She had a high spirit—all her life she had had her way at last, in spite of her heartless, frivolous mother and her selfish, brilliant father, and this was a trial hard to bear. Clancarty was the first man who had not done her homage, who met her on her own ground and demanded that she should love him. Perhaps it was that which won her; howbeit, her eyes were dim with tears as she looked out of the window and looked, indeed, until the sun rose on another day.
CHAPTER XXI
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
IT was a small and desolate room, with bare rafters overhead, and the wind rattling fiercely at the old casements, while Denis was trying to keep a sickly fire of green wood alive upon the hearth. The floor was of stone, cold and bare, save for a few rushes strewn beside the truckle bed, and there was no light but that from the sputtering logs and one poor taper; there were only two chairs and one small table in the room beside the bed, but all was scrupulously clean, though barren and chilly beyond description.
And on the bed lay Lord Clancarty, his cheeks flushed with fever, his hair dishevelled, his eyes shining, and his hands ever and anon clutching at the coverlet fiercely whenever any chance movement gave him pain.
If the aspect of the place was poor, it was also desolately lonely; no sound reached their ears but the rustling of the wind in the tree tops without and the creaking of the old building itself. It was an old farmhouse, the dwelling of the widow of a Jacobite—for England was honey-combed with conspiracies and counter-conspiracies—and this woman, a rigid believer in the old order of things, had the courage to take the wounded nobleman under her roof; she could give him shelter, but as for comforts she had none to give. Here, too, with her connivance, Denis smuggled a young surgeon, one of the faithful, to tend the wound that the famous Radcliffe had dressed with his own hands on the field. The young practitioner shared the doubts of his senior, and shook his head gravely; the wounded man might live, but he was quite as likely to die. So, with these gloomy predictions, and the still more gloomy aid of the solemn visaged widow, Denis was left with almost an empty purse to guard and nurse the feverish patient.
Stricken with profound anxieties, the faithful Irishman fed the fire, kneeling before it, his back toward his master, to hide a face that betrayed his feelings too plainly. On the table lay Lord Clancarty’s cloak and plumed hat and the hilt of the sword that had served him so ill and there, too, was his pistol primed and ready for use. He lay watching Denis, fever flushed but in his senses, though more than once that night his mind had wandered.
The stillness of the place was broken by the stamping of a horse’s feet at no great distance.