“My brother must know his own needs,” she said. “It is better to work than to sulk like a sick hawk upon a perch.”
“Child, that is the right spirit.”
And he stood to bless her, with no complacent unction, but with heart of grace.
For a while she looked at Robin kneeling on the naked earth, her silence seeming to confess that she was more content to leave him in the Church’s keeping.
“I go now to La Bellière,” she said, quietly.
“You have a double share, my child, to give and to receive.”
“God grant that I may remember it,” and she turned to Bertrand with a stately lifting of the head.
At La Bellière the sky was an open wealth of blue, the aspens all a-whisper. And yet, with summer reddening the lips of June, the sorrow of the place was still like the sighing of a wind through winter trees on a winter evening. Logs burned in the great fireplace of the solar. Stephen Raguenel, looking like some December saint, craved from the flames that warmth that life and the noon sun could not give.
The turrets were casting long shadows towards the east when dust rose on the road from Dinan. A few peasants were running in advance of a knight and a lady who wound between the aspen-trees towards the towers and chimneys of La Bellière. Soon there came the sound of men shouting, the clatter of hoofs on the bridge before the gate. The starlings and jackdaws wheeled and chattered about the chimneys. It was as though the château had slept under some wizard’s spell, to awake suddenly at the sounding of a hero’s horn.
Girard, discretion among the discreet, was craning out of a turret window, his face like a vociferous gargoyle spouting from a wall. He saw madame’s palfrey, the cloak with its crimson lining, and understood that Croquart had been cheated of a ransom.