“No, I shall not forget.”
“You have given us great honor.”
“Madame, remember, I am still Bertrand, your son.”
XLV
Bertrand was astir next morning, with the reconciliation of yesterday still vividly before his mind. He began to dress and to arm himself, sitting on the edge of the bed in his room in one of the turrets, his hands dawdling at their work as though their master were too much enthralled by the importunity of his own thoughts. He had been moved by the sudden surrender of his mother’s pride, and the element of shame in her recantation had roused in him a new instinct of tenderness, a tenderness that overflowed perhaps from a subtle and more human source. The indifference of years had been broken by a few halting, yet inevitable, words. Bertrand had given Jeanne du Guesclin no idle promise. He would turn his horse’s head towards Cancale that very day.
Bertrand could hear Hopart and Guicheaux talking together in the little anteroom that opened from the turret stair. The fellows had lain like a couple of dogs outside his door, happy in the promise that he had given them that they should be his men from that day forth. The murmur of their voices came up to Bertrand as he armed, bringing back many a wild memory of wild nights spent on the moors and in the woods.
He buckled on his arm-pieces, using teeth and hands to clinch the straps, and, picking up his sword, went to the turret window and looked out. A thin mist hung over the meadows and the woods, a mist shot through like some silvery cloth with the gold threads of the morning sun. Above the haze the tops of the aspen-trees glimmered towards the deepening blue, and the jackdaws, whose nests were in the tall chimneys, were croaking and wheeling about the castle.
From the turret window Bertrand could see into the garden, where the mist clung about the orchard trees and dimmed the pool where the water-lilies spread their cups of ivory and of gold. Early though it was, Tiphaïne walked in the garden, with the Vicomte’s dog following at her heels. Bertrand had hoped for some such chance of speaking to her alone before he sallied to Cancale.
“Saddle the horses in an hour,” he said, as he passed Hopart and Guicheaux on the stairs and went clashing down in his well-worn harness. The men watched him down the first gray curve of the winding stair, silent, whimsical, mysteriously wise. Hopart nodded; Guicheaux bobbed his hatchet face in turn. A long, red tongue darted out momentarily between a thin and humorous pair of lips.
“The captain has it, God bless him.”