“But, father, I must stay here. Where else?”
“At Windyhough. No, girl, I’ll have no arguments about it. You’ll be protected there.”
Will Underwood laughed, and somehow Nance liked him none the better for it. “Sir Jasper will go with us, and Maurice, and every able-bodied man about the place—who will be left to play guardian to Nance?”
“Rupert, unless I’ve misjudged the lad,” snapped the Squire.
“He cannot protect himself, sir.”
“No. May be not—just yet. But I’ve faith in that lad, somehow. He’ll look after other folk’s cattle better than his own. Some few are made in that mould, Will. It’s a good mould, and rare.”
His secret trouble, and his jealousy of any man who threatened to come close to Nance, swept Will Underwood’s prudence clean away. He should have known by now this bluff, uncompromising tone of the Squire’s. “She’s safer here, sir,” he blundered on. “We all know Rupert for a scholar—I’d rather trust Nance to her own women-servants.”
“But I would not,” put in old Roger dryly, “and I happen to have a say in the matter. If Rupert’s a fool—well, he shall have his chance of proving it. Nance, you go to Windyhough. That’s understood? The house down yonder can stand a siege, and this cannot. My fool of a grandfather—God rest him, all the same!—dismantled the house here. He thought there’d never again be civil war in Lancashire—but down at Windyhough they lived in hope.”
Nance laughed—the brave laugh of a woman cradled in a house of gallant faith, of loyalty to old tradition. She understood her father’s breezy, offhand talk of civil war, as if it were a pleasant matter. He would have chosen other means, she knew, if peace had shown the road; but better war, of friend against friend, than this corroding apathy that had fallen on men’s ideals since the King-in-name ruled England by the help of foreign mercenaries.
Will Underwood caught infection from these two. The one was hale, bluff and hard-riding, a man proven; the other was a slip of a lassie, slender as a reed and fanciful; yet each had the same eager outlook on this matter of the Rising—an outlook that admitted no compromise, no asking whether the time were ripe for sacrifice and peril. The moment was instinct with drama to Underwood, and he was ready always to step into the forefront of a scene.