"Ask the stream." Kit's laugh was unsteady, and his voice seemed to come from far-away. "To die for the King—it may not be ease, but surely it is happiness."
"Talk to me. Tell me how he looked—the King—when you saw him there in Oxford. And Rupert? His name alone brings back the old Crusading days, before we grew tired of poetry."
She beguiled him into talk. She spun a web about him, fine as gossamer and strong as hempen rope. All the route south to Oxford—the return by way of Lathom House—the queer way of their entry into York—took on a new significance and glamour as she prompted him with eager, maidish questions.
"So you came to York as a Puritan? There would be no great disguise in that, as I have told you often. Ah, no wrath, I pray you! Women laugh at—at those they care for, lest they care too much."
Kit seemed to be in some poppyland of dreams. He had travelled that country once already in Miss Bingham's company—at the ferry-steps in Knaresborough. Then he had been weak of body, recovering slowly from a sickness she had nursed. Now he was hale and ruddy; but there is a weakness of great health, and this found him now. Gallop and trot over perilous roads, rude bivouacs by night and rough-handed war by day—these had been his life since, long ago, he had left the ripening Yoredale corn. He was weary of the effort, now that it was over; and all the gardens he had known, all the ease and softness of summer skies, were gathered round this woman who shared the glen with him.
"And there was Marston," she said, breaking the silence.
"Ay, God knows there was Marston. Rupert, the Squire, and I—the three of us lying in a bean-field, listening to the wounded there in Wilstrop Wood—I can hear the uproar now."
"Ah! forget it. It is over and done with. You have earned your ease."
Kit believed it. The poppy odours were about him, thick as the scent of flowering beans that had all but sent Rupert and himself to their last sleep at Marston. The strong, up-country gospel whispered at his ear that no man earns his ease this side the grave. He would not heed the whisper. It was good to be here with the lapping water, the smell of woodland growth, the woman who cast pleasant spells about him.
A great pity stirred in her, against her will. She grew aware of things beyond the dalliance of each day's affairs. Here, weak in her hands, was a man to be made or marred; and he seemed well on the way to lose all because she bade him. Compunction came to her. She was minded to laugh out of court this grave affair, and send him out, as she had done others, with great faith in her own instability.