“Where’s Will Underwood?” he was asking noisily. “We’ve got the fire under, and we can see each other’s faces now we’ve lit the candles. Where, by the Mass, is Underwood?”
Nance shivered. Through her weariness, through the panic of this sharp attack, she recalled the shame of her first love, recalled her meeting with Will Underwood on the high moors, when he had talked of loyalty as a thing of barter.
She stooped to touch Rupert as he slept. Here was a man, spent and weak; but here, proved through and through, was a cleanly gentleman who, against odds, had kept his obligations. Old affection stirred in her, and new pride in his conduct of the siege.
“Where’s Underwood?” came the squire’s voice again. “Is this some prank of his, to hide away?”
“With Nance Demaine, sir,” answered some pert youngster of the company. “Where else should he be? He was never one to waste time.”
“You’ve guessed the riddle, youngster.” The squire’s laugh was boisterous. “It’s odd to think of Underwood lovesick as a lad in his teens—especially just now, with all this litter in the hall.”
Outside the doorway Will Underwood was lying in the moonlight. He had been hit in the groin by Goldstein’s trooper, just as he answered with a charge of shot at six paces; and because the hills had bred him, he needed to get out into the open, taking his sickness with him.
He lay in the snow and looked up at the sky. He had never seen a whiter moon, a clearer light, at time of midwinter. Land and sky were glittering with frost, and overhead he saw the seven starry lamps of Charlie’s Wain. He was in bitter anguish, and knew that his hurt was mortal; he had no regret for that, because he knew, too, that Windyhough and Nance were saved. His bitterness was of the soul. Strain as he would, he could not shut out the picture—clear as the frosty sky above him—of Nance’s face when she met him on the moor—years ago, it seemed—and he thought he was his own ghost, come to warn her of his death.
He lived through that scene again in detail, heard Nance’s voice sweep all his prudent self-esteem aside. And her scorn bit deeper now, because he knew at last the strength of his fine regard for her. Passion was gone. Prudence was gone, because men near to death remember that they came naked into the world. He had lost the trickeries that had earned him the name of Wild Will, and was glad to let them go. He was aware only that he lay between here and hereafter, in pain of body and soul, and that he might take this last fence gladly, as on a hunting-morn, if he could wipe away the remembrance of one day gone by.
Many things grew clear to him as he lay and watched the moon. The wrath and pitiless hell-fire of Rigstones Chapel yielded to a wider outlook on the forgiveness of a Being greater than himself in charity. He found it easy to forgive his enemies, to forget his jealousy of Rupert, whom he had saved just now. But, warring against the peace he sought, and keeping the life quick in his tortured body, was remembrance of that day on the high moors. His work, good or ill, was done, and he longed to die, and could not.