He got stubbornly to his feet, and moved a pace or two across the floor; and then he grew weak and dizzy, and was glad to find his way again to the lang-settle.
“Ay, so!” said Shackleton’s wife. “It’s good for men-folk to learn, just time and time, how they can go weak as a little babby.”
“My wife needs me yonder.”
“Ay, and I need my goodman here. Exchange is no robbery, Sir Jasper.”
“She is in danger,” he snapped, with a sick man’s petulance.
“Well, so’s my man, I reckon—they’ve kept him yonder, or he’d have been home lang-syne.”
Then weariness conquered Sir Jasper; and he slept again till that day passed, and the next night, and half through the morning. It was his respite from remembrance of the retreat from Derby, from the wound that kept him out of action.
“You’ll do nicely now,” said Shackleton’s wife, glancing round from ironing a shirt of her husband’s. “You’ve got the look of your old self about you, Sir Jasper.”
The wound itself was of less account than the bleeding that had followed it; and by nightfall he was waiting impatiently until the shepherd saddled his mare and brought her to the door.
The farm-wife looked him up and down, with the frank glance that had only friendliness and extreme solicitude behind it. “Eh, but you look sick and wambly,” she said. “Can you sit a horse, Sir Jasper?”