Raimbaut spoke. “I give you leave. I have not been a bad lord to you.”
His squire looked at him with shining eyes. “No, lord, you have not. I thank you for much. And some day if I may I will return good for good, and pay the service that I owe!”
Foulque the Cripple limped from the hearth to a chest by the wall, unlocked it with a key hanging from his belt, and took out a bag of soft leather—a small bag and a lank. He turned with it. “You shall have wherewith to fit you out. Escape harm now, little brother! But when the wind has ceased to blow, come back—”
The abbot seemed to awake from a dream, and, awakening, became golden and expansive even beyond his wont. “You hear him say himself that he has no vocation.... Nay, if he begins so early by overthrowing knights he may be called, who knoweth? to become a column and pattern of chivalry! I will bring him safe out of the immediate clutch of danger.”
An hour, and Raimbaut departed, and none outside the hall of Castel-Noir knew aught but that, hunting a stag, he had come riding that way. The sun set, and the abbot and his following had supper and Garin served his brother and Abbot Arnaut. Afterwards, it was said about the place that the company—having a long way to make—would ride away before dawn. So, after a few hours sleep, all did arise by torchlight and ate a hasty breakfast, and the horses and mules and the abbot’s palfrey stamped in the courtyard. Mistral was dead and the air cool, still, and dark. The swung torches confused shadow and substance. In the trampling and neighing and barking of dogs, clamour and shifting of shapes, it went unnoticed that only Foulque was there to bid farewell to the abbot and kinsman.
In the early night, under the one cypress between the tower and the wall, Foulque and Garin had said farewell. The light was gone from about Garin; he seemed but a youth, poor and stricken, fleeing before a very actual danger. The two brothers embraced. They shed tears, for in their time men wept when they felt like doing so. They commended each other to God and Our Lady and all the saints, and they parted, not knowing if ever they would see each other again.
The abbot and his company wound down the zig-zag road and turned face toward the distant Abbey of Saint Pamphilius. Riding westward they came into the fir wood. The sun was at the hill-tops, when they overtook a limping pedestrian,—a youth in a coarse and worn dress, with shoes of poor leather and leggings of bark bound with thongs, and with a caped hood that obscured his features. Questioned, he said that his father sowed grain and reaped it for Castel-Noir, but that he had an uncle who was a dyer and lived beyond Albi. His uncle was an old man and had somewhat to leave and his father had got permission for him to go on a visit—and he had hurt his foot. With that he looked wistfully at the horse of the lay brother who had summoned him to the abbot.
“Saint Gilles!” exclaimed the abbot, and he spoke loud and goldenly. “It were a long way to hop to Albi! Not a day but I strive to plant one kindly deed—Take him up, my son, behind thee!”