On the same afternoon he sent for Philip to come to him in the highest room of the great tower. It was in this room that, many years ago, the Duke’s young and noble wife, from the province of Aquitaine, had given birth to the second son of the house of Bercy, and had died a year later, happy that she should at last leave behind a healthy, beautiful child, to do her honour in her lord’s eyes.
In this same room the Duke and the brave second son had spent unnumbered hours; and here it had come home to him that the young wife was faultless as to the elder, else she had not borne him this perfect younger son. Thus her memory came to be adored; and thus, when the noble second son, the glory of his house and of his heart, was killed in Macedonia, the Duke still came to the little upper room for his communion of remembrance. Hour after hour he would sit looking from the great window out over the wide green valley, mourning bitterly, and feeling his heart shrivel up within him, his body grow crabbed and cold, and his face sour and scornful.
When Philip now entered this sanctuary, the Duke nodded and motioned him to a chair. In silence he accepted, and in silence they sat for a time. Philip knew the history of this little room—he had learned it first from Frange Pergot, the porter at the castle gates with whom he had made friends. The silence gave him opportunity to recall the whole story.
At length the motionless brown figure huddled in the great chair, not looking at Philip but out over the wide green valley, began to speak in a low, measured tone, as a dreamer might tell his dream, or a priest his vision:
“A breath of life has come again to me through you. Centuries ago our ancestors were brothers—far back in the direct line, brothers—the monks have proved it.
“Now I shall have my spite of the Vaufoutaines, and now shall I have another son—strong, and with good blood in him to beget good blood.”
A strange, lean sort of smile passed over his lips, his eyebrows twitched, his hands clinched the arm of the chair wherein he sat, and he made a motion of his jaws as though enjoying a toothsome morsel.
“H’m, Henri Vaufontaine shall see—and all his tribe! They shall not feed upon these lands of the d’Avranches, they shall not carouse at my table when I am gone and the fool I begot has returned to his Maker. The fault of him was never mine, but God’s—does the Almighty think we can forget that? I was ever sound and strong. When I was twenty I killed two men with my own sword at a blow; when I was thirty, to serve the King I rode a hundred and forty miles in one day—from Paris to Dracourt it was. We d’Avranches have been men of power always. We fought for Christ’s sepulchre in the Holy Land, and three bishops and two archbishops have gone from us to speak God’s cause to the world. And my wife, she came of the purest stock of Aquitaine, and she was constant, in her prayers. What discourtesy was it then, for God, who hath been served well by us, to serve me in return with such mockery: to send me a bloodless zany, whom his wife left ere the wedding meats were cold.”
His foot tapped the floor in anger, his eyes wandered restlessly out over the green expanse. Suddenly a dove perched upon the window-sill before him. His quick, shifting gaze settled on it and stayed, softening and quieting.
After a slight pause, he turned to Philip and spoke in a still lower tone. “Last night in the chapel I spake to God and I said: ‘Lord God, let there be fair speech between us. Wherefore hast Thou nailed me like a malefactor to the tree? Why didst Thou send me a fool to lead our house, and afterwards a lad as fine and strong as Absalom, and then lay him low like a wisp of corn in the wind, leaving me wifeless—with a prince to follow me, the by-word of men, the scorn of women—and of the Vaufontaines?”’