"Oh, yes," assented Joan, laughing at herself because he was not the suitor now, but the lord paramount, who must be obeyed. "Proceed, Captain Metcalf—or have they made you colonel since yesterday? Promotion comes so quickly in time of war."
"You can flout me later," said Christopher, with country stolidness.
He repeated the rest of the message, and made sure that she had it by heart. "My folk are up the moor," he finished. "They’re waiting near the High Cross till they hear what Lady Ingilby asks of them."
Joan Grant again, for no reason that she understood, grew lenient with this man’s bluntness, his disregard of the glamour she had been able once to weave about him as a spider spins its threads.
"Your folk are as near as High Cross, and you ask no more of me?"
"What is there to ask, except that you get into your carriage and find Lady Ingilby? My work’s done, now that I have a messenger."
She looked him in the face. In all her life of coquetry and whims, Miss Grant had never stood so close to the reality that is beauty. She smiled gravely, turned without a word, and got into her carriage.
"Pansy," she said, as they were covering the short journey to the Castle, "I have met a man to-day."
"Snares o’ Belial, most of them," murmured Pansy.
"He was tied by ropes, and I think he was in pain, his face was so grey and drawn. It did not seem to matter. He had all his folk at call, and would not summon them, except for Lady Ingilby’s needs. He forgot his own."
"Knighthood," said Pansy, in her practical, quiet voice. "He always had the way of it."
So Miss Grant boxed her on the ears for her pains. "Small use in that, girl, if he dies in the middle of the business."
She stopped the carriage, summoned old Ben Waddilove, who rode in front to guard her journey. "Ben, do you know the High Cross on the moor?" she asked.
"I should do, Miss Joan, seeing I was reared i’ this country before I went to Nappa."
"Then ride for it. You’ll find Squire Metcalf and his men there. Tell him that his son is sitting on a bench at Ripley, tied hand and foot."
After the loiterers of the village had watched Miss Grant’s carriage out of sight, they turned again to baiting Christopher, until this diversion was interrupted by Drinkwater coming with his men from supper in the tavern. Whether the man’s digestion was wrong, or his heart out of place, only a physician could have told; but it happened always that a full meal brought out his worst qualities.