"Was there a young lady there?" Bernard de Rohan inquired, with as much calmness as he could command.
"Yes, he talked of a stranger lady from France," replied the shepherd, "with a number of soldiers and attendants belonging to some French lord, for whom they were all grieving and weeping bitterly, because he had been killed somehow."
"How long will it be ere your son returns?" asked Bernard de Rohan, eager, notwithstanding all the fatigues that he had suffered, to reach the inn that night.
The answer he received was one of those vague and indefinite replies which are always given on such occasions by persons to whom, as to the shepherd, time seems of little or no value. He said that the lad would be back very soon; but hour after hour passed, and he did not appear.
The young cavalier became impatient; and, finding that it was impossible, from any direction the old man could give, to learn the path which he ought to pursue, he urged him, with many promises of reward, to conduct him to Gandelot's small hostelry himself.
Had he proposed to the good shepherd, however, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it would not have seemed more impracticable. He declared that it was perfectly out of the question; that, now his wife was dead, there was nobody to remain in his cottage; that the distance was fully four leagues, and that it would take them as many hours to go. "It will be dark in half an hour," he continued, "and we should but break our necks over the rocks and precipices."
Bernard de Rohan found that it was impossible to move him; the son did not come home till the evening was beginning to grow gray, and the young cavalier was obliged, unwillingly, to resign all hopes of rejoining his bride before the next day.
With the shepherd and his son, the use of any other light but that of the broad sun was unknown except in the depth of the winter; and, though Bernard de Rohan could have sat up for many an hour questioning the younger man upon all he had seen and heard at the inn, but a short period was allowed him for so doing ere they retired to repose.
The information that he obtained was but little, for neither the elder nor the younger mountaineer was very intelligent or very communicative. The latter, indeed, seemed to divine at once, what had never struck the old man, that the young cavalier who had become their accidental guest was no other than the person by whose supposed death the lady whom he had seen at the inn had been plunged into such deep grief.
"She will be mighty glad to see you," he said, taking the matter for granted; "and, if we set off by daylight to-morrow, you will just catch her as she wakes, for you nobles are sad lie-abeds."