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.