He leaned a hand on the Red Squire’s shoulder, wiped a trickle of blood from some chance wound that had touched his forehead, glanced round at them with dim, unseeing eyes.
“Have I kept the house? Have I finished?”
“The house is in our keeping now. You’ve done well, my lad,” said the red-faced squire, with gruff tenderness.
“Then I’ll get to sleep, I think.”
And he would have fallen, but the squire held him up and, putting two rough arms about him, carried him upstairs.
“A well-plucked one,” he said, returning quickly. “And now, gentlemen, the house will be on fire, by your leave, if we don’t turn our hands to the pump.”
Nance, watching from the shadows, was bewildered by the speed and fury of it all—bewildered more by the business-like, quiet way in which these linen-coated gentry went in and out of hall, carrying buckets and quenching the last smouldering flames with water from the stable yard. This was war—war, with its horror, its gallantry, its comedy; but it was not the warfare she had pictured when she sang heroic ballads at the spinet.
And then the night’s uproar and its madness passed by her. She thought only of the master who had all but died just now to save the house—to save her honour. She could not face the busy hall, the man sprawling on the stair, head downward, where Rupert’s blow had left him. Instead, she went back along the corridor and up by the servants’ stairway, and found Rupert lying in a dead sleep in his own chamber, a lighted candle at his elbow, just as the red-faced squire had left him.
“My dear,” she said, knowing he could not hear, “my dear”—her voice broke in a deep, quiet laugh that had no meaning to her as yet—“they said you were the scholar. And I think they lied.”
She lifted her head by and by, hearing the squire’s voice below in the hall.