The little picture was broken at last, though it seemed to the man among the hazels that Tinteniac had had hours at his disposal. They were binding up the wounded shoulder, and there was blood, Tinteniac’s blood, on Tiphaïne’s hands. With some trick of the memory the sight of it brought back to Bertrand the vision of Arletta dying with red hands in that dark tower amid the beeches of Broceliande. It was as though God’s voice had called to him—a still, small voice amid the silence of the mysterious woods. The perfervid selfishness went out of him like the lust out of the man who remembers the womanhood of his mother.
Bertrand’s hands gripped the blade of his sword as he lay with it crosswise under his throat. He saw Tiphaïne rise, draw aside, her face hidden by her hands. Bertrand felt numb at the sight of it, yet very humble. If she wept for Tinteniac, then Tinteniac was of all men the most to be honored. Honored? And Bertrand’s face burned with the hot memories of many unclean years—years when he had bartered his manhood for harlots’ kisses.
He drew back slowly from under the hazels, and, crawling through the gorse and underwood, reached the place where he had left his horse. A dead tree lay there that had fallen in a winter gale, and Bertrand sat down on the trunk with his drawn sword across his knees. He was humbled, but the struggle was not over with him yet. His heart was still full of the bitterness of the man who covets what he imagines another man to possess.
Bertrand sat on his tree-trunk with the sword across his knees and stared at his horse, that was trying to crop the grass, though the bridle was hitched over the bough of a tree. The oak bough would not bend, nor would the grass spring up to the hungry beast’s muzzle. Bertrand, with a wry twist of the mouth, saw that he and his horse were the victims of a somewhat similar dilemma.
Jealousy is the great distorter of justice, and Bertrand had the devil at his elbow for fully ten minutes on the trunk of the dead tree. The imp shouted every imaginable grievance in his ear, exaggerating possibilities into facts and creating reality from conjecture. Had not he, Bertrand du Guesclin, sacrificed himself for Robin Raguenel’s sake, and accepted shame to save a coward? If Tiphaïne was so tender for Tinteniac’s sake, then, by God, let Tinteniac look to the guarding of his own petticoats!
But that great advocate whose irony slashes to shreds the special pleading of the meaner spirit, the sense of chivalry, that great chastener of manhood, took up the argument in Bertrand’s cause. All ethical struggles are fierce in powerful natures, fierce in their climax, but sure in their decision. Bertrand’s honesty was not to be cajoled. He sat in judgment on himself, the self-asking of a few pitiless questions baring that sincerity that makes true strength.
When he carried Robin’s arms at Mivoie, had he not hoped that some day Tiphaïne might know what he had done?
Had Tiphaïne ever given him the promise of any deeper thing than friendship?
Whose past was the cleaner, the Sieur de Tinteniac’s or his own?
Bertrand knotted his brows over these accusations, and confessed that the spirit of justice had him at its mercy.