“Messire Croquart is gentleman enough to respect fair play.”
“Madame, you have read me right,” and he fell to her flattery without a question. “Hi, Tête Bois”—and he climbed out of the saddle—“take off my breastplate and my cuishes. The butcher-boy of Flanders will take no man at a disadvantage. Madame, I most reverently kiss your hands.”
Tiphaïne’s heart misgave her for Tinteniac, as she watched the man Tête Bois at work upon his master under the shadows of a great beech. The Fleming’s girth of chest and limb seemed almost monstrous when compared with Tinteniac’s Grecian stateliness. The one was like a Norman pillar, massive and ponderous, giving a sense of uncrushable strength; the other like a fluted shaft of a more decorative age, its lines the lines of well-balanced beauty, its power concealed by perfection of design. The faces of the men were as vividly in contrast as their bodies. The butcher had the face of a butcher, and, as Tiphaïne watched him, the very insolent superfluity of his strength made him appear as the champion of the brute world against the nobler ideals of the soul.
“Sire, shall we fight mounted or on foot?”
Tinteniac, with the courtly composure of an aristocrat, stood leaning on his sword.
“As you please.”
“On foot, then.”
“I am ready.”
They engaged each other on a broad strip of grass clear of the roots and the sweeping branches of the trees. Croquart had lived by his sword; the noble had drawn his only when the serenity of the seignorial honor was embroiled. From the first the Fleming had the upper hand. Tiphaïne could see his grinning mouth, the glint of his eyes as though insolently sure of his own strength. Tinteniac never flinched from him, despite his wounds, taking Croquart’s blows with shield forward and head thrown back.
In the first minute Tinteniac was wounded in the thigh; Tiphaïne could see blood on his green surcoat, but to have meddled would have been an insult that no true man would have forgiven. His own blows seemed to lack power against the Fleming’s greater bulk. He felt the wounds crack that the English had given him at Mivoie, and he was short in the wind, like a man who has been a week in bed.