“What good, messire! Have you, then, fallen so much from your own heart?”
He flung back his head suddenly and looked her in the face.
“Why should I shirk it?” he said. “I am what I am—a captain of free companions, a beast, a ruffian—God knows what! Where is my honor? Ask those great lords who made me what I am.”
He seemed to recover his dignity of a sudden, a dignity that, though bitter and rebellious, boasted sincerity and truth. He rested his sword-point on the floor, crossed his two hands on the pommel, and waited like a man who has thrown down the gage.
Tiphaïne stood above him on the altar steps.
“Then you have forgotten Rennes?” she said.
“I—madame?”
“How, then, should Bertrand du Guesclin have fallen to leading these poor fools to the plunder of Breton homes? I should not have dreamed it when—I was a child—at Rennes.”
Her words moved him, and he bent his head.
“Men fail—sometimes,” he said, sullenly.