The maid recovered a little of her courage and her native tartness. “She is, forbye. Have you come buying old claes, or are you looking just for a chance to steal siller from the hoose?”
Rupert caught at the help she gave him. “There’s the quick wit ye have, my lass,” he said.
“Ah, now, you’ll not be ‘my lassing’ me! I’ll bid ye keep your station, as I keep mine.”
“Well, then, my dear, go up to your mistress—the young mistress, I mean—and tell her there’s a pedlar wanting her—a pedlar from the hills of Lancashire. Tell her he comes buying and selling white favours.”
“So you’re just one of us,” said the maid, with surprising change of front. Then, her Scots caution getting the better of her again, “Your voice is o’ the gentry-folk,” she added, “but you’re a queer body i’ your claes. How should I know what you’d be stealing while I ran up to tell the mistress?”
Rupert, for answer, closed and barred the door behind him, and pointed up the stair. And then the maid, by the masterful, quiet way of him, knew that he came peddling honesty.
And by and by Nance came down, guessing who had come, because twice during the past month Rupert had sent word to her by messengers encountered haphazard in the Highland country.
At the stairfoot she halted, and never saw what clothes he wore. She looked only at his hard, tired face, at the straight carriage of him, as if he stood on parade. And, without her knowing it, or caring either way, a welcome, frank and luminous, brought a sudden beauty to the face that had been magical enough to him in the far-off Lancashire days.
The warmth of the lighted hall, the sense of courage and well-being that Nance had always brought him, were in sharp contrast with the night and the ceaseless peril out of doors. He went to her, and took her two hands, and would not be done with reading what her eyes had to tell him. There could be no doubting what had come to them—the love deep, and to the death, and loyal; the love, not to be bought or counterfeited, that touches common things with radiance.
Rupert was giddy with it all. He had only to stoop and claim her, without question asked or answered. And yet he would not. He fought against this sudden warmth that tempted him to forget his friends—those driven comrades who trusted him to see them safely on board ship to the French coast. He put Nance away, as a courtier might who fears to hurt his queen, and only the strength of him redeemed his ludicrous and muddied clothes.