Nance was obstinate in her loyalty to friends; yet she remembered now stray hints, odds and ends of scandal passed between the women after dinner, while they waited for the men to join them; and all had been agreed that Will Underwood had the gift of making the last woman who engaged his ardour believe she was the first.
Lady Royd warmed her hands at the fire again, and laughed gently. “Why, child, you’re half in love with him, like the rest of us. I know it by your silence.”
And Nance, whose good-humour was a byword among her intimates, found her temper snap, like any common, ill-forged sword might do. “By your leave,” she said, “I never did anything by halves. My friends are my friends. I’m loyal, Lady Royd.”
“Yes, yes--and I--am middle-aged, my dear, and the fire grows cold already.”
There was appeal in the older woman’s voice. She needed the girl’s strength, her windy, moor-swept grasp of the big hills and the bigger faith. But Nance was full of her own troubles, and would not heed.
“There are dogs left at Windyhough?” she said, moving to the door. “Well, then, let me take them for a scamper. I cannot stay in prison, Lady Royd.”
Nance swept out of the parlour, with its faded scent of rose-leaves, donned hat and cloak, and went out in hot rebellion to cool her fever in the nipping wind. She did not guess how she was needed by this frail, discontented woman she had left indoors.
Lady Royd, indeed, was human--no more, no less. She could not escape in a moment from the spoiled, settled habits of a lifetime. Sir Jasper had ridden out, and the misery of it had been sudden, agonising. Rupert had blundered home, in his derelict way, with a sprained ankle and a face as white as the hills he loved; and the motherhood in her, untrained, suppressed, had cut through her like a knife. All was desolation here; and she thought of her homeland--of the south country, where winds blew soft and quiet, and lilac bloomed before the leaf-buds had well broken here in Lancashire--and she was hidden by a mist of desperate self-pity.
Like Rupert, when he found himself lying in the mud of Langton Road not long ago and heard his horse go galloping down the wind, she thought of death as an easy pathway of escape. Like Rupert, she was not needed here. She was not of the breed that rides out, easy in saddle, on such heroic, foolish errands as Sir Jasper coveted. And yet, when she came to face the matter, she had not courage, either, to die and venture into the cold unknown beyond.