“Gilles and Gilbert are fighting. Listen! They are falling back towards us. Look, who goes there?”
There was a crackling of the underwood near them, and they had a glimpse of the white face of a man pushing through the brushwood into a little glade. He seemed to see neither Tiphaïne nor the knight on the great horse. And with the flash of a helmet he was gone, the green boughs closing on him like water over a diver’s body.
Tinteniac bit his lip.
“A bad omen”—and he reached for Tiphaïne’s bridle—“that fellow of mine has taken to his heels. Perhaps he is discreet. We, too, can take cover.”
He had already dragged Tiphaïne’s palfrey half across the road, when a man in red, riding a black horse, swerved round the beech wood into the sunlight. Three others followed him at a canter, shields forward, swords out. Tinteniac saw himself caught in the open. He wheeled briskly, covering Tiphaïne with his horse.
“Keep close to me, child.”
“Thanks, sire; do not risk anything for my sake.”
He answered her with a look that it was impossible for her to parry.
Croquart drew rein when he saw nothing more terrible on the forest road before him than a knight and a lady without escort and without servants. The Fleming had taken the two esquires and their men for the advance-guard of a company pushing forward to help in the defence of Josselin. He had not waited to ask questions, but had charged without a parley, and, since the two poor youngsters had made a gallant stand against him, the Fleming had used his tusks in his hurry to break through.
The first thing that Croquart noticed was the gold and gules upon Tinteniac’s shield; the second, Tiphaïne’s figure with its gray cloak lined with crimson silk, and the glitter of her hair under the boughs of the trees. Now Croquart was one of those insufferable creatures whose vanity takes fire at the first flash of a woman’s gown. Ugly and illiterate rascal that he was, he had conceived a fashionable fury for the French romances, and had even taken to modelling his behavior upon that of their aristocratic heroes. A renegade is always doubly bitter against the party he has deserted; so Croquart, hating the past, aspired to be the gay and flamboyant gentleman, tender and irresistible to women. Hard and grim in the business of life, the sex feeling made a fool of him, even so much as to make him one of those fulsome fops who cannot refrain from displaying their feathers to the poorest draggle-tail be she beneath the age of fifty. His gaudy clothes would have seemed wasted but for the women, and his successes among the bourgeoisie had made him ambitious of flying for nobler game.