“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.