She was past argument or quiet persuasion. They ate and drank their fill that night, because they needed it—and their needs were the King's just now—and on the morrow, when they had cursed their wounds, and prayed for further sleep, and got up again for whatever chanced, they found Graham's widow still intractable. They told her that the safety of many women-folk was in her hands.
"I trust them to you," she said. "There's an old nurse of mine lives up in a fold of the hills yonder. They will not find me there, and I care little if they do. Meanwhile, I shall get down each night and morning to pray for the soul of a gallant gentleman who has unlocked the Gate"—her eyes were luminous with a temperate fire—"unlocked it a little ahead of me. He has left it on the latch."
The Squire bent to her hand. "Madam," he said, his roughness broken up, as honest moorland soil is broken when it is asked to rear pleasant crops—"madam, I've a wife in Yoredale, I. She carries your sort of heart, I think. Of your charity, pray for her till I come."
"I shall pray, sir."
And so the Riding Metcalfs went from Norton Conyers, with an added burden of women-folk, but with a sense of rosemary and starshine, as if they had tarried for a while in some wayside Calvary.
CHAPTER XXII.
MISS BINGHAM.
It was no usual comradeship that held between the Royalists who gathered in one company after Marston Moor was lost to the King. They travelled through vile roads—roads broken up by incessant rains—they camped wherever they found a patch of drier ground for the night's sleep. But never for a moment did they lose the glamour that attached to the person of King Charles. Like a beacon-light, the thought of the half-vanquished Stuart went steadily in front of them. Their strength lay in this—that, whether death or life arrived, they knew the venture well worth while.
The life had a strange savour of its own. The Nappa Squire, the late Governor of Knaresborough and his officers, Lady Ingilby—all had known the weight of harsh responsibility so long as the King's cause was alive in the North. The cause was dead now. There was no need to be at strain, sleeping or waking, with the sense that it rested with each of them to keep the monarchy secure. There was asked of them only a haphazard and stimulating warfare, of the sort dear to all hillmen.
Scarborough Castle fell, and when the news was brought—they were dining at the moment in a wooded dell between Beamsley and Langbar—the Governor lifted his hat with pleasant gravity.