She ran to get his sword, docile as a child, and laid it on the table. “I shall buckle it on for you, never fear,” she said, with the light in her eyes at last—the light he had sought and hungered for.
“Sweetheart, you—you care, then, after all?” He kissed her on the lips this time. “We shall go far together, you and I, in the Prince’s cause. Women sit at home, and pray—and their men fight the better for it. My dear, believe me, they fight the better for it.”
They faced each other, searching, as wind-driven folk do, for the larger air that cleanses human troubles. And suddenly she understood how secure was the bond that intimacy had tied about them. She had not guessed it till she came from her sheltered garden and faced the breezy hills of Lancashire at last.
And her husband, seeing her resolute, allowed himself a moment’s sickness, such as he had felt not long ago after saying good-bye to Oliphant high up the moor. He might not return. The odds were all against it. He was bidding a last farewell, perhaps, to the ordered life here, the lover’s zeal which his wife commanded from him still—to the son whom he had watched from babyhood, waiting always, with a father’s dogged hope, for signs of latent strength. In some queer way he thought most of his boy just now; the lad was lonely, and needed him.
Then he crushed the sickness down. The night’s road was dark and troublesome; but, whether he returned or no, there must needs be a golden end to it.
“What does it matter, wife?” he said, his voice quivering a little. “A little loneliness—in any case it would not be for long, sweetheart—and then—why, just that the Prince had called me, and we had answered, you and I——”
She swept round on him in a storm of misery and doubt. “Oh, Faith’s good enough in time of Peace. Women cherish it when days go easily, and chide their men for slackness. And the call comes—and then, God help us! we cling about your knees while you are resolute. It is the men who have true faith—the faith that matters and that helps them.”
He took her face into his two hands. She remembered that he had worn just this look, far off in the days of lavender and rosemary, when he had brought her home a bride to Windyhough and had kissed her loneliness away.
“What’s to fear? War or peace—what’s to fear? We’re not children, wife o’ mine.”
And “No!” she said, with brave submissiveness. And then again her face clouded with woe, and tenderness, and longing, as when hill-mists gather round the sun. “Ah, but yes!” she added petulantly. “We are like children—like children straying in the dark. You see the Prince taking London, with skirl of the pipes and swinging Highland kilts. I see you kneeling, husband, with your head upon the block.”