“But what of those who have not?” said he, gloomily. “Surely for all these things there will one day be a heavy reckoning.”
Tiphaine laid her cool, soft hand on the dying man’s fevered brow, and in the haggard eyes shone a sudden gleam of joyful recognition.
“God has sent an angel to receive my soul,” he murmured, “unworthy though I be of such grace; but ’tis a black soul for thy pure white hands to touch, holy one.”
“For such souls our Lord died on the cross,” she replied gently. “Peace be with thee.”
“And when thou meet’st my father yonder,” broke in Bertrand, vehemently, “tell him from me that never had man truer comrade than I have found in thee, and that——”
Here the brave man’s voice failed, and—for all emotions of that downright age, good or evil, worked as openly as those of children—the stern eyes, that had never blenched in the face of death, let fall tear after tear on the nerveless hand that he clasped in both his own.
“Lady,” said the dying bandit, straining his failing eyes towards Tiphaine’s face, “bind, I pray thee, thy sash around my neck, and let it be buried with me; for men say we shall be sore changed yonder, and I would fain have some token whereby God may know me for thy liegeman!”
And she, without a word, did as he asked.
An hour later all was over; but the rescued citizens did not forget what they owed to the man who had given his life to save them. All Rennes swelled the train that bore him to his last resting-place in the churchyard of Sainte-Melaine; and over his grave Du Guesclin set up, at his own cost, a fair tablet of hewn stone, inscribed with an epitaph that had indeed been fully earned—
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”