She smiled pleasantly at this man in evil mood. "Sir, that is not like you. If your courtesy towards women has gone, too, then chivalry is ended for all time."
The Metcalfs waited for the Squire's rejoinder. None guessed how the rebuke would take him; but all knew how deep he was wading in the chill bog of adversity. They saw him lift his head in fury, saw him relent with hardship.
"Miss Bingham," he said, "there was a sorrow and a madness at my heart. You are right. If I forget courtesy toward women, I forget the wife who bred tall sons for me in Yoredale."
He went apart that night and took counsel of his God, on the high lands where the birds seemed to rise for matins almost as soon as evensong was ended. He came down again for early breakfast in the woodland camp, with all the grace of youth about him, in high spirits, ready for the day's surprises.
CHAPTER XXIII.
YOREDALE.
From that day forward, the first strangeness of their gipsy life grew to be familiar, usual. Little by little the Parliament soldiery went south or westward, to share in the attack on Royalist garrisons still unaffected by the disastrous news from Yorkshire; but the country was infested by roving bands of cut-purses and murderers—men who had hung on the skirts of civil war, ready to be King's men or Levellers, when they knew which side claimed the victory.
It was the exploits of these prowling rascals that set many a story going of the outrages committed by true Roundheads, who had no share in them; but the Squire of Nappa was not concerned with public rumour or the judgment of generations to come after. His whole heart—all the untiring watchfulness that had made him a leader of picked cavalry—were centred in this new, appalling peril. Day by day the raff and jetsom of the country moved abroad in numbers that steadily increased. They were not dangerous in the open against the disciplined men of Knaresborough and Nappa; but they asked for constant vigilance, as if the wolf-packs of old days had returned to haunt these moorland solitudes.
They were heading by short stages to Nappa; for, as the Squire explained, there was room enough in house and outbuildings to house them all, and they might well hold it for the King, if the chance of war brought the tumult North again.
"A hard-bitten bull-dog, you," said the Governor of Knaresborough.