“It was so, good sword! I remember it as if it had been yesterday!”
“And at Cerisoles, the Battle of the Plain, in the old Spanish wars, that was most like a joust of all the pitched fields I ever saw—at Cerisoles, where I caught your horse? You mind me? It was in the shock when we broke Guasto’s line—”
“At Cerisoles?” Count Hannibal muttered slowly. “Why, man, I—”
“I caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? You remember, my lord? And at Landriano, where Leyva turned the tables on us again.”
Count Hannibal stared. “Landriano?” he muttered bluntly. “’Twas in ’29, forty years ago and more! My father, indeed—”
“And at Rome—at Rome, my lord? Mon Dieu! in the old days at Rome! When the Spanish company scaled the wall—Ruiz was first, I next—was it not my foot you held? And was it not I who dragged you up, while the devils of Swiss pressed us hard? Ah, those were days, my lord! I was young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning—”
“You rave!” Tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. “Rome? You rave, old man! Why, I was not born in those days. My father even was a boy! It was in ’27 you sacked it—five-and-forty years ago!”
The old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. The light died out of his eyes—as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink, even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down.
“No, I remember,” he muttered slowly. “It was Prince Philibert of Chalons, my lord of Orange.”
“Dead these forty years!”