“Content, sire, content.”
“What road do you take us?”
“The road to Morlaix, sire. I shall join young Bamborough there.”
XXVIII
In the underwood that topped a high bank overhanging the road where it swept round the beech wood a man in black harness crouched behind the twisting roots and stems of a clump of hazels. The black shell of steel was almost indistinguishable in the shadows. Snakelike it had crawled through a bank of gorse and reached the hazels overhanging the road.
Bertrand, with his sword naked at his side, had lifted his head cautiously and looked down into the road through a loop left by the twisting roots. The first glance had shown him Tiphaïne seated on her palfrey under the trees, watching Tinteniac weakening before the Fleming’s sword. Bertrand was not a man easily astonished, but his heart gave a great leap in him as he saw the Lady of the Aspen Tower with the sunlight shining through the branches on her face. Bertrand’s thoughts were in a tangle for the moment. The Sieur de Tinteniac fighting with Croquart the Fleming, and the Vicomte de Bellière’s daughter waiting to be claimed as the better man’s prize! Bertrand felt dazed for the moment by the utter unexpectedness of the scene before him. The whole tone of the adventure had changed on the instant. Had a miracle been performed before him the man amid the grass and hazels, with bluebells nodding about his body, could not have been more struck than by this strange interweaving of the threads of fate.
When Tinteniac fell, Bertrand was on his knees, teeth set, sword ready, on the brink of a battle with the Fleming. The three men-at-arms watching the fight had not seen the black figure poised amid the hazel boughs. It hung there a moment as though hesitating, and then dropped back again into the grass and leaves.
Tiphaïne was facing Croquart, while Tinteniac grovelled on his elbow, and this new grouping of the characters had sent Bertrand back to cover. He lay like a fallen bough, almost invisible, his body sunk in the dead leaves and the grass tussocks, hearing Tiphaïne speak, yet unable to catch her words. Her face, clear before him in the sunlight, had that look that was peculiar to her when her courage was in arms. She was speaking for Tinteniac, and Bertrand watched her, noting the play of feeling on her face with the intentness of a man who watches the face of one he loves. It hurt him to see her speaking for Tinteniac, so sensitive is the strongest heart when a woman’s eyes have power to wound or heal. The old blind feeling of bitterness that had been bred in him at Motte Broon rushed up to tantalize him with the imagined meaning his instinct set upon the scene.
Croquart gave her the wine-flask and the linen, and she knelt beside Tinteniac, one arm about his shoulders, her face very close to his. Bertrand winced, drove one knee into the grass, and yet cursed himself for a credulous fool. Would any woman stand by and see a wounded man bleed to death, and would that woman be Tiphaïne of La Bellière?
Croquart had moved away, and was shouting orders to his men. Bertrand heard them, though his eyes never left Tinteniac, with his head upon Tiphaïne’s knee. They seemed to be speaking together in low tones, and watching the broad back the Fleming had turned to them for the moment. Bertrand saw their hands touch, and looks that were alive with a subtle significance pass between them. Bertrand would have given all he had to have heard the words they had spoken.