Nance flushed. She scarcely knew what she had said. “I do not need,” she said, with instinctive grace and dignity. “You know so much of them, and I so little; and I am sorry if--if I spoke in haste. I am so tired, and I forget the--the deference owing to your years.”
So then, because they stood very near each other for this moment, and because she feared intimacy just yet with the simple, happy glimpse of life that Nance had shown her, Sir Jasper’s wife drew her skirts about her and picked up the yapping, pampered thing she called a dog and kissed its nose. It was her signal for good-night.
“A woman likes deference, my dear,” she said sharply, “deference of all kinds, except that owing to--to advancing years. You sang out of tune there, Nance. Never to be made love to again; never again, so long as one’s little world lasts, to catch the glance, the little broken word of tribute--things that do not wrong one’s husband, Nance, but add a spice to the workaday, quiet road of love for him; they’re hard to give up, my dear.”
Nance looked at her with frank surprise. She was strong and untried yet; and Lady Royd was frail, but experienced so far as indolence allowed. And there was a deep gulf between them.
“I will take my candle up,” said Nance lamely.
“Yes, and sleep well, child. Dream of--oh, of love and honour and the foolish rosemary of life. And come sing to me to-morrow--of the things you’ve dreamed. Perhaps I spoke at random, Nance. I’m widowed of my husband; and this Rising never wore a lucky face to me--and--my temper is not gentle, Nance, I know.”
That night there were few who slept at Windyhough. Sir Jasper’s wife, alone with the wind that rattled at her window, made no disguise of the love that beat, strong and trusty, underneath her follies. Despite herself, she had come out at last into the road of life--the road of mire and jealousies and tragedy, lit far ahead by the single lamp of honour, for those whose eyes were trained to see it.
“I’m not worthy of him,” she moaned, drawing the sleepy spaniel toward her. “My husband climbs the bigger hills, while I--am weak, as Rupert is.”
Nance, too, lay awake. She was busy with what Lady Royd had named the rosemary of life. All her instincts rose in warm defence of that view of honour which Sir Jasper’s wife had slighted. And there were men, men in their own midst, who could love in the old knightly way. There was Will Underwood--and so she lost herself, half between waking and dreaming, in a maze of high perfection that she reared about his person. Of a truth Wild Will was in danger, had he known it. He had pressed his suit on Nance, had urged it, in and out of season, during the months that preceded this upset of the Rising. He had captured her fancy already, and her heart might follow any day; but he did not guess what simplicity and breadth of tenderness she would bring him, what answering devotion she would ask. Nance had the double gift--she had the woman’s instincts, the woman’s suppleness of fancy, but she had been reared in a house where a big, downright father and big, uncompromising brothers had trained her to the man’s code of life. She would never come to the wooing as to a one-sided bargain, giving all meekly and asking nothing in return. She would ask, with tenderest persistence, that her man, as she had said to Lady Royd, should claim knighthood at her hands once every while. Marriage, to her unproved heart, was a thing magical, renewing its romance each day--but renewing, too, that every-day and hard endeavour on which the true romance is founded.