He groaned, kissed the dead face, and then laid Arletta gently upon the floor. Still kneeling, he watched her, the truth—and the irrevocable bitterness thereof—coming home to him slowly with a great sense of shame.
“Bertrand.”
“Don’t speak to me”—and he buried his face deep in his hands—“let me bear it out alone.”
Tiphaïne passed out, leaving the candle burning in a sconce upon the wall. She groped her way down to the moonlit gallery, and so to the chapel, where she knelt before the altar, her face turned to the figure upon the cross. But Bertrand watched all night beside Arletta’s body, holding the hands that were cold in death.
XVI
The dawn was streaming up when Bertrand came down the stairway from the upper room in the tower and paused in the gallery leading to the solar. A bitter watch had it been for Bertrand, a long vigil with the relentless past condemning him with the thoughts of his own heart. He had knelt there, stunned and awed, with Arletta’s blood dyeing the floor and her white face shining on him from amid the dark wreathings of her hair. There had been no horror in her death for him, only a great revulsion of remorse, a moving of all his manhood. He had looked on the dead face hating himself, haunted by memories—memories poignant as a mother’s tears. How good the girl had been to him, even when he had been rough and petulant! She had often gone hungry that he might eat. And now he had killed her—killed her with his great blundering penitence that had trampled on her love in its struggles to be free. He had blood on his hands—the blood of the woman whose bosom had pillowed his head in sleep.
Bertrand stood in the gallery, miserable and cold, watching the dawn come up over the thickets of Broceliande. There was no joy for him in that splendor of gold, for the eyes of Arletta would open with the dawn no more. Ah, God, what a brute he had been, what a self-righteous coward! He had taken this woman’s heart, broken it, and thrown it back to her in this awakening of his, of which he had been so proud. Bertrand gripped the window-rail and stared at the moat. A glory of gold was streaming over the forest, and the black water beneath him caught the splendor and seemed glad.
The two women, Gwen and Barbe, were washing themselves in the water-butt before the kitchen entry when Bertrand went down into the court. They pulled their clothes up over their breasts on catching sight of him, and stood giggling and looking at each other.
“Good-morrow, lording.”
“Your servant, Messire Bertrand. Letta’s a proud woman again, I’m thinking—”