Away they went across the bridge with the breath of the May morning sweeping over the meadows. Bertrand had lifted Tiphaïne into the saddle, and shouted to Dame Jake, who lay asleep in the court-yard with her nose on her paws. Bertrand ran with his hand on the bridle, looking up into the child’s face, laughing when she laughed, delighted with her delight. Youth was in the air, youth and the joy thereof. Bertrand forgot his ugliness and his shabby clothes as the palfrey cantered along the road with Dame Jake barking and bounding under her nose.
Away over the meadows with their dew-drenched green and gold stood a clump of old thorn-trees white as driven snow. Tiphaïne pointed to them with a thrill of innocent wonder.
“See, Bertrand, the great thorns! I should like a white bough to carry into Rennes.”
Bertrand turned the palfrey into the meadows, and they were soon racing over the wet grass for the thorns. The trees grew in a circle about a great stone cromlech that rose gray as death amid the revelry of spring. There were other stones lying half hidden in the grass, the fallen pillars that the black Iberians had heaved up of old. The gray cromlech seemed to cast a shadow across the face of the morning, as though grim Ankrou still lurked in the woods and wastes.
Tiphaïne’s face fell a little as the granite rose amid the green.
“Bertrand, there is a wizard’s table. I hate these old stones; they make me think of ghosts.”
Bertrand was not an imaginative lad, and somewhat of a sturdy sceptic with regard to many of the Breton superstitions.
“Our folk call it the Maid’s Gate,” he said, with a twinkle. “On midsummer night the wenches who want husbands run through it at midnight in their shifts. I was here last midsummer.”
“Oh, Bertrand!”
“I hid in one of the thorn-trees, and when the silly hussies came sneaking up I set up such a croaking and a growling that they took to their heels and ran like rabbits. Tiphaïne, how I laughed, till I nearly fell right out of the tree! Dom Isidore came up next day with his Mass Book—and a cup of holy-water—and drove the devil out of the stones.”