Into the littered hall at Windyhough, while the squire paced up and down asking noisily for Will Underwood, old Nat the shepherd sauntered, pipe in hand. He was old, and a dreamer, and the gunshots and the fury had not disturbed him greatly.
Nat glanced round at the fallen men and the standing, at the doorway through whose blackened lintels the keen moonlight stole to drown the candle-flames. And he laughed, a gentle, pitying laugh. “It’s naught so much to brag about,” he said. “There were bonnier doings i’ the ’15 Rising. Men were men i’ those days.”
Nance wearied of it all as she stood by the master’s bed and listened to the talk downstairs. The house seemed full of men, and insolent coupling of her name with Will Underwood’s, and the sickly, pungent smell of blood and smoke. She was tired of gallantry and war, tired of her own weariness; and she went down the stair, stepping lightly over Rupert’s enemy, and came among them into hall.
“Your servant, Miss Nance,” said the red-faced squire, not guessing what a figure of comedy he cut, bowing under the folds of a white linen coat.
“I thank you, gentlemen,” said Nance unsteadily. “From my heart I thank you. You—you have done us service. And now, by your leave, I need to get out of doors. I—I have been in prison here.”
They made a lane of honour for her. They had been laggards in the Prince’s service; they were recusants, come at the last hour to prove themselves; but they felt, seeing Nance step down between them, her face stained with weariness and long vigil, that a royal lady had come into their midst.
Nance went through the charred doorway, and halted a moment as the pleasant frost-wind met her. The moonlight and the clean face of the sky gave her a sense of ease and liberty, after the cramped days indoors. The siege’s uproar, its stealthy quiet, were lost in this big silence of the frosty spaces overhead.
From the silence, from the snowy courtyard at her feet, a groan brought her back sharply to realities. She looked down, and saw Will Underwood lying face upwards to the stars. He, too, was linen-sheeted, as the squire had been; but there was no touch of comedy in his apparel. It seemed to Nance that he was shrouded for his bier.
They looked into each other’s eyes for a while, and some kindness in the girl’s glance, some regret to see him lying helpless with the fire of torment in his eyes, fired his courage.
“You?” she said gently. “You came to save the house?”