watered the horses and stabled them in the hall, lit a fire, and slung the cooking-pot over a couple of forked sticks. In a little hovel at the end of the orchard Croquart had found some clean straw, and carried a truss into the goodman’s parlor to make Tiphaïne a bed. She met him with a finger on her lip, and pointed to Tinteniac, whose tired body drank in sleep as a dry soil drinks in rain. How much alone she was, how wholly at the Fleming’s mercy, she only realized as she watched him spread the straw in a far corner of the room.

“You will sleep softly enough,” he said, turning on his knees, and looking at her with an expression of the eyes she did not trust.

“It is not likely that I shall sleep,” and she moved aside towards the window.

“No bedfellow, eh?” And he got up with a chuckle, leaving her alone with the wounded man upon the straw.

Presently he returned with a pitcher full of water, some brown bread, and a few olives. He set them down on a rough bench by the window, and loitered foolishly at the door.

“I trust madame has forgotten the quarrel we had this morning?”

“I am ready to forget it, Messire Croquart.”

“Thanks,” and he gave her an impudent bow, “we shall be better friends before we reach Morlaix.”

When he had gone she closed the door on him, and found to her delight the wooden bar that was used in lieu of a latch. The staples were firm in the oak posts, yet not so firm that she could abandon her distrust. The rough bench at the window, a cup of water, olives, and bread; with such comforts she was content, so long as the door parted Croquart and herself. While Tinteniac slept she watched the sun sink low behind the woods that broke like green waves upon the bosoms of the hills. Below her lay the orchard trees, smothering the old house with beauty under the benisons of eve. Swallows were skimming over the still waters of the pond, and the mist in the meadows covered the sheeted gold of May.

In the dirty cobwebbed hall Croquart was making his plans for the coming night. The house door, studded with iron nails, lay wrenched from its hinges in the yard, and through the open windows the birds and bats could come and go. Croquart, sitting on a saddle by the fire, his sword across his thighs, called Harduin to him, and offered him the same bribe as he had given Tête Bois the night before.

“Well, my friend, are you in a hurry to desert?”

The fellow fidgeted under the Fleming’s eyes.

“Come, let us understand each other; I have a mind to be generous. Will you stand by Croquart the Fleming or follow Tête Bois, who preferred a ring to a thousand crowns?”

Harduin, who had already stolen the rings from Tinteniac’s dead esquires, appeared even more greedy than the Gascon.

“When shall I finger the money, captain?”

“At Morlaix.”

“Call it a bargain.”

“And easily earned, eh? Keep guard in the orchard near the Sieur de Tinteniac’s window.”

Harduin nodded.

“The house shall be my affair. Whistle if you see anything strange.”

“Right, captain.”

And taking his spear and shield with him, he went out into the orchard to keep watch.

About midnight Tinteniac awoke, and turned on his straw with the confused thoughts of a man whose surroundings are strange to him. Tiphaïne, seated by the window, where the moonlight streamed in upon the floor, went to him quietly, and knelt down by the bed.

“You have slept well,” and she felt his forehead; “there is food here if you are hungry.”

“Asleep! Selfish devil that I am! You must be tired to death.”

“No, I am not tired.”

He looked at her steadily, propping himself upon one arm. Sleep had cooled the fever in him, freshened his brain, and strengthened the beating of his heart. The room lit by the moonlight, the perfumed coolness of the night, the white face of the woman by the bed, filled him with a sense of strangeness and of mystery.

“It is my turn to watch.” And he touched her arm, thrilling, man of forty that he was, at Tiphaïne’s nearness to him in the moonlight.

“There is no need for it; I have barred the door.”

“And Croquart?”

She did not tell him of her great distrust.

“Croquart has left us as man and wife. I have too much to think about to wish to sleep.”

Tinteniac sank back on his straw, watching her as she brought him the water-pot, bread, and olives.

“I am afraid I am a broken reed,” he said, with the smile of a man contented to be ministered to by a woman’s hands.

“You must gain strength, sire, for both our sakes.”

“Yes, true.”

“Therefore, you must sleep again.”

“I would rather talk.”

“We can talk to-morrow.”

“Have we not changed our parts? Well, I will obey your orders.”

And in half an hour his breathing showed that he had forgotten the world and such subtleties as the glimmer of moonlight on a woman’s hair.

Tiphaïne had returned to her seat by the window, her sense of loneliness increased now that Tinteniac was asleep. The night, with all its infinite uncertainty, its vague sounds and distorted shadows, filled her with restlessness and with those imaginings that people the world with half-seen shapes. The bravest of us are but great children when a wind blows the boughs against the window at midnight, and the moon, that magician of the skies, brings back the childhood of the race, when man trembled before Nature, filling the forest, the desert, and the marsh with goblin creatures born out of his own vivid brain.

Before Tiphaïne at her window stood the orchard trees, pillars of ebony spreading into carved canopies of whitest marble, each chisel-mark perfect as from the touch of a god. The deep grass looked black as water in a well, the wooded slopes of the silent valley steepled with a thousand shimmering spires. Under an apple-tree stood Croquart’s sentinel, leaning lazily against the trunk, the moonlight sifting through the apple bloom and dappling his harness with silver burrs. Tiphaïne had discovered Harduin there, and knew that he had been set there to watch the window. Twice she saw Croquart enter the orchard to assure himself that Harduin was awake at his post.

An hour later she heard the Fleming mount the stairs, stealthily and with the deliberation of a man fearing to wake a household as he creeps to an intrigue. She could hear his breathing as he stood and listened, while the rats scuffled and squeaked under the wood-work of the floor. His hand tried the door, shaking it cautiously with tentative clickings of the wooden latch. Tiphaïne thanked God for the good oak-bar that gave Messire Croquart the lie for once. He turned at last and went back to the hall, where she could hear him swearing and throwing wood upon the fire. There would be no thought of sleep for the mock wife that night.

Now whether Tiphaïne was very quick of hearing, or whether the tension of her distrust had turned up the sensitiveness of her ears, she heard some sound in the moonlit orchard that seemed lost upon Harduin as he leaned against his tree. The noise resembled the faint “tuff—tuff” of a sheep cropping at short grass. Sometimes it ceased, only to commence again, nearer and more distinct to her than before. Tiphaïne strained her ears and her conjectures to set a cause to the approaching sound. She wondered that Harduin had not heard it, and judged that his bassinet might make him harder of hearing than herself.

A suggestion of movement, a vague sheen in the grass showed in the moonlight under the apple-trees, as of something crawling towards the house. Slowly, noiselessly, a figure rose from the grass behind the trunk of the tree against which Croquart’s sentinel was leaning. There was a sudden darting forward of the stooping figure, a flinging out of a pair of arms, a curious choking cry, a short struggle. Tiphaïne saw Harduin drop his spear, writhe and twist like a man with a rope knotted about his neck. In the moonlight she could see the violent contortions of his body, his hands tearing at something that seemed to grip his throat, his feet scraping and kicking at the soft turf. The man’s struggle reminded her of a toy she had had as a child, a little wooden manikin, whose legs and arms flew into grotesque attitudes on the pulling of a string. Before she realized what had happened, Harduin’s muscles relaxed, his hands dropped, and he hung against the trunk of the tree like a man nailed there through the throat. The body slid slowly to earth, doubled upon itself, was seized and heaved up over the shoulders of the other, and carried away into the deeps of the orchard.

A shudder of superstitious terror passed through Tiphaïne. It had been done so swiftly, with such unhuman silence, that Harduin might have been pounced upon by some ogre out of the woods. The patch of grass under the apple-tree fascinated her; her eyes remained fixed on it, her heart going at a gallop, the blood drumming in her ears. With a sudden flash of intuition she remembered Tête Bois’s disappearance the preceding night, and the way the man Guymon had been stricken down over the bodies of the dead esquires. Some grim and inexorable spirit seemed tracking Croquart through the woods, a fierce shadow that seized its prey under cover of the night.

She lifted her head suddenly with a quick-drawn breath of eagerness and fear. Something was moving in the orchard, for she heard the same peculiar sound that had heralded its first coming. A faint glimmer of harness under the white boughs, and a figure drew out of the mists of the night and halted under the tree where Harduin had stood a few minutes ago. A half-luminous band ran from the man’s breast to the rank grass, the long blade of a sword like a beam of moonlight slanting through a chink in a shuttered window at night. The figure remained motionless, leaning upon the sword, as though it stood on guard in the orchard and waited for the dawn.

XXXII

BERTRAND kept watch in his black harness under the apple-tree, knowing that his time would come when Croquart should find him there, an enemy in Harduin’s place. Whether it was the last night-watch he would ever keep, Bertrand du Guesclin could not tell. He knew Croquart’s great strength and the little mercy he might expect from him; he knew that he was to match himself against a man who had never taken a beating in single combat. Bertrand put the chances of victory and defeat beyond the pale of thought. He was to fight Croquart for his head and for the two prisoners pent up in the ruined house. For his own life Bertrand had no particular greed. He would kill Croquart or be killed himself.

Cool, calm-eyed, firm at the mouth, he watched the night pass and the dawn come up out of the broadening east. He saw the color kindle on the apple-trees, the wet grass flash and glitter at his feet, the dim woods smoking with their silvery mists. He heard the birds begin in the great orchard, thrush and robin, blackbird and starling, piping and chattering as the sky grew bright.

“Bide by it! bide by it!” sang a thrush in the tree above his head.

“Thanks, my brown fellow,” he said, with a grim smile; “wait and see whether Bertrand du Guesclin runs away.”

He stretched his arms and the muscles of his chest and shoulders, tossing his sword from hand to hand. The flash of the steel seemed reflected to him for the moment from the narrow window of the solar in the western gable. Bertrand stood still. He had seen the white oval of a face framed by the inward darkness of the room, as though some one watched him without wishing to be seen. He knew that it was Tiphaïne by the faint gleam of her coiled hair. How coldly she would be looking at him with those eyes of hers, taking him for Croquart’s man, a shabby fellow who fought for hire. His carcass and his destiny could concern her little.

“Hallo, a whistle! Now, Brother Croquart, let us get to work.”

He whipped round, closed his visor, and looked quickly to the buckles of his harness, and to see that his dagger was loose in its sheath. His shield, that he had hung on a bough of the apple-tree, dipped down and changed the fruit bough for his arm. The taut grip of the strap gave Bertrand a kind of comfort. He had two friends left him, his battered shield and his old sword.

Round the corner of the house came Croquart, his bassinet half laced, his scabbard bumping against his legs, the creases in his red surcoat showing that he had been asleep. He saw the man leaning lazily against the tree, and promptly cursed him for not answering his whistle.

“Harduin, blockhead, water the horses!”

The sentinel moved never an inch.

“Hallo, there, hallo, have you got maggots in your brain?”

Croquart’s hail might have cheered on a troop of horse in the thick of a charge home. He came striding through the grass, with his fingers twitching, a buffet tingling in the muscles of his arm.

“Hallo, you deaf fool—”

His mouth was open, the lips a red oval, empty for the instant of more words. It was not Harduin under the tree, but the man in the black harness who had stricken down Guymon in the woods. Croquart looked staggered, like some fat grandee charged in the pit of the stomach by a small boy’s head.

The repulse was but momentary. He leaped full six feet from where he stood, sweeping his gadded fist forward with good intent for the stranger’s head. Bertrand, every muscle on the alert, was quicker far than Croquart. The Fleming’s fist smashed the bark from the tree, leaving him bloody knuckles despite his glove.

“Good-day, Brother Croquart”—and a sword came to the salute—“they have offered five thousand crowns for your head at Josselin.”

The Fleming began tying the laces of his bassinet.

“And who are you, sir, that you are such a fool to think of earning the Sieur de Beaumanoir’s money?”

“I am a Breton, Brother Croquart, and that is the reason why I am going to have your head.”

XXXIII

TINTENIAC was still asleep upon his straw, nor did Tiphaïne wake him, but stood at the window and watched the drama that was taking shape under the apple boughs. The man in the black harness was leaning on his sword, waiting for Croquart, whose fingers fumbled at the laces of his bassinet. There was something familiar to Tiphaïne in this attitude of his, the attitude of a man whose heart beat steadily and whose eyes were quick and on the alert.

Croquart’s sword was out. He looked at the window where Tiphaïne stood, and guessed by her face that she did not wish him great success.

“Guard, Breton.”

They sprang to it with great good-will, Bertrand keeping careful guard, and never shifting his eyes from the Fleming’s face. He had learned his lesson off by heart, to let Croquart think that he had an easy bargain and that a few heavy blows would end the tussle. The butcher-boy of Flanders fell to the trick; he had met so few men who could match him in arms that he had grown rash in his methods, forgetting that guile is often more deadly than muscle and address. He had seen that Bertrand was a head shorter than himself; he soon suspected that he was clumsy, and not the master of his sword.

Bertrand gave ground, puffing and laboring like a man hard pressed. He let the Fleming’s blows rattle about his body harness, half parrying them with a concealed adroitness, continually retreating, or dodging to right and left. He was playing for an opening in Croquart’s attack, luring him into rashness, tempting him to hammer at him without thought of a dangerous counter in return. Croquart would soon stretch himself for the _coup de grâce_, thinking his man tired, and that he had trifled with him over-long.

Still Bertrand bided his time. He faltered suddenly, made a pretended stumble, tempted Croquart with an unguarded flank. Down came the Fleming’s open blow, given with the rash vigor of a man imagining the victim at his mercy. Bertrand bent from it like a supple osier, rallied, and struck out with a swiftness that caught Messire Croquart off his balance and off his guard. Steel met steel on the vambrace of the Fleming’s sword-arm. Tiphaïne had a vision of a lopped limb swinging by its tendons, of a falling sword, of a second blow heaved home on the Fleming’s thigh.

The loss of his right hand sent Croquart mad. He picked up the fallen sword, and flew at Bertrand like any Baersark, the one lust left in him to wound, to mutilate, and to kill.

The din of their fighting had wakened Tinteniac, and he had dragged himself from the straw to join Tiphaïne at the window. They stood shoulder to shoulder, silent, and half awed by the fury of these two men, who neither desired nor craved for mercy. Tinteniac had seen such battles before, but to the woman there was something horrible and repulsive in its animal frenzy, a reversion to the brutal past, when the lusts of man made him an ape or a bull. She shuddered at Croquart’s dangling hand, and at the mad biting of his breath as he lashed at Bertrand with his sword. Shocked by the brute violence, the physical distortions of the scene, she turned back into the room, unwilling to watch the ordeal to the end.

Soon she heard a hoarse cry from Tinteniac. The men had closed and gone to earth, and were struggling together in the long grass. Croquart was losing blood and strength, and in such a death-grapple under the trees the cunning of the wrestler gave Bertrand the advantage. Though the lighter man, he was tougher and more sinewy than the Fleming, and fit in the matter of condition as a lean hound who has worked for his food.

“By God, he has the fellow down!”

Tinteniac was biting his lips in his excitement, and shivering like a dog on leash waiting to be let loose upon the quarry. Bertrand, with a twist of the leg and a hug of the Fleming’s body, had turned Croquart under him and won the upper hand. The Breton’s fist flew to his poniard. Croquart, who knew the meaning of the act, kicked like a mad horse, twisting and turning under Bertrand’s body. With a heave of the arm he rolled half over, and, lifting Bertrand, struggled to his knees. Before he could shake the Breton off the misericord was splitting the plates of his gorget. Croquart, with a great cry, fell forward upon his face, dragging Bertrand with him into the grass, as a sinking ship drags down the enemy it has grappled hulk to hulk. Slowly the black figure disentangled itself from the red, rose up, and leaned for a moment against the trunk of a tree.

“An end to Croquart!”

The words came from Tinteniac in a half whisper, but Tiphaïne heard them where she stood in the deep shadow against the wall.

Croquart dead! And she seemed to feel the great breath of gratitude the Breton folk would draw for such a death. Guymon, Tête Bois, Harduin, and the Fleming, all had fallen to the sword of this one man who had dogged them through the woods past Loudeac. Tinteniac had taken his shield, and was holding it from the window so that the hero of the orchard should see the blazonings. Tiphaïne still leaned against the wall, watching Tinteniac and the blur of green woodland and blue sky above his head.

Bertrand was bending over Croquart and unlacing the bassinet that still bore the fox’s brush. He saw Tiphaïne’s face beside Tinteniac at the window. Her presence did not hinder him, but rather urged him to despatch the work in hand.

“Sieur de Tinteniac,” he shouted, “make me one promise and I give you back your liberty.”

The aristocrat made the man in the black harness a very flattering bow.

“The conqueror of Croquart can ask what he pleases.”

Bertrand, with Tiphaïne’s face looking down on him like lost love’s face out of heaven, broke the laces of Croquart’s bassinet.

“Sire”—and his voice needed no disguising—“I ask you and madame, your wife, not to leave that room till I have made an end.”

Tinteniac gave the promise, turning with a smile to Tiphaïne, who promised nothing.

“Granted, sir. And in return, will you trust us with your name?”

Bertrand had turned his back on them and was bending over the body.

“Sire, you ask me what I cannot answer.”

“We will hold it sacred.”

Bertrand shook his head.

Tinteniac pressed him no further, and Bertrand, forcing off Croquart’s bassinet, broke away the plates of the gorget from the bleeding throat. Picking up his poniard he slit the Fleming’s surcoat from breast to knee, dragged it from the body, and spread the stuff upon the grass. Two sharp sweeps of the sword served to sever the neck. The dead thing was wrapped up in the red surcoat, and the ends of the cloth knotted together.

Tinteniac watched all this from the window, mystified in measure as to what the man in the black harness purposed next. He had not noticed that Tiphaïne had left him, had lifted the bar from the staples, and was hurrying down the stone stairway into the hall.

Bertrand ran the blade of his sword under the knotted ends of the surcoat, slung it over his shoulder like a bundle, and picked up his shield. He gave a last look at the window, saluted Tinteniac, and marched off briskly into the orchard. His black harness had already disappeared beyond the apple-trees before Tiphaïne’s gray gown swept the grass.

She looked round her with a slight knitting of the brows, seeing only Tinteniac at the window, the white domes of the trees, and the headless body in its gaudy harness lying prone in the long grass.

“Where?” and her eyes questioned Tinteniac, who stroked his chin and appeared puzzled.

“Our Breton champion has left us with our liberty.”

“Gone?”

“Like a beggar with a bundle. Let the man alone. He has his reasons and the advantage of us.”

“And yet—”

Tinteniac laughed.

“The woman in you is inquisitive,” he said.

Tiphaïne went a few steps nearer to Croquart’s body. It seemed difficult to believe that this lifeless, weltering thing had raised in her but an hour ago all the passionate hatred that great love of her home land could inspire. Now that it was mere carrion she conceived a scornful pity for the thing as she recalled the man’s arrogance, his bombast, his supreme and coarse self-adoration. Truly this was the proper rounding of such a life, to be bred a butcher, fattened with the blood of a noble province, and left a mere carcass for the crows and wolves. She turned from Croquart’s body with a sigh half of pity, half of disgust.

Tinteniac watched her from the window, his mind moved by the same reflections, the religious instinct in him pointing a moral. In the distance he had seen a figure on a horse pass through the morning mists in the meadows and vanish into the sun-touched woods.

“Our Breton has gone,” and he lifted up his shield, “I would have given half that ransom to have had a glimpse of his face.”

Tiphaïne looked at him with eyes that mused.

“Why should he have deserted us?”

“I am no reader of riddles. And our plans? What are they to be?”

“I am thinking of your wounds,” she answered.

“They are nothing. This fellow has given me new strength. Shall we still say, ‘to Josselin’?”

“Thanks, sire. I remember that I have the truth to tell.”

XXXIV

NOT a league from the Breton homestead, where Croquart the Fleming had made his end, the gyron of Geoffroi Dubois, vert, a bend between two buckles argent, came dancing along the road from Loudeac. With Dubois were Carro de Bodegat and some score more who had sworn on the crosses of their swords to overtake Croquart before he could find sanctuary with an English garrison in the west. By luck they had struck upon his trail near Loudeac where the fox’s brush and the red surcoat had been seen, and recognized; and at Loudeac, also, Dubois had found Tinteniac’s men-at-arms and the La Bellière servants, ready to affirm on oath that the Fleming could muster at least a hundred men. Dubois and his gentlemen had wasted no time scouring the country towards Morlaix, and doubtless they would have won the credit of taking the Fleming’s head had not the man in the black harness been more forward in the adventure.

Geoffroi Dubois and Carro de Bodegat were pushing on with their troop at a brisk trot that morning, when the very fellow who had cheated them of the prize loomed up against the sky-line, on the crest of a moor. The morning sun shone in Bertrand’s eyes, and he was seen by Dubois’s men before he caught the flutter of their pennons down in the hollow where the moorland touched the woods. Half a dozen riders had broken away to right and left, and were cantering over the heather to make a capture certain.

Bertrand showed no concern at the measures taken to secure the pleasure of a parley with him. He reined in his horse to a walk, and approached Dubois’s troop, reading their pennons and the devices upon their shields. If the green gyron of Dubois did not please him hugely, the tawny and blue of De Bodegat’s pennon was even less welcome to Bertrand’s eyes. These two Breton knights had been no friends to him in the Montfort wars. Dubois was a man jealous for his dignity, a good hater, and not over magnanimous or honest where his own interests were concerned. Carro de Bodegat had a grudge against Du Guesclin, an old wound, and an unpaid score. They would be ready to throw the troth-breaking at Mivoie in his face, the more so he thought now that he had forestalled them in the taking of Croquart’s head.

Bertrand, on his raw-boned horse, looked for all the world like a needy free lance riding from town to town in search of hire. The green gyron came to a halt on a hillock, Dubois, gentleman of distinction that he was, refusing to drag his dignity aside to catechise a fellow who made so indifferent a show. The humble rush-light should approach the baronial torch, and Bertrand, knowing Dubois’s nature, kept his visor down, and prepared to be hectored by the noble.

“Hallo, my man, you are on the road early.”

Bertrand saluted the Breton gentlemen as their tall spears gathered about him like the striding masts of as many ships. He had the red bundle before him on the saddle, and answered Dubois in broad Breton patois, posing as the common soldier in search of pay.

“God’s grace to you, sire, I ride towards Josselin; they tell me men are needed under the Marshal’s banner.”

Dubois studied him with the leisurely impertinence of a great lord criticising the patched clothes of a servant.

“So you go to Josselin, my little fellow, eh? Have you had news hereabouts of Croquart the Fleming?”

Bertrand looked stupidly at Dubois’s green plume.

“Croquart! To be sure, sire, Croquart is dead.”

“How! Croquart dead!”

There was a slight swaying of the spears like the swaying of tall ash-trees in a wind.

“Sire, if it please you I saw Croquart’s body lying unburied in the orchard of a farm-house not three miles farther west.”

Dubois was not pleased; nor were De Bodegat and the rest.

“Be careful, my friend, how you tamper with the truth. How did you know that it was Croquart you saw dead?”

Bertrand did not hesitate.

“Sire, by the fox’s brush.”

“Yes.”

“And the ugliness of the Fleming’s face.”

Carro de Bodegat, tempted to quarrel with the nature of the news, leaned towards Dubois, and pointed out the red bundle Bertrand carried on his saddle.

“I’ll swear the fellow is playing tricks with us.”

“Well, try him.”

“Let him open that bundle.”

Carro de Bodegat’s sharp eyes had picked out the gold thread-work on the scarlet cloth, and a patch of purplish ooze on the under side thereof.

“Friend, do you carry your food there?”

“Where, sir?”

“There, in that bundle.”

Bertrand held the thing up by its knotted ends.

“Devil take it, the cider bottle has had a knock!”

Bodegat pouted his lips, and sniffed.

“Do you carry your brown bread in ciclaton and your cider bottles in silk?” he asked.

“God’s mercy, sirs, what’s there to quarrel with in the stuff?”

Dubois exchanged a glance with Bodegat.

“Let us see what you have in that cloth.”

Bertrand made a show of hesitation.

“Open it, I say.”

“But, sirs—”

“Open it, or—” and at a sign from Dubois half a dozen spears were slanted at Bertrand’s body.

Persuaded, he fumbled at the knots, flung out his arm suddenly, holding the surcoat by a corner.

“Have your way, Messire Geoffroi Dubois. Look and see whether this is Croquart’s head.”

That which but an hour ago had held the conscious soul of a man was tossed from the red surcoat at the feet of Dubois’s horse. The beast reared and backed some paces. Twenty figures were craning forward in their saddles to get a glimpse of the thing that had half hidden itself in a clump of heather.

Carro de Bodegat was the first to earth. He threw his bridle to a trooper, and, picking up the Fleming’s head by the hair, looked at the face, with its closed lids and gaping mouth, and, turning with a sharp, inarticulate cry, held up the head before Dubois.

“It is Croquart’s.”

“Should I not know it?”

“Who killed him?”

“Bertrand du Guesclin.”

Bodegat turned sharply on the man in the black harness.

“And you?”

“I am Bertrand du Guesclin, Messire Carro de Bodegat. Has my face changed since I fought with you at Quimperlé?”

He put up his visor and let Dubois and the Bretons see his face. Many of them knew him; but there was no comradely cheering, no out-stretching of the hand.

Dubois had touched Bodegat on the shoulder with his spear, and they were speaking together in low tones, glancing from time to time at the man who had robbed them of Croquart’s head. Bertrand liked neither their looks nor their whisperings; the hedge of spears about his horse raised his impatience and filled him with distrust.

“Messire Dubois, I am waiting for that head.”

The pair ignored him, and still chattered together, their faces nearly touching, like a pair of lovers poking confidences into each other’s ears. Bertrand was spreading the red surcoat for the return of Croquart the Fleming’s head, watching the two whisperers with gathering impatience.

“We make a virtue of waiting,” he said to the three Bretons nearest to him; “these two gentlemen seem very enamoured of each other’s tongues.”

Dubois’s figure straightened suddenly in the saddle. Carro de Bodegat turned, with an unpleasant smirk hovering about his mouth.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, we have not finished with you yet.”

“So!”

“There is a matter which concerns us all.”

“Messire, I ask you to give me back that head.”

“Gentlemen, close round; I order you to arrest a traitor.”

Bertrand’s hand went to his sword. Carro de Bodegat had already seized his bridle.

“Bertrand du Guesclin, surrender.”

“Surrender! In God’s name, no!” and he struck at Bodegat with his fist, broke loose, and made a plunge forward to be free. Half a dozen men closed round him like Saracen galleys about a sturdy ship. His sword was struck down, the shaft of a spear thrust between the hind legs of his horse, bringing the beast to earth, with Bertrand pinned by the right knee. Before he could break loose De Bodegat and four others heaped themselves on him and soon had him helpless and flat upon his back.

“Off, fools!—I surrender.”

“Let him up, sirs!” and Dubois bent forward in the saddle, still holding Croquart’s head by the hair.

The men rose from him, and Bertrand, sullen and angry, scrambled slowly to his feet.

“Which of you calls me a traitor?” and he swung round and looked from man to man. “Answer me; I am to be heard. You, De Bodegat? By Heaven, you have not the courage!”

Dubois’s mounted figure, haughty and splendid with its opulence of armor and sweeping plume, moved forward and overtopped Bertrand with an air of towering and seigniorial strength.

“Messire du Guesclin, what of the Oak of Mivoie?”

Dubois’s horse overshadowed him, but Bertrand held his ground.

“Well, what of Mivoie?”

“You broke troth, sir.”

“And if I did?”

“You stand to be judged by any two of those whom you deserted; so run the Marshal’s orders. As for this head—well, it is Croquart’s, and it has been noised abroad that you were Croquart’s man.”

“I Croquart’s man! By Heaven, a lie!”

His sturdy scorn flew full in the face of Geoffroi Dubois. It was then that Carro de Bodegat stood forward, precise, courteous, and insolently suave.

“By your leave, gentlemen, I will ask Messire Bertrand du Guesclin a few questions.”

“Ask on.” And Bertrand held his head high and squared his shoulders.

“Come, sweet sir, why should we quarrel? You were not at Mivoie; good; and why?”

Bertrand looked Bodegat straight in the face.

“That is my affair.”

“You will not answer?”

“No.”

“Then we can conclude the reason—some slight sickness, a seductive soul in a tavern on the road. But wait, you have been at Pontivy, eh, with the Fleming’s men?”

Bertrand felt the coils of Bodegat’s cunning, but he was far too stubborn to slip through them with a lie.

“True; I was at Pontivy. Does that make me Croquart’s man?”

Bodegat smiled and gave a shrug of the shoulders.

“Oh, we had our spies there, messire; we are not fools. But bear with me; another question: Why have you beaten out the eagle from your shield?”

Bertrand’s sturdy figure quivered under the unruffled insolence of Bodegat’s pleased cleverness.

“That also is my affair.”

“Of course; these gentlemen will understand. You choose to ride abroad unrecognized. And, doubtless, messire, you were at the fight before Josselin town?”

Bertrand bent his head.

“You did not fight for us.”

“I fought for neither side.”

Bodegat and the listeners laughed aloud.

“Messire du Guesclin, you are a prudent soldier. And yet you had heard that Beaumanoir had offered five thousand crowns for the Fleming’s head.”

“I had heard it.”

“Five thousand crowns, good money, for striking off a Fleming’s head, perhaps while he was asleep.”

This last taunt brought Bertrand’s patience down. He sprang at Bodegat, only to be dragged back and to find a couple of spear-points at his throat.

“Messire Carro de Bodegat”—and he grappled with his wrath and conquered it—“these words of yours shall not be writ in sand. Ask the Sieur de Tinteniac whether Croquart the Fleming was murdered in his sleep.”

Bodegat bowed.

“The Sieur de Tinteniac and the Vicomte de Bellière’s daughter—the Lady Tiphaïne—where are they?”

“Where Croquart’s body lies.”

“And they know that Bertrand du Guesclin killed him?”

“No, messire, they do not.”

Bodegat made a pitying gesture with his hands. There was a grim yet ironical exchange of confidences among the esquires and troopers. Carro de Bodegat had entangled Bertrand in what appeared to them a web of treachery, greed, and double-dealing. They showed no surprise when Dubois ordered Du Guesclin’s hands to be bound behind his back, that he should be set upon his horse, and his feet tied under the beast’s belly.

He suffered the shame of it without a murmur, ignoring the derision and looking steadily at Croquart’s head, that Dubois still carried.

“Forward, gentlemen!”

And, getting to horse, they pushed on for the homestead where Croquart and his prisoners had passed the night.

XXXV

BERTRAND, bound hand and foot, rode between Dubois and Carro de Bodegat, a figure of flint. His eyes seemed to see nothing but the monotonous banking of the clouds across the western sky. Dubois and Carro de Bodegat had never a word from him. They thought him savage and sulky, a rough fellow with a temper of the more sinister sort, who was furious at having been brought so suddenly to book.

Carro de Bodegat and Dubois knew nothing of the agony of loneliness that wounded Bertrand’s heart, nor did they imagine that they were dragging him to a humiliation that he dreaded more than death. Bertrand had a foreshadowing of the ignominies that would soon ensue. In thought he saw himself standing before Tiphaïne, a disgraced man, a traitor, a breaker of solemn promises. He felt death in his heart at the thought of meeting those eyes of hers. What a hypocrite he would appear, what a mean, dastardly fool, whose honor was a mere drab to be debauched shamelessly for the sake of gold! Bertrand du Guesclin, bribed by the English not to fight at Mivoie! Inferences and facts were against him on every side. Robin, poor coward, had confessed nothing; of that Bertrand felt assured.

And now Tiphaïne was Tinteniac’s wife. Had he not seen them whispering together, lying on one bed, passing before him as lover and beloved? The bitterness of his predicament gave jealousy a second opening into Bertrand’s heart. Why should he bear all this for Tiphaïne and for Robin Raguenel, her brother, and what was Bertrand du Guesclin to the Sieur de Tinteniac’s wife, that he should die dangling on a rope to save her and her kinsmen from the humiliation of the truth? Surely his passion for self-sacrifice had made him mad, and he was throwing life and honor away for the sake of an imaginary duty.

Yet of such stubborn stuff was Bertrand’s soul that the fight was fought and won in him before his black horse had carried him a furlong. Like some old pagan martyr, he would rather drink the poison than confess himself a fool and recant from a philosophy that the world might class as madness. He had chosen his part, and it should serve him to the bitter end. Every child in Brittany might be taught to curse him as a traitor, but confess himself beaten—that, before God, he would not do.

Bertrand could meet death, but to meet Tiphaïne—that was another matter. The infinite refinement of such a humiliation, the pitiful injustice of it, modified his pride in that respect alone. What need was there for Dubois and De Bodegat to make a mock of him before her face? If they had any pity, any touch of chivalry nearer their knightliness than the tinctures on their shields, they would spare him this ordeal and let him make his end in peace. At least he could ask them this last favor. They could but refuse it, and then he would know the worst.

“Messire Dubois,” and he opened his lips for the first time since they had bound him upon his horse, “you have called me a traitor. Is my treachery so great that I cannot speak to you as man to man?”

The Breton lord regarded him with the serenity of conscious virtue.

“Courtesy is part of our religion, Messire du Guesclin,” and his sufferance made Bertrand long to smite him across the mouth.

“I ask no great favor.”

“Let us hear it, messire.”

“Quick judging, a long rope, and no witnesses.”

Dubois elevated his eyebrows and returned Carro de Bodegat’s significant smile.

“You do not appear to expect an acquittal from us,” he said.

“I expect nothing, messire, and ask for nothing, save this one thing.”

“Well, and that?”

“That the Sieur de Tinteniac and madame his wife may neither hear my name nor see my face.”

Dubois looked curiously at Bertrand, as though considering what his motives were.

“You have a reason for this.”

“Be easy,” and Bertrand grimaced like a man in pain; “they have had no wrong from me. I tell you, sir, that it is a mere whim of the heart. The Lady Tiphaïne would not rejoice to see me as I am, and for myself I would rather shirk the meeting.”

Carro de Bodegat laughed maliciously.

“Messire du Guesclin, I feel for the lady.”

“Ascribe nothing to her, sir, but sorrow at seeing me condemned as a hypocrite.”

“True chivalry, messire; we can serve a petticoat when we cannot serve a country. What is your judgment, Brother Dubois?”

The elder man reflected before committing himself to an opinion.

“The thing seems reasonable, since it shows consideration for a lady. Then you ask this in all seriousness, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin?”

“Hang me as high as Haman, only grant this favor.”

Dubois smiled, like a man not sorry to avail himself of an advantage. Neither he nor De Bodegat had any love for Du Guesclin, and Tinteniac, more scrupulous, might seize the authority and spoil their retaliation.

“Well, sir, how would you contrive it?”

“Messire Dubois, here are plenty of trees.”

“Trees! But we have to try you first.”

“Try me!” and Bertrand gave a grim laugh; “please dispense with such a formality.”

“We are honorable men, messire.”

“I do not doubt it. Well, if you must drag me to this place you need not have me thrown like a bundle at Madame Tiphaïne’s feet.”

Dubois watched him narrowly.

“In the orchard, hidden by the trees, there is a little hovel that the farm-folk use for tools and wood. Throw me in there, and say nothing. I assure you that for this consideration I will speak well of you in heaven.”

Bertrand’s grim quaintness had its effect upon Dubois.

“Let it be as you wish,” he said; “the Sieur de Tinteniac and his wife need not be told that we have a prisoner.”

“Nor who that prisoner is. My heart’s thanks to you. One last word.”

“Well?”

“I am not a kneeling creature. I shall be ready to be hanged at your earliest chance.”

And Bertrand, having won his point, shut his mouth obdurately and said no more.

Before long they rode down into the valley and saw the apple-trees shining like spray blown from the green billowing hill-side. To Bertrand, who had ceased to look for good in life, those Breton apple-trees seemed to pile their blossoms as for a bridal about the place where Tiphaïne had slept. Great deeps of thought were uncovered in him as he remembered her as a child, taking his part against Dame Jeanne and young Olivier. The sinuous glitter of her hair seemed to have flashed through the strange darkness of his life like some magic river casting a spell through the heart of some mysterious land. He recalled his old hopes and desires, the ambitions that he had thrown aside, his pride of strength and pride of sinew, the ill-luck that had dogged him even to the last. Well, he had kept troth and played the man, even though Tiphaïne might never learn the truth and think of him as a worthless beast whom in her youth she had been foolish enough to pity.

Hardly two hours had passed since Croquart’s death when Geoffroi Dubois crossed the meadows and saw the dark thatch of the homestead sweeping above the orchard trees. True to his promise, he sent Carro de Bodegat forward with the main troop, while he loitered to lodge Bertrand in the hovel that he had chosen for his prison. The rough door was closed on Du Guesclin, and three men-at-arms left on guard to prevent an escape. Bertrand, _sans_ sword and dagger, with roped wrists and a heavy heart, sat down on some fagots in a dark corner and set himself to face the last renunciation he would make in dying to complete a lie.

Up at the homestead Tiphaïne was leading her palfrey to drink at the pool when the thudding of hoofs sounded over the meadows. Carro de Bodegat and his men came into view. Tinteniac, who was in the goodman’s parlor, stripped to the waist and washing his wounds with water Tiphaïne had brought him in a great earthen pitcher, had heard the sound of armed men riding, and, going to the window, recognized De Bodegat by his pennon.

Covering himself with his surcoat, he waved to Tiphaïne, whom he could see standing beside the pool.

“Friends!” he shouted; “have no fear!”

Carro de Bodegat and his Bretons tossed their spears to her as they rounded the orchard at a trot. Two and two they streamed into the deserted yard, De Bodegat riding forward to where Tiphaïne stood under the green boughs of a willow.

“Madame,” and he bent his plume to her, “we had the good news on the road this morning.”

“Croquart is dead, messire.”

“Thank God for Brittany—we have seen his head.”

XXXVI

WHILE Dubois, Bodegat, and the rest poured into the orchard to gaze at Croquart’s headless body, Tiphaïne led back her palfrey to the house, where the horses of the dead Fleming and his men still waited in the hall to be fed and watered. The beasts turned their heads to look at her, their eyes seeming to ask what had befallen their masters in the night. Croquart’s own horse was strangely restless and uneasy, ears laid low, the whites of the eyes showing, and an inclination to kick very evident in his heels.

Leaving her palfrey stalled in the dirty hall, where the embers of the fire, harness, and baggage littered the floor, she mounted the stairs to the room in the gable, meeting Tinteniac at the open door. His wounded shoulder had given him a ludicrous but painful contest with his clothes, and he appealed to a woman’s hands for the righting of his wrongs. There was a characteristic distinction in the way the pale and imperturbable patrician stood to be brooched and buckled without squandering a fragment of his dignity. Head held high, the sunlight touching the silver in his hair, a sensitive smile softening his mouth, he felt a youth’s tremor at the nearness of her hands, and feared to look at her because she seemed so fair.

“The flies are buzzing about the dead dog,” and he pointed to the Bretons who were crowding and elbowing about Croquart’s body.

“How pitiful his boastings seem to me now!”

“Yes, mine was the last notch he cut upon his spear.”

Tinteniac seemed the grand seigneur again—tall, gracious, a man whose face had the quality of command. Tiphaïne felt that his manner had changed towards her, as though he were too honorable to prolong their supposed intimacy, however pleasant the playing of the part might seem. And yet she discovered more than mere gentleness in his eyes towards her, a posture of his manhood that betrayed homage and desire.

She fastened the brooch at his throat, and stood back from him, looking aside towards the window, where the iron men trampled the long grass under the orchard trees.

“Sire, I have much to thank you for.”

“The thanks should come from the man whom you have trusted.”

“Well, we will exchange our gratitude.”

“And I can swear to being flattered by the bargain.”

He bowed to her, and for the moment she felt herself a mere ignorant girl, uneasy and half abashed under the eyes of a courtier whose manners were too splendid. Tinteniac’s stateliness made her sincerity seem incomplete. It was difficult to repulse a man whose methods were without aggression.

“Sire, I had almost forgotten that I have your ring.”

“My ring?”

“Yes,” and she slipped it from her finger and let the circle of gold lie in her white palm.

Tinteniac looked at her, yet without a stare, and was slow in the stretching out of his hand.

“Can you not keep it?”

Their eyes met, but Tiphaïne’s were the first to fall.

“Sire, I cannot.”

“As a remembrancer?”

“No, for it might be unjust.”

A man of forty may be fired with all the inspired impulses of youth. We live in circumstances and are as old as the freshness of our sensibility to music. The fine candor of Tinteniac’s face warmed to the feelings that his heart had cherished.

“I will not trade upon the trust that you have given me. Yet—these few days—”

“Sire,” and he saw that she was troubled, “I have not the heart to hear this from you now.”

“Then—I may wait?”

“I remember that my father waits for me. For his sake I promise nothing for myself.”

She still held the ring out to him, looking bravely in his face, half hating the sincerity that made her hurt him for the sake of truth.

“Your pardon,” and he took the ring.

“Sire, do not misjudge me.”

“You are too honest, child, to be misjudged.”

His fine spirit of chivalry and self-restraint rescued them both from the discomfort of the moment. He slipped the ring upon his finger, and seemed ready to forget what he had asked.

“There are other things to be remembered,” and he looked thoughtfully at the orchard trees. “What are your wishes as to the secret you have given me to share?”

His self-repression pleased her, with its immediate turning to interests that were hers alone.

“You seem to think for me. I feel my lips close when I see these men.”

“Such a truth is not easy in the telling.”

“It is not that I am afraid. But there are memories—and thoughts.”

“That the best of us hold sacred. Do I not understand? Let the truth wait till you meet Beaumanoir at Josselin.”

Her eyes thanked him, for she was loath to expose her pride to these grim men who were sating their blood-lust with staring at a carcass.

“You do not think me a coward?”

“No, God forbid! Who are Dubois and Carro de Bodegat that you should show your heart to them?”

To Tinteniac her reluctance was natural enough, for when a man loves, his sympathies are quickened till he can behold beauty in the simplest workings of the soul. He left Tiphaïne in the little solar, and went to greet Dubois and his brother Bretons, who were crowding from the orchard into the farm-house. So hot was the blood-hate in them that they had stripped Croquart’s body of its armor, hacked off his feet and hands, and driven a stake through the naked torso. The dead Fleming’s fingers were being treasured like ingots of gold, and some of the rougher spirits of the troop called for the slaughtering of Croquart’s horse.

“Down, you mad dogs!” and Dubois saved the animal from their swords, and had his arm badly bitten as he held the beast’s bridle.

The men laughed at their leader’s savage face, and at the way he abruptly reconsidered his opinion.

“The beast has the master’s devil in him,” and he suffered the rough troopers to have their way.

Tinteniac was seized on when he came down into the hall. The men kissed him like great children, for he had been the idol of the Breton soldiery since the combat at the Oak of Mivoie. He broke free from them at last and joined Dubois, who was sitting snarling on a saddle while one of his men rubbed ointment into the horse bite on his arm.

“The result of mistaken mercy, sire,” and he grimaced with the smart of it. “Steady, you fool, steady! you are not scrubbing the hall floor.”

Carro de Bodegat joined them, smiling ironically at Dubois’s oaths and distortions of the face.

“Courage, brother, courage; the son of a mare has as much gratitude as the son of a woman. Is it true, sire,” and he turned to Tinteniac, “that you do not know the name of the bully who pulled down the Fleming here in the orchard?”

Tinteniac confessed that he was as ignorant as the rest, nor did the two knights enlighten him, since the spirit of jealousy strengthened the promise they had made.

To Tinteniac the news of the rout at Josselin explained Croquart’s inordinate hurry to put twenty leagues between him and Pontivy. Dubois and De Bodegat were ready with many questions, and he in turn had much to hear from them. On neither side was Bertrand’s name mentioned; Tiphaïne’s wishes were tending towards his doom.

In a few minutes they had made their plans, Dubois still swearing at the teeth-marks in his arm. Tinteniac, who felt his wounds, desired them to let him rest for a day, and neither Dubois nor Carro de Bodegat demurred at the suggestion. The delay would enable them, in the name of Justice, to vent their ill-humor upon the traitor who had cheated them of Croquart’s head. Dubois had left the bloody trophy hidden in the hovel where Bertrand sat and brooded on the past. The three guards had been ordered to let no one pass, and the whole troop warned against divulging Bertrand’s name.

Tinteniac, knowing nothing of the prisoner in the hovel, returned to the solar to rest on his bed of straw.

It was past noon, and Tinteniac lay asleep, when Tiphaïne, weary of the four walls of the room, went out alone into the orchard. Geoffroi Dubois and Carro de Bodegat were sitting as judges over a wrestling-match that the Breton soldiery had started in the yard. She slipped out almost unnoticed, catching a glimpse of two sturdy troopers hugging each other in the middle of the ring. The white-topped trees and the deep aloneness of the rich green grass were very pleasant to her, for with Croquart’s death and the return of freedom she had a great hunger for her home and for the face of her father, whom she had left in sorrow and unrest. The human consciousness, like the sky, is rarely untraversed by a cloud, the azure days serving only to part one gray noon from another. And to such a heart as Tiphaïne’s solitude called from the deeps of nature where the warm sap spread into the quiet faces of the flowers.

The Breton soldiers were shouting and exchanging wagers in the yard, their loud voices bringing discords where she sought for silence; nor was the orchard bereft of horror, seeing that Croquart’s body, naked and mutilated, lay near the house, with a stake trust through it. Tiphaïne could see the glint of the golden meadows sweeping towards the arches of the trees. It would be good, she thought, to wander away into the fields, to let her gown sweep the waving grass, to watch the larks soar, and to hear them sing.

The desire led her towards the hovel where Bertrand waited for the end, the three guards gossiping together and leaning on their spears. A mere passing curiosity stirred in her like a thought suggested to a wayfarer by some grotesque tree beside the road. She had no vision of Bertrand sitting upon the pile of faggots, his head bowed over his roped hands.

The three men saluted her, and she turned aside to ask why Messire Geoffroi Dubois took such trouble to guard a mere stack of sticks.

“A prisoner, madame,” said the tallest of the three.

“A prisoner?”

“A common thief we picked up on the road from Loudeac. Messire Dubois will give him the rope anon.”

Tiphaïne passed on, and yet the soldier’s curt and casual words had robbed the meadows of half their restfulness. She found herself repeating those same words: “A common thief. Messire Dubois will give him the rope anon.” It was as though her sorrow had opened the heart of pity to all the world. Death and the pathos of it seemed everywhere—in the woods and fields, in the monk’s cell, and in the castles of the great. Tiphaïne’s heart was full of that deep tenderness that dowers the meanest life with significance and the power of awaking pity. She seemed to hear the whimpering of this poor wretch, caged like an animal awaiting the butcher’s knife. What though he was “a common thief,” a rogue, an outcast, her soul had found something on which to pour the divine dew that God gives to those who suffer. The purpose came to her as she wandered slowly over the fields. One man’s life should be spared that day; she would beg it of Dubois before the sword could spill more blood.

As for Bertrand, he had heard Tiphaïne’s voice, and sat shaking as with an ague, his eyes staring vacantly at the wattled wall of the hovel. It seemed to him of a sudden that he was less strong than he had believed, for the soul in him cried out for life and the joy of being. In a day he would have followed Croquart to the awe of the unknown, the woman for whom he had suffered knowing nothing of his end. The loneliness and the bitter smart of it made him for the moment like a forgotten child. Great tears were wet upon his cheeks, and for once no angry hand dashed them impatiently away.

XXXVII

IN a green corner of the orchard, shaded towards the west by a bank of brushwood, Bertrand stood for his last trial before those Bretons who had hunted Croquart from the walls of Josselin. Behind him the brown gold of the meadows rippled like water at sunset, to touch the gnarled trunks of the flowering apple-trees. A pile of faggots had been thrown down to give Messires Geoffroi Dubois and Carro de Bodegat a seat; their esquires were grouped behind them, bearing their masters’ shields and spears.

Bertrand watched the faces of these two knights; Dubois, brawny, ponderous, black faced and round shouldered as a bear, less to be feared than his sleek and mercurial brother in arms. Carro de Bodegat’s face, narrow and aggressive, with its sharp brown beard and rapid eyes, reminded Du Guesclin of the face of some velvet-capped merchant who had learned to deal with all the greedy littleness of the great. Bertrand hated the man for his high-nostrilled unction, for his insinuating smoothness that was most treacherous when most suave. He knew Carro de Bodegat’s nature too well to hope much from him in the way of magnanimity. He was a creature of courtly astuteness and polished persiflage, who would use a dagger where an honest man would have used a sword.

Carro de Bodegat assumed the authority, Dubois lolling on the faggots, and nursing the arm that Croquart’s horse had bitten.

“Messire Bertrand du Guesclin. Stand aside, gentlemen, and let our friend have room.”

To Bertrand the circle of steel-clad figures seemed like as many pillars of gray granite set up by the folk of old upon the wind-swept Breton moors. The faces were as so many masks, curious and distrustful, crowding upon him like the threatening faces of a dream. He felt as though they kept the air from him, and confused his thoughts with the intentness of their many eyes.

From this mist of faces the countenance of Carro de Bodegat disentangled itself, keen and thin—an axe shining among so many billets of wood. It was with De Bodegat that the ordeal lay, and Bertrand braced himself for the touch of the glowing metal.

“Well, messire, what are we to say of the troth-breaking at Mivoie?”

“Why ask that question? It has been asked and answered.”

The half smile in the man’s eyes, the aggressive tilt of his peaked chin, made Bertrand hate him as he had never hated living thing before. The conviction weighed on him that he was like a sullen boy doomed to be outwitted by this shrewd and cold-brained man.

“Then Messire Bertrand du Guesclin will not accuse another gentleman of treachery?”

“I accuse no one, messire.”

“Nine-and-twenty of us fought at Mivoie, and Guillaume de Montauban took the vacant place.”

“You are well-informed, sir; you say I was not there. Why ask me all these questions?”

“Because,” and De Bodegat hugged his knee, “you cannot answer me, messire, and you show these gentlemen how to escape a lie.”

Bertrand angrily tightened one wrist against the other, so that the straining thongs twisted and bruised the sinews.

“Then, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, we can color our own conclusions?”

“Well?”

“That you took bribes from Bamborough and the English not to fight at Mivoie.”

Bertrand looked at the apple-boughs, and answered:

“That is a lie.”

The merest child could have seen that he was suffering, yet for De Bodegat there was an ungenerous gratification of the ego in prolonging the humiliation of a man who once worsted him in a duel.

“And yet, sir, you were with Croquart at Pontivy?”

“I have already answered that.”

“And you had battered the bearings from your shield.”

“Well, you have seen it.”

“So we may say that you loved the Fleming because of the blood-money that had been offered for his head.”

A few short, sharp laughs, like the yapping of dogs, betrayed the temper of those to whom Carro de Bodegat appealed. Bertrand looked round him with a defiant lifting of the head. His eyes gleamed out at these countrymen of his who seemed so ready to condemn and to disgrace.

“Messires, I tell no lies, neither do I ask for mercy. If I am a traitor—and God himself cannot prove that true—give me my quittance and make an end.”

Carro de Bodegat turned to Dubois, and made some pretence of deferring to his brother’s judgment, feeling perfectly assured that justice would meet with no obstruction in that quarter. It was sufficient for Messire Geoffroi Dubois that his authority had been consulted. A straightforward and rather savage soldier, he had no manner of doubt as to Bertrand’s guilt, and elected to have him hanged on the nearest tree.

Carro de Bodegat called one of his esquires forward.

“Gretry, where is this gentleman’s sword?”

A man-at-arms had taken charge of it, and delivered the sword to Gretry, who brought it to his master. Carro de Bodegat unsheathed the weapon, and held it before him, balanced by the blade across his palm.

“Here, gentlemen, you see the sword of a traitor—a sword that was to be bought and sold, and used for the winning of blood-money in these wars. Such swords must be broken with those who handle them. Come, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, have you anything to say?”

“Nothing, messire.”

His eyes were fixed wistfully upon the sword that had served him for many years—one of the few friends he had ever owned. It had memories for him, had that same sword, and now—like its master—it was to be broken for a lie.

“Gretry!” and De Bodegat called the esquire forward.

“Yes, sire.”

“Take this traitor’s sword and break it across your knee.”

Gretry received it from Carro de Bodegat’s hands, set one foot upon the point, and bent the blade up over his knee. But being a mere youngster and of fragile build, the steel proved too tough for such strength as he possessed.

Carro de Bodegat started from the pile of fagots, and, taking the sword from Gretry, looked insolently into Bertrand’s face.

“It is a pity that such a sword should have been wasted, sir,” he said.

“God knows that it was not wasted, Messire Carro de Bodegat.”

“And God knows that Bertrand du Guesclin has told the truth!”

There was a sharp movement among the crowded figures, a sudden turning of all faces towards the shadows cast by the apple-trees. De Bodegat, with Bertrand’s sword held crosswise across his thigh, swung round on his heel like a man who has been called a liar by some stranger in a crowd.

The circle of armed men broke and parted before his eyes, giving a glimpse of the dark trunks of the apple-trees and the green depths of the orchard grass.

Bertrand, looking like a man in Hades who beholds the shining figure of the risen Christ, saw Tiphaïne standing under the trees, where the sun poured through the white boughs, making her hair glow like a halo of gold.

XXXVIII

FOR the moment the figure in the black armor had ceased to be the centre about which the human interest of the scene revolved. All heads were turned towards that more imperious shape sweeping in its cloak of gray from the quiet shadows of the orchard trees.

Queenliness in a woman is the counterpart of courage in a man, and with Tiphaïne the very carriage of her head conveyed more magnetism than the choicest smiles of a woman of meaner presence and address. She walked as though these gentlemen of the sword would fall back before her, and fall back they did, leaving her a pathway through the trampled grass. Dubois, standing beside the pile of fagots, had his expectancy ignored as though his knightliness had no standing in the lady’s eyes. Tall as many of the men who watched her, fearless, and forgetful of all feebler issues, she swept on like one who walks towards God’s altar amid the blurred figures of an unseen crowd.

The fifty odd bassinets turned with the unanimity of so many weather-cocks veering with the wind. Their incontinent curiosity trailed at her heels as though she were St. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins following in her wake. Carro de Bodegat alone had the presence to obstruct the path she chose to tread, and to attempt a parley with this imperious perfection of a queen.

“Madame—”

She looked straight into De Bodegat’s sallow face like a red dawn refusing to be smothered by a cloud.

“Room, messire.”

And Bertrand, into whose heart the blood of life seemed bubbling up, saw Carro de Bodegat step back, hunch up his bony shoulders, and venture a side-thrust as she passed.

“I would ask madame her authority—”

“Have patience, messire, and I promise you you shall hear it,” and she left him grimacing in perplexity at Dubois.

To Bertrand the apple-boughs seemed more white against the blue, the grass more green, the gold of the meadows deeper than golden wine. She came near to him, halted, and looked into his face so steadily, and with such an outflashing of her woman’s soul, that he felt like one dazed by some bright light.

“Messires, it has been spread abroad that Bertrand du Guesclin did not fight at Mivoie.”

She spoke as though flinging a challenge at their feet, her voice slow but very quiet. The eyes of the whole company were fixed upon her face, for the strange stateliness of her manner seemed to promise some great confession.

Dubois and his brother in arms bowed to her like men who were half in doubt as to what attitude to assume.

“Madame, we were with the Sire de Beaumanoir at Mivoie—”

“And you did not see the Du Guesclin eagle?”

They admitted the enigma, and were the more puzzled by the expression of consent upon her face.

“Perhaps, messires, you remember my brother’s arms—a silver fesse on a field of blue, the shield of Sir Robin Raguenel, of La Bellière, near Dinan?”

“Assuredly.” And they waited to hear more.

“And yet, messires, my brother was not at Mivoie. His heart had failed him, and he had broken troth. You would have found him hiding in the woods near Loudeac.”

Her words won a murmur of astonishment from the listening men, her very calmness carrying conviction to the hearts of not a few.

“Impossible!”

Carro de Bodegat’s face was honestly impertinent in its unbelief.

“How impossible, messire? Should I confess this shame without a cause?”

“Madame, we saw your brother’s shield, and heard him answer to his name.”

“Then the deceit was the braver in its thoroughness. Know, gentlemen, and Bretons—all, that it was Bertrand du Guesclin who fought in my brother’s stead!”

Her words fell like stones into a pool, making the waters swing into merging circles that spread and melted into a vague suggestion of unrest.

“Messires,” and she looked round at the listening faces with a brave lifting of the head, “I loved my brother, and I was afraid, for he was young and not stiffened into manhood when the news came of the gathering at Mivoie. It was then that Bertrand lodged at La Bellière with us a night, and since he was my friend I gave my brother to him with these words: ‘Look to the lad, because I love him, and because he is our father’s only son.’ Little did I think that Bertrand du Guesclin would set so great a price upon my words, and bear the shame to save a coward.”

She ceased, and looked round her at the faces of those who listened. Only on Carro de Bodegat’s face did she find the unhallowed glimmer of a prurient sneer.

“If this is the truth—”

It was Dubois, the Breton bear, who came forward several paces from where he stood.

“It is the truth. Ask the Sire de Tinteniac, ask Robin Raguenel, for you will find him among the monks of the abbey of Lehon. Shame drove my brother there when he could no longer bear the burden of a lie.”

Not a man doubted her in the sincerity of his heart. Carro de Bodegat alone remained grudging and ungenerous to the end.

“Madame, we have yet to hear the meaning of this man’s hiding at Pontivy.”

“This man—indeed!” and she let her scorn flash out at him. “Come, Messire Carro de Bodegat, I will ask you a question in return. Who was it killed Croquart and his three men single-handed when you were hunting them with fifty Bretons at your back?”

The laugh was against De Bodegat. The rest had drawn aside from him. He stood alone, and would not suffer his jealousy to be convinced.

“Madame, you have not answered me.”

“I have no wish to answer you, messire. Bertrand, who is no traitor, will answer for himself.”

The Bretons cheered her. De Bodegat, remembering Croquart’s mangled neck, looked sullenly at Bertrand and said nothing.

The pent-up ardor of the men burst out at last. All hands were towards Bertrand, and they crowded about him, strenuous to make amends. It was Dubois who was the first to do a brave man’s penance for a savage wrong. And yet another was before him in the act, for Tinteniac, long a listener, had pushed through the crowd and rushed on Du Guesclin with a great hearted-shout of joy.

“Bertrand, Brother Bertrand, the prize at Mivoie should have been yours—not mine.”

“Sire,” and the strong man’s head was bowed at last so that it rested on Tinteniac’s shoulder—“sire, I am a great fool, but—God help me—I shall play the woman.”

XXXIX

THEY stood alone together on the edge of the orchard, nothing but deep grassland before them and the haze of heat that covered the woods. The men who had followed the green gyron from Josselin had slipped away by twos and threes—Tinteniac, with his hand on Dubois’s shoulder; Carro de Bodegat, in sneering solitude and ready to snap at his best friend.

The bees were working in the apple-boughs, and the birds sang everywhere. The green lap of the world was filled with the precious stones from the treasure-chest of spring. Tiphaïne was looking before her with a faint smile playing about her mouth, the sword that Carro de Bodegat had surrendered to her held like a crucifix in her hands.

“Bertrand.”

Now that they were alone together he felt half afraid of her, and shy of the great gulf that her imagined marriage had set between them. Tiphaïne, turning to him, wondered why his eyes looked sad. Her gratitude was more deep than gratitude towards him. Bertrand might have suspected it had he not been so resigned to believing her a wife.

“Do you remember the day when you plucked the white May-bough for me before the tournament at Rennes?”

Bertrand remembered it, and by his face the memory brought him more bitterness than joy.

“You were a child—then.”

“A child, yes. I can see Robin now cantering his pony over the meadows. What a blessed boon it is that we mortals cannot foresee the future! The shame of this thing has broken my father’s heart.”

She began to speak of the past, that past that made the present seem more unlivable and real. She was grateful to him, Bertrand knew. But what was mere gratitude?—a cup of wine to a starving man.

“Tiphaïne,” and the low pitch of his voice startled her, “I am thinking of that poor child’s grave among the beech-trees of Broceliande.”

“Arletta?”

“Yes. You remember the words you gave me then?”

She looked at him steadily, with a transient quivering of her upper lip.

“I remember those words. And—I am thinking they may be forgotten.”

“They can never be forgotten.”

“No?”

“For they have made me something of which I am not ashamed.”

His deep sadness puzzled her, for his eyes were like the eyes of a man who strives to be patient when suffering inward pain. The tragedy of the Aspen Tower had left its shadow on him, and yet it could not explain to her the overmastering melancholy that seemed to humble his whole heart.

“I did my best to save the lad,” he said.

“Can I doubt that? No, no, you kept your promises almost too well. If they had hanged you for a traitor I should not have had the heart to look the world in the face again.”

“What would it have mattered?” and she saw that his bitterness was not assumed.

“Mattered? To lose the bravest man in Brittany, at the end of a rope!”

“Tiphaïne!”

“Did I not dream as a child that Bertrand du Guesclin would do great things. And now this Bertrand du Guesclin is proving the wisdom of my dreams.”

He looked at her so sadly, but with such an air of patient self-distrust, that it seemed that her praise was like wealth to a man dying of some inexorable disease.

“I am glad that I kept my promise,” he began, “and that you can think well of a man who but a year ago was not worthy to touch your hands.”

“But now?”

“Now—also”—and he spoke with a sense of effort—“I am glad—that you have chosen for yourself a man who in these rough times can give you honor and strength—things precious to a woman.”

He made a brave uttering of these words, trying not to betray to her anything of the thoughts that were in his heart. There was a questioning wonder in Tiphaïne’s eyes. Only at that moment did she remember the part that the Sieur de Tinteniac had played.

“Bertrand!”

He looked at her sharply, for her voice had startled him.

“I had forgotten that you had followed us from Josselin. You often watched us with Croquart—was that not so?”

“Yes, I was always on the watch.”

“And perhaps you were near enough to hear some chance words.”

He flushed like an eavesdropper discovered in a seeming meanness.

“I was near you—” he began, “because—”

She broke in on him as though she had read his thoughts. “You believed that I was the Sieur de Tinteniac’s wife?”

“I believed it.”

“You believed that?”

“What else could I believe?”

“It was a mere pretence. Tinteniac knew too well what manner of man Croquart was.”

She told him the whole truth, and Bertrand watched her even as he had watched when she had swept past Carro de Bodegat to set him free. The bonds then had been bonds upon the flesh. Now she was breaking the spiritual fetters that had been riveted so fast about his soul.

“Tiphaïne, it is enough.”

The simplicity of those few words showed her how deep a loyalty had suffered here in silence. Woman that she was, she realized the completeness of his self-abnegation, and honored him the more because he had not grudged his faith to her when he had no hope of a reward.

“Bertrand, come near to me. Do you believe that I have told you the whole truth?”

He looked at her, silent yet very happy.

“I believe whatever you may say to me.”

“Blindly?”

“No—not blindly.”

“And why—not blindly?”

“Because”—and his strong face warmed to her—“because I can swear you are what you seem to be. Because I know what I myself have been. Because I have learned what honor is, and to know the face that cannot give a lie.”

“Then I am the same Tiphaïne who carried the white May-bough into Rennes?”

“Need you ask that?”

His faith was the more precious to her now that she knew what such a faith was worth. She turned aside, still holding the sword, and looked out over the meadows like one who wonders at the mystery of a moonlit sea. Some measure of awe had fallen on her in the presence of this silent and patient man who had learned to suffer—even to the death.

“Bertrand,” she said, at last, “I have a great longing in me for La Bellière and for my home.”

He bowed his head, watched her, and waited.

“The Sieur de Tinteniac and these men will carry the news to Beaumanoir at Josselin. Is it your wish that I should go to Josselin with them?”

“My wish?”

“Yes. For it is your right to ask.”

He drew a deep breath and gave her all his homage.

“If I might take you to La Bellière—”

“Bertrand!”

“You can trust me?”

“I trust you utterly,” she said.

XL

AT La Bellière an old man walked in the garden of the château, leaning on a servant’s arm and taking short turns to and fro on the stretch of grass bordering the fish-pond, where the sedges rustled and the yellow flags were raising their yellow banners above each clump of spears. The bloom was falling from the fruit trees, and lay turning brown upon the grass. In the wilder corners of the orchard the weeds and wild flowers stood knee-deep, the sunlight shimmering into the waste of green, and making each wild flower seem like a living gem, red, white, and azure, purple and gold.

A dog wandered lazily at the old man’s heels, snapping now and again at an over-zealous fly or watching the blackbirds and mistlethrushes that were foraging for nestfuls of querulous children. Swallows skimmed the surface of the fish-pond, twittering, and touching the still water with their wings between the great green leaves of the water-lilies.

It was Stephen Raguenel, who went slowly to and fro, leaning on the servant’s arm, his steps weak and hesitating, an expression of profound and patient melancholy upon his face. He stooped so much that he seemed to have lost three inches of his stature in a week. His eyes had lost their pointedness and their sparkle; they were fixed and vacant, the eyes of a man who is living largely in the past. From time to time the Vicomte would lift his head and look round him with the half-wistful wonder of a child. The second simplicity of life seemed to be taking possession of him, and the pride of the great seigneur had mellowed into the quiet gentleness of the old man.

The servant, whose head was but a shade darker than his master’s, kept step with him, and did not speak except when spoken to. Nor was his respect a thing of the surface only. He had felt much that the Vicomte himself had felt, and the shadow of humiliation fell also across his face.

“Girard, good fellow, what day of the week is it?”

“The third, sire.”

“Ah, ah, and the swallows are here. It is hardly a year ago since we rode to join Madame the Countess in the south.”

“Yes, sire, that is so.” And the servant, with the discretion of a good listener, contented himself with following where his master led.

“How do the apricots look on the south wall, Girard—eh?”

“They have been full of bloom, sire.”

“Madame Tiphaïne is fond of the fruit. Let me see, Girard—how many leagues is it to Josselin from here?”

Girard pretended to consider, though he was asked the same question twenty times a day.

“Some seventeen leagues, I should say, sire, by Montcontour and Loudeac.”

“And it was Thursday?”

“A Thursday, sire, when madame set out.”

The Vicomte had halted and appeared to be counting the ripples that a swallow’s wings had raised on the quiet waters of the pool.

“Then I shall judge that they reached Josselin on the Sabbath, Girard—eh?”

“I should judge so, sire.”

“And to-day is Tuesday.”

“To-day is Tuesday.”

“Then on the morrow or the next day we should have good news?”

“To-morrow or the next day, sire, we should have good news.”

Stephen Raguenel turned away from the fish-pond with a quiet sigh.

“That is well, that is well. I think I will rest, Girard, on the seat under the Pucelle de Saintongue. Thanks, my good fellow. There is no news to-day from the abbey of Lehon?”

“No news, sire,” and Girard passed a nervous hand across his mouth.

“Abbot Stephen has a good name in Dinan, Girard—eh?”

“A very good name, sire. The country people call him their ‘little father.’”

“Their ‘little father’?” and the Vicomte folded his arms. “He will be a spiritual father to my son, my good Girard. Good luck to the lad. He was the only son I had.”

It so happened that while Stephen Raguenel dozed in the sun on the bench under the pear-tree, Stephen, Abbot of Lehon, dealt with two shamefaced mortals who had begged an audience of him that very morning. They were none other than the two La Bellière men-servants who had shown such whole-hearted consideration for Croquart in refusing to hinder him in the capturing of the Sieur de Tinteniac and their lady. Honestly ashamed of the part they had played in the adventure, they had ridden back from Loudeac, only to find that they had not the courage to be the bearers of such news to their lord and master the Vicomte of La Bellière.

Being sensible fellows, they had conceived the plan of shifting the responsibility upon the fatherly shoulders of the Abbot of Lehon.

The Abbot did not thank them in the sincerity of his heart, but, being a conscientious priest, bemoaned the disaster and accepted the responsibility.

He ordered the two men to be locked up safely in two vacant cells.

The Vicomte had lost one child to the Church, and Abbot Stephen concluded that it would be courting a calamity to confess to him that his other child had been stolen by the “Flemish Devil.” Madame Tiphaïne and the Sieur de Tinteniac might be rescued by the Bretons under Messire Geoffroi Dubois, and the Abbot deemed it wise to temporize, in the hope of receiving better news.

Unfortunately the good man’s discretion was nullified by the tongue of an irresponsible woman, and that woman Lisette, Tiphaïne’s bower wench whom the two men had left at Loudeac. A meddlesome but warm-hearted creature, she had made her way to Dinan by begging a place on the back of a pack-horse belonging to a merchant who was returning to that town after disposing of his goods at Loudeac. From Dinan she trudged to La Bellière, carrying her news like a piece of hot pudding on her tongue. To such a woman it was easier to chatter than to think, and after such a journey it was imperative that she should create something of a sensation. She created it by falling in a faint at the Vicomte’s feet as the old man crossed the court-yard from the garden, leaning on Girard’s arm.

The woman was a fool, and Girard, shrewd in his generation, suspecting that she was ready to shriek the news of some calamity into his master’s ears, promptly attempted to smother her indiscretion by whipping her gown up over her face.

“Ah, the little fox! Pierre, Gilbert, carry the baggage into the kitchen and give her a cup of wine.”

He was bending over Lisette and stuffing her gown into her mouth to prolong her fainting fit. Several men ran forward, pounced on her, and prepared to bundle her unceremoniously out of the Vicomte’s sight.

“Who is it, Girard?”

“No one, sire—only a silly chit who has walked too fast in the sun,” and his knuckles showed no consideration for the softness of Lisette’s lips.

The men were lifting her from the flag-stones when she recovered her senses with true hysterical inopportuneness and began to claw at the dress Girard had turned up over her head. The old man saw a scream gathering in the bower woman’s bosom, and did his best to throttle it in her throat.

“Fool! idiot! hold your tongue—”

Lisette wriggled her hands free and clawed at Girard’s face.

“Sire, sire—”

“Devil take the cat!”

The men showed her no great courtesy, but the gown fell away from her face in the scuffle.

“Let me be, fools!”

“Hold your tongue, you she-dog!”

“Sire, sire, they are hiding the truth from you. It is Lisette, madame’s woman.”

The Vicomte’s shadow fell across the flag-stones close to her.

“Lisette!”

He had recognized the girl. Girard stood back and surrendered to the hysterical folly of a woman.

“Let her be, men. Come, what has happened?”

The dishevelled figure fell on its knees at the Vicomte’s feet.

“Sire, sire, a great misfortune.”

“Ah!”

“Madame has been taken by Croquart the Fleming. It was on the road to Josselin.” And she gabbled all she knew, and straightway began to weep.

Stephen Raguenel looked down at her mutely, very gently, yet with a peculiar quivering of the lips. There was nothing foolish in Lisette’s grief to him. The truth was too poignant to suffer him to feel the thoughtless egotism of the woman’s tears.

“Girard.”

The old man was at his side, looking questioningly into his master’s face.

“Girard, help me to my room. I had rather have heard that she was dead.”

XLI

OVER golden moors and through winding woodways deep with the glamour of forests in green leaf, Bertrand and Tiphaïne rode homeward towards Dinan.

Since there seemed something sacred in the days to them, they shunned the towns and villages, holding to the wilderness of the woods and moors, as though solitude and the silence thereof had a restfulness for either heart. For Bertrand that season of the world’s awakening had been a season of storm, of weary nights and troubled dawns. He had slain his own self, to find his manhood reincarnated in the second life that had risen for him like a gold cloud out of the east. He was as a man who had much to remember, and much more to foreshadow. The woods and moors had a sudden awe for him, an awe that played like sacred fire upon the solemn summits of the hills.

As a man’s life is, so are his desires. In the making or the marring it is the genius of effort that sets the furnace glowing and strikes with the hammer upon the malleable metal of the soul. No man ever drifted into strength or dreamed into nobleness by lying on a bed with a wine-cup at his elbow. We gather life or lose it. God strikes no balance for us. We may labor blindly, but we must labor—to be men.

As for Bertrand, he had grown young and old in the same breath—young in that he had won the brave ardor of his youth again; old, because he had taken the temper of the world, and learned to behold the conquering good even in the darkness of disloyalty and shame. He had come to true manhood by throwing that same manhood bound and broken at the feet of honor. He had won in thinking that he had lost, triumphed by believing that he could bear defeat.

Therefore he rode beside Tiphaïne, the Child of the White May Bough, the Enchantress of the Aspen Tower, looking upon the beauty of her womanhood without fear, yet with awe. Her face seemed to open the gates of heaven before his eyes. He was content to follow her, hoping that in due season he might hold her hand in his.

The first night they lodged in a little inn upon the road. There was but one guest-chamber in the place, and Tiphaïne slept there, while Bertrand lay awake before the door.

They passed the second night in an open wood, great pine-trees towering to the stars, Tiphaïne asleep on a bed of heather that Bertrand’s hands had gathered and spread. He stood on guard till the dawn came, feeling the dark, whispering wood like some solemn temple where he could keep vigil as a sacred right. Tiphaïne slept, even like a trusting child. Her great faith in him made Bertrand happy, happy as a man who has conquered fame.

He saw the dawn come up, a stealing into the sky of vapors of crimson and of gold. He knew that that evening they would reach La Bellière. It was to be the last day of their pilgrimage together.

The sunlight was slanting through the trees, warming the red trunks, when Tiphaïne awoke and saw Bertrand, motionless, a pillar of patience, leaning upon his sword. There was a faint glimmering of sunlight in the eyes that looked at him. Her hair bathed Tiphaïne’s face like some soft autumn color bathing the white face of an autumn flower.

She left the bed of heather, and Bertrand heard the rustle of her footsteps in the grass. He turned, looking like one who has been watching the sunrise and finding the woods dark and mist-fogged after the brightness of the broadening east.

Tiphaïne’s eyes had the strangeness of eyes that are half happy and half sad.

“And I have let you watch all night!”

He looked at her and smiled.

“It has seemed short enough.”

“Then Bertrand du Guesclin is never weary?”

“I had my own thoughts. With some thoughts—a man is never tired.”

The secrets of the heart escape in the uttering of a few simple words. They stood looking at each other, each wishing to be compassionate yet honest. Tiphaïne’s eyes were the first to turn away.

“We shall reach La Bellière to-night,” she said.

“Yes, to-night.”

“And I shall see my father.”

Perhaps there was the slightest tremor of regret quivering in her thankfulness. Bertrand was watching Tiphaïne as a strong man watches the light or shadow in the eyes of one he loves.

“Shall I be welcome at La Bellière?”

“Welcome?”

“You see, some men are remembered—with bitterness.”

“You misjudge my father.”

“No, but I feel for him.”

“I know it.”

She lifted her face to his with a brave quickening of her womanhood. Instinct told her all that was in Bertrand’s heart.

His hands were opening and shutting upon the hilt of his sword.

“A year ago you know what manner of man I was.”

“I know what manner of man I honor now.”

“You called me a worthless ruffian, and you were right.”

“Forget the words.”

“No, before God, no; they made me turn into a man.”

“And you, Bertrand, have taught me many things in return.”

It was as though she yielded, and yet did not yield.

“Tiphaïne.”

“We owe so much to you, we of La Bellière.”

His hands swept out to her, letting the sword fall.

“No, no, do not say that. Am I a man to trade upon my deeds?”

“Bertrand!”

“Forget them, for I should hate myself if you were to look on me as one who had plotted for your gratitude. Tiphaïne, I am just a man. I am thinking of you as the child who rescued me at Rennes.”

His words moved her more deeply than he imagined. She looked into his swarthy and impassioned face, and felt his homage leap up about her like sacred fire.

“If I might speak it?”

She faltered, and her cheeks were red, her eyes mysterious.

“No, no, not now—”

He went near to her, holding out his great, strong hands.

“I am a rough, ignorant fool, but—before God—I know now how to give you homage.”

“Bertrand, I know it—”

“Well—”

“Wait”—and she looked at him, and then at the hands he held to her—“I ask you to see the shadows that I see, the shadows that are darkening my own home.”

“Shadows?”

“Yes”—and her courage came to her—“I am thinking Bertrand, of my father, and of Robin hiding in the cloisters of Lehon.”

He dropped his hands and drew back a step, not harshly or selfishly, but with the reverence of a man who could behold the same vision as her tenderness beheld.

“Tiphaïne, I never had a home.”

“No.”

“They always hated me. And yet—”

“And yet you feel what I feel, the sacredness that watches over home. Bertrand, there is my father; my heart goes out to him; I remember how he looked at me when I told him the truth of Robin’s shame.”

His face was more tender towards her than before.

“He loved the lad.”

“And now he looks to me for all the love he lost at Mivoie. To-night he will kiss me and think me all his own.”

There was no bitterness in Bertrand’s eyes.

“You have a great heart in you.”

“Bertrand, you understand?”

“God bless you, yes.”

She went to him suddenly and took his hands.

“Patience.”

And in her eyes he might have read the dawning truth.

XLII

IN the Abbot’s parlor at Lehon there was a window that looked out upon the abbey garden, with its sunny stretch of turf, broad beds of herbs and vegetables, its barrier of aspen-trees about the orchard, an orchard rich in Pucelle de Flanders, St. Reols, and Caillon pears, cherries, and quinces, and pearmain apples. At this same window stood the Abbot Stephen, and behind him, half in the shadow, a girl in a gray hood and cloak and a man in black and rusty harness. The window was shaded, moreover, by a swinging lattice and by the red flowers and green leaves of a climbing rose, whose tendrils wavered athwart the blue of the summer sky.

Below, in the garden, between two broad bands of beans in flower, a young man in a russet-colored cassock was stooping over an onion-bed, holding a basket woven of osier twigs in one hand, while with the other he pulled up weeds. From time to time he stood up as though to stretch himself, or took to crawling between the rows, pushing the basket before him and throwing the weeds into it as he worked. The cowl of the cassock was turned back, leaving his head with its cropped hair bare to the sun.

The man weeding the onion-bed was Robin Raguenel; those who watched him, Bertrand du Guesclin and Robin’s sister.

The crawling figure, in its brown cassock, hardly suggested the young Breton noble who had ridden out to fight at Mivoie in all the splendor and opulence of arms. Robin had changed the sword for the hoe, the helmet for a basket of osiers. In lieu of cantering to the cry of trumpets over the Breton moors, he crawled across the cabbage and onion beds of the abbey of Lehon, the sun scorching his rough cassock, his nails rimmed with dirt, his sandalled feet brown with the warm earth of the garden. Here was a transfiguration that challenged the pride of the worldly-hearted.

“Pax Dei.”

Abbot Stephen crossed himself, beholding in Tiphaïne’s eyes a certain unpleased pity, as though the crawling figure of her brother had made her set the past beside the present.

Abbot Stephen looked at her steadily and smiled.

“You are offended for your brother’s sake,” he said.

Her eyes were on Robin, who had squatted on his heels to rest, and was staring vacantly into the basket half filled with weeds.

“Offended, father?”

“There is more wisdom, child, in this penance than the mere eye can see.”

She still watched Robin, an expression of poignant pity upon her face.

“The change is so sudden to me,” she said.

Stephen of Lehon spread his hands with a gesture of fatherly assent.

“And yet, my daughter, there is wisdom in this work of his. Your brother’s pride is in the dust, and in the dust man’s humbleness may find that subtle and mysterious seed that has its flowering when the heart is sad.”

“It is difficult for me, father, not to grudge the past.”

“Is there, then, no glory, child, save in the service of the sword?”

He looked at her with an amiable austerity whose humaneness had not hardened into the mere dogmatism of the priest. Abbot Stephen still boasted the instinctive sympathy of youth. As for Tiphaïne, she glanced at Bertrand, who had drawn back into the room, arguing in her heart that it was better to fight God’s battle in the world than to dream dreams in a religious house.

“Christ our Lord was but a carpenter.” And the Abbot crossed himself.

“I remember it.”

“In the simple things of life the heart finds comfort. A sinless working with the hands leads to a sinless working of the soul. It was the lad himself who prayed me to give him work to do.”

She put her hands together as though in prayer.

“My brother must know his own needs,” she said. “It is better to work than to sulk like a sick hawk upon a perch.”

“Child, that is the right spirit.”

And he stood to bless her, with no complacent unction, but with heart of grace.

For a while she looked at Robin kneeling on the naked earth, her silence seeming to confess that she was more content to leave him in the Church’s keeping.

“I go now to La Bellière,” she said, quietly.

“You have a double share, my child, to give and to receive.”

“God grant that I may remember it,” and she turned to Bertrand with a stately lifting of the head.

At La Bellière the sky was an open wealth of blue, the aspens all a-whisper. And yet, with summer reddening the lips of June, the sorrow of the place was still like the sighing of a wind through winter trees on a winter evening. Logs burned in the great fireplace of the solar. Stephen Raguenel, looking like some December saint, craved from the flames that warmth that life and the noon sun could not give.

The turrets were casting long shadows towards the east when dust rose on the road from Dinan. A few peasants were running in advance of a knight and a lady who wound between the aspen-trees towards the towers and chimneys of La Bellière. Soon there came the sound of men shouting, the clatter of hoofs on the bridge before the gate. The starlings and jackdaws wheeled and chattered about the chimneys. It was as though the château had slept under some wizard’s spell, to awake suddenly at the sounding of a hero’s horn.

Girard, discretion among the discreet, was craning out of a turret window, his face like a vociferous gargoyle spouting from a wall. He saw madame’s palfrey, the cloak with its crimson lining, and understood that Croquart had been cheated of a ransom.

Girard ran down the tower stair two steps at a time, bruised his forehead—without swearing—against the cross-beam of a door, and reached the great court in time to see Tiphaïne and the man in the black harness ride in through the gate.

“Assuredly this is God’s doing.” And Girard crossed himself before running forward to join his fellow-servants in frightening the starlings, who were unaccustomed to so much shouting.

“Madame, this is God’s doing.”

He kissed the hem of her cloak, and was asked but a single question in return:

“Girard, my father?”

“Now that madame has come back to us my lord the Vicomte will most surely live.”

She left the saddle and bade Bertrand follow her. But the man in the black harness held back, feeling that he was a stranger amid the curious and many faces that filled the court-yard of La Bellière.

“Go,” he said to her. “I will wait my time.”

“Perhaps it is better.”

“Yes, that you should go to him alone.”

Girard, sparkling like a well-polished flagon, and brimful of exultation, presented his homage to the gentleman on the black horse. All the La Bellière servants had been told the truth. Messire Bertrand du Guesclin could have commanded more devotion at that moment than Charles of Blois himself.

“The grace of God to you, messire,” and Girard’s face carried more than a servile blessing.

The men made the turrets ring.

“God and St. Ives for the Eagle of Cancale!”

They crowded round, each trying to hold his stirrup or bridle or to take his spear. Their enthusiasm grew bolder as the contact became more intimate. Two of the tallest men soon had Bertrand upon their shoulders, and carried him in triumph to the dais in the great hall.

Girard’s bald pate glistened with obeisances.

“Would my lord eat and drink?”

Bertrand accepted the suggestion. He felt it embarrassing, this setting-up of him like an idol to be stared at unwinkingly by so many pairs of eyes. If the god ate, they would at least see that he was half-human like themselves.

“My good-fellow, honest men are always thirsty.”

And had it been possible they would have emptied a hogshead of Bordeaux down Bertrand’s throat by way of testifying their devotion.

Even the cook, gardeners, and dairy-women crowded “the screens” to catch a glimpse of Bertrand as he sat at the high table. They watched him eat and drink as though he were an ogre, whispering together, peeping over one another’s shoulders. Bertrand, who had none of the spirit of the mock hero, chafed under this flattering publicity, being in no humor to be gaped at like a black bear in a cage.

“My good-fellow, do people ever eat here?”

Girard flourished a napkin and looked puzzled.

“Ah, messire—”

“These friends of yours seem to grudge me my hunger by the way they push and stare.”

Girard took the hint and closed the doors on the array of inquisitive faces. He returned and made his bow.

“Messire du Guesclin must pardon the people. Messire du Guesclin is a great soldier and a hero.”

“Nonsense, sir,” and Bertrand laughed half foolishly at Girard’s magniloquent respect.

“Messire, you have a modest heart.”

“Modest heart!—to the devil with you!”

“And a courage that will not be flattered.”

Bertrand picked up his wine-cup and held it towards Girard.

“Enough, friend,” he said; “I am clumsy at catching compliments. Drink to all good Bretons. That will please me better.”

And Girard drank, his eyes looking at Bertrand over the rim of the cup.

It was then that the door leading to the stairway behind the dais opened, showing Tiphaïne in a green gown, a red girdle about her waist.

“Bertrand.”

He saw at once that she had been weeping, though her eyes shone like a clear sky after rain.

“Come.”

Bertrand followed her without a word. She climbed the stairs and halted on the threshold of the solar, her hand on the latch of the closed door.

“My father has asked for you.”

The man before her appeared far more distrustful of himself than if he had been called to lead the forlornest of forlorn hopes.

“You will find him changed.”

“Am I to go alone?”

“If you wish it.”

Bertrand’s face betrayed his unwillingness.

“I would rather—”

“I came with you?”

And she took his hand.

Stephen Raguenel was sitting in his chair before the fire, with the look of a man exhausted by too sudden and great a joy. Tears were still shining on his cheeks. Bertrand felt more afraid of him than of a weeping girl.

“Father, I have brought Bertrand to you.”

The old man would have risen; his hands were already on the arms of his chair. Bertrand, a great rush of pity sweeping away his awkwardness, went to him and knelt like a stripling beside the Vicomte’s chair.

“Sire—”

Stephen Raguenel laid his hands upon Bertrand’s shoulders. His eyes had a blind and vacant look. It was the wreck of a face that Bertrand saw gazing into his.

“It is you, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin?”

“It is I, sire.”

“We owe you much, my Tiphaïne and I.”

“Sire, let us not speak of it,” and his mouth quivered, for he saw in the old man’s eyes the yearning of a father for his son.

“No, messire, our honor is with us yet. We give you that gratitude of which God alone can know the depth. Child, is not that so?”

Tiphaïne had slipped behind him, and stood leaning upon the carved back of the chair. Her hands rested on her father’s shoulders. He drew them down with his and looked up wistfully into her face.

“Bertrand braved more than death for us,” she said.

“For the lad Robin’s sake.”

“Yes, for him.”

He lay back in his chair with his eyes closed, his breathing slow and regular like the breathing of one who sleeps. Bertrand had risen, and was leaning against the carved hood of the chimney. He remembered vividly that night, not many weeks, ago when the old man had gloried in the promise of his son.

Tiphaïne’s hands were smoothing her father’s hair. The touch of those hands brought a smile to the old man’s face. He opened his eyes to look at her, and in that look the heart of the father seemed to drink in peace.

Bertrand turned, and went stealthily towards the door. He opened it gently, and left them alone together.

XLIII

BERTRAND rode out hawking early on the forenoon of the third day at La Bellière, leaving Tiphaïne and her father seated together under the Vicomte’s favorite pear-tree in the orchard. He had chosen a gerfalcon in the La Bellière mews, and taken the path towards a marsh where there was a heron passage some three miles from the château. He rode alone, with the bird belled and hooded on his wrist, more intent, perhaps, in gaining solitude than on seeing the falcon make a flight. For the heart of a man in love is a world within itself, where the green pastures and deep woods are tinged with a melancholy like the perfume of wild thyme in the green deeps of June.

But there was more than mere melancholy in Bertrand’s heart that morning, for the truth was plain to him as the blue sweep of the summer sky that the old man at La Bellière lived in the spirit on the eyes and lips of Tiphaïne, his child. The vision of yesterday shone ever before Bertrand’s mind, the vision of Stephen Raguenel’s face glowing with a reflected light, a light falling from Tiphaïne’s face, with its great eyes and splendid sheen of hair. Nor would Bertrand have grudged the old man this, or have reproached Tiphaïne for having a woman’s heart. Men look for piety in priests, patience in a philosopher, tenderness and loyalty in a daughter towards her sire. The true man desires to find a beautiful completeness in the creature of his heart’s creation. He would rather starve his own desires than see her fail in some sacred duty towards her soul.

But the Vicomte had given Bertrand food for reflection that same morning, nor had the food seemed particularly sweet.

“I am remembering, Messire Bertrand,” he had said, “that there are other hearts in Brittany more near of sympathy to you than ours. We must not keep you at La Bellière.”

A broad hint, forsooth, and Bertrand had read more in the old man’s restless eyes than the Vicomte’s tongue had suffered him to say. Half an hour’s talk with Tiphaïne at the open window! Stephen Raguenel had even grudged him that, and betrayed by a flash of senile peevishness that the younger man’s presence cast a shadow across the narrowing path of age.

Human, most human, and yet there was something pitiful to Bertrand in the old man’s sensitiveness, his readiness to resent any sharing of Tiphaïne’s thoughts. No doubt she was all that was left to him, his pearl of great price, which he would suffer no other man to handle. In this life the services of a friend may be too soon forgotten when the clash of interests rouses the armed ego. Gratitude is the most volatile of all the sentiments. Return an old man his lost purse, and it is but natural that he should knit his brows when the self-same purse is coveted by the very mortal who returned it.

Yet to one who has suffered in the cause of others a grudging and suspicious spirit is as a north wind in the midst of June. It was for this reason that Bertrand’s heart was bitter in him that morning, not because Tiphaïne loved her father, but because the old man grudged her even a friend. In the past the lord of La Bellière would have laughed at such a notion of tyranny. But sorrow and the slackening of the fibres of the heart can change the temper of the happiest mind.

The forenoon had gone when Bertrand turned homeward to La Bellière without having so much as slipped the hood or jesses. Yet even though he had won nothing by the falcon’s talons, he had come by a decision to leave La Bellière on the morrow.

Not in the best of tempers, he came suddenly upon two shabby-looking devils squatting side by side under a wayside cross. They were sharing half a brown loaf and a bottle of cider, the jaws of both munching energetically with that stolid emphasis that betrays the philosophic and worldly mendicant. A couple of rusty swords and bucklers lay on the grass at the men’s feet. One of the pair was leathery and tall; the other, buxom about the body, with a face that matched the frayed scarlet of his coat.

They sighted Bertrand, falcon on wrist, and stared at him casually as though considering whether he was a gentleman likely to disburse a coin. There was an abrupt slackening of the masticatory muscles. Two pairs of eyes were startled by the apparition. The lean man bolted a large mouthful of bread and started up with a shout that sent Bertrand’s horse swerving across the road.

The loaf and the cider bottle were tossed upon the grass.

“Soul of my grandmother, bully Hopart, but it’s the captain!”

“Lording! lording!”

“Devil’s luck, and I’m no sinner!”

They made a rush across the grass, waving their caps and cutting grotesque capers.

“Hopart! Guicheaux!”

“The very dogs, messire.”

“God save me, but this is gallant!”

Bertrand’s face beamed like a great boy’s as he rolled out of the saddle almost into Guicheaux’s arms. Hopart and his brother bully sprang at him like a couple of barking and delirious dogs. So rough and strenuous were their methods of showing joy that a stranger might have taken them for a couple of footpads in the act of robbing a gentleman of his purse.

“Captain, captain, I could hug the heart out of you.”

“Goodman, Guicheaux. Give me a grip.”

“A crack of the knuckle-bones. Sir, but you are still strong in the fist.”

In the midst of all this loving turbulence the gyrfalcon on Bertrand’s wrist took to fluttering and screeching by way of protest, ruffled in feathers as well as temper. Bertrand disentangled himself, laughing and not a little out of breath.

“Captain, we have been beating all the country this side of Loudeac.”

“Good-fellows!”

“And, lord, we have had our hands busy cramming lies back down these squeakers’ throats. Faugh! how some of these fat folk stink of the pit!”

“So you have heard lies, eh?”

Hopart and Guicheaux exchanged glances.

“Well, captain, there’s never a wind in seed-time but thistle-down’s a blowing. Certain lewd rogues had been puffing a tale of the fight at Mivoie.”

“To be sure.”

“What is more, captain, a harping devil made so bold as to blab of it at Cancale.”

“To Sieur Robert, eh?”

“Yes, and to madame.”

“And it was believed?”

Guicheaux screwed his hatchet face into a kind of knot.

“Your pardon, captain, Madame Jeanne is a great lady.”

“And has some spite against me. Well?”

Guicheaux looked at Hopart; his comrade returned an eloquent grin.

“Well, captain, we two took that harping devil and half drowned him in the ditch.”

“You did?”

“But madame had her weapons ready. Brother Hopart, be so good as to scratch my back.”

The fat man pulled up the thin man’s shirt, and Guicheaux displayed a back still livid from the blows of a whip.

“Madame knows how to argue, captain,” and he chuckled.

“What, they whipped you?”

“By the lord, they did that!” and Guicheaux proceeded to display in turn his comrade’s honorable scars.

Bertrand looked at them, stubble-chinned rascals that they were, and felt a significant stiffening of the throat. It was no news to him that Dame Jeanne should have been ready to hear him slandered, but the loyalty of these rough dogs of war more than compensated for the smart.

“Hopart, Guicheaux, answer me. It was told then to madame my mother that Bertrand du Guesclin had played the traitor?”

They both stared at him and nodded.

“She believed it?”

Again the two heads bobbed acquiescence.

“And you?”

“We, captain?”

“Yes, you.”

“Well,” and Guicheaux looked embarrassed—“well, Brother Hopart, what did we do?”

“Kicked,” quoth the fat man, “and were royally toe-plugged for our pains.”

Bertrand slipped the jesses and shook the falcon from his wrist. He opened his arms to the two men, and Messire Bertrand du Guesclin might have been seen embracing the two vagabonds like brothers.

“Assuredly,” he said, “that harper friend of yours told lies.”

“Captain!”

“I fought at Mivoie, but not in my own arms.”

“Captain! captain!”

“All Brittany will soon know the truth.”

“St. Ives du Guesclin!” And Guicheaux threw his cap into the air, sprang at Hopart, and smote him an open-handed smack across the chest.

“Bully Hopart, bully Hopart, we must get drunk on this—or die!”

And they gripped hands and danced round Bertrand like a couple of clowns at a fair.

XLIV

WHILE Hopart and Guicheaux discovered themselves in such excellent fettle over the recovery of their idol, no less a person than Madame Jeanne du Guesclin presented her husband’s pennon before the great gates of La Bellière.

The disgrace at the Oak of Mivoie had sent Madame Jeanne upon a pilgrimage among her friends, for the news of Bertrand’s troth-breaking had challenged her pride, if it had not troubled her affection. Sieur Robert, a fat imbecile, had been left to gormandize at Cancale, while the wife, with sweet Olivier at her side, rode out to play the Roman mother. It was a necessary discretion that Bertrand should be sacrificed, nor did Madame Jeanne fail in the heroism of her indignation.

Sumptuous in red gown, with streamers of gold at the elbows, a short “spencer” of blue cloth open at the hips, a hood of some amber-colored stuff with liripipia of green silk, Madame Jeanne rode her roan horse into the La Bellière court. Olivier, as flushed and splendid as his mother, straight-waisted, full and jagged in the sleeves, smiled at the wide welkin as though his motto were, “By God’s soul, I am the man.” Ten armed servants in red and green, a falconer, two huntsmen with four hounds in leash, followed hard at madame’s heels.

Some people seem designed by nature for the more spacious ways of life, for terraces that touch the sunset, marble stairways, and chairs of gold. This largeness of presence was part of Jeanne du Guesclin’s birthright. Standing in the state solar of La Bellière, with one hand on Olivier’s shoulder, she dwarfed her slim fop of a son, whose mawkish look betrayed the oppression of a youth tired by indiscriminate motherly conceit.

The window of the solar, with its scarlet cushions and carved pillars in the jambs, looked out upon the garden, where Madame Jeanne could see the Vicomte asleep on the bench under the Pucelle de Saintonge. Half an hour had passed since Girard had bowed them into the state solar, and Madame Jeanne was not a lady who could wait in patience. She watched Stephen Raguenel with a slight twitching of her nostrils and the air of a grand seigneuress much upon her dignity.

“It seems that they do things slowly at La Bellière.”

Olivier yawned behind his hand.

“The roads are devilish dry,” he remarked. “I should not quarrel with a cup of wine. The old gentleman there appears to have eaten a big dinner.”

“The servants must be fools.”

“Probably Madame Tiphaïne is looking out her very best gown.” And Olivier began to flick the dust from the embroidery and the slashed splendor of his _côte hardie_.

Jeanne du Guesclin looked at him and smiled.

“If Robin Raguenel is half as handsome—”

“Pooh, mother!”

“—as Messire Olivier.”

“Confound my good looks,” and he pretended to appear modestly impatient. “How often are you talking to me as though I were a fool of a peacock?”

“There, put your girdle straight, Olivier. If I have a handsome son, am I not allowed to use my eyes?”

“I may be straighter in the legs than Bertrand,” and he gave a sharp and shallow laugh.

“Bertrand, indeed! We shall soon have done with the worthless fool. My friends cannot say that I am prejudiced in the man’s favor, since I have been the first to tell many of them the truth.”

“Poor fellow!”

It was curious to watch Jeanne du Guesclin’s eyes change their expression—like water that seems hardened by the passing of a cloud.

“Remember, you have taken Bertrand’s place,” she said.

“Poor Bertrand!” and he showed his teeth; “if Beaumanoir catches him, he will most assuredly be hanged.”

“Let them hang the traitor. I can have no pity for a turncoat and a coward.”

Tiphaïne was in her brother’s room, looking through the hundred and one things that had belonged to Robin: his whips and hunting-spears; the jesses, hoods, and gloves he had used in hawking; a few books; a great press full of perfumed clothes. On a peg by the window hung the surcoat that Bertrand had worn at Mivoie. The room was much as the lad had left it on the night of his flight to the abbey of Lehon. None of the servants had dared to touch the room. The care of all these treasures of a young man’s youth had been left to Tiphaïne like some sacred trust.

It was in this room that Girard found her, kneeling before the great carved chest, her brother’s helmet in her lap. She was burnishing the armor that Robin should have worn at Mivoie, and whose sheen displayed the scars gotten from the English swords. The light from the window fell across her figure as she knelt, her hair aglow, her eyes deep with the pathos of the past.

“Madame.”

To Girard it seemed that she had been praying, and perhaps weeping, over her brother’s arms. His voice startled her, for she had not heard the opening of the door.

“Girard?”

The old man bowed to her as she rose with Robin’s helmet in her hands.

“Pardon, madame, there are guests in the great solar.”

“I heard the sound of trumpets, Girard, and thought that Messire Bertrand had returned.”

“It is his mother, madame.”

“Jeanne du Guesclin?”

“And Messire Olivier with her.”

Tiphaïne laid Robin’s helmet upon the bed, closed the great chest, and went to her own room, telling Girard not to wake the Vicomte. She changed her old gown for one of grass-green dusted with violets, fastened on a girdle of beaten silver and a brooch of lapis lazuli at her throat. Like Girard, she believed that Jeanne du Guesclin had ridden to La Bellière with the news of Bertrand’s nobleness ringing like some old epic in her ears.

The windows of the gallery that led from Tiphaïne’s room towards the chapel and the great solar looked out westward over the main court. The sun beat full upon these windows, and Tiphaïne, as she passed, had a blurred vision of Jeanne du Guesclin’s men, in their red jupons slashed with green, crowding round some of the La Bellière servants. They appeared to be arguing and chaffering over some piece of news. In fact, Madame Jeanne’s men were in the process of being enlightened as to that truth of which their mistress was most unmotherly in her ignorance. Tiphaïne loitered a moment at one of the windows. She had an instinctive antipathy for the haughty-mouthed lady of Motte Broon. The two strong natures were in contrast, and Tiphaïne was in no mood for uncovering her heart for the edification of this woman, whom she had distrusted ever since the days at Rennes.

To Girard, Tiphaïne had given orders that the Vicomte was not to be disturbed, for she had taken the cares of the household on her own shoulders; nor was her father in a fit state to be afflicted with the irresponsible sympathy of inquisitive friends. The honor of the château was with Tiphaïne, and it was this same honor that brought Girard to the door of the state solar ten minutes after his mistress had entered. Girard’s fist was about to knock, when the pitch of the voices from within suggested suddenly that any intrusion would be indiscreet.

Girard stood there stroking his chin and knowing not for the moment whether to enter or to retire. Tiphaïne was speaking, not loudly, but with that intensity of self-restraint that made each word ring like the clear stroke of a bell. Girard, who had known her since a child, and had grown familiar with every modulation of her voice, could see her, even though the door was shut. She would be standing at her full height, her head thrown back a little, her eyes looking straight at the face of the woman to whom she spoke.

Soon a harsher, sharper voice broke in at intervals, questioning, criticising, snapping out short sentences with too evident a twinge of temper. Madame Jeanne had lost her haughty poise, and Girard, smiling a shrewd smile, thanked Heaven that he did not wear the Du Guesclin livery. From time to time a thinner and less aggressive voice would interpose, drawling out a few half-apologetic syllables—Messire Olivier trying to play the part of the wise and conciliating man of the world.

Girard was in the act of turning to retreat when he heard footsteps sweeping towards the door.

“Madame,” said Jeanne du Guesclin’s voice, harsh and metallic with inexpressible impatience, “you need not twit me with having blundered. What I heard I heard, and we credulous mortals are very human. Olivier, your arm.”

The door swung back, and Girard, caught before he could scramble round the corner, flattened himself against the wall. He had a glimpse of Jeanne du Guesclin’s face shining like a red sun through a thunder cloud, her lower lip pinched by her strong, white teeth. She came sweeping out on Olivier’s arm—Olivier, who looked like a wet chicken trying to appear worthy of an incensed and fluffed-up hen.

Jeanne du Guesclin saw Girard flattened like a pilaster against the wall, and recognized him as the man in office who had ordered the trumpets to blow a fanfan in her honor.

“Fellow, my horses!”

Girard contrived to bend at the hips.

“Order my men to be ready to return to Dinan in ten minutes.”

“It shall be done, madame.”

And Girard disappeared like a flitting shadow down the stairs.

Fate, however, reserved a more scathing ordeal for the chastening of Jeanne du Guesclin’s pride. Probably she never realized in life how insolent the truth could be till that moment when she came out from the doorway of the hall, and, standing at the top of a flight of steps, looked down upon the crowd of servants in the castle court.

The crowd was divided into two parties, distinguishable in the bulk by the contrasting colors of their liveries. Before the great gate the red and green of the Du Guesclins had huddled itself into a sullen and silent knot, while the blue and silver of La Bellière fluttered more cheerily across the court. But the dramatic energy of the scene seemed centred in two shabby, swaggering figures footing it to and fro under the noses of Jeanne du Guesclin’s men.

Messires Hopart and Guicheaux were taking their revenge, arm in arm, with a flourish of swords and the happy arrogance of a pair of heroes. The La Bellière servants appeared to be applauding their bombast and their swagger. Not so Jeanne du Guesclin’s men, whose toes were being trodden on and whose ribs had suffered from the ironical raillery of the mighty Hopart’s elbows. Bertrand’s rapscallions were top dogs for the moment.

“Hallo, sirs!”—and Guicheaux spread his fingers at one of Olivier’s grooms who had taken part in the “scourging” at Cancale, “—who said Messire Bertrand did not fight at Mivoie? They swallow strange tales at Gleaquim, eh?”

A figure in red and green growled out:

“God have pity on these two fools!”

“Fools?” and Hopart stopped dead in front of a little man who had ventured the insult. “So it is you, Jacques, my little pig, eh? I have always heard that swine are unclean brutes in the matter of food. Did you say ‘fools’?”

Hopart, bulking big, with a face like a devouring fire, stared at the little man and shook a huge, brown fist.

“Did you say ‘fool,’ little pig?”

“Let Jacques be, bully Hopart.”

“So!” and Hopart set his hoof on the great toe of the second man who had spoken, and emphasized the rebuke by a sounding smack across the mouth.

“Come out and fight,” he said; “we are not in madame’s piggery now.”

The crowd roared. Hopart’s swagger neared the sublime, his great, fiery face making the men in red and green blink like a brood of startled owls. Hopart was too big and threatening to be taken by the beard. No one answered his challenge, and the two heroes strutted to and fro again like a couple of prize cocks.

Jeanne du Guesclin, standing at the top of the stairway leading from the hall, saw all this in the compass of a moment. Nor had her coming been lost upon Hopart and Guicheaux. They doffed their caps to her with exaggerated gestures of respect, a display of mock homage that turned all eyes upon the proud figure of the lady.

Jeanne du Guesclin’s face was white with anger.

“Olivier”—and she bit her words—“go down and give those swine a beating with your sword.”

“Madame mother, leave the men to me.”

It was not Olivier who had answered her, and Dame Jeanne started as though a snake had fallen at her feet. She turned and saw Bertrand standing on the threshold of the hall, his face impassive, his arms folded across his chest.

For the first time in her life Jeanne du Guesclin faltered before her son. There was a peculiar look in Bertrand’s eyes, a look that shamed her, leaving her speechless and at his mercy.

“Guicheaux! Hopart!” And he went down the steps into the court.

The two worthies had discarded all swagger and were meek as lambs.

“Yes, captain?”

“We are here, captain.”

Their innocence was sublime. No school-boy could have equalled it. Bertrand struggled hard to hide a smile.

“You are too noisy, you two. Stand back and remember your manners.”

They stood back, yet ready to wink at the first chance.

“Certainly, captain. We were amusing ourselves a little.”

“Cease to be amused.”

And for the life of him Bertrand could not bully them further when they looked at him like a pair of rough and mischievous dogs ready to come and lick his hands.

Two men in red and green were leading Madame Jeanne’s roan horse forward. She was still standing at the top of the steps, looking at Bertrand and biting her lower lip. All the prejudices of twenty years seemed shadowed forth upon her face. Even the cherished Olivier was afraid to meet her eyes.

Jeanne du Guesclin saw Bertrand take the roan’s bridle from the hands of one of the grooms. To those who watched her closely it seemed that some great struggle was passing behind the proud and full-lipped face. Her eyes had the strained look of an imperious nature to whom the bitterest ordeal may be the forgiving of defeat.

“Madame.”

Bertrand was before her, holding the bridle of her horse. His face appeared cold and impassive, and yet there was a slight softening of the stubborn mouth. Olivier, a mere pawn in this pageant of pride and passion, stood to one side, playing with his sword.

“Madame mother, may I help you to mount?”

Jeanne du Guesclin came down the steps like one under compulsion, and suffered Bertrand to take her hand. A strange thrill swept through her at the touch. It was as though she had realized with a flash of intuition that it was possible for a woman to be despised by her own son.

“Bertrand.”

He saw her lips tremble, saw her color and then go pale.

“Mother.”

It was as though the word struck her on the bosom—over her heart. She flashed an indescribable look at him, a look half of defiance, half of awe.

“Bertrand—”

He bent his head.

“You will come to us at Cancale?”

The words were half whispered, but Bertrand heard them, and felt all that was passing in Jeanne du Guesclin’s heart.

“Mother, you can command.”

He saw her draw a deep and hurried breath, and felt her grasp tighten upon his hand. Her eyes, full of the stormy instincts of a woman’s soul, betrayed a half-hunger for something that she could not name.

“Then—you will come? I ask it.”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. You are generous—more generous than I deserve.”

Thus far her pride would bend itself, and Bertrand, as he helped her to the saddle, felt her hand close again spasmodically on his. He knew the iron of his mother’s will, and understood how much those few words meant.

He walked beside her to the gate. And there, like a woman whose true instincts break through the ice of years, she looked long at him, and touched his forehead with her hand.

“Do not forget us at Cancale.”

“No, I shall not forget.”

“You have given us great honor.”

“Madame, remember, I am still Bertrand, your son.”

XLV

BERTRAND was astir next morning, with the reconciliation of yesterday still vividly before his mind. He began to dress and to arm himself, sitting on the edge of the bed in his room in one of the turrets, his hands dawdling at their work as though their master were too much enthralled by the importunity of his own thoughts. He had been moved by the sudden surrender of his mother’s pride, and the element of shame in her recantation had roused in him a new instinct of tenderness, a tenderness that overflowed perhaps from a subtle and more human source. The indifference of years had been broken by a few halting, yet inevitable, words. Bertrand had given Jeanne du Guesclin no idle promise. He would turn his horse’s head towards Cancale that very day.

Bertrand could hear Hopart and Guicheaux talking together in the little anteroom that opened from the turret stair. The fellows had lain like a couple of dogs outside his door, happy in the promise that he had given them that they should be his men from that day forth. The murmur of their voices came up to Bertrand as he armed, bringing back many a wild memory of wild nights spent on the moors and in the woods.

He buckled on his arm-pieces, using teeth and hands to clinch the straps, and, picking up his sword, went to the turret window and looked out. A thin mist hung over the meadows and the woods, a mist shot through like some silvery cloth with the gold threads of the morning sun. Above the haze the tops of the aspen-trees glimmered towards the deepening blue, and the jackdaws, whose nests were in the tall chimneys, were croaking and wheeling about the castle.

From the turret window Bertrand could see into the garden, where the mist clung about the orchard trees and dimmed the pool where the water-lilies spread their cups of ivory and of gold. Early though it was, Tiphaïne walked in the garden, with the Vicomte’s dog following at her heels. Bertrand had hoped for some such chance of speaking to her alone before he sallied to Cancale.

“Saddle the horses in an hour,” he said, as he passed Hopart and Guicheaux on the stairs and went clashing down in his well-worn harness. The men watched him down the first gray curve of the winding stair, silent, whimsical, mysteriously wise. Hopart nodded; Guicheaux bobbed his hatchet face in turn. A long, red tongue darted out momentarily between a thin and humorous pair of lips.

“The captain has it, God bless him.”

Hopart looked solemn.

“And something of a scold, too!”

Guicheaux’s bright eyes were dull suddenly, as though he were thinking of the Aspen Tower in far Broceliande, and of the grim happenings there that had shocked even his war-hardened soul.

“The devil’s in the women,” he said, with reflection, “and yet—not the devil, brother Hopart, for the devil, I guess, would never have bearded the captain and made him humble, as she did, in Broceliande.”

Hopart nodded.

“A brave lady.”

“Our Lord keep them”—and the rascal crossed himself with the gravity of a fanatic—“she’s just the captain’s match, just as stout in the heart as he. I’ll wager she’s waiting for him in the garden.”

The giant chuckled.

“If she’s a lady of sense.”

“Which she is. Come up; we’ll peep.”

And in they went to the window of the turret-room, and by the affectionate grin on Hopart’s face it was plain that Guicheaux’s prophecy had not flown wide.

Tiphaïne and Bertrand were standing beside the pool, she in her green gown with the violets thereon, he in his harness, belted and spurred for the road to the sea. He had told her the preceding night of the last melting of his mother’s pride. Tiphaïne had known, when she rose with the dawn, that Bertrand was leaving La Bellière for Cancale that morning.

But it was not of his own home that Bertrand thought as he stood beside Tiphaïne in the mist-wrapped garden. Life had taken for him a deeper tone. No more would he be the free lance, the man of the moors, who fought like an outcast for the law of his own hand.

“So you will go to Cancale?”

She spoke softly, like one who thinks. Bertrand was standing with his shoulders squared, looking at the water, his arms crossed upon his breast.

“To Cancale, my old home.”

“And then—?”

“To the wars again.”

“It is always war with us.”

“It will always be war with us till the English are driven into the sea.”

“You will share—in that.”

“God helping me”—and he bowed his head—“and some day—”

He paused, a man weighing his words.

“Some day—I shall come to La Bellière again.”

He turned and looked at her, as though wondering whether the woman in her understood.

“Bertrand.”

She was gazing at the pool, with its floating lilies and the swallows skimming.

“Bertrand. My father is going towards the grave. He looks to me for a double love, now that Robin is no more his son. Can you blame me for remembering this?”

He looked at her honestly, and answered:

“No.”

They were standing close to each other, so close that Bertrand’s hand touched Tiphaïne’s arm.

“It is not easy to give up—all.”

She felt that he was trembling.

“Bertrand, I have one word for you.”

“And that word?”

“Wait.”

Her hand touched his. He held it, and stood looking down into her face.

“To serve you, honor you, to bide my time,” he said.

It was not the half-shamed face of a girl that he gazed at, but the inspired face of a brave woman.

“Bertrand, take troth from me; are you content?”

He threw his head back with a great intake of his breath.

“Content,” was all he answered.

From the turret window overhead Hopart and Guicheaux had drawn back with curiously stolid and solemn faces. It was as though each of these ragged sworders were attempting to disavow any trace of feeling by assuming a staring obtuseness that scorned anything so mawkish as sympathy with Bertrand and the lady. Hopart yawned behind his hand, looking at his comrade the while out of the corners of his slits of eyes.

“Borrowed that grease-pot, brother?” he asked, abruptly, as though fixing on a sufficiently unemotional topic.

Guicheaux stared. He was not without sentiment.

“Grease-pot?”

“For the captain’s stirrup leathers; they’re stiff as boards. I told you to get it from the cook, eh?”

“Wipe them round your neck, brother,” said the thin man; “’twill serve.”

Hopart yawned again, and glanced reflectively towards his stomach.

“Honest service once more,” he said, with a fat and complacent sigh; “a roof over a man’s head, and clean straw to lie in; good food and plenty. Brother, I have pricked two holes to let out my belt.”

It was the distant braying of a trumpet and the floating-up of a haze of dust among the poplar-trees on the Dinan road where the mist had cleared that brought the alert, hawklike glint back into Guicheaux’s eyes. He rested his elbows on the window-sill and craned his head forward, his mouth open as though it helped him to take in sound.

“Hst!”

Hopart leaned his hands on Guicheaux’s shoulders and flattened the thin man against the wall as he peered out in turn.

“Trumpets and banners, God a mercy!”

Guicheaux gave an expostulatory heave.

“Push me through the wall, hogshead! Eyes alive, but here’s a brave show—pennons by the score.”

Hopart’s heavy breathing grew yet heavier as he craned his head forward over Guicheaux’s shoulder.

“The Ermine, the Ermine, or I’m a bat!”

“Beaumanoir! Beaumanoir!”

“All for the love of the captain, I’ll swear. All the cats in Brittany coming to purr and rub against his legs.”

Guicheaux, in his excitement, continued to heave Hopart back a little, and to draw himself up so that he lay like a bolster doubled over the sill.

“Beaumanoir! Bully Beaumanoir, by God’s grace! Phew!”

He kicked out suddenly and began to writhe and wriggle under Hopart’s weight.

“Get back, great fool! Let me in.”

“What ails you, little one?”

“The captain!” And Guicheaux spluttered. “Get off my legs, oaf. He’ll break my head.”

Hopart’s obtuseness seemed as bulky as his body.

“What’s the captain doing, eh?”

Guicheaux cursed him, and contrived to squeeze back into the room.

“Was not madame there, fool?” he asked, looking hot and flattened.

“Madame?”

“Yes.”

And Guicheaux smacked his lips on the back of his hand.

XLVI

THE Breton chivalry flowed into La Bellière that day, a gaudy torrent that carried much pomp and panoply in the resonant splendor of its coming; trumpets blew, dogs barked, servants tumbled hither and thither, each man ordering and instructing his neighbor. Jehan, the porter, was fastening his best jerkin as pennons, two by two, came dipping under the arch of the gate. Heralds, trumpeters, lords, and knights poured in, till to the jackdaws on the chimneys the court-yard must have looked like a magician’s pit crammed with all manner of strange beasts, glittering dragons, and grotesque centaurs.

Of the knighting of Messire Bertrand du Guesclin in the great hall of La Bellière that same morning, Hopart and Guicheaux had many things to tell in the years to come, when they were rusty, bent-backed figures declaiming to open-mouthed youth on the settles before the winter fires: How Bertrand was taken in the Sieur de Beaumanoir’s arms; how the Breton lords crowded about him, offering him, one a horse, another a chain of gold, another a signet ring set with rubies; how Madame Tiphaïne stood on the great dais, looking down upon her man’s triumph with eyes that shone, even through brimming tears; how Beaumanoir’s sword touched Bertrand’s shoulder, and how the rafters rang with the shout that went up at his knighting; and how Messire Bertrand said little, and looked sly, as though ready to laugh over the time all these fine gentlemen had taken in discovering that he was not a fool.

But to leave Hopart and Guicheaux in their inglenooks with the firelight twinkling on their wrinkled old faces and their tongues wagging over the days that were no more.

For Bertrand’s sake Tiphaïne would have made a great feast that night for the Breton lords at La Bellière, but Bertrand, drawing the Sieur de Beaumanoir aside, told him the tale of Robin Raguenel. It was not in his heart to hear the trumpeting of his own triumph in the place while old Stephen Raguenel sat like a man stunned and thought of his son in the abbey of Lehon. There would have been mockery, gross mockery, in such a festival. And Beaumanoir, great lord and honest gentleman, gathered his pennons, his heralds, and his trumpeters, and returned by the road to Dinan that same day.

“I am for England, messire,” he said to Bertrand before he sallied forth. “We go to bring Count Charles back to his own land again. Come with me and see the English court.”

Bertrand flushed at the Marshal’s words.

“I have a promise that must be kept,” he answered.

“Here?” And Beaumanoir looked at him hard and smiled.

“No, to my mother—at Cancale.”

“Keep it, messire. It may be a month before we sail—if that is time enough.”

“Then, sire, I will come with you.”

“Brothers in arms—for the memory of Mivoie.”

Hopart and Guicheaux, trudging behind Bertrand’s horse as they followed him over the bleak lands towards the sea, glanced often at each other like two men most wise; for their lord rode as though he were alone with his own thoughts, a smile on his lips, and in his eyes the light of a brave desire.

For Tiphaïne had given him one long kiss at parting, and a lock of her hair, that he should wear under his armor—over his heart.

“Wait,” her eyes had said.

And Bertrand had answered:

“Until death.”

THE END

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Transcriber’s Notes:

Contents at the beginning of the book has been added for reader convenience. Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Obvious typesetting and punctuation errors have been corrected without note.

* * * * *

[End of _Bertrand of Brittany_, by Warwick Deeping]