“Faintness—nothing more.”
Wilson’s words seemed to send Jeffray’s thoughts winging back to the chapel in the valley. He remembered the whole scene as though it had been burned into his brain with fire. That look, so shamed and piteous, that Bess had given him, as though she yearned to him from amid the ruins of her pride! There would be the brutal bride—ale, the lewd jesting, the drinking, the rough, clownish games. Then would come scrambling for the bride’s ribbons and for the rosemary she had worn. Her clean shift would be laid out on the bed all decked with bays and flowers. Cake and wine would be taken betwixt the bellowing of coarse and indecent songs.
Peter Gladden’s placid and imperturbable face seemed to offer an unconscious admonition towards calmness as he came forward to help his master out of the chaise. Jeffray appeared to have become oblivious of the fact that he was a convalescent; he brushed Gladden’s arm aside, threw off his cloak, and tossed it aside in the porch.
“Gladden,” he said, with a peculiar tightness about the mouth, “I want to speak with you alone in the library.”
“At once, sir?”
There was just the faintest shade of curiosity upon the butler’s face.
“Yes, Gladden, at once. Dick, you will excuse me, I have some private business on hand.”
Wilson, who was rubbing Dame Meg’s black muzzle and wondering what spiritual quicksilver had diffused itself in Jeffray’s blood, looked hard at Richard, and warned him not to try his strength too greatly.
“You must keep an eye on your master, Gladden,” he said, with a twinkle. “I thought we should have had him in a dead faint on the road this morning.”
The butler was still standing in the porch, leaning forward slightly from the hips, with an expression of deferential concern on his colorless face.