“How is it with you, noble sir? Woe worth the day, if my ill hap hath made me harm the best knight I ever faced!”
“Grieve not, fair sir,” said the brave Englishman, faintly. “I trow I shall live to fight another day, though I be sore shaken; but the victory is thine.”
“I pray you, then,” cried Bertrand, eagerly, as he raised him from the ground and signed to the nearest men to support him, “let me buy of you this good horse that I have ridden to-day, for better could no man wish at need.”
“Take him from me as a free gift, good Sir Bertrand,” said his gallant foe, “and may he ever bear thee as bravely as he hath done this day!”
An hour later Bertrand, having seen the English host sullenly preparing to break up the now hopeless siege, sat in a chamber of the gate-tower beside his cousin Huon, who was by this time recovering from his fall.
“Bertrand,” said the prostrate man, looking up at him, “thou hast not spared to risk thy life for mine; and yet, for I must needs tell it, I have envied thy renown, and would fain have done a deed this day that should match even thine!”
“Vex thyself about it no more, lad,” said the great soldier, with a blunt kindliness that became him well. “So mean a thing as envy hath no abiding place, I wot, in the heart of a good knight like thee; and so long as a good and knightly deed is done, what matter if it be done by thee or me, or some better man than either? Trust me, cousin, the true hero is not he whose name is most vaunted by men, but he who hath striven most to do his duty before God.”
“And such a hero art thou, Bertrand,” said the other, brokenly: “and God be my witness that I repent me, from my very heart, that I ever envied thee or bare thee ill-will!”
CHAPTER XVII
The Haunted Circle
The July sun of 1354 was shining warm and bright on the broad stream of the Loire, and lighting up the hard, wooden, sun-browned faces of a group of peasants who sat talking on a bench at the door of a tiny wayside inn, on the high-road leading inland from Nantes along the river.