“Bah, there’s no great harm done. Get him to bed, dame, and when he wakes see that you put the youngster in a good temper.”
Isaac beckoned his son away, Ursula hobbling off to drag clean sheets from the linen-press. Calling Bess, who was watching Jeffray, she bade her fetch a new blanket and the best quilt from the oak chest on the stairs. Isaac had taken Jeffray’s mare, and, still rating Dan, stabled her in the byre where Ursula kept her cows.
The old woman pattered into her bedroom on the ground floor, dragged the clothes from the four-poster, while Bess came in bearing a new blanket and a patch-work quilt of many colors. Between them they spread the clean sheets, stripped off Jeffray’s clothes, and put him to bed there in his shirt. Ursula made a stew of friar’s-balsam, and after tearing soft linen into strips, washed Jeffray’s wound and bound up his head. Then she went out to speak with Isaac in the kitchen, leaving Bess alone to watch by the bed.
It was growing dark when Jeffray recovered consciousness, and awoke to find great beams above his head, and the sunset reddening the narrow casement of a room. He fingered his bandaged head, looked round him curiously, and would have struggled up in the bed but for the swooping of Bess’s strong brown hand upon his shoulder. She had been sitting there silently in the twilight, thinking of the dream she had dreamed on St. Agnes’s Eve, and studying Jeffray’s pale and inanimate face.
At his wakening she had set her hand upon his shoulder, as though to hint that he was under fair protection. Old Ursula had whispered to the girl that she was to be polite, nay, servile, to the gentleman, since the Squire of Rodenham might prove a troublesome neighbor should he care to charge Dan with violence. Servility, however, was not part of Bess’s nature. She did not even call Mr. Richard “sir,” and though she abated her masterfulness, she spoke to him as to an equal.
“Bide still,” she said, leaning over him and looking in his eyes, “you are safe with us.”
Richard could see the girl’s face in the dusk, white beneath the dead black hair. There was the deliciousness of youth in the rare roundness of her cheek, the smooth low forehead, the strong chin and pouting mouth.
“Where am I?” he asked her, quietly, with his hands lying on the many-colored quilt.
“In our cottage—Ursula’s cottage. I made Dan carry you home from the woods.”
“Ah, I had the worst of it. What happened? Tell me.”