FullReads

‘Hurt?’ she echoed, and turned to me, where I stood swaying, with a hand on the table’s edge, and a face (I dare say) as white as the diapered cloth. Her eyes rested on me at first increduously, then with dismay.

‘It is not serious,’ I stammered. ‘If some one will set a chair for me–no, not there–clear of the rug. My boots are full of blood, I think.’

With this I must have fallen in a faint, straight into her arms, and the faint must have lasted a few minutes. For when my senses came back some one had removed my jack-boots and stockings, and a hand had opened my shirt wide at the breast and found the wound. The hand was Lady Glynn’s; and on the other side of me stood her husband with a goblet of wine, some of which he had managed to coax down my throat.

The wine doubtless had revived me, yet not so that I noted all this at once or distinctly. For the while I lay back with closed eyes, and heard–as it were in a dream–my host and hostess talking together.

‘A scratch, as you see,’ said Lady Glynn. ‘There is no need to send for a surgeon–who belike would only take blood from him: and he has lost enough already. A few hours’ rest–if, when I have bathed the wound, you and Pascoe will carry him upstairs–‘

‘You are considerate, truly,’ he answered. ‘No doubt, having hired your bully, you wish to make the best of him. But–I put it to you– in asking me to nurse him you overshoot my Christian virtue.’

‘I think not,’ she corrected him in a cool, level voice. ‘That is, if you will consider him for what he is, the messenger of your honour. For the rest, he happens to be no bully but a gentleman– though I confess,’ she added, ‘this comes to you by purest luck: I had no time to pick or choose. Lastly, I have not hired him; but–‘

‘But what?’ he asked, as she came to a deliberate pause.

‘But, if you force me to it, I may try.’

What she meant by this, I, lying between them with closed eyes, could not guess: but I suppose that, meeting her look, he understood.

‘You?’ he said at length, hoarsely. ‘You?’ he repeated, and broke out with a furious oath. ‘No, by–, Kate, you can’t mean it! You can’t–it’s not like you . . . there, take your hand from him, or I’ll slit his throat, there, as he lies!’

But her hand, though it trembled, rested still on my breast, above the wound. ‘If you lay hand on him, I go straight to the King; and if you hurt me, I have provided that a letter reaches the King. You are trapped every way, husband; and–and let us have no violence, please, for here comes Pascoe at last with the hot water.’

It had cost me some self-command to keep my eyes closed during this talk. I opened them as a gray-headed servant came bustling in with a steaming pan. For just a second they encountered Lady Glynn’s. Perhaps some irregular pulse of the heart–she had not withdrawn her hand–or some catch in my breathing warned her in the act of turning. She gazed down on me as if to ask how much I had heard: but almost on the instant motioned to the old man to come close.

‘Have you a sponge?’ she asked.

‘It is in the pan, my lady.’

She took it, rinsed it twice or thrice to make sure the water was not too hot, and fell to bathing my wound. Her hand was exquisitely light; the sense of the warm water delicious; and again I closed my eyes. But in this exchange of glances my previous image of her had somehow faded or been transformed, and with a suddenness that to this day I cannot account for. To be sure I had formed it in haste and amid the distractions of a pretty sharp combat. On the way to the house she had kept well ahead–and drawn rein but to converse with me for less than half a minute. Only once–as she came riding back across the bridge from her parley with the patrol–had I taken stock (as you might say) of her looks; and, even so, my eyes had been occupied with her scarlet habit and feather, her bearing, her seat in the saddle, and the tone in which she spoke her commands, rather than with her actual features. That these were handsome I had certainly noted: but that I had noted them more particularly at the time I only discovered now, and by contrast.