At Will Underwood’s house, meanwhile, the laggard gentry of Lancashire were sitting over their wine, and were cursing this snowfall that would not let them hunt to-morrow. And they were troubled, all of them; for they knew that better men were facing hardship on the London road, while they, from faults of sloth or caution, were sheltered by house-walls. They were men, after all, under the infirmities that hindered them; and ease, for its own sake, never yet appealed for long to hearts built for weather and adventure. They needed hard exercise, to blunt the edge of conscience; and they were fretful, ready to pick quarrels among themselves, because they knew that the morrow must be spent in idleness.
“We can always drink, gentlemen,” said Underwood, pushing the bottle round. “That is one consolation.”
“Likely to be our only one,” snapped his neighbour, “if this cursed snow stays on the ground. And we can drink half the night, Underwood—but not all the day as well. You can have too much of a pastime.”
“What are they doing London way, I wonder?” put in a smooth-faced youngster, gibing at himself and all of them. “They’ll have bonnie roads to travel.”
Underwood remembered a day, not long ago, when he had met Nance Demaine on the moor, recalled the look in her face as she gave him her kerchief and bade him use it as a flag of truce “when her men returned from the crowning.” He got to his feet and reached across the table with clenched fist. “How dare you!” he said savagely. “We’re all wearing the white feather, and you twit us with it, you young fool.”
They drew back from him for a moment. His pain and fury were so evident, his easy-going temper so completely broken, that they thought him drunk, when in reality he was vastly sober—so sobered that he saw himself a creature pitiful and time-serving.
And the youngster, taking fire in turn, said that he would be called fool by no man without asking satisfaction; and swords would have been out had not Underwood’s neighbour, a jolly, red-faced squire who liked to drink his wine in peace, taken the situation at a canter.
“For shame, Underwood!” he said, laying a sharp hand on his shoulder. “It would be no duel—it would be another slaughter of the innocents. To fight a boy like that——”
“Not very innocent, by your leave,” broke in the youngster, with such palpable affront, such pride in his budding vices, that the old squire laughed outrageously.
“By gad! not very innocent!” he echoed, with another rolling laugh. “See the cockrel standing up to crow—all red about the gills, gentlemen. Let’s fill our glasses and drink to his growing comb.”