“Ha, you call me a liar! I tell you, messire, I never lamed my horse. It was your doubting me that cut me to the quick. And then when you had wounded me in the heart you scoffed and sneered. I tell you it was your taunts that took my strength away at Loudeac.”
He jigged to and fro in his hysterical fury, spluttering, snapping his teeth, jerking his arms about. It was plain enough to Bertrand whence all this froth and ferment came. The lad was mad with him for what he had done and also for what he knew.
“Come,” he said, quietly, bolting up his scorn. “Come, Robin, I never thought to hear you speak like this.”
Robin still chattered like an angry ape.
“No, no; you thought I should grovel and fall at your knees, eh! Yes, you are a fine fellow, Bertrand du Guesclin, but, by God, I am not going to wallow at your feet! Give me back my armor; give me back my armor, and be damned to you! Go and tell all the duchy that Robin Raguenel played the coward.”
Bertrand looked at him as Christ might have looked at Judas. The lad’s squealing passion filled him with bitterness and disgust. It was difficult to believe that this was Tiphaïne’s brother.
“Fool,” he said, speaking with a self-control that was fiercer than any clamor, “it is for those who love you that I have done this thing! What shame I bear, I bear it for their sakes, not for yours. Take back your arms. I shall suffer for them long enough.”
He took Robin’s shield, scarred and dented by the English swords at Mivoie, and threw it on its face at Robin’s feet. Then, without a word, he began to unbuckle the borrowed harness, piling it on the grass beside the shield. Robin watched him, biting his nails, the futile fury dying down in him like a fire built of straw. The scorn of Bertrand’s silence sobered him as he idled to and fro not daring to offer to help Bertrand to disarm.
The girl looked out at them inquisitively from the back door of the inn. Robin shouted to her, bidding her bring the armor that lay in his room. She drew her white face in, and returned anon with Bertrand’s shield slung about her neck, her arms and bosom full of steel. Bertrand glanced up at her, and at the sight of his ugly face, made more grim and terrible by its pent-up passion, she dropped the armor with a clatter on the grass and, throwing down the shield, skipped away, after darting out her tongue at Robin. Bertrand had put off the last piece of young Raguenel’s harness. He stood up and stretched himself, and tightened the bandage about his thigh.
Robin’s face had grown weak and irresolute once more. His blood had cooled, and he remembered how much he lay at Bertrand’s mercy.