No question but Master Neville felt the double bereavement—the very shock of it strewed silver threads in his black hair. But he was one of those men who, with an outward frankness of address, keep their inner lives as sealed books from their neighbours—almost, it would seem, from the men themselves. He made no sign as he sat alone in his empty hall, drank his flagon of wine or tankard of ale, and professed to busy himself with his steward’s accounts, the flies for his fishing, or the play-books he was fond of studying. He rode, and hunted, and visited his neighbours much as usual. There might be a shade of greater reserve and sternness in his manner, and he was in no haste to replace the madam who was gone by a new madam to preside over the old court; but he was still a man who trolled his song, took his wild jest, and rather made a parade of his half-boisterous, half-sardonic philosophy.
But he always spared kindly notice for Roy and Reine—made them be seen to, had them about him, playing with them, pulling their long ears, teaching them tricks, praising and rewarding them with tit-bits—only not plaguing them so much as of old—not more than the creatures liked now. He certainly preferred the small encumbrances to any fox-hound or lurcher in his kennel, which had brought him credit, or secured him a prey. He would sooner suffer inconvenience himself than have Roy and Reine disturbed; he would shrug his broad shoulders and take another seat, to the great disgust of his old housekeeper, when he found the two nestling together, fast asleep, in the depths of his great arm-chair.
The vicar’s eyes used to moisten when he came upon the tall strong man and his pets. “I suppose their utter unconsciousness, together with their fondness, doth soothe the soreness and the void in his heart,” said Master Arundel to himself; “and their entire dependence on him makes an appeal to the tenderness that is at the bottom of Master Neville’s imperious, boastful nature.”
The time came when Master Neville, with every man of any mind or energy in the country, was roused by the state of public affairs—when he had no longer leisure to manufacture his flies and ponder over his stage saws—when he was rarely at home, or else had a host of company with him. Riders and runners—posts, with carefully sealed and disposed of letters, were constantly drawing bridle, or pausing footsore under the gateway of the court. There was an eager rummaging out of rusty matchlocks and swords, and an arming and marshalling of the servants, and such tenants as Master Neville’s example and authority constrained. At last a compact band of some twenty or thirty retainers, with the squire—looking a proper man in his glittering steel morion and breastplate—dashed with a flourish out of the courtyard.
But first Master Neville stood ready to start in the hall, and looked for an instant all around him, from the musicians’ gallery to the deep recesses of the window that were draped with clematis and jessamine. There was nobody to take leave of save Roy and Reine, till Dame Hynd, covertly wiping her eyes, stole to the door, under pretence of receiving her master’s last orders, for he was not a man who could brook spying on his privacy, or an unsolicited intrusion into states of feeling which he did not confess even to himself, whether the offender were intimate friend or old servant. She discovered Master Neville, in what looked like a reverie, drawing Roy’s ears through the fingers of one hand, and holding up a finger of the other to enjoin on Reine the refraining from that jealousy to which she was prone.
“I am afraid the little brutes will have forgot my pretty lessons, and will be as stupid and fat as yourself, dame, before I return,” he said, with a mixture of mockery and rudeness, testy at the interruption; and then he turned and begged her to forgive him, with an odd candid sweetness that went far to breaking her heart. “Very likely that day will never come, and so you will not mind this piece of impudence any more than the rest of my offences. You will keep the house, though it be for my worshipful cousin and heir, and see that, so far as you can help it, neither old horse nor dog” (he was somewhat ashamed of his partiality for the foolish spaniels, and thus did not particularise them further), “which I am leaving behind me, come to grief. And you will wish me good-bye and good luck; hey, dame?”
It was a breezy summer morning when Master Neville rode away at the head of his band. It was a foggy winter day, with years between, when he came back, attended by no more than two followers, and, shrouded in the early darkness of a December afternoon, sought to get into the old court, to spend a single night there. His arrival was unexpected; but though it had been otherwise, neither Dame Hynd, who remembered not only his marriage but his baptism, nor any other attached family friend, dared have made the least demonstration of joy and welcome.
Fortune, or the will of Providence, had been against Master Neville and his cause. The King’s troops had been beaten again and again, alike in fenced cities and in the open field, before three weary men, soiled with travel and rough living, approached by back ways and side gates, skulking in the gloom into the house of which one of them was the master.
“Alack and well-a-day!” cried Dame Hynd, wringing her hands at the sorry plight of a gallant gentleman.