He got from saddle, left the mare to her own devices, and ran across the courtyard. Here, too, were bodies lying in the snow. The main door was gone, save for a charred framework through which the moon showed him a disordered hall. Without thought of his own safety here, with a single, savage purpose to find his wife--dead or worse--he crossed the hall; and at the stairway foot he met the red-faced squire, coming down with a brisk tread surprising in a man of his bulk and goutiness. “By gad! we’re too busy with flesh and blood to care for ghosts,” said the squire, halting suddenly. His laugh was boisterous, but it covered a superstition lively and afraid. “A truce to nonsense,” snapped Sir Jasper. “Where is Lady Royd?” “Asleep--and her toy spaniel, too.” The squire had come down and touched Sir Jasper to make sure that he was of this world. “I should poison that dog if it were mine, Royd. It yapped at every wounded man we carried in.” “My wife is asleep--and safe?” asked the other, as if he feared the answer. “We’re all safe--except poor Will Underwood; and all busy, thanks to that game pup of yours. For a scholar, he shaped well.” “Rupert kept the house?” Through all his trouble and unrest Sir Jasper tried to grasp the meaning of the charred doorway, the groans of wounded men above. “It did not seem so when I came indoors.” So then the Squire told him, all in clipped, hurried speech, the way of it. And Sir Jasper forgot his wife, forgot his wound, and all the misery that had dogged his steps since Derby. He had an heir at last. Rupert, the well-beloved, had proved himself. “Where is he?” he asked huskily. “Asleep, too, by your leave. No, we’ll not wake him. He’s had three days of gunpowder and wakefulness, Royd. Let him sleep the clock round.” The squire, seeing how weak Sir Jasper was, took him by the arm into the dining-chamber, filled him a measure of brandy, and pushed him gently into a chair. “I came late to the wedding, Royd,” he said dryly, “but I’m in command here, till you find your strength.” Sir Jasper, for the first time since Derby, was content. His wife was safe, and his heir was a man at last. And the red-faced squire, whom he had always liked, was no recusant, after all. “You talked of carrying wounded men in?” he asked by and by. “I can hear them crying out for thirst.” “That’s where they have us, Royd, these flea-bitten men of George’s,” said the squire, with another boisterous laugh. “They were crying like stuck pigs--out in the cold--and we _had_ to take them in. Windyhough is a hospital, I tell you, owing to the queer Catholic training that weakens us. They’d not have done as much for us.” “That is their loss--and, as for training, I think Rupert has proved it fairly right.” “Well, yes. But I hate wounds, Royd, and all the sickroom messiness. It’s an ill business, tending men you’d rather see lying snugly in their graves.”