“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
* * * * *
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]