THE PLEASANT FURY
AT Windyhough there was an end of watching. Sleep had been the one
traitor within-doors, and Goldstein’s men, by firing the main door,
had killed their comrade in the garrison. Rupert, fingering one of his
six muskets, was tasting the keenest happiness that had come to him as
yet. Ben Shackleton, as he watched the timbers of the doorway flame
and glow, forgot that he had a farm, a wife, and twenty head of cattle
needing him. And Simon Foster, for his part, remembered the ’15, the
slow years afterwards, and knew that it was good to be alive at last.
They watched the fire eat at the woodwork, watched the shifting play
of colour; and, apart from the roar of the flames, the cracking of
strained timbers, there was silence on each side of the crumbling
barricades. Then suddenly the whole middle of the door fell inward, and
in the pulsing light outside Rupert saw a press of men.
And the battle at the main door here was guided with wise generalship,
as it had been at the outer gate some days ago.
“Fire!” said the master sharply.
His own musket was the first to answer the command, then Shackleton’s,
and afterwards Simon Foster’s. In the red light, and at such close
quarters, they could not miss their aim, and three of Goldstein’s
company dropped headlong into the flaming gap, hindering those behind
them.
“Fire!” said the master again, with quick precision.
And then the attacking company withdrew a while, after sending a
hurried, useless volley through the hall. They had been prepared for a
fight within-doors against a garrison of unknown strength, but not for
this welcome on the threshold.
The sergeant, hard-bitten and old to campaigning, was dismayed for a
moment as he looked at his lessened company. When they came first to
Windyhough this band of Goldstein’s had numbered one-and-twenty. Now,
at the end of two days, he could count only ten; the rest were either
killed or laid aside beyond present hope of action. It was no pleasant
beginning for an assault upon the darkness that lay inside the burning
woodwork of the door.
Then he got himself in hand again. Whatever the unknown odds against
them, their one chance was to go forward, now the door was down.
“We’ve tasted hell before,” he growled. “Steady, you fools! You’re not
frightened of the dark.”
He sprang forward, and at the moment the last timbers of the doorway
fell and flamed on the threshold, lighting up the whole width of the
hall. He saw Simon Foster standing by the wall and levelling his
musket, and fired sharply and hit him through the ribs. And after that
was Bedlam, confused and maniacal and full of oaths; but to Rupert the
glamour of his life had dawned in earnest.
He fired into the incoming company, and so did Ben Shackleton; and then
they retreated to the stairfoot, carrying a musket apiece.
There were eight left now of Goldstein’s men, and they rushed in with
such fury that they jostled one another, hindering their aim. Eight
shots spat viciously at the garrison of two, and Shackleton’s right arm
was hit by a bullet that glanced wide from the masonry behind him. He
clubbed his musket with the left hand and brought it down on the head
of the man nearest to him, and then he was borne down by numbers.
Rupert, not for the first time in his life, was alone against long
odds. But to-night he was master of his house, master of the clean,
eager soul that had waited for this battle. From the kitchen, where he
had bidden his women-folk take shelter, he heard Lady Royd’s spaniel
yapping furiously; and he smiled, because old memories were stirred.
He went up five steps of the stairway, singled out the sergeant,
because he was the bulkiest of the seven left, and fired point-blank at
him. After that there was no leisure for any one of them to reload; it
was simply Rupert on the narrow stairway, swinging his musket lightly,
against six maddened troopers who could only come up one by one.
It was Nance who intervened disastrously. She did not know--how could
she--that the master, at the end of a dismaying, harassed vigil, was
stronger than the six who met him. They were dulled to the glory of
assault, but he was gathering up the dreams of the long, unproven
years, was fighting his first battle, was armoured by a faith more keen
and vivid than this world’s weaknesses could touch.
Nance, sick to know how it was faring with the master, weary of the
yapping spaniel and the old housekeeper’s complaint that she wished to
die decently in her bed, out of eye-shot of rude men--Nance crept up
the back stair, and took a musket from the ledge of the north window
she had guarded. Then she went down again, crossed the passage that
led to the main hall, halted a moment as she saw Rupert on the stair,
the six men below--all lit by the unearthly, crimson flare of burning
woodwork--and lifted her musket with trim precision.
She had lessened the odds by one; but Rupert, glancing down to see
who had fired so unexpectedly, saw Nance standing at the rear of this
battle which was his. And his weakness took him unawares. He had been
dominant and gay, because he carried his life lightly; but now there
was Nance’s honour. One of the five left came up at him, and Rupert’s
aim was true with the butt-end of his musket; but he was not fighting
now with a single purpose, and he knew it. And sleep, kept at bay
through every minute of every hour that had struck since Goldstein’s
men came first, began to claim its toll.
He could not hold the stair, sleep whispered at his ear. And he rallied
bravely, afraid for the first time because of Nance. If he should fail
to keep the stair? A sharp, unreasoning anger seized him. Why was she
here? Women were good to send men into battle, to bind their wounds up
afterwards, but in the hot, keen thick of it they had no place. Do as
he would, his glance kept seeking the little figure that stood on the
edge of the fire-glow, and the men pressing up were quick to see the
change in him.
With a last, hard effort he shut down all thought of Nance. The
troopers he had stunned lay sprawling down the stair, hindering the
men behind. For a moment there was respite, and in that moment sleep
thickened round the master’s eyelids. The confidence, the sense of
treading air, borrowed at usury from his strength, were fast deserting
him. He had victory full in sight on this narrow stair, and, like his
Prince, he felt it slip past him out of reach, for no cause that seemed
logical.
Nance did not guess the share she had had in this. She saw only that
Rupert stooped suddenly, as if in mortal sickness, then squared his
shoulders--saw that one of the men at the stairfoot was reloading his
musket with deft haste, and shut her eyes. For she, too, was weak from
lack of sleep.
Will Underwood, meanwhile, was running down the moor, the red-faced
squire and the other sporting recusants behind him. There was no doubt
now that Windyhough was in urgent peril. They could see the flaming
doorway, could smell the scudding reek of smoke that came up-wind.
“You’re up to the neck in love,” protested the squire, trying to keep
pace with Will. “There’s naught else gives such wind to a man’s feet.”
A sharp noise of musketry answered him from below, and Will ran ever a
little faster. The squire’s gibe did not trouble him. The whole past
life of him--the squalor of his youth, the sterile abnegation of the
Sabbaths spent at Rigstones Chapel, the gradual change to ease and
popularity among big-hearted gentry--passed by him like a fast-moving
company of ghosts. And then another phantom stole, with faltering steps
and shrouded head, across this vision he was borrowing from another
world. He saw his cowardice, lean, shrivelled, stooping--the cowardice
that had been born of ease and frank self-seeking. He had pledged faith
that he would follow the Stuart when need asked; and he had broken
troth, because he yearned to keep his house and lands, because he had
planned to give a ball at Christmas that should set all Lancashire
talking of its pomp.
God was very kind to-night to Wild Will. The run was short and swift
to Windyhough, as time is reckoned; but during the scamper over broken
ground he found that leisure of the soul which is cradled in eternity.
He won free of his past. He knew only that the squire had spoken a true
word in jest.
He was deep in love. All the ache and trouble of his need for Nance
were wiped clean away. She was in danger, and he was running to her
aid; and he understood, with a clean and happy sense of well-being, the
way of his Catholic friends when they loved a woman. Until now it had
been a riddle to him, the quality of this regard. He had seen them love
as full-blooded men do--with storm and jealousy and passionate unrest,
but always with a subtle reserve, a princely deference, shining dimly
through it all. And to-night, his vision singularly clear, he knew that
their faith was more than lip speech, knew that the Madonna had come
once, and once for all, to show the path of chivalry.
If Rupert had found happiness during this siege that had tested his
manhood, so, too, had Will Underwood. With a single purpose, with
desire only to serve Nance, asking no thanks or recompense, he raced
over the last strip of broken ground and through the courtyard gate.
“Be gad! they’ve been busy here!” growled the red-faced squire, seeing
the bodies lying black against the snow and hearing the wounded crying
in their anguish. But Will did not see the littered yard, the white,
keen moonlight that spared no ugly detail. His eyes were fixed on the
burning threshold--Nance was behind it, and she needed him.
The fallen doorway, the blazing remnants of the settle, had set fire by
now to the woodwork of the hall. Will ran through the heat and smoke of
it, saw Rupert swaying dizzily half up the stair, and below him four
Hessian troopers, one of whom was lifting a musket to his shoulder. He
had his fowling-piece in hand, half-cocked by instinct when he left the
duck-shooting for this scamper down the moor. He cocked it, and at the
moment the trooper who was taking aim at Rupert turned sharply, hearing
the din of feet behind, saw a press of men, white from head to foot,
pouring through the doorway, and fired heedlessly at Underwood. And
Will’s fowling-piece barked at the same moment; at six paces the charge
of shot was compact and solid as a bullet, but the wound it made was
larger, and not clean at all.
The three troopers left faced round on the incoming company. They saw
seven men, white in the linen coats they had not found thought or
leisure to throw off, and sudden panic seized them. Through the stark
waiting-time of their siege, with the moors and the sobbing winds to
foster superstition, they had learned belief in ghosts, and thought
they saw them now. They ran blindly for the doorway. Rupert leaped from
the stair, and they were taken front and rear.
When all was done, Rupert steadied himself, stood straight and
soldierly, scanned the faces of his rescuers, and knew them all for
friends.
“My thanks, gentlemen,” he said, with tired courtesy. “You came in a
good hour.”
He leaned a hand on the Red Squire’s shoulder, wiped a trickle of blood
from some chance wound that had touched his forehead, glanced round at
them with dim, unseeing eyes.
“Have I kept the house? Have I finished?”
“The house is in our keeping now. You’ve done well, my lad,” said the
red-faced squire, with gruff tenderness.
“Then I’ll get to sleep, I think.”
And he would have fallen, but the squire held him up and, putting two
rough arms about him, carried him upstairs.
“A well-plucked one,” he said, returning quickly. “And now, gentlemen,
the house will be on fire, by your leave, if we don’t turn our hands to
the pump.”
Nance, watching from the shadows, was bewildered by the speed and fury
of it all--bewildered more by the business-like, quiet way in which
these linen-coated gentry went in and out of hall, carrying buckets and
quenching the last smouldering flames with water from the stable yard.
This was war--war, with its horror, its gallantry, its comedy; but it
was not the warfare she had pictured when she sang heroic ballads at
the spinet.
And then the night’s uproar and its madness passed by her. She thought
only of the master who had all but died just now to save the house--to
save her honour. She could not face the busy hall, the man sprawling on
the stair, head downward, where Rupert’s blow had left him. Instead,
she went back along the corridor and up by the servants’ stairway, and
found Rupert lying in a dead sleep in his own chamber, a lighted candle
at his elbow, just as the red-faced squire had left him.
“My dear,” she said, knowing he could not hear, “my dear”--her voice
broke in a deep, quiet laugh that had no meaning to her as yet--“they
said you were the scholar. And I think they lied.”
She lifted her head by and by, hearing the squire’s voice below in the
hall.
“Where’s Will Underwood?” he was asking noisily. “We’ve got the fire
under, and we can see each other’s faces now we’ve lit the candles.
Where, by the Mass, is Underwood?”
Nance shivered. Through her weariness, through the panic of this sharp
attack, she recalled the shame of her first love, recalled her meeting
with Will Underwood on the high moors, when he had talked of loyalty as
a thing of barter.
She stooped to touch Rupert as he slept. Here was a man, spent and
weak; but here, proved through and through, was a cleanly gentleman
who, against odds, had kept his obligations. Old affection stirred in
her, and new pride in his conduct of the siege.
“Where’s Underwood?” came the squire’s voice again. “Is this some prank
of his, to hide away?”
“With Nance Demaine, sir,” answered some pert youngster of the company.
“Where else should he be? He was never one to waste time.”
“You’ve guessed the riddle, youngster.” The squire’s laugh was
boisterous. “It’s odd to think of Underwood lovesick as a lad in his
teens--especially just now, with all this litter in the hall.”
Outside the doorway Will Underwood was lying in the moonlight. He had
been hit in the groin by Goldstein’s trooper, just as he answered with
a charge of shot at six paces; and because the hills had bred him, he
needed to get out into the open, taking his sickness with him.
He lay in the snow and looked up at the sky. He had never seen a
whiter moon, a clearer light, at time of midwinter. Land and sky were
glittering with frost, and overhead he saw the seven starry lamps
of Charlie’s Wain. He was in bitter anguish, and knew that his hurt
was mortal; he had no regret for that, because he knew, too, that
Windyhough and Nance were saved. His bitterness was of the soul. Strain
as he would, he could not shut out the picture--clear as the frosty sky
above him--of Nance’s face when she met him on the moor--years ago, it
seemed--and he thought he was his own ghost, come to warn her of his
death.
He lived through that scene again in detail, heard Nance’s voice sweep
all his prudent self-esteem aside. And her scorn bit deeper now,
because he knew at last the strength of his fine regard for her.
Passion was gone. Prudence was gone, because men near to death remember
that they came naked into the world. He had lost the trickeries that
had earned him the name of Wild Will, and was glad to let them go.
He was aware only that he lay between here and hereafter, in pain of
body and soul, and that he might take this last fence gladly, as on a
hunting-morn, if he could wipe away the remembrance of one day gone by.
Many things grew clear to him as he lay and watched the moon. The wrath
and pitiless hell-fire of Rigstones Chapel yielded to a wider outlook
on the forgiveness of a Being greater than himself in charity. He found
it easy to forgive his enemies, to forget his jealousy of Rupert, whom
he had saved just now. But, warring against the peace he sought, and
keeping the life quick in his tortured body, was remembrance of that
day on the high moors. His work, good or ill, was done, and he longed
to die, and could not.
Into the littered hall at Windyhough, while the squire paced up and
down asking noisily for Will Underwood, old Nat the shepherd sauntered,
pipe in hand. He was old, and a dreamer, and the gunshots and the fury
had not disturbed him greatly.
Nat glanced round at the fallen men and the standing, at the doorway
through whose blackened lintels the keen moonlight stole to drown the
candle-flames. And he laughed, a gentle, pitying laugh. “It’s naught
so much to brag about,” he said. “There were bonnier doings i’ the ’15
Rising. Men were men i’ those days.”
Nance wearied of it all as she stood by the master’s bed and listened
to the talk downstairs. The house seemed full of men, and insolent
coupling of her name with Will Underwood’s, and the sickly, pungent
smell of blood and smoke. She was tired of gallantry and war, tired of
her own weariness; and she went down the stair, stepping lightly over
Rupert’s enemy, and came among them into hall.
“Your servant, Miss Nance,” said the red-faced squire, not guessing
what a figure of comedy he cut, bowing under the folds of a white linen
coat.
“I thank you, gentlemen,” said Nance unsteadily. “From my heart I thank
you. You--you have done us service. And now, by your leave, I need to
get out of doors. I--I have been in prison here.”
They made a lane of honour for her. They had been laggards in the
Prince’s service; they were recusants, come at the last hour to prove
themselves; but they felt, seeing Nance step down between them, her
face stained with weariness and long vigil, that a royal lady had come
into their midst.
Nance went through the charred doorway, and halted a moment as the
pleasant frost-wind met her. The moonlight and the clean face of the
sky gave her a sense of ease and liberty, after the cramped days
indoors. The siege’s uproar, its stealthy quiet, were lost in this big
silence of the frosty spaces overhead.
From the silence, from the snowy courtyard at her feet, a groan brought
her back sharply to realities. She looked down, and saw Will Underwood
lying face upwards to the stars. He, too, was linen-sheeted, as the
squire had been; but there was no touch of comedy in his apparel. It
seemed to Nance that he was shrouded for his bier.
They looked into each other’s eyes for a while, and some kindness in
the girl’s glance, some regret to see him lying helpless with the fire
of torment in his eyes, fired his courage.
“You?” she said gently. “You came to save the house?”
“No, Nance; I came to save you. That was my only thought.”
“They are asking for you indoors. I do not understand--you are
wounded----”
“In your service--yes. They were right, after all--they always said I’d
more luck than I deserved.”
She was free now of the bewilderment of this night attack, the sharp
battle in the hall, quick and confused in the doing. The moonlight
showed her the face of a man in obvious pain, a man fighting for every
word that crossed his lips; and yet he was smiling, and the soul of him
was gay.
“I’ll bring help,” she said, turning toward the house.
“No; you’ve brought help. Nance, I’ll not keep you long. There was a
day--a day when we met up the moor, and I was your liar, Nance--from
heel to crown I was your liar--and God knows the shame you put on me.”
Nance, scarce heeding what she did, took a kerchief, stained with
gunpowder, from the pocket of the riding-coat she had worn, day in, day
out, since the siege began.
“I keep my promise, Will.”
Even yet, though Nance was kneeling in the snow beside him and he
heard the pity in her voice, Will could not free himself from some
remembrance of that bygone meeting. “As a flag of truce?” he asked
sharply.
“As a badge of honour. You are free to wear it.”
He reached out for her hand, and put it to his lips with the reverence
learned since he came down from duck-shooting to find a mortal hurt.
“As God sees me,” he said, a pleasant note of triumph in his voice--“as
God sees me, I die happy.”
And then he turned on his side. And the pert youngster who had coupled
Nance’s name with Will’s, coming out in search of the missing leader,
saw the girl kneeling in the snow and heard her sobs. And he crept back
into the hall, ashamed in some queer way.
“Why, lad, have you seen a ghost out yonder?” asked the red-faced
squire.
“No, sir,” the boy answered gravely. “It is as I said--Will is with
Nance Demaine, and--and I think we’d better leave them to it.”