“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.”