“There’s no need, my lady,” broke in Simon Foster. He had forgotten the manners of a trained servant, and was back again in the happy days when he had carried a pike for the Cause and did not know it lost. “I’ve mended worse matters than this in my time. You, Martha, get bandages. They’re somewhere handy—we brought plenty in at haytime, along with the powder-kegs.”
Lady Royd did not rebuke him. Martha, who not long since had tempted him to folly, went off submissively to do his bidding. It seemed natural to these women that a man should be in command—a man who knew his mind and did not turn aside.
“There,” said Simon, after he had strapped the ankle. “It will bother ye a while, master, but there’s a lot o’ time for rest these days at Windyhough. Let me gi’e ye an arm up the stair. Ye’d best get to bed, I reckon.”
Nance Demaine had kept to her room this morning. They had brought her to Windyhough, had taken her mare, had left her derelict in a house that harboured only memories of past deeds. The active men were gone; the mettled horses were gone; she was bidden to keep within four walls, and wait, and pray. And she wished neither to pray nor to be stifled by four house-walls; she longed to be out in the open country, following the open road that had led to her heart’s desire. Tired of her own thoughts at last, she went out on to the landing, with a restless sense that duty was calling her below-stairs; but she got no farther than the window that looked on a stormy sweep of moorland.
Nance was in a bitter mood, as she sat in the window-seat and watched the white, lifeless hills, the sodden fields. Squire Demaine had trained her to love of galloping and loyalty, had taught her that England’s one, prime need was to see a Stuart on the throne again; and now, when deeds were asked of men and women both, he had left her here, to weave samplers, or to help Lady Royd brew simples in the stillroom, while they waited for their men to come home from the slaying.
There was Will Underwood, too. With the obstinacy that attaches to a girl’s first love, she was warm in defence of him against the men who had liked him—some few of them—but had never trusted him. He had not come to claim her kerchief. Well, he would claim it another day; he had his own reasons, doubtless, for joining the Meet farther south. Some urgent message had reached him—from the Prince himself, may be—bidding him ride out on an errand of especial danger. No surmise was too wild to find acceptance. He was so strong, so graceful and well-favoured; he sat his horse so well, courted risks which prudent riders declined. It was fitting that he should be chosen for some post demanding gaiety, a firm seat in saddle, and reckless courage.
Nance, for all the sleety outlook, was seeing this Rising again as a warm, impulsive drama. She had watched Sir Jasper and her father ride out, had been chilled by their simple gravity; but she had forgotten the lesson already, in her girl’s need for the alluring and the picturesque. This love of hers for Underwood was an answer to the like need. At all hazards she must have warmth and colour, to feed her young, impulsive dreams of a world built in the midst of fairyland. She could not know, just yet, that the true warmth, the true, vivid colours come to those who, not concerned with the fairyland of make-believe, ride leal and trusty through the wind that stings their faces, over the sloppy, ill-found roads that spatter them with mud.
She was desolate, this child who sat in the window-seat and constructed all afresh the picture of her hero-lover. She was weaving one of the samplers she despised, after all—not with wool and canvas, but in fancy’s loom. Obstinate in her demand for vivid drama, she was following Will Underwood already on this errand that the Prince had entrusted to his care. She saw him riding through the dangerous night roads, and prayed for his safety, at each corner of a highway peopled with assassins. She saw him galloping recklessly in open daylight, meeting odds laughable in their overwhelming number, killing his men, not singly but by scores, as he rode on, untouched, and gay, and loyal to his trust. It is so that young love is apt to make its idol a knight miraculous, moving through a cloud-land too ethereal for the needs of each day as it comes. Nance Demaine could hold her own in the open country; but here, shut in by the walls of a house that was old and dumb, waiting for the men’s return, she reached out for Will Underwood’s help, and needed him—or needed the untried, easy air of romance that he carried with him.
She got up from the window-seat at last. The sleet and the piping wind wearied her. She was tired already of inaction, ashamed of the thoughts that could not keep away from pictures of Will Underwood, riding on the Prince’s service. She remembered that she was a guest here, that she must get away from her dreams as best she might.
“I must go down,” she said fretfully. “Lady Royd will be needing me. And she’ll take my hands, and cry a little, and ask me, ‘Will Sir Jasper live?’ And then she’ll kiss me, and cry again, and ask, ‘Will Sir Jasper die?’ Oh, I know it all beforehand! But I must go down.”