The thrushes were singing on the glimmering spires of the oaks as the crimson banner of the sunset waved to pale gold. In the deepening azure of the east the moon had lost the filmy thinness of a cloud and stood out in splendor over the black hills and the valleys faint with mist. Night came, and with it the bent figures of Croquart’s men, gathering sticks and kicking leaves together to make a fire.

The very brilliance of the night made the woods cold, and Tinteniac, stiff with his wounds, sat propped against a tree, trying to pretend that he was neither in pain nor cold. TiphaÏne stood near him, her eyes seeming to catch the melancholy of the dying afterglow.

Croquart turned his hands everywhere to help his men. Whistling, as he might have whistled as a boy when splitting carcasses in Flanders, he looked to the horses, cut down underwood, the fresh, green foam of the woods in spring, and built a screen between the trunks of two great oaks. A horse-cloth stretched across two poles gave some sort of shelter. Business was brisk and money forthcoming, despite the rout at Josselin and the loss of all his baggage. A ransom of twenty thousand crowns was not to be counted on every day of the week, and with the Sieur de Tinteniac as a hostage he could bargain with Beaumanoir should the marshal be discourteous enough to continue offering bribes for his head.

Croquart plunged down the slope of the hill where he had chosen ground for the night, to reappear with a bundle of freshly cut broom, which he tossed down under cover of the screen of boughs. His men’s cloaks were purloined to cover the litter; the fellows could go damp when a Tinteniac was to be kept dry. TÊte Bois had already persuaded the fire to blaze, and Croquart turned to his prisoners with a smile that suggested supper.

“A bed, sire, for you and for madame.”

They saw, and avoided each other’s eyes. Croquart, officious in his courtesies, picked up Tinteniac and laid him on the pile of broom, with a saddle on which he might rest his shoulders.

“Room for two, sire,” and he looked at TiphaÏne as though it would have pleased him to lift her as he had lifted Tinteniac. Her immobility discouraged him, and the dusk covered the color on her face. She was watching the flames leap up through the crackling wood, and thinking of poor Gilbert and poor Gilles, left to be spoiled of their rings in the lonely Loudeac woods. Only that morning she had seen their two heads, tawny and black, bowed over the chess-board as they made, little knowing it, the last moves in the game of life. Croquart had killed them, yet stood there offering her the impertinences of his butcher’s tongue. The two lads might have been two sparrows caught in a trap and left with their necks wrung, for all the reflection the deed caused the Fleming.

She went and sat with Tinteniac on the bed Croquart had made for them. Her mock husband felt the unwillingness of her nearness to him, an antagonism, that he would have found in few ladies of the court.

“I remember we have a part to play,” she said, when the Fleming had moved away some paces.

“You trust me, child?”

“Yes, at all times. Yet to lie to this fellow makes me despise myself. I cannot forget the Breton blood he has upon his hands.”

“We shall remember it,” and his eyes grew alive with the firelight. “Mother of God, does a Tinteniac forget such things!”

Supper came, with Croquart ready to serve as their esquire. The man TÊte Bois had been sent into a hamlet to the north of Loudeac, with orders to get food, wine, a horse-cloth, flint, steel and tinder, and an iron pot. A boiled chicken, eggs, brown bread, and a flask of cider had resulted from TÊte Bois’s marketing. Hunger is a great leveller of prides and prejudices, yet Croquart, ravenous as he was, set his reputation for gallantry before the cravings of his stomach, and carved the chicken and broke the bread.

On a square manchet the white slices of the bird’s breast were proffered to the lady. TiphaÏne saw the two great hands loaded with rings. She thought of the dead esquires, and the food disgusted her, given by those butcher’s hands.

“Madame will eat?”

She took the bread and meat as though they smelled of blood. Tinteniac, less sensitive, and a veteran in the art of concealing his feelings, drew his knife and betrayed no disgust.

“Keep the fool in a good temper,” ran his counsel to TiphaÏne in a whisper.

“Must I eat this food?”

“Yes, though it choke you.”

Croquart watched her, as though his cunning had uncovered her pride. He came to her with the wine-flask, saw her touch it with her lips and hardly taste the wine. Tinteniac was less scrupulous. Croquart’s turn came next. He took a long pull, wiped the mouth on a corner of his surcoat, and smiled a smile that made his small eyes glitter.

“Madame, more wine?”

“Thanks to you, sir, no.”

He saw the repugnance on her face, as though the slime of some unclean reptile could not have made the flask more nauseous to her lips.

“Madame will not drink after me?”

“I am not thirsty.”

“And you do not eat? Well, as you will,” and he treated her as though she were a sulky child. “Sire, I drink to you, the champion of Mivoie.”

Tinteniac laughed.

“Women never know what is pleasant,” he said.

Croquart sprawled beside the fire.

“The battle makes men friends,” and he sucked at the flask till the wine dribbled down his chin.

“I remember, sire, when the Countess de Montfort gave me her own cup after the first taking of Roche d’Errien.”

“Ah, yes.”

“A great lady, sire, who can set courage before birth. I had this ring from her,” and he held a hand up in the light of the fire.

Tinteniac humored him.

“Rubies! I have no such stones in my strong-box.”

“Ah, sire, Jeanne de Montfort knows the value of a brave man when she is served by him. What say you, madame?”

TiphaÏne swept the crumbs from her lap with a quick gesture of the hand.

“No doubt the Countess had need of you,” she said.

Croquart’s watch-fire was the red eye of the night to Bertrand, the black shadow on the black horse stealing through the greenwood on the Fleming’s heels. Bertrand saw the flames waving through the trees as he sat amid the crooked roots of a great oak, cutting slices from a loaf of bread he had bought on the road, his bassinet full of brackish water that he had drawn from a woodland pool. Bertrand was not a sentimentalist, and he broke his dry bread in the dusk as though hungry from a sense of duty, knowing that Croquart was not the man to starve on the march, and that a full stomach makes a better soldier than a head stuffed full of Southern songs. Bertrand carried an amusing matter-of-factness into the current of his adventures. It was not that he did not feel or suffer, but rather the obstinacy of his strength that insisted on coolness and lack of flurry. Thoroughness was a passion with him, even to the masticating of a loaf of bread.

When the dusk had deepened into the white mystery of a moonlit night, Bertrand braced on his bassinet, saw that his horse was securely tethered, and began his advance on Croquart’s fire. Slipping from trunk to trunk and bush to bush, he made a mere moving shadow amid the trees. Croquart had chosen his ground on the slope of a low hill, a ridge of forest hiding the fire from the main track running to Loudeac town. Bertrand, by crawling along the farther slope of the knoll, got within twenty yards of the fire, and lay where a tree threw a black patch on the grass like a piece of ebony set in silver.

The figures were easily distinguishable to Bertrand. TiphaÏne, head held high, lids drooping, the whiteness of her throat rising out of the crimson stuffs beneath. Tinteniac, propped against a saddle, his handsome face looking thin and tired, his eyes restless like the eyes of a man in pain. Croquart, a burly patch of angry red, bassinet off, tanned throat showing, a wine-flask in one hand, a charred stake in the other for stirring the fire. The two men-at-arms stretched half asleep on the far side of the flames.

The setting of the picture gave Bertrand the chance of testing the sincerity of his renunciation. He saw the rough bed, the canopy, the screen of boughs; TiphaÏne close to Tinteniac, a space between them and the Fleming, as though the two were one by courtesy and by desire. Bertrand gnawed at his lips, despite the sternness of his self-repression. The group seemed typical of his own luck in life. TiphaÏne and the Sieur de Tinteniac shared the fire, while he, as ever, lurked in the dark, alone.

“I would say, sire, without making a boast of it, that I have found none of your Breton men a match for me in arms.”

Bertrand heard the words as a man who is half asleep hears a voice that wakes him in the morning. Croquart had been telling a few of his adventures, poking the fire with his stick and brandishing it like the baton of a master musician marshalling the lutanists and flute-players at a feast. The vanity of the Fleming was so inevitable a characteristic that one was no more surprised by it than by seeing a toad spit. Innocent egoism may be a delicate perfume, an essence that adds to the charm of the individual, admirably so in women when they are deserving of desire. But with Croquart his intemperate arrogance was a veritable stench, an effluvium of the flesh, a carrion conceit that nauseated and repelled.

To Bertrand, TiphaÏne’s face seemed tilted antagonistically towards the moon. Her throat lengthened, her lids drooped more over her eyes. She looked impatient over the bellowings of this bull. Tinteniac leaned on his elbow and watched the fire. His contempt, deep as it was, found no expression on his face.

“You cut a notch on your spear,” he said, “for every gentleman you have beaten in arms.”

Croquart prodded the embers with his stick.

“I have cut twenty notches, sire, already.”

“You will have no wood left to your spear soon, eh?”

“Room for more yet,” and he laughed. “I will tell you the names: Sir John de Montigny, Sir Aymery de la Barre, Geoffroi Dubois, Sir Gringoir of Angers, Lord Thomas Allison, whom I challenged at Brest—” And he ran on, mouthing the syllables with the air of a gourmet recalling the dishes at some great feast.

TiphaÏne drew her cloak about her as though she felt the cold.

“And to-day, sir, you have cut another notch,” she said.

“Ah, madame, it shall be one of the deepest, I assure you.”

Tinteniac was able to laugh.

“You flatter me, Fleming. We shared the fame at Mivoie.”

“Sire, madame your wife would break my spear at this last notch if she could.”

His eyes challenged TiphaÏne, and she did not deny him.

To the man lying in the shadow of the tree these words came like the blows of a passing bell. It seemed to him that he had heard all now that he could ever know, and that the silver swan of Rennes would be but a memory and a lost desire. He lay very still in the wet grass, looking at TiphaÏne with a dull aching of the heart, as a man might look at a lost love who has risen to trouble him beyond the waters of the river of death.