Chapter X: Book III: “the Oak of Mivoie” (4)

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—”