“We’re all safe—except poor Will Underwood; and all busy, thanks to that game pup of yours. For a scholar, he shaped well.”
“Rupert kept the house?” Through all his trouble and unrest Sir Jasper tried to grasp the meaning of the charred doorway, the groans of wounded men above. “It did not seem so when I came indoors.”
So then the Squire told him, all in clipped, hurried speech, the way of it. And Sir Jasper forgot his wife, forgot his wound, and all the misery that had dogged his steps since Derby. He had an heir at last. Rupert, the well-beloved, had proved himself.
“Where is he?” he asked huskily.
“Asleep, too, by your leave. No, we’ll not wake him. He’s had three days of gunpowder and wakefulness, Royd. Let him sleep the clock round.”
The squire, seeing how weak Sir Jasper was, took him by the arm into the dining-chamber, filled him a measure of brandy, and pushed him gently into a chair.
“I came late to the wedding, Royd,” he said dryly, “but I’m in command here, till you find your strength.”
Sir Jasper, for the first time since Derby, was content. His wife was safe, and his heir was a man at last. And the red-faced squire, whom he had always liked, was no recusant, after all.
“You talked of carrying wounded men in?” he asked by and by. “I can hear them crying out for thirst.”
“That’s where they have us, Royd, these flea-bitten men of George’s,” said the squire, with another boisterous laugh. “They were crying like stuck pigs—out in the cold—and we had to take them in. Windyhough is a hospital, I tell you, owing to the queer Catholic training that weakens us. They’d not have done as much for us.”