One of the girls, stirring in her sleep, touched a glass with her elbow, and it fell on its side, the dark wine splashing over the table, crawling to the edge, thudding in heavy drops on the shoe of the mistress of the house, who drew back her foot without waking. But her moving started up the man at her ear. He looked at her face, kissed her on the hair, and got to his feet with no noise. A sour smile curdled his face when he looked about the room, drunken and yellow-sick in the guttering candlelight.
Stretching himself, he made for the window and pulled back the curtain.
The mountain looked in on the wastrel company, with a black and blaming scowl—the mountain set in blackness at the foot, but its brow touching the first of a cold day.
Tree and bush stood like wraiths all about the garden, the river cried high and snell. George Mor turned and looked at the room and its sleeping company like corpses propped in chairs, in the light of candle and daybreak.
The smell of the drunken chamber fogged at the back of his throat. He laughed in a kind of bitter way, the lace shaking at his neck and wrist-bands: then his humour changed, and he rued the night and his merry life.
“I wish I was yont this cursed country,” said he to himself, shivering with cold. “'Tis these folk lead me a pretty spring, and had George Mor better luck of his company he was a decent man. And yet—and yet—who's George Mor to be better than his neighbours? As grow the fir-trees, some of them crooked and some of them straight, and we are the way the winds would have us!”
He was standing in the window yet, deep in the morning's grief, running his fingers among his curls.
Without warning the door of the room opened, and a man took one step in, soft, without noise, white-faced, and expecting no less than he found, by the look in his eyes. It was the goodwife's husband, still with the mud on his shoes and the sword on his belt. He beckoned on the fellow at the window, and went before him (the company still in their sleep), making for the big door, and George Mor as he followed lifted a sword from a pin.
Close by Adventurer the two men stopped. It was on a level round of old moss, damp but springy, hid from the house by some saugh-trees.
The master of the house spoke first. Said he, “It's no great surprise; they told me at the ferry over-by that strange carry-on and George Mor were keeping up the wife's heart in Castle Dark.”