It was the song of a cavalier, written to his wife the night before he went to execution for the Stuart’s sake. And it had lived, this ballad, because to its core it rang true to the heart’s love of a man. And Nance was singing it as if she understood its depth and meaning. This was the man’s love, royal, simple, courageous, of which she had talked to Lady Royd not long ago, for which she had been laughed at by the older woman. Yet one man at least had found grace to carry such love with him unblemished to the scaffold. The resignation, the willing sacrifice for kingship’s sake summed up by “the lonely tryst to keep,” as if this were a little matter—the human note of loss and heartbreak when she reached the last love confession, strong, tender, final in its simplicity—Nance’s voice found breadth and compass for them all, as if she had stood by this cavalier long dead, feeling pulse by pulse with him. And so, in a sense, she had; for these royalists of Lancashire had faults and weaknesses in plenty, but they had been strong in this—from generation to generation they had reared their children to a gospel resolute and thorough as the words of this old ballad.
Nance lingered on those last words as if they haunted her—“I give him all my wealth.” And Rupert, standing in the doorway, was aware that, even to his eyes, Nance had never shown herself so tender and complete. She leaned over the spinet, touching a key idly now and then; and her thoughts were of Will Underwood, who had courage of a sort, a fine, reckless horsemanship that was needed by the Rising; of Wild Will, whose whole, big, dashing make-believe of character was ruined by a mean calculation, a need to keep houseroom and good cheer safe about him. She remembered her trust in him, their meeting on the moor, the sick, helpless misery that followed. And then she thought of Rupert, standing scholarly and apart from life—no figure of a hero, but one whom she trusted, in some queer way, to die for the faith that was in him, if need asked. And then again she laughed, a little, mournful laugh of trouble and bewilderment. Life seemed so wayward and haphazard, such a waste of qualities that were hindered by weaknesses tragic in their littleness. If Rupert’s steady soul could be housed in Will Underwood’s fine, dominant body, the world would see a man after its own heart.
And Rupert had his own thoughts, too, in this silence they were sharing. He knew to a heart-beat the way of his love for Nance, the gladness and the torture of it; and again he wondered, with passionate dismay, that he had done so little to make himself a man of both worlds, ready to fight through the open roads for her. He had given her a regard that, by its very strength and quality, was an honour in the giving and the receiving; he had built high dreams about her, feeling her remote and unattainable; but he had failed in common sense, in grasp of the truth that a man, before he reaches the hilltops where high dreams find reality, must climb the workaday, rough fields. He understood all this, knew for the first time that his father had been just in leaving him behind, because the fighting-line needs men who can use their two hands, can sit a horse, can face, not death only but all the harsh, unlovely details that war asks of men. His humiliation was bitter and complete. There was Nance, sitting at the spinet, the gusty candlelight playing about her trim, royal little figure, and she was desirable beyond belief; and yet he knew that she stood, not for faith only but for deeds, that he had only gone a few paces on the road that led to the fulfilment of his dreams.
The silence was so intimate, so full of the strife that hinders comrade souls at times, that Nance knew she was not alone. She glanced up, saw Rupert standing in the doorway, read the misery and longing in his face. For women have a gift denied to men—they see us as an open book, clear for them to read, while we can only sight them at odd moments, like startled deer that cross the mountain mists.
“You’re sad, my dear,” she said, with pleasant handling of the intimacy that had held between them since they were boy and girl together.
“No,” he answered, hard pressed and dour. “I am—your fool, Nance, as I always was.”
“Come sit beside me,” she commanded. “I shall sing Stuart songs to you—sing them till you hear the pipes go screeling up Ben Ore, till I see the good light in your face again.”
Her tenderness was hard to combat. “I need no Stuart songs,” he said, with savage bluntness.
“Why, then, you’re changeable. You liked them once.”
“I’ll like them again, Nance—but not to-night. It is Stuart deeds I ask, and they do not come my way.”