The ladies of Jean de Penthièvre’s household had long despaired of making the Sieur de Tinteniac blush for them, yet a most palpable deepening of color overspread his face that morning as the mistress of La Bellière came towards him between the herb-beds of the abbot’s garden. Thyme, marjoram, lavender, basil, rosemary, and balm crowded about the lithe lightness of her figure. As she stood before Tinteniac in her gray riding-cloak, lined with crimson silk, her hair burning in the sunlight about her face, she seemed to recall to him the troubled tenderness of a green yet stormy June, long grass weary with the rain, pools brimming with the sunset, silent trees wrapped in a mysterious glory of gold. Beauty in woman should fire all the best beauty in the soul of man. And to such as Tinteniac, whose natural impulses towards nobleness were above mere religious and chivalric ordinances, the girl’s brave charm was a mystery and a romance.
“Are the horses ready?”
“Ready, if you are not afraid of being snapped up by some of Croquart’s plunderers.”
“No, I am not afraid,” and her eyes showed Tinteniac that she spoke the truth; “but your wounds, sire? How one’s own trouble makes one selfish towards others!”
Tinteniac looked at her as though he might imagine other woundings than those he had earned at the Oak of Mivoie.
“I am myself again, though I wear half-armor. We had better take the forest road.”
“As you will; I trust to you.”
She began to fasten her cloak with its loops of crimson cord, her hands moving slowly, her eyes looking past Tinteniac as though he were mere mist to her for the moment. She was thinking of Robin, her brother, buried in the abbey of Lehon, and of the old man, her father, sitting alone before the fire. From La Bellière her thoughts swept over Brittany with an impatient pity for the land that suffered.
“I had hoped that Mivoie would have ended all this misery,” she said.
Tinteniac was watching her as though her beauty had more meaning for him than her words.