“Simon!” she called, with late-found penitence.
He did not turn his head, but strode indoors, through the running banter that met him by the way, and went upstairs to find Rupert standing by the loophole that overlooked the main doorway.
“At your post, master?” he said dryly.
Rupert turned sharply. “You disturbed a dream of mine,” he said, in his well-bred, scholarly voice. “I was fancying men were out in the moonlit courtyard, that I aimed straight, Simon, and shot a few of those black rats from Hanover.”
Simon chuckled soberly. He liked to hear his favourite lapse from the orderly speech that was his usual habit.
“They’ll come, sure enough,” he said gruffly. “We’ve waited over-long, you and me, to miss some chance o’ frolic at the last.”
Rupert, with his large, royal air, disdaining always the lean, scholarly form he carried, laughed gently. “My faith is weak to-night, Simon. So little happens, and God knows I’ve prayed for open battle.”
“Well, bide,” said Simon. “I’ve my own fancy, too, though I was never what you might call a prayerful man, that the battle’s coming up this way. My old wounds are plaguing me, master, like to burn me up; and you may say it’s th’ change i’ the weather, if it pleases ye, but I think different.”
Rupert welcomed the other’s guarded prophecy, for to-night he needed hope. And he fell again to looking through the loophole on to the empty, moonlit courtyard; and suddenly, from the far side of the house, he heard Nance’s voice again, as she tried to sing a little of Lady Royd’s heart-sickness away.
The voice, so low and strong and charitable, the thought of her face, her brown, waving hair, her candid eyes, struck Rupert with intolerable pain and sense of loss. He recalled the years when he should have been up and doing, winning his spurs like other men. His shy, half-ironic, half-scholarly aloofness from the life of every day showed as a thing contemptible. He magnified his shortcomings, accused himself of cowardice, not physical cowardice, but moral. All these years, while his love for Nance was growing, he should have been conquering the weakness that separated him from his fellows, should have been climbing the steep path of hardship, training himself to be strong as his passion for Nance Demaine.