Part 21

The Squire's wife watched it brewing, this new menace to all that was left of her happiness. She knew, that it was idle to resist or to persuade. She had bred men-sons for the King's service, and must abide by it.

Joan Grant was younger to experience. First-love was hindering her vision of what her man must do before he came to his kingdom; and she quarrelled openly with Christopher, as they came home together through the gloaming August fields.

"So you are weary of me in a month?" she said, halting at the stile. "Ah, the pity of it. It was here--or have you forgotten?--that I bade you climb high if you would find my heart. And you climbed and--and found it, and now you talk of battle--only of battle and the King."

All his world seemed to fail him--the will to ride out again until there was no more asked of him but to return and claim her--the certainty that she would be the first to give God-speed to his errand--all were drowned in this storm of tears and petulance that broke about him. Yet he remembered the sword that had stood, its point in the woodland stream, its hilt against the clear, blue sky above. He did not waver this time, for his love was no beguilement, but a spur that urged him forward.

"I go," he said roughly.

"And if you lose me in the going?"

"Then I lose you--there's no choice."

She got down from the stile, rebellious, fitful as a gusty spring. It was only when they neared the homestead that she turned, her eyes bright and eager, and touched his hand. "I am glad--oh, I am glad!" she said.

Late that afternoon Miss Bingham and little Blake had gone for a moorland ride together. Blake had made a false recovery from his weakness, as soon as he learned that there was to be another riding-out, and had urged that he must get his mare in trim again by daily rides. And Miss Bingham had insisted that his nurse went with him, lest he fell by the way.

In all her wide experience of men she had not met one so gay, so tranquil, so entirely master of what had been, of what was to come, as this little Irishman whose health had gone down the stream of high adventure. With a broken heart and a broken body, he thought only of the coming rides through lonely night-roads, of Meccas riding again for the King they served, of the dust and rain of circumstance. He remembered droll stories, flavoured by Irish wit and heedlessness. He fell, between whiles, into passionate hope of what was to come, when the King came to his own in the south country, by help of the Riding Metcalfs, and drove the rebels from the north. Then, with a gentleness that laughed at itself, he explained that it was good to have sat on the ferry-steps at Knaresborough.

"I lost--but the stakes were well worth winning. The Blakes were ever gamblers."

She had great skill in tending the wounded. In the man's face she read many signs of bodily weakness. His voice--his detachment from the gross affairs of life--told their own tale. But she did not look for it so soon.

At the gate of the farmstead, just as he dismounted, Blake fell prone in the roadway, and tried to rise, and could not.

When Joan and Kit Metcalf returned--it might be a half-hour later--they found Miss Bingham kneeling at the dead man's side. And her face, when she lifted it, was a woman's face--grave, charitable, tender with some forward hope.

"Here's little Blake," she said. "He rides very well, my friends."

THE END.

LONDON: WARD, LOCK & Co., LIMITED.