“And the lad less reticent.”
“My love would have sent him like a man to Mivoie.”
Tinteniac looked ahead between the dark boles of the trees.
“It is the waiting for danger that tires the courage,” he said. “Like the sounds of wolves following at night, when one can see nothing.”
“And the wolves?”
“May be a man’s own thoughts. Most of us are brave when we plunge into peril with no time given us to think.”
Had Tinteniac been able to see five furlongs through the forest, he might have put his philosophy to the test by watching the champion of the fox’s brush cantering on the same road towards Loudeac. About them were the quiet glades and woodways of the forest, green with the glamour and the mystery of spring. Wind flowers fluttering white as swan’s-down; wild hyacinths like the dust of lapis lazuli scattered on emerald cloth; the cuckoo flower with its lilac crosslets; primroses brilliant in the green gloom of coppice and of dell. The winding glades were paved with color and arched with tremulous foliage bathed in the sunlight. Through many a green cleft could be seen the golden splendor of the gorse in bloom, the white clouds moving over the azure of the sky.
Tinteniac and Tiphaïne had loitered as they talked, and the rest of the troop, with the two esquires leading, had disappeared round the shoulder of a beech wood, the great trunks rising out of the bronze flooring of leaves to spread into a delicate shimmer of green above. In a thicket of birches to the south of the road a cuckoo was calling, while the sunlight played on the white stems of the trees.
Tiphaïne was still thinking of all that Tinteniac had told her, her eyes looking into the distance, a sad smile hovering about her mouth. The wild woods and the brown birds darting and fluttering in the brakes made her pity the poor lad who was shutting himself in Lehon against such life as this. She was roused from her reverie by the sound of men shouting on the road beyond the beech wood. Tiphaïne’s horse pricked up its ears. The birds, those spirits of the solemn woods, came scudding fast over the tree-tops.
Tiphaïne’s eyes were turned to Tinteniac’s face. His fine profile, with its alert lines, showed that he had spoken of panic with the quiet smile of a man remembering a weakness long since dead.