"Oh, I said. What will not women say? Their tongues are wayward."
"For my part, give me men," said Kit, with blunt challenge.
The end of that escapade was a high fever, that taxed Miss Bingham's skill and the patience that was foreign to her. Michael, too, in spite of all his gaiety, saw death come very close to his bedside. It was not the blows they had taken here in Knaresborough that had knocked their strength to bits. In the months that had passed since the riding out from Yoredale, each had taken wounds, time and time again, had tied any sort of bandage round them, and gone forward to the next sharp attack. They were proud of their tough breed, and had taken liberties with a strength that was only human, after all. And now they were laid by in a backwater of life, like riddled battleships in need of overhauling.
It was when Kit was in that odd half-way land between great weakness and returning strength that a sudden turmoil came to him. His memory of Joan Grant grew weak and fugitive. With him day by day was Miss Bingham, who had forgotten long since how to pick a quarrel. The beauty of an experience new to her spoiled life gave warmth and colour to a face that had once been merely pretty.
On one of these afternoons—a spurt of rain against the windows, and the sullen roar of guns outside—he lay watching her as she sat by the bedside, busy with a foolish piece of embroidery. She was very near, had nursed him with devotion, had smoothed his pillow many times for him.
"Agnes," he said, "what will you say to me when my strength comes back, and I've brought Rupert into York?"
So then she knew that battle is not only for the men. She met her trouble with a courage that surprised her. "I—I should bid my Puritan go seek the lady who once flouted him. Oh, boy, you're in a dream! When you wake, remember that I nursed you back to health."
Two days later Kit was so far recovered that he was allowed to move abroad; and, while his strength was returning, the Vicar was his close companion. Something in Kit's bearing—dour hardihood half concealing some spiritual fire that burned beneath it—had attracted this parish priest since the lad's first coming. He showed him the comely parsonage, with its garden sloping to the wide bosom of the Nidd; talked of the town's beauty and antiquity—topics dear to him. Then, one afternoon, near gloaming, he led him up the steep face of the cliff to St. Robert's cell.
What is sown in the time between great sickness and recovery—good or ill—is apt to abide with a man, like impressions of the earlier childhood. And Kit, until he died, would not forget this hermitage, carved out of the solid rock that bottomed the whole town of Knaresborough. Without, facing the world that St. Robert had known, was his coat-of-arms, as if daring gossip to deny his record in the stress of battle. Within was a narrow chamber, roofed and floored by rock; at one end an altar, at the side a bed of stone—that, and the water dripping from the walls, and a strange sense of peace and holiness, as if a spirit brooded round about the place.
"Here is peace, sir," said Kit, a quick fire glowing in his eyes.