"Her bridal-morn!" cried Nell, as though her father could hear that she was speaking to him. "Is it for malice that she gowns herself in white on such a day, and prates of weddings? Father, why didst go to the Low Country for a wife? She has brought disaster on disaster since the first day she set foot in Marsh."
A new thought came to her, adding its own load to the burden that was already over-heavy for her. Would Ned win free of his passion for Janet Ratcliffe, or would his marriage, too, be ill-fated as his father's? To wed from the Low Country was folly, but marriage between a Ratcliffe and a Wayne would be a crime on which the country-side would up and cry out shame.
And then, in a moment, all the girl's fierceness, her resolution and tearless pride, were lost. God had made her a woman, and like a woman she fell prone across the bier, and wept, and thought neither of vengeance nor of hatred, but of the love that had grown through twenty years of comradeship between the dead man and herself. It was not her father's strength, his sweeping recklessness in fight, that she remembered now; but she recalled his gentleness toward her, his clean and upright courtesy, his generosity to rich and poor among his neighbours.
Marsh House was full of the unrest that goes before a burial, the fruitless wandering to-and-fro which seems to ease the sorrow of the living. The menservants were idling in the courtyard with a subdued sort of noisiness; the maids were still passing and re-passing from the kitchen; and Nanny Witherlee, unable to snatch more than the briefest spell of sleep, came hobbling by and by into the hall.
The old woman stopped on seeing Nell stretched across the bier, and half advanced toward her; then shook her head. "I'll let her be; happen 'twill be best for her to cry her een out," she muttered, and turned down the passage to the kitchen.
Nanny showed different altogether this morning from the quivering, ghost-ridden watcher who had kept so long a vigil with only the dead and strange voices in the wind for company. Then there had been no work to be done, no household cares to rouse the old instincts in her; but now that preparations for the burial feast were going busily forward she slipped naturally into the place which had been hers at Marsh aforetime. Brisk as though she had had a full night's sleep, she fell to doing this and that, rating the maids the while with a keenness that robbed the day of half its sadness for her.
"Now then, ye idle wenches!" she cried, soon as she had crossed the kitchen threshold. "Do ye think gaping at a mutton-pasty 'ull mak it walk to th' dining board? Martha, tha'rt allus mooning ower thy work like a goose wi' a nicked head. An' look at Mary yonder! Standing arms under apron when th' house 'ull soon be full o' hungry folk. An' th' Waynes allus had good appetites, sorrow or no sorrow."
Nanny was setting parsley-sprigs round a dish of neat's tongue all this time; and when this was done she climbed onto the settle and reached down piece after piece of haver-bread that was drying on the creel. The same instinct that had bidden her test the quality of Wayne's winding sheet, while yet she was deep in sorrow for him, was with her now, and her mind was set on leaving no unremembered detail, of wine or meat or ripe October ale, to mar the burial-feast.
"It's weel to do nowt, same as some folk!" she cried, stopping to glance sourly at the progress of the maids. "I don't know what wenches are made on nowadays, that I don't."
"Do nowt, my sakes! When my knees is dibble-double-ways wi' weariness," cried Martha.