Even now she could not bring herself to the effort. She paced up and down the floor of her bedchamber. Disdain of her position here, intemperate dislike of weaklings, the longing to be out and about under the free sky, were overwhelming in their call to this child who needed discipline. And, though she was Squire Demaine’s child, she resented this first, drab-coloured call of duty.
She braced herself to the effort. But she was bitter still, and some remembrance of her father’s teaching took her unawares. “Lady Royd comes from the south country, where they killed a Royal Stuart once,” she muttered. “She does not know—she cannot even learn—our northern ways. Sir Jasper lives or dies—but either way he lives. She does not know that either way he lives—as we count life up here.”
Nance was shaken by the passion known to women who have seen their men go out to war—the passion that finds no outlet in hard give-and-take—the desperate, keen heartache that is left to feed upon itself.
“I must go down,” she said, as if repeating a lesson hard to learn.
As she opened the door and crossed the landing, she heard a heavy footfall on the stair below, then Simon Foster’s laboured breathing. Some instinct of disaster chilled her. In this house of emptiness, with the wind roaming like an unquiet ghost down every corridor, she listened to the uncanny, stealthy upcoming. Once, years ago, she had heard men bringing home her brother, killed in the hunting-field; and it seemed to her that she was listening to the same sounds again, was feeling the same vague, unreasoning dread. Then she remembered that Rupert had been missing since dawn, and she was moved by some grief that struck deeper than she understood.
They turned the corner of the stair at last, and Nance saw Rupert coming up—Rupert, his face grey and tired as he leaned on Simon’s arm; Rupert, who looked older, manlier, more like Sir Jasper. And then, for no reason she could have given, she lost half her grief. At least he was not dead; and there was a look about him which stronger men of her acquaintance had worn when they were in the thick of trouble.
There was a long, mullioned window lighting the stairway head. And Rupert, looking up, saw Nance standing there—close to him, yet far away as some lady of dreams might stand. The keen winter’s sun, getting out from sleet-clouds, made a St. Luke’s summer round about her; and Nance, who was just comely, good to see, at other times, borrowed a strange beauty from the hour and place, and from the human pity that was troubling her.
Rupert halted on the landing, and looked at her as if she were food and drink to him. Then he flushed, and turned his head.
“You?” he said quietly. “I’d rather have met any one but you just now.”
“And why, my dear?” asked Nance, with simple tenderness.