THE STAY-AT-HOMES
WINTER is not always rough on the high moors of Lancashire. There are
days when the wind creeps into hiding, and the sun comes up into a sky
of blue and saffron, and the thrush begins to find his mating-note
before its time. The gnats steal out from crannies in the walls,
making pretence of a morris-dance along the slant rays of the sun; and
everywhere there is a pleasant warmth and bustle, as if faith in this
far-off summer, after all, had easily survived the east wind’s spite.
It was on such a day--the breeze soft from the west, and Pendle Hill
all crimson in the sunset--that Rupert limped out from Windyhough on
the crutch that Simon Foster had made for him. He had gone his round
of the house--that empty round performed for duty’s sake twice every
day--and he was hungry for the smell of the open country. He hobbled up
the pastures, as far as the rough lands where the moor and the intaken
fields were fighting their old, unyielding battle--a feud as old as the
day when the first heath-man drove his spade into the heather and began
to win a scanty living from the wilderness for wife and bairns.
Rupert, the dreamer, who had stood apart from life, had always found
his sanctuary here, where the broken lands lay troubled, like himself,
between the desert and the harvest. Instinct had led him here to-night,
though weakness of body, never far from him, was trying once again to
sap his courage.
He looked across the moor, strong and comely in its winter nakedness.
He watched a cock-grouse whirr across the crimson sun-rays. And then,
with a sense of thanksgiving and security, he saw the round, stalwart
bulk of Pendle Hill. There is something about Pendle--a legacy from
the far-off fathers, may be--that goes deep to the heart of Lancashire
men. Its shape is not to be mistaken. It stands like a rounded
watch-tower, guarding the moors where freedom and rough weather go
hand in hand. It has seen many fights of men--feuds, and single-handed
combats, and stealthy ambushes--and has come, stalwart and upstanding,
through weather that would have daunted meaner souls. It has the strong
man’s gift of helping weaker men along the gallant, uphill climb that
stretches from the cradle to the stars.
Pendle Hill, big above the wilderness of bog and heath, never chatters
of destiny, never tells a man that life is hard, that he had best be
done with it, that all his striving has been so much useless labour.
Pendle, the fairest citadel of Lancashire, has won through too many
generations of cold and hardship to be daunted by the troubles of one
man’s lifetime. Rugged, round to the wide, wind-swept skies, old Pendle
keeps the faith, and will not yield.
Rupert had yet to win his spurs, he thought. And yet, as Pendle Hill
viewed the matter, he had won them long ago. Day by day, year by year,
through his unhappy and disastrous boyhood, the lad had come to the
windy lands, for strength and solace. He had been loyal to the hills,
steadfast when stronger men had taken their ease. And to-night, because
it saw a soldier in the making, gruff Pendle sent out a welcome to Sir
Jasper’s heir.
“God knows me for a fool,” said Rupert, afraid of the new message that
had reached him.
And there was stillness, while the sun’s red died behind the moor.
No voice answered Rupert’s challenge to the over-world; but, for all
that, he limped down to Windyhough with a sense that all the birds were
singing. Through the misery and darkness of these days he was reaching
out, with stubborn gallantry, to grasp the forward hope. The forward
hope! He had lived on little else since he was breeked.
As he came down to Windyhough, he met Nance and old Simon Foster at the
courtyard gate; Simon was carrying a musket, and polishing the barrel
with his sleeve as he hobbled at the girl’s side.
“I’ve news for you, Rupert!” she said gaily.
“Of the Rising?” He was eager, possessed of the one thought only. “Is
trouble nearing Windyhough? Nance, is there real work to be done at
last?”
“Oh, my dear, you ask too much. Nothing ever happens at Windyhough;
nothing will ever happen again, I think. We’re derelict, Rupert; the
Highlandmen are playing their Prince into his kingdom by this time,
and we”--she grew bitter, petulant, for the silence and the waiting
were sapping her buoyant health, her courage, her trust in high
endeavour--“and we in Lancashire are churning our butter every week,
Rupert, and selling cows on market days, and dozing by the hearth. _I
am ashamed._”
Simon Foster glanced sharply at Rupert. He knew the lad through and
through, was prepared for the whiteness of his face, the withdrawal as
if a friend had struck him wantonly. “Miss Nance,” he said bluntly,
“shame is for folk that’s earned it. There’s three of us here, and we’d
all be marching into London, if only it could have happened that way,
like.”
Nance would not look at Rupert, though she guessed how she had wounded
him. She did not know this mood that had settled on her since coming to
the draughty, loyal house of Windyhough. The long inaction, the waiting
for news gathered from gruff, hard-ridden messengers, the day-long wish
to be out in the thick of battle, had troubled her; but there was a
deeper trouble--a trouble that was half delight, a turmoil and unrest
to which she could not give a name. And the trouble centred round
Rupert. She liked him so well, had grown up with his queer, dreamy
ways, his uncomplaining courage.
She had laughed at him, had pitied him; but now she was pitying
herself. If only he would remember that he was a man, the heir to a
fine, loyal record--if only he would clear the cobwebs from his eyes,
and sit a horse as other men did, would show the stuff his soul was
made of, the world would understand him at long last.
Nance was tired, her temper out of hand. “Simon, you can go indoors,”
she said dryly. “Since you did not join the Rising--why, Lady Royd has
work for you.”
She did not know what she needed, or what ailed her. And she and Rupert
stood in the courtyard after old Simon had gone in, fronting each other
like wary duellists.
“What was your news?” asked Rupert, his temper brittle like her own.
“Oh, we set up a target, Simon and I; and I practised with one of your
clumsy muskets, Rupert, and wished that I had a bow-and-arrow in my
hands instead. I have some skill in archery, have I not?”
“Yes. You’ve skill in all things, Nance. There’s no news in that.”
“And I aimed very wide at first, till I turned and found Simon smiling
as if he were watching a baby at its play. So then I kept him hard at
work--loading, and priming, and the rest, and wasted a good deal of
your ammunition, Rupert--but I learned to hit the target.”
She spoke lightly, hurriedly, as if fearing to sound the depths of this
trouble that had come between Rupert and herself.
“Was it just to pass the time?” he asked by and by. “You’re shut in
here and restless, I know----”
“It was more, perhaps. We are so few, and I said just now that nothing
would ever happen again at Windyhough--but the attack may come.”
Rupert glanced at his crutch. He was sensitive, from long suffering, to
the least hint that touched his personal infirmities. “And you could
not trust your men to guard you?” he said sharply. “That was your
thought?”
“Oh, Rupert, no! I’m out of heart--I did not mean to hurt you.”
“You’ve not hurt me, Nance. I--I must find Simon and go the round of
the house with him. We call it our drill.” He turned at the door,
glanced at her with the smile of self-derision that she knew. “Simon is
right. He says that, if a man can’t go soldiering, the next best thing
is to play at it, like a bairn with a wooden sword. Good-night, Nance.
I’m tired, and shall get to bed after seeing to the defences.”
Nance heard the delicate irony as he spoke of the defences, saw him
limp into the house. And some new feeling came to her. It was not
pity; it was a strange, fugitive pride in the courage that could keep
so harassed a spirit under control. She had been harsh and bitter,
had wounded him because she needed any outlet from these pent-up days
at Windyhough; and he had gathered his little strength together, had
laughed at himself, had gone to the routine of guarding a house that
did not need defence.
Nance was ashamed to-night. Her reliance and high spirits had deserted
her; and for that reason she saw nearer to the heart of life. She
felt that a great gentleman, marred in the making, had gone into this
house of fine traditions. She asked, with an entreaty passionate and
wilful as herself, why Rupert had been condemned to sit at home among
the women, when so little more was needed to shape him to the comely
likeness of a man.
And then she thought of Will Underwood, who had strength and grace of
body, remembered with obstinate zeal her faith that he had ridden on
some desperate business of the Rising, though men doubted him. And she
was in the turmoil of first love again.
The next day, and the next, she missed Rupert from the house. He would
go his rounds punctiliously after breakfast, and then would take a
crust and a piece of cheese in his pocket and limp up into the hills.
She thought that he was feeding his dreams, as of old, on the high
winds and the high legends of the heath; and she missed him, with a
sense of loneliness that would not let her rest.
Simon Foster, too, was absent these days, and Lady Royd grew petulant.
Though her husband was like to lose his head, and England was stirred
by that throb of coming battle which is like thunder-heat before the
rain and lightning come, she was troubled because Simon did not perform
his indoor duties. For she, who had little guidance of herself, and
therefore less control of serving-folk, was exact in her demand that
all the details of the house should be well-ordered.
“I thought Simon at least tied by rheumatism to the house,” she wailed
to Nance, on the second day of absence; “but he’s like all our men--off
to the Rising, or off to the fields; any excuse will serve, it seems,
when women feel their indoor loneliness.”
And Nance, though her impulse was to laugh, was subdued by those
blundering, poignant words, “their indoor loneliness.” Nance was
a child of the open fields, meeting all chances of life better in
the free wind than in the stifled houses. Not until her coming to
Windyhough had she understood the heartache, the repression, summed up
by “their indoor loneliness.” A fierce resentment took hold of her.
“Men have all the pleasure,” she said, in a low, hard voice. “It was so
always.”
She would have been the better for a glimpse of the Prince’s tattered
army, fighting through sleet and mud and jealousy for the privilege of
setting a Stuart on the throne. But Nance was young and untried yet,
and thought herself ill-used because she had a roof above her.
And then Rupert came in, with Simon Foster close behind him.
“You’ve been at the ale-house, Simon,” said Lady Royd shrewishly.
“No, by your leave. I’ve been on the King’s business, and other needs
must wait, my lady. So I was taught, leastways, when I was a bairn at
my father’s knee.”
“What is the mystery, Rupert?” asked Nance, after Simon had grumbled
his way toward the servants’ quarters.
“Mystery? None, my dear, except that I’m tired to death, and have the
round of the house to go before I get to bed.”
He spoke the truth. Mystery there was none, except that out of his
great love for her he was learning many lessons. And she tempted him,
meanwhile, to tell her what this business was that had taken Simon and
himself to the open fields; but he gave no answer.
And that evening passed, as many another had done, with a monotony that
seemed to tick the seconds out, deliberate as the eight-day clock in
the hall--a passionless, grave clock that had seen many generations of
the Royds go through their hot youth, their fiery middle-age, their
last surrender--surrender honourable, upright, staunch in the last
hour, to that great general, Death, who has taken more citadels than
any human hero of renown.
The eight-day clock knew that life was not meant to be taken at the
gallop, each moment packed with ambush, high romance, fine-spoken
wooing that could not outlast the honeymoon. It knew that fine
deeds--big moments when the heart finds room to know itself--are earned
by steady preparation, ticked out by the slow-moving seconds. But Nance
had all this to learn as yet, and this evening, of all evenings she
had spent at Windyhough, seemed the longest and the dreariest. And my
lady’s little spaniel--a nervous, unlicked lap-dog--annoyed her beyond
reason.
Lady Royd was full of dread and surmise. First, she heard a mouse
gnawing at the wainscoting, and fell into a panic obviously real. Then
a farm-dog began to yelp and whimper from the stables, and she was sure
it foretold disaster to her husband.
“It was so foolish of him,” she said, “to go on this wild Rising. He
had all to keep him here--his wife and his two sons and the house he
loved, and the hunting in the winter. Why did he leave it all? He had
_all_ to keep him, Nance.”
Because she was tired and heart-sick, perhaps, Nance spoke with a
wisdom not her own; for at these times we do not lash instinct to the
gallop, but let it carry us like a sure-footed horse. “Except his
heart. It was his heart that took him south.”
“But his heart was here, my girl,” put in the other, with sudden
spirit. She had been moved to terror by the sound of a mouse in the
wainscoting; but she was fierce in her defence of the love her goodman
bore her.
“No,” said Nance gently, as if she persuaded a child to learn some
obvious and simple lesson, “his heart could not be here until he had
answered the call of honour.”
“Oh, spare me!” sighed the other languidly. “Honour is so pretty a
thing--like a rapier, or a Frenchman’s wit--when they sing of it in
ballads. But in practice it is like getting up at sunrise to see the
poet’s dawn--so chilly and uncomfortable, Nance.”
“What else?” said Nance, her head thrown up with a sudden, eager
gesture that was vastly like her father’s. “Honour rusts, my lady,
if it stays always in the scabbard. Discomfort? I think honour--Sir
Jasper’s and my father’s--feeds on discomfort, thrives on it----”
“But Sir Jasper, what more did he need? He can find no more if he
returns--no more than he left behind when he went on this wild-goose
chase. I shall be waiting for him--the wife who loves him, no more, no
less----”
“Is there a boundary-wall round love, then?” asked Nance, with eyes
wide open and astonished. “I’m young and fanciful, perhaps. I thought
love was a thing that found wider fields to travel every hour; that,
each day one’s man came home with honour, one cared for him ever a
little the more, and knighted him afresh. For it is knighthood, surely,
a true man asks always from the woman of his choice.”
Lady Royd fingered her scent-bottle, and laughed vaguely, enjoying the
girl’s transparent honesty. “It all has a romantic sound, Nance. Did
you learn it from books, as poor Rupert learned his soldiery?”
The taunt stung Nance, because she had hoped, with odd persistency,
that Rupert would come in, after going his round of the house, to ask
her to sing to him. And he had not come; and she had tender songs
enough in readiness, for she remembered how wantonly she had hurt him
not long ago.
“Where did you learn it, girl?” insisted Lady Royd, with tired irony.
“I’m past the age of glamour--and half regret it--and you may recapture
for me all the fragment silliness. Nance, believe me, I cannot make a
satisfying meal of dew-drops. I must be getting old, for I grow fonder
and fonder of my cook, who sends substantial rations from the kitchen.”
So then Nance, hot-headed, resentful, not guessing that she was being
gently baited to while away an hour’s boredom from her companion--Nance
stood to her little, queenly height. And her eyes were beautiful,
because her eagerness shone through them. And she tapped her buckled
slipper on the beeswaxed floor, as if she were impatient to be dancing
with true men, or dying with them along the road that Sir Jasper and
his friends had sought.
“I learned it--as Rupert learned his soldiery, I think--not from books
at all, my lady. It was my heart taught me, or my soul, or what you
choose to name that something which is--is bigger, somehow, than one’s
self. Honour--I cannot tell you the keen, sharp strength, the sweetness
and the pity the word spells for me. It is like the swords my father
is so fond of--bright and slim, like toys to look at; but you can bend
them till point touches hilt and yet not break them. And you can ride
out and cleave a way with these same words.”
Lady Royd was no cynic now. The peril and discomfort of the times had
been opening closed windows for her, as for others who lived near this
wind-swept heath. By stealth, and fearing much, she had peered out
through these unshuttered casements; and Nance was speaking outright of
the fugitive, dim thoughts that she herself had harboured.
“Go, my dear,” she said gently. “You’ve the voice you sing with--the
voice that Rupert praises. Go, sing to me again of--of love and honour,
child.”
Nance flushed. She scarcely knew what she had said. “I do not need,”
she said, with instinctive grace and dignity. “You know so much of
them, and I so little; and I am sorry if--if I spoke in haste. I am so
tired, and I forget the--the deference owing to your years.”
So then, because they stood very near each other for this moment, and
because she feared intimacy just yet with the simple, happy glimpse of
life that Nance had shown her, Sir Jasper’s wife drew her skirts about
her and picked up the yapping, pampered thing she called a dog and
kissed its nose. It was her signal for good-night.
“A woman likes deference, my dear,” she said sharply, “deference of all
kinds, except that owing to--to advancing years. You sang out of tune
there, Nance. Never to be made love to again; never again, so long as
one’s little world lasts, to catch the glance, the little broken word
of tribute--things that do not wrong one’s husband, Nance, but add a
spice to the workaday, quiet road of love for him; they’re hard to give
up, my dear.”
Nance looked at her with frank surprise. She was strong and untried
yet; and Lady Royd was frail, but experienced so far as indolence
allowed. And there was a deep gulf between them.
“I will take my candle up,” said Nance lamely.
“Yes, and sleep well, child. Dream of--oh, of love and honour and the
foolish rosemary of life. And come sing to me to-morrow--of the things
you’ve dreamed. Perhaps I spoke at random, Nance. I’m widowed of my
husband; and this Rising never wore a lucky face to me--and--my temper
is not gentle, Nance, I know.”
That night there were few who slept at Windyhough. Sir Jasper’s wife,
alone with the wind that rattled at her window, made no disguise of the
love that beat, strong and trusty, underneath her follies. Despite
herself, she had come out at last into the road of life--the road of
mire and jealousies and tragedy, lit far ahead by the single lamp of
honour, for those whose eyes were trained to see it.
“I’m not worthy of him,” she moaned, drawing the sleepy spaniel toward
her. “My husband climbs the bigger hills, while I--am weak, as Rupert
is.”
Nance, too, lay awake. She was busy with what Lady Royd had named
the rosemary of life. All her instincts rose in warm defence of that
view of honour which Sir Jasper’s wife had slighted. And there were
men, men in their own midst, who could love in the old knightly way.
There was Will Underwood--and so she lost herself, half between waking
and dreaming, in a maze of high perfection that she reared about his
person. Of a truth Wild Will was in danger, had he known it. He had
pressed his suit on Nance, had urged it, in and out of season, during
the months that preceded this upset of the Rising. He had captured
her fancy already, and her heart might follow any day; but he did not
guess what simplicity and breadth of tenderness she would bring him,
what answering devotion she would ask. Nance had the double gift--she
had the woman’s instincts, the woman’s suppleness of fancy, but she
had been reared in a house where a big, downright father and big,
uncompromising brothers had trained her to the man’s code of life. She
would never come to the wooing as to a one-sided bargain, giving all
meekly and asking nothing in return. She would ask, with tenderest
persistence, that her man, as she had said to Lady Royd, should claim
knighthood at her hands once every while. Marriage, to her unproved
heart, was a thing magical, renewing its romance each day--but
renewing, too, that every-day and hard endeavour on which the true
romance is founded.
And so she got to sleep at last, and woke in terror. She had dreamed
that Will Underwood, engaged in a single-handed fight against a company
of the Prince’s enemies, lay wounded sorely; and she had reached out
hands, impotent with nightmare, to succour him, and she had seen him
fall.
At the end of the long, draughty corridor, not many yards away from
her, Rupert was fighting his new trouble. He and Simon had been engaged
on the King’s business--or the pretence of it--during these excursions
that had taken them afield for two days past. But he could only
remember now what had driven him into endeavour--how he had come home
to find Nance flushed and eager, Simon carrying a couple of muskets;
and how she had told him, in plain words, that women must needs take up
soldiery, because the men about the house were so infirm.
Since his soul was launched into the open sea of life, Rupert had known
many a Gethsemane, but the pain had never been so keen as now. His love
for Nance was of the kind she claimed, but his power to do high deeds
lagged far behind the will to be a conqueror. And Nance, who had always
brought a sense of well-being and of inspiration to him, had wounded
him--mortally, he thought. Sir Jasper had bidden him guard the house,
and he had overheard his father say that the defence was a toy he left
his heir to play with; and the bitterness of that was past, not without
hardship and a struggle that, fought out in loneliness, was fine as a
battle against heavy odds. That was past, but Nance’s taunt was with
him still, a sting that banished sleep and poisoned all his outlook on
the hills where Faith, crowned and a strong monarch, looks down to see
into the hearts of men and choose her soldiers.
Old Simon Foster, for his part, had not slept well to-night. As he
put it to himself, he “was never one to miss sleep or victuals, come
peace or earthquakes”; but to-night he could not rest. He was with the
master, fighting somewhere near to that London which was a far-off
land to him, unknown and perilous, as if wide seas divided it from
Lancashire. And he was itching to be out of a house where the mistress
could still be anxious lest her spaniel missed his proper meals, where,
to his fancy, women crowded all the passages and hindered him at every
turn. Simon was twisted out of shape by exposure and harsh, rheumatic
pains, but he was sick to be out again with the wind and the weather
that had crippled him.
Simon Foster, too infirm to go with his master to the wars, was
ill-tempered these days, as a grey old hound is when he sees the whelps
of his own fathering go out to hunting while he is left at home. He
was in and out of the house, till the women-servants grew tired of
his grim, weather-beaten face. Only Martha put in a good word for
him--Martha who, at five-and-thirty, had not found a mate, though she
would have made a good wife to any man. Simon was barely turned fifty,
she said, and was hale enough “if rheumatiz would only let him bide in
peace.” And when a prim maid-of-all-work had suggested that bent legs
tempted no maid’s fancy, Martha had answered hotly that the shape of a
man’s heart mattered more than any casual infirmity attaching to his
legs.
He got up this morning, two hours before the wintry dawn came red and
buoyant over Pendle Hill, for he could not rest indoors. He went to the
stables, his lantern swinging crazily in his gnarled hands, and roused
the horses from the slumber that is never sleep, because men ask so
much of them at all hours of the day and night, and patted them, as a
father touches his bairns--gently, with a sort of benediction. For the
smell of a horse to Simon was vastly comforting.
He came to an old, fiddle-headed nag that had been a pensioner at
Windyhough these many years, and stayed and chatted with him with the
ease that comes of long comradeship.
“We’re in the same plight, lad,” he growled--“old, and left at home,
the two of us. Ay, we’re thrown on the lumber-heap, I reckon.”
He went out by and by; and his face cleared suddenly like wintry
sunlight creeping over a grey stubble-field, as he saw Martha cross
from the mistals with a milking-pail over each well-rounded arm. And,
because there seemed little else to to, he stopped to praise the trim
shape of her.
“And your cheeks, Martha,” he added, after a pause--“there’s some warm
wind been at ’em, or they’d never look so bonnie.”
“Winds blow cold up hereabout,” said Martha demurely, setting down her
pails. “And my cheeks are my own, Simon Foster, by your leave.”
Simon had known this game of give-and-take with a lass in the days
before he grew harder and more keen on battle. He returned now with
ease to habits forsworn until the Rising left him derelict among the
women.
“Nay, but they’re not, as the bee said to the clover.”
“For shame, Simon--and at your age, too!”
“At my age! I’d teach ye I’m young if rheumatiz was not like a hive o’
bees about me.”
She twisted a corner of her apron, half hid her face with it; and Simon
admitted to himself that the brown eyes looking into his “might be
tempting, like, to a younger lad than me.”
“At my age a man’s just beginning to know women,” he said persuasively.
“It takes a long ’prenticeship, Martha. You can learn to break in a
horse, or do smithy work, or aught useful like, in a lile few years.
But to learn the way of a woman--durned if it isn’t a long job and a
tough job, Martha.”
“We’re very simple, if you men weren’t blind as bats at midday.”
“Oh, ay; you’re simple!” put in Simon, with a quiet chuckle. “Simple as
driving sows to market.”
So then Martha put a hand to each of her milking-pails. “I’d best be
getting on with my work. If you’re likening me to a sow----”
“There, there! It wasn’t you lass; it was women not just so bonnie--the
most part o’ women, I mean.”
Martha lingered. The deft flattery had pleased her, and she was
willing to surrender any casual defence of her own sex. “Well, the most
part o’ women, Simon, they’re feather-witted maybe. I’ll own as much.”
“And like sows,” went on the other, with patient explanation of his
theme. “A man chooses his straight road and sticks to it, but a sow,
when you want to get her Lunnon way, why, you’ve just to twist her by
the tail, backward foremost, and pretend you want her to head straight
for Scotland.”
They eyed each other with a large, impassive silence. There was plenty
of leisure these days at Windyhough, too much of it; and Simon found
it pleasant to watch Martha’s wholesome, wind-sweet face, to hear the
voice that seemed made for singing to the kine while she sat at the
milking-pail. And Martha, for her part, had never known a wooing, and
the prime hunger of her life still went unsatisfied.
“Human nature--it’s a queer matter,” said Simon by and by.
“And there’s a deal of it about,” sighed Martha. “Human nature--soon
as ever a body can get away from moil and toil and begin to think,
like--why, it’s just made up o’ things we haven’t got, Simon. And if
we’d got them we shouldn’t care so much for ’em, and so it’s all a
round o’ foolishness, like a donkey treading at the mill-wheel.”
A tear fell down on to Martha’s hand, and, because the grief was come
by honestly, Simon felt an odd impulse stirring him. “Martha, my lass,
I wish I was a good twenty years younger. If I were forty, now, and
you----”
“I’m nearing forty, Simon. We’ll not talk of ages, by your leave.”
Simon walked up and down the yard, in a mood that was half between
panic and something worthier. Then he came to Martha’s side. “I’ve a
mind to kiss you,” he said.
“Well, I’m busy,” said Martha; “but I might happen spare time.”
And so they plighted troth. And Simon, when at last he went indoors to
get about the duties Lady Royd found for him, was astonished that he
had no qualms. He had given his promise, and knew that, as a man of his
word, he would keep it. All old instincts whispered that he had been
“varry rash to tie himself in a halter in that fool’s fashion”; and yet
he felt only like a lad who goes whistling to help his lass bring in
the kine to byre.
As he reached the house, Nance, in her riding-habit, stepped out into
the courtyard. Tired of her restless dreams, weary to death of the
inaction and misery at Windyhough, she had stolen out of the house like
a thief, afraid lest Lady Royd should need her before she made good her
escape. She flushed guiltily even at this meeting with Simon, as if he
had detected her in wrong-doing, though her longing for a gallop was
innocent enough.
“You’re for riding on horseback, Miss Nance?” he asked, by way of
giving her good-day.
“Yes, Simon. I shall die if I spend another day indoors. It is like
being wrapped in cotton-wool.”
“Well, now, you’re right! I’ve just been to the stables myself,” he
added dryly, “and you’ve the pick of three rare stay-at-homes to choose
from. One’s broken-winded, and one’s spavined, and t’other’s lame in
the off hind-leg. There’s a fine choice for you!”
“Which of the three shall I choose?” laughed Nance.
“Oh, I’d take the broken-winded one, with the head like Timothy Wade’s
bass-viol that he plays i’ church. He’s a lot o’ fire in him yet--if
you don’t mind him roaring like a half-gale under you. I was talking to
him just now--telling him the oldsters had as much pluck in ’em as the
youngsters. It was a shame, I said, to leave such spirited folk as him
and me behind.”
Nance gave him a friendly smile--he had always been a favourite of
hers, by force of his tough, homespun strength and honesty--and crossed
the yard. The stablemen and grooms were off with Sir Jasper to the
wars--all save two who were past seventy, and were warming themselves
indoors before facing the nipping wind. She found the three horses
left, like the stablemen, because of age and infirmity, and helped
Simon, with a quickness she had learned in childhood, to saddle the
fiddle-headed beast that he had recommended.
The beast had been eating his head off, and was almost youthful in
caprice and eagerness as Nance rode him up into the moors. He had
watched his comrades go out a week ago--mettled youngsters, neighing
with wide nostrils from sheer lust of adventure--and he had been left
to eat more corn than was good for him, left to think back along the
years when men had needed him to carry the burden of their hopes.
The horse knew, perhaps, that Nance, like himself, was seeking respite
from indolence and the companionship of ailing folk. He carried her
bravely, and disguised from her for a while, with a certain chivalry,
the fact that he was broken-winded. When they came to the moor,
however, the smell of the marshes and the ling seemed to get to his
head, like too much wine; and twice he all but unseated Nance, who was
thinking of Will Underwood, riding south like her father into that
perilous country where George the Second was seated on a stolen throne.
The horse, after his display of youthfulness, was content to laze up
and down the sheep-tracks of the heath; and even Nance, blind as she
was by habit to the failings of her comrades, was aware that he was
roaring now like a half-gale from the north.
Then she forgot the horse, forgot the languid mother, the weakling
heir, down yonder at the bleak house of Windyhough. Her thoughts
returned to her father, to Sir Jasper, to gentle and simple of the
Lancashire men who had ridden out against long odds. Last of all, her
maidenly reserve broke down, and she knew that she was eager for Will
Underwood’s safety. She saw him so clearly--fearless, a keen rider
after hounds, a man who sought danger and coveted it. Surely he was
made for such reckless battles as were coming. Through her anxieties,
through her womanish picturing of the wounds and sickness that were
lying in wait along this high-road that led south to victory and the
Stuart, she was glad that “Wild Will” would need her prayers, her trust
in him.
She rode slowly up by way of Hangman’s Snout--a bluff, round hill that
once had carried a gallows-tree. Line by swarthy line the heath widened
out before her as she climbed. Crumpled hillocks, flat wastes of peat,
acre after acre of dead bracken intermixed with ling and benty grasses,
swept out and up to the sky that was big with sunrise and with storm.
The wind blew cold and shrill, and all was empty loneliness; but to
Nance it seemed that she was in a friendly land, where she was free to
breathe. They would not let her fight for the true cause; she had no
skill in arms; but here, on the naked, friendly heath, she was free at
least to grasp the meaning of that stormy hardship which her folk had
been content to undergo.
There was Sir Jasper--her father, and many who had ridden out from the
Loyal Meet at Windyhough under her own eyes--and all of them had seemed
instinct with this large, stormy air that lay above the moors. She was
girlish yet, healthy and in need of pleasure; and she had wondered,
seeing these men ride from Windyhough, that they were so grave about
the matter, intent and quiet, as if they went to kirk instead of to the
wars. Like Rupert, she had pictured the scene in more vivid colours,
had been impatient that no music of the pipes, no rousing cheers had
gone to the farewell. She had longed for the strong lights and shades
of drama, and had found instead a workaday company of gentlemen who
rode about their business and made no boast of it.
Here on the wintry heights she looked life in the face to-day. These
men who had ridden out--Sir Jasper turning only at the last moment to
kiss his wife, though he was deep in love with her at the end of many
years--had been rugged and silent as the hills that had nursed their
strength and loyalty.
Nance was not herself just now. The superstitious would have said that
she was “seeing far.” And so she was--far as the red sunrise-glow that
reached up to heaven. She and the moors, between them, struck sparks
of vivid faith from the winter’s barrenness and hardship. She was sure
that summer would return, fragrant with the scent of Stuart roses.
They had reached the top of Hangman’s Snout, she and her broken-winded
horse. And suddenly a doubt came blowing down the breeze to her. Will
Underwood had been absent from the Loyal Meet. She was aware that men
doubted him in some subtle manner that did not need words to explain
its meaning. He was popular, in a haphazard way, with his own kind; but
always, as Nance looked back along the years, there was a suggestion
that he was happier among the women, because he had the gift of
fooling them. And yet men admitted that he was a good companion in all
field-sports--and yet again Nance remembered how, not long ago, she had
overheard her father talking with Oliphant of Muirhouse, when they did
not guess that she was within earshot.
“Will Underwood will join us,” Squire Roger had said, with the
testiness of a man who only half believes his own words. “He takes any
fence that comes.”
“Yes,” Oliphant had broken in, with the dry smile of one who knew his
world. “Yes, he can gallop well. Can he stand a siege, though?”
“A siege?”
“There’s not always a game fox in front, Squire--and hounds running
with a fine, full-throated cry. I’m on the other side o’ life
myself--the long night rides, when a man would barter all for one
clean fight in open daylight. Underwood will not find this march such
a gallop. Horse and foot go together, and the roads are vile. Can he
last, Squire, crawling at a foot pace?”
Nance remembered the very tone of Oliphant’s voice--the dry, sharp
challenge in it, as of one who had learned to sum up a man’s character
quickly. It was her own judgment of Will Underwood, though warm liking
for him--his bigness and his way of taking fences--had stifled half her
healthy common sense.
She checked her horse, looked out across this land of wintry nakedness.
It was here on the uplands that she had let Underwood steal into her
friendship, here that her quick need for romance had shaped him to the
likeness of a gentleman--gallant, debonair, a man to count on whether
peace or war were in the doing.
Something of the wind’s free-roving heedlessness took hold of her. She
was free to choose her man, free to be loyal to her heart and let her
judgment go.
She looked down the slope. A horseman came suddenly into view, riding
up the trough of the hills. She checked her horse, with a sharp,
instinctive cry. The superstitions of the moor, bred in its lonely
marshes and voiced by its high priests, the curlews and the plover,
crept round her like the hill-mists that bewilder human judgment. Will
Underwood was away with the Stuart, riding south to London and the
Restoration; yet he was coming up to meet her, over the slopes which
they had crossed together on many a hunting-day.
She watched him climb the slope. There was no mistaking the dashing,
handsome figure, the way he had of sitting a horse; and the wide
emptiness of the heath, its savage loneliness, seemed only to make
bigger this intruder who rode up into its silence.
The old, unconquerable legends of the moor returned to Nance. Her nurse
had taught her, long ago, what such apparitions meant. The dead were
allowed to return to those they loved, for the brief hour before the
soul, half between heaven and earth, took its last departure.
She watched the horseman ride nearer, nearer. And suddenly she broke
into a flood of tears. He had died in battle--had died for the
Stuart--and was riding up, a ghostly horseman on a phantom steed, to
tell her of it. He had died well--yes--but she would miss him in the
coming years. She would miss him----
Again she thought of Rupert. All his life the Scholar had been
struggling against impotence and misery. He had grown used to it by
habit; and, of all her friends, she longed most to have him by her
side, because he would understand this trouble that unsteadied her.
Will Underwood’s wraith came up and up the track. She drooped in the
saddle of the broken-winded horse, and hid her eyes, and waited for the
kiss, cold as an east wind over the marshes, that would tell her he was
loyal in the dying. The tales of nursery days were very close about her
now, and she was a child who walked in the unknown.
“Why, Nance, what the devil is amiss? You’re crying like a burn in
spate.”
Will’s voice was sharp and human. Nance reined back a pace or two.
They were so near, so big, Will and his horse, that they shattered her
nursery tales with bewildering roughness.
For a while she could not speak, could not check the sobs which were a
tribute, not to the living man but to his wraith. Then she gathered up
her strength, for she came of a plucky stock. Will Underwood was good
at reading women’s faces; it was his trade in life; but he could make
nothing of Nance just now. Her glance was searching, her eyes quiet and
hard, though tears were lying on her lashes still. All her world had
slipped from under her. There seemed no longer any trust, or faith, or
happiness in the bleak years to come; but at least she had her pride.
“Nance, what is it?” he asked.
“I thought you a ghost just now, Mr. Underwood--the ghost of your
better self, may be. And now----”
“Well, and now?” he broke in, with the hardy self-assurance that had
served him well in days gone by. “I’m alive, and entirely at your
service, Nance. Surely there’s no occasion for distress in that.”
She looked gravely at him for a moment, with clear eyes that seemed to
glance through and beyond him, as if his handsome body and his strength
had disappeared, leaving only a puff of unsubstantial wind behind.
“There _is_ occasion,” she said, very gravely and in a voice that was
musical with pain and steadfastness. “You had better be lying dead, Mr.
Underwood, along some road of loyalty, than--than be idling here, when
other men are fighting.”
He reddened, seemed at a loss for words. Then, “Nance, what a child
you are--and I fancied you a woman grown,” he said, with an attempt at
playfulness. “What is this Rising, after all? A few Scots ragamuffins
following a laddie with yellow hair and flyaway wits. Let the women
sing ballads, and dream dreams; but level-headed men don’t risk all on
moonshine of that sort.”
“My father--he is older than you, and is counted--more level-headed,
shall we say? Sir Jasper Royd, too, is a soldier whose record all men
know. _They_ have gone with the ragamuffins and the yellow-haired
laddie.”
Underwood was startled by the quiet irony, the security, that were
instinct in the girl’s voice, her bearing. She was not the wayward,
pleasure-loving Nance he had known; she stood, in some odd way, for
all the pride and all the resolution of her race. He had earned his
title of “Wild Will” by taking fences which men more sensitively built
refused to hazard, and by more doubtful exploits which were laughed at
and avoided by the cleaner sort among his comrades. He was good to look
at, gay and dominant; yet never, to his life’s end, would he lay hold
of the subtle meaning which those of an old race attach to that one
word “loyalty.” It was not his fault that his father had been of slight
account, except for a gift of money-making; but he had not cared to
learn the lessons which the second generation must, if it wished to lay
hold of old tradition and make itself a home among the great-hearted,
simple gentlemen of Lancashire.
He and Nance were alone here on the uplands. A ragged, crimson sunset
lingered over the moor. A cock-grouse got up from the heather on their
right, and whirred down the bitter wind, chuckling harshly as it went.
It was a man’s land, this, full of hills that stepped, sleety and
austere, to the red of the stormy sky. A man should have been easily
the master here; and yet Underwood knew that he was dwarfed, belittled,
by this slim lass of Demaine’s, whose eyes held truth and looked him
through and through.
“Your excuse, Mr. Underwood?” asked Nance, in a tone as wintry as the
hills.
He should have known, from the quiet and hungry longing in her face,
from the shiver that took her unawares, though the wind’s cold had no
part in it, how eagerly she waited for his answer. He had shared her
dreams. He had captured a liking that was very near to love; and she
was defending the last ditch of her faith in him. If he could make
amends, even now--and surely he must, he who was so big and strong--if
he could give her one sudden, inspired word that would unravel all the
tangle--she was ready to believe in him.
Instead, Will laughed like a country hobbledehoy. “My excuse--why,
prudence, Nance; and prudence, they say, is a quiet mare to ride or
drive at all times. I’ll join your Rising when there’s a better chance
of its success. There were few rode out from Lancashire, after all;
I’ve met many a stay-at-home good fellow already since I returned from
the business that took me south.”
He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. Her tone, her
contemptuous air of question, had stung him. Until now he had assumed
the manners worn by these people into whose midst his father had
intruded, had carried lip-service to the Stuart passably enough, had
won his way by conformity to the letter of their deep traditions. And
here and now, on the moor that would have none of lies, he had plucked
the mask aside, so that Nance shrank back a little in the saddle,
afraid of the meanness in his face.
There was a silence, broken only by the wind’s fret, by the ripple of a
neighbouring stream whose floods were racing banktop high. With sharp
insistence, one memory came to Nance. She recalled how, weeks ago, she
had left Rupert and his brother to their fight, had ridden down to
Demaine House with Will, had found her father eager as a boy because
Oliphant of Muirhouse had brought news of the Rising. She recalled,
too, how Underwood had seemed cold, how he had followed her out into
the hall and answered her distrust of him. And she had listened to his
pleading--had bidden him come before the month was out, if he were
leal--_if he were leal_.
The moor, and the frost that made rose-pink and amber of the sunset
sky, were very cold to Nance just now. If she had felt distrust of this
big, loose-built ruffler, she had been willing enough to let first love
cover up her doubts. She had cared for what he might have been, and had
been concerned each day to hide the traces of what, in sober fact, he
was. For a moment it seemed to her that pride, and strength, and all,
had left her. It was hard and bitter to know that something warmer,
gayer than she had known as yet, had gone from her, not to return.
Then courage came to her again, borrowed from the hard-riding days that
had fathered many generations of her race. “Mr. Underwood,” she said,
not looking at him, “you picked up my kerchief not long ago--do you
remember?--and asked to keep it.”
Even now he could not rid himself of the easy hunting days, the easy
conquests, which had built up a wall of self-security about him.
“You’ll give it me before the month is out, Nance? You promised it,” he
said, edging his horse nearer hers.
Nance took a kerchief from the pocket of her riding-coat. “Why, yes,”
she said, “I keep my word. You may claim it.”
He took it, put it to his lips, all with the over-done effrontery of a
groom who finds the master’s daughter stooping to him. “I shall keep
it,” he said--“until the next true Rising comes.”
“Yes,” said Nance submissively. “You may keep it, Mr. Underwood.”
“Nay, call me Will!” he blundered on. “Listen, Nance. When I spoke
of prudence just now, I--I lied. You stung me into saying what I did
not mean. There were reasons kept me here. You’ll believe me, surely?
Urgent reasons. And here I am, eating my heart out while other men are
taking happy risks.”
Nance glanced once at him. His voice was persuasive as of old; he had
the same easy seat in saddle, the handsome, dash-away figure that had
given him a certain romantic place of his own among his intimates; but
there was something new. She understood, with sudden humiliation and
self-pity, how slight a thing first love may be. And, because he had
forced this knowledge on her, she would not spare him.
“You may keep it,” she repeated. “The enemy may come to Windyhough,
and you will need a flag of truce, as the old men and the disabled
will--and my kerchief--it will serve as well as another.”
She was alone with him, here on the empty moor, and had only a
broken-winded horse to help her if need asked. Yet her disdain of him
was so complete, her humiliation so bitter, that she had no fear. She
spoke slowly, quietly; and Underwood reined his horse back a little, as
if she had struck him with her riding-whip.
“All this because I’ll not risk my head for a wild-cat plot to put a
Stuart on the throne?”
“Oh, not for that reason. Because you promised to risk your head;
because, in time of peace, you persuaded loyal gentlemen that you were
one of them; because, Mr. Underwood, you ran away before you had ever
seen the enemy.”
Nance’s one desire was to hurt this man, to get through his armour
of good living and complacency; it was her way--the woman’s way--of
digging a grave in which to hide the first love that was dead,
unlovely, pitiful.
“Well, we hunted yesterday,” said the other doggedly. “There were
plenty of Lancashire gentlemen in my own case--our heads sounder than
our hearts--and we had fine sport. And, coming home--you’ll forgive
me--we laughed at Sir Jasper and his handful of enthusiasts. We like
them--we shall miss them when they’re gibbeted in London--but we
laughed at their old-fashioned view of honour. Honour trims pretty
rosettes for a man to wear, but doesn’t save his head. Honour’s a
woman’s pastime, Miss Demaine.”
Nance looked at him with frank astonishment. This man knew that her own
father was of Sir Jasper’s company, that she was troubled, like all
stay-at-homes, lest ill news should come. And he chose this time to
defend himself by confessing that he and others had laughed at better
men. And he talked of Tower Hill.
“When the gentlemen of Lancashire return--when the Prince has come to
his own, and England is free again and happy--what then, Mr. Underwood?
It will go ill, I think, with masqueraders.”
They faced each other, the man insolent, ungroomed--true to his breed,
as folk are apt to be in time of stress--Nance in that mood of hot fury
and contempt which is cool and debonair.
“What then?” he said, stroking his horse’s neck. “The Vicar of Bray
was a very good man of the world, after all, and he prospered. We shall
toast the Stuart openly; it will save all that clumsy ritual of passing
the wine across the water.”
Nance was healthy, eager, human. She shrank, with an odd, childish
loathing, from this man who counted the world--the big, gallant world
of faith, and strife, and loyalty--as a dining-table, no more, no less,
where wise men took their ease. She gathered the reins into her hand,
turned in saddle.
“Keep the kerchief, sir,” she said gently. “As I told you, you will
need it when”--her voice broke suddenly, against her will--“when our
men come home from the crowning.”
And then she left him. He watched her go down the slope on her
fiddle-headed nag. All his buoyancy was gone. He had been spoiled by
flattery, of word and glance; he had been accustomed to be taken at his
surface value, giving his friends little opportunity to test whether
he rang true or not. And now he was like a pampered child that meets
its first rebuff. His pluck had left him. He had no heart to follow
Nance, though by and by he would regret the lost opportunity to claim
rough satisfaction for her handling of him. She had spoken, with such
security and pride, of the loyalty that was an instinct with her. Her
men who had ridden out were of the like mind; and Underwood, in a flash
of enlightenment and dismay, saw how the coming days would go with him
if this haphazard venture of the Prince’s carried him to London and
the throne. His comfortable house of Underwood, his easy life, the
dinners and the hunting and the balls--all would have to be given up.
He had no illusions now as to his power to continue here among them,
explaining his share in the enterprise, winning his way back to favour
by excellence in field-sports and in ladies’ parlours. If the Prince
came to his own, there would be an end of Wild Will, so far as loyal
Lancashire was concerned; for at every turn he would have to meet the
scorn that Nance had given him so unsparingly to-day.
Nance looked back once, when she was half down the slope, and saw him
sitting rigid in the saddle, horse and man showing in clear, lonely
outline against the rainy sky. He would be himself again to-morrow, for
shallowness can never suffer long; but she would have pitied him, may
be, could she have guessed his bitter loneliness just now. Shorn of his
self-love, Nance lost beyond hope of regaining--instinct told him so
much--alive to the cowardice which no longer wore the more pleasant air
of prudence, Underwood looked out on lands as forlorn as himself; and,
far down the slope, he saw Nance’s little figure, and knew that, in
some odd way that was better than himself, he loved this trim lass of
Demaine’s.
Nance reached the lower lands, where the bridle-track ran in and out
beside the swollen streams, past coppices where the trees were comely
in their winter’s nakedness. She saw each line and furrow of the
pastures, remembered they had found a fox last month in the spinney
yonder, recalled how she and Rupert had fished the brook together, just
where it ran under the grey stone bridge below her. All her faculties
seemed to be sharpened, rather than deadened, by the blow, pitiless and
hard, that Will had given her just now. Her first love--the delicate
and fragrant thing that had been interwoven with her waking and her
dreaming hours--had died shamefully. She could not even bring a decent
show of grief to the graveside; her only feeling was that it should be
buried, in the middle of a dark midwinter’s night, out of all men’s
sight and gossip.
And, in this hour of swift and unexpected trouble, she was as her
father and her brothers would have had her be--unflinching, reliant,
reaching out instinctively to the strong morrow, not to the dead,
unlovely yesterday. Only, she was very tired; and there was one friend
she needed--a friend who could not come and put warm, human arms about
her, because her mother had died long ago, leaving her to the care of
men who love and honour and defend their women, but who are weak to
understand their times of loneliness.
She was a great figure, after all, this daughter of Demaine’s who rode
on a broken-winded horse through the fieldways that had bred her. It
is easy to ride forward, head erect, into the city you have taken
by assault; but it is hard to carry upright shoulders and a firm,
disdainful head, when only faith and the clean years behind support you
in the thick of grave disaster.
At the bend of the track, where it passed Sunderland’s cornmill--the
water-wheel treading its sleepy round--she saw Rupert and Simon Foster
twenty yards ahead. Simon was carrying a couple of muskets, his pockets
bulging with powder-flasks and lead, and Rupert was limping a little,
as if he had given too much work to his damaged ankle; and Nance
Demaine, who was in the mood that sees all and understands, knew, from
the look of Rupert’s back, that he was pleased with the day’s adventure.
Her horse was tired now, and for the last mile she had ridden him at a
gentle foot pace. The track was heavy with wet leaves that waited for a
drying wind to scatter them. The two on foot did not hear the muffled
splash of hoofs, and she was content to follow them.
She had been friendless; and now half her loneliness had slipped away
from her, at sight of Rupert limping on ahead. He was more diffident
than she, more sensitive to ridicule and hardship; but he stood for the
truths that matter in a world where men and women are ready, for the
most part, to believe that all ends when death robs them of the power
to eat, and sleep, and dance foolishly from day to day, like gnats when
the sun is warm about them. He stood for her own simple, downright view
of creed and honour; he was a comrade of the true breed, in brief, and
she was in sore need of companionship just now.
How well she seemed to know this cripple who jogged on before her!
Half-forgotten words of his; little, unselfish surrenders when Maurice
had shown a younger brother’s wilfulness; the patient chivalry that
had bidden him show deference to Lady Royd when her tongue was lashing
his infirmities--all these stood out with startling clearness. And
again that curious, sharp pain was at her heart, and the old thought
returned how good a knight was lost to Prince Charles Edward.
They were near the gate of Windyhough now, and Rupert, hearing hoofs
behind him at last, turned quickly. The familiar eagerness came to his
face at sight of her--the instant pleasure, followed by a hint of pain;
the homage that was there to be read plainly by any onlooker.
“So this is the King’s business you have been about?” said Nance,
looking down at him with a tenderness that set his blood on fire.
“Why, yes. I said there was no mystery about it. Since you told me you
could not trust your men to shoot straight----”
“Oh, Rupert, I was foolish; I did not mean it. I was out of heart that
day, and temper got the better of me.”
“But it was true. I had fancied that, if the attack came, it would be
enough to fire one’s musket and trust to Providence for marksmanship.
It was a daft thought, Nance, was it not? It was shirking trouble.”
Nance got down from the saddle, gave the reins to Simon Foster. “Take
him to the stable, Simon,” she said. “He has carried me well, and
deserves a double feed.” She wished to be alone with Rupert and the
other’s presence seemed an irritating check on speech. And yet, when
Simon had left them, they stood looking at each other in troubled
silence. Each was in a tense, restless mood, and their trouble only
gathered weight by the companionship.
“Did you find it hard--this learning how to shoot?” she asked at last.
“It was easier than knowing you could not trust me, Nance, to guard
you.” The old, whimsical self-derision was in his voice. He had learned
at least to carry his hurts bravely.
And she could find no words. There was some quality in Rupert--of
manliness--that touched her now with an emotion deep and poignant, and
clean as tempered steel.
“The pity of it!” she murmured, after another long, uneasy silence.
“To prepare so well for an attack that cannot come----”
“But it may come, Nance. These last days--I cannot tell you why--I have
not felt that all was make-believe, as I did at first.”
“How should it come, Rupert? They are so far away--near London, surely,
now----”
“How will it come? I do not know. But I know that I have asked for
it--asked patiently, Nance--and faith must be answered one day.”
“My dear,” she said, “you are so--so oddly staunch, and so
unpractical.” And her voice broke, and she could get no farther.
And Rupert smiled gravely, touched her hand, as a courtier might, and
limped up toward the house.
Nance stood there awhile, with long thoughts for company. Then, seeking
a respite from her mood, she crossed the stables to give a carrot to
the fiddle-headed horse; but she got no farther than the corner of the
yard. At the stable-door, deaf to all sounds from the outward world
and careless of the many windows looking out on them, Simon Foster
and Martha were standing hand in hand. Martha’s face was rose-red and
smiling, her lover’s full of an amazing foolishness.
“There’s the bonnie, snod lass you are, Martha!” Simon was declaring.
“I never thought to see such a day as this. Why didn’t I think of it
before, like?”
“Perhaps you were blind, Simon,” put in the other, with a coy upward
glance.
Nance retreated out of eye-shot, and for the moment she forgot her
troubles. She just laughed until her eyes were wet and her slim little
body shook. The scene was so unexpected, so instinct with sheer humour,
that the gravest must have yielded to it. Then, as the pressure of the
last ill-fated days returned to her, she was filled with a childish
wonder that life should be so muddled, so rough-and-tumble, so
seemingly disordered. There was Sir Jasper, conquering or defeated,
but either way carrying his life in his hands. There was Windyhough
itself--house, lands and all--at stake. And yet Simon and the
dairymaid, whose discretion now, if ever, should have ripened, were
reading folly in each other’s eyes.
She heard Martha cross, singing, to the kitchen, and turned and sought
the stables again. She was anxious to learn something which only Simon
could tell her; for Rupert was diffident of his own skill at all times,
and would not have given her, had she asked it, a true account of his
marksmanship.
Simon was brushing down the horse when she went in. He glanced up with
grave, stolid innocence, as if he had had no other occupation than this
of grooming.
“What has the master learned in these last days?” she asked abruptly.
“Does he aim well, Simon?”
“He shapes grandly; but then, he always does when his mind is fair set
on a matter. We were in a lonely spot, too, you see, with none to laugh
at him while he made his first mistakes.”
Nance stroked the fiddle-headed nag, and watched him munch his carrot,
and seemed glad to linger here.
“He can hit his man now, you think?”
“Well, I reckon if I were the man, I’d as lief be out of range as in.
I tell you, the young master does naught by halves. The trouble is to
get him started. You’d best come with us when we go out again this
afternoon, and shoot a match with him.”
And by and by Nance went indoors with a light step and a sense of
betterment. It was pleasant to hear Rupert praised.