THE TALE COMES TO WINDYHOUGH
NEARLY a week had gone since Nance came down from her ride on the
moor, from the meeting with Will Underwood that had ruined one dream
of her life for good and all. Each day that passed was more full of
strain for those at Windyhough. They practised musketry together, she
and Rupert and old Simon Foster; and the rivalry between them, keen
enough, improved their marksmanship. At the week’s end Rupert was the
best shot of the three; it was his way to be thorough, and to this
business of countering Nance’s taunt--that she could not trust her men
to guard her--he brought the same untiring zeal, the patience not to be
dismayed, that had kept his faith secure against disastrous odds.
But as each short day closed in there was the return to the silence
of the house at Windyhough, to Lady Royd’s wonder if her husband were
lying dead in some south country ditch, to the yapping of the toy
spaniel that harassed Rupert because, soul and body, he was tired of
mimic warfare.
They had come home this afternoon from musket-drill, and Simon had left
them in the courtyard. A little, sobbing wind was fluting round the
gables, and the red light on the hills foretold, unerringly, that snow
would come.
Nance looked up at the black front of Windyhough. The homeless
desolation of the land took hold of her. She was cold, and tired of all
things; and she sought for some relief, and could find none, save by
way of the tongue that is woman’s rapier.
“What of your trust, Rupert?” she asked sharply. “A week ago--it seems
half a lifetime--you said there would be some swift attack--you said
that you had faith. Faith, my dear--I tell you it is cold and empty as
the wind. Your only answer is--why, just your mother’s spaniel barking
at you from within. Faith should know the master’s footstep, Rupert.”
He had been sick at heart till now. The answer had not come as soon as
he had hoped, and his need was urgent; but the faith in him rose clear
and dominant.
“You’re a baby, Nance. You talked of half a lifetime. I could wait so
long in patience, knowing the Stuart, soon or late, would come to the
good crowning.”
She glanced at him with impatience, with a certain wistful curiosity.
“Does your creed go deep as that, Rupert? Mine does not,” she said,
with her frank, bewildering honesty.
“My creed?” Rupert’s shoulders were squared in earnest now. He stood to
his full six feet, and in his eyes was that look of the man who cannot
be bought, or bullied, or flattered, from allegiance to the straight
road ahead. “It goes deeper, Nance. What else? Faith! You seem to think
it means only kneeling in a church, a woman’s refuge from the outside
storms, a ball to play with, when the time seems slow in passing.”
“You will tell me more,” said Nance gently.
“I cannot. Go to Sir Jasper, who can use a sword; go to your father,
who can fight and hunt and play the man wherever men are gathered. They
kneel in church, Nance--and in the open roads they feel their swords
the cleaner for it; they carry knighthood with them, so that clowns
read it in their faces as they pass.”
“Who taught you this?” she asked.
He laughed, with the diffidence and self-contempt that always lay in
ambush for him. “I dreamed it, maybe. You always said I was a dreamer,
Nance--a fool, you meant, but were too kind to think it.”
So they stood there, in the cold and ruddy gloaming, and were helpless
to find speech together. All that lay deep in Nance, secure beneath
each day’s indignities, went out to this heir of Windyhough. His
view of life was hers; his roots were in the soil, tilled lovingly
by far-back fathers, that breeds the strong plants of chivalry. And
yet--and yet he was so fitful in his moods, so apart from the needs of
every day, so galling to the women who looked, as a matter of course,
for their men to go out into the open.
And then, following some odd byway of memory, she recalled how grim
and steady and reliant he had been that winter’s day--it seemed long
since--when he had sent Will Underwood and herself down the moor while
he prepared to fight out the quarrel with his younger brother.
“Rupert,” she said, seeking for some way of praising him, “you shot
well to-day.”
“Yes,” he growled. “I outshot a woman, Nance--and a man who was
crippled in every joint he owned. I take no praise for that. As men
count shooting, I’m where I always stood--your patient fool, Nance.”
So they stood helpless there, one aching with the love he had--each
day of this close companionship making Nance more lovable and more far
off--the other stifled by her pity for this heir of Windyhough, who
needed so little to touch his manhood into living flame.
And as they stood a horseman came clattering up. There was mud on his
horse, so that none could have told whether it were roan or black or
chestnut. There was mud on his clothes, and on his hands, and on his
lean, strained face. As he reined up sharply, his gift of knowing faces
and their records did not fail him.
“You’re Sir Jasper’s son?” he said. “I’m glad, sir, to meet you out of
doors, for it will save me time.”
Rupert was aware of some sense of betterment. Dimly, and far off as
yet, he saw the answer to his faith take shape and substance. “I
remember you, sir,” he answered gravely. “You are Mr. Oliphant of
Muirhouse, and once you--you praised my shortcomings. You--you helped
me, sir, that night you came to Windyhough. You do not guess the debt I
owe you.”
Oliphant, sick with hard riding, more sick with the disastrous news
that he was bringing to the loyal north, halted for remembrance of that
night when he had come to Sir Jasper’s and found Lady Royd and a slim,
nerve-ridden lad who was vastly like his own dead self, buried long ago
under the hills of fine endeavour.
“By your leave, sir,” he said, gently as if the pipes were sobbing for
dead hopes, “I think you’ve pluck enough to hear bad news and take it
like a soldier. All’s lost--at Derby--and the Prince’s men are coming
north again.”
Nance went apart and put weak, foolish hands about her eyes. There
could be no resurrection, she fancied, from this death in life that was
meant by the retreat from Derby. But Rupert held his head up and looked
at Oliphant with steady eyes. The blow was sudden and bewildering; this
retreat cut deep into his faith, his certainty that the Prince could
not fail to carry London; and his shoulders broadened to the burden, so
that he carried it well--almost lightly, as it seemed to Nance.
“My father--he is safe, sir?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, safe; but his temper is like a watch-dog’s on the chain----”
“He’ll bite deeper when the chance comes.” Rupert was smiling gravely
through his eagerness. “Mr. Oliphant, I--I dare not ask you what--what
my father--and the Prince--and the Highlanders--are feeling.”
Oliphant set a rough hand on his arm. “Feeling? The whole route north
is one long burial. I’ve seen battle, I’ve heard the wounded crying
when the night-wind crept into their wounds, but I never met anguish as
I met it on the road from Derby. My lad, I cannot speak of it--and the
Prince among them all, with a jest on his lips to hearten them, and his
face as if he danced a minuet--all but the eyes, the saddened eyes--the
eyes, I think, of martyred Charles, when he stepped to the scaffold on
a bygone January morning and bade us all _remember_.” Oliphant halted a
moment. A fury, resolute and quiet, was on him. “By God, sir, some few
of us are not likely to forget!”
And suddenly Nance sobbed aloud, though she had never learned the
woman’s trick of easy tears. And about Oliphant’s face, too, a softness
played. It was a moment for these three such as comes seldom to any of
us--a moment packed so full with grief and tragedy that they must needs
slip off the masks worn at usual times. They three were of the old
Faith, the old, unquestioning loyalty. They had no intrigues, of policy
or caution, to hide from one another. One of the three had been with
the army of retreat, had felt the throb and pity that put a finer edge
to the sword he carried; and two of them waited here at Windyhough,
sending long thoughts out to help the wayfarers. And now there was an
end, it seemed; and in the chilly gloaming their hearts met, caught
fire, were friendly in a common grief.
As for Rupert, he felt his soul go free to prison; he was finding
now the answer to the unhappy, ceaseless trouble he had undergone
since childhood. He had been thrust aside by folk more practical and
matter-of-fact; he had feared ridicule; he had heard men name him
scholarly, and had retreated, like a snail into its shell, to the
dreams of gallantry that were food and drink to him. But through it all
he had kept one bridge against all comers--the bridge of his simple,
knightly faith; and it is the big deeds such as this--wrought out in
silence, so that none guesses them--that train a man for the forlorn
hope, the sudden call, the need to step out into the open when there is
no one else to face odds ludicrous and overwhelming.
It was Rupert who broke the silence, and his voice was deep and steady.
“Mr. Oliphant,” he said, not knowing how the words came to him, “this
may be for the best.”
So Oliphant, who was saddle-sore and human, snapped round on him. “By
gad, sir, you are obstinately cheerful! Ride somewhere between here
and Derby, and ask the Highlanders if all is for the best. I tell you
I have seen the Prince’s face, and faith grows dull. He would be in
London now, if he had had his way.”
Rupert glanced up to the moors, where the last tattered banners of the
sunset fluttered crimson on the hilltops. And in his eyes was the look
which any countryman of Lancashire, or any Highlander from Skye, would
have known as “seeing far.”
“The Prince has not had his way,” he said, with queer, unhurried
certainty. “You tell us he retreats as other men go to a ball. You
say his heart is breaking, sir, and that he still finds jests. I know
retreat and waiting--know them by heart--and the going is not smooth.
If he can do this--why, he’s bigger even than my dreams of him.”
Nance understood him now; and Oliphant’s ill-temper ceased to trouble
him. Here was one, bred of a soldier-stock, who had missed his way
along the road of deeds; but to the bone of him he was instinct, not
with the ballad-stuff of victory, but with the tedious prose of long,
sick marches, of defeat carried with shoulders squared to any onset of
adversity.
Oliphant laughed grimly. It was his way when feeling waded so deep that
it was like to carry him away. “I’ve seen many countries, lad--have
had my back to the wall a few times, knowing who stood by me and who
found excuse to save his skin; but I never in my travels met one so
like a man, round and about, find him in rough weather or in smooth,
as--as the Prince, God bless him! The ladies up in Edinburgh--your
pardon, Miss Demaine, but some of your sex are fools paramount--saw
only his love-locks and the rest of it; but we have seen his manhood.
There’s none like him. And he retreats because my Lord George Murray
is mathematical and has captured the Scots prudence of the chiefs; and
he’s still the great gentleman among us--greater now that he dances,
not in Holyrood, but through the miry roads.”
Nance glanced up sharply. She was thinking of Will Underwood, who had
killed first love for her with a clown’s rough hand. “If there were
more men of your breed--and Rupert’s----”
“By your leave,” broke in Oliphant gruffly, “I think most of us are
bred straight. The mongrels make such an uproar that you fancy them a
full pack in cry, Miss Demaine. We’re not happy, not one of us three;
but we carry a faith bigger than our hardships.” He turned to Rupert
with surprising grace and charm. “My thanks, sir. I was tired before I
met you, and now--my weariness is gone.”
The door of Windyhough was opened suddenly, and Lady Royd came running
out bareheaded, and halted on seeing the horseman and the two on foot
in the falling dusk of the courtyard.
“Rupert, I cannot find my little dog!” she cried.
Her elder-born smiled grimly. He was struggling with the need to stand
firm against Oliphant’s disastrous news; and his mother came to tell
him, in her pretty, querulous way, that her little dog was missing.
“Fido is in the house, mother,” he answered patiently. “We heard him
barking at us when we crossed the courtyard.”
“Oh, it is not Fido. It’s the little black pug, Rupert. And she’s so
delicate. An hour of this keen wind, if she is out of doors, might kill
the poor, wee doggie.”
Oliphant of Muirhouse gave a muttered curse, for, to his finger-tips,
he was a man, his instincts primitive when they were touched. Then he
laughed gently, for his soul’s health, and got from saddle, and stooped
to kiss Lady Royd’s hand.
“You do not know me, Lady Royd, in this dim light? I’m Oliphant of
Muirhouse, and I bring Rising news.”
Sir Jasper’s wife put a hand to her breast. The movement was quick, and
another than Oliphant might easily have missed it in this dim light;
but now his task grew harder, for he knew that, apart from pet-dog
whimsies, she loved her husband.
“Is he safe, Mr. Oliphant?” she asked, bridging all usual courtesies of
greeting.
“Hale and well. I saw him three days since, and he sent messages to
you, knowing I had errands here in Lancashire.”
Lady Royd, easy for the moment because her good man did not happen to
be lying dead among the ditches of her nightmares, grew almost roguish.
“And his heart, sir? Is it sound, too? There are so many pretty women
in the south--I know, because I lived there once, before I came to
these bleak hills that frighten me.”
Oliphant sought for some way of breaking news better left untold. “You
to fear rivalry?” he said, in his low, pleasant voice. “Sir Jasper has
known you all these years----”
“Precisely. And the years have left their mark. You need not dwell on
that, Mr. Oliphant.”
“I meant that, to have known you all these years--why, it explains the
lover-like and pressing messages he sent by me.”
So then Lady Royd was like a girl in her teens. “Tell me what he said.”
“No, by your leave!” laughed Oliphant. “He said so much, and my time is
not my own just now.”
“How--how comforting you are, like Mr. Underwood, who finds always the
right word to say.”
“I say it with a difference, I hope,” snapped Oliphant, too weary to
hide old dislikes. “I’ve known Mr. Underwood longer than I care to
remember. He’s a man I’d trust to fail me whenever the big hunt was up.”
Nance laughed suddenly. The relief was so unexpected and so rousing.
“You’ve the gift of knowing men, Mr. Oliphant.”
“There, child!” broke in Lady Royd. “You must come to my years before
you talk of understanding men; and even then, if I die in my bed at
ninety, I shall never know why we find their daft ways so likeable.”
Oliphant, afraid to hurt a woman always, was seeking for some way
to break his news. This wife of Sir Jasper’s was leal and tender,
underneath her follies; and her husband was in retreat--in a retreat
dangerous to the safety of his body, but more perilous still to the
quick and fiery soul that had led him south with Prince Charles Edward.
“He is in good health,” he said slowly--“but the Cause is not.”
“There has been a battle?” She was alert, attentive now.
“Yes--a battle of the Council-chamber, and the Prince was outnumbered.
The odds were four to one at least.”
“I do not understand, sir.”
“Nor do I,” he went on, in a quiet heat of rage. “We were cavaliers
all, dashing straight through England on the forlorn hope. All depended
on looking forward. The chiefs chose just that moment to look back
along the road of prudence. It is disastrous, pitiful. I dare not think
of it.”
“So they--are in retreat?”
“That is my message to you. Sir Jasper wishes you to stay here at
Windyhough. The march north will go wide of you, through Langton, and
you’ll be secure here.”
Lady Royd stood very still in the wind that at another time would have
made her peevish with longing for her warm south country. Her surface
tricks, the casual littleness that had disturbed Sir Jasper’s peace,
were blown aside. She was thinking of her husband, of all this Rising
meant to him, of his heart-sickness and the hazards that were doubled
now.
“I would God, sir, that he had bidden me go out to join him in
retreat,” she said at last. “I shall be secure here, he thinks? House
walls about one, Mr. Oliphant, and food to eat, and wine to drink--are
they security? I’m weak and foolish on the sudden--I never understood
till now that, where he goes, there is home for me. Shelter? I need
none, except his arms about me.”
There are times--moments set thick with trouble, when faith and all
else seem drowning in the flood--that compel us to struggle free of
reticence. Oliphant of Muirhouse was not aware that there was anything
singular or unseemly in this spoiled wife’s statement of her case.
Nance answered to the direct appeal; for her own heart was bruised, and
fragrant with the herb named pity. And Rupert, for his part, stood
aside and gazed at his mother across the red, murky twilight, and
wondered how it came that one of his dreams was answered after all. In
face and voice and tender uprightness of figure, this mother of his was
something near the ideal he had woven round her, despite her careless
handling of him in the years gone by.
“Ah, there!” said Lady Royd, with a coquettish, gentle laugh. “Nance
was talking not long ago of love and knighthood and all that--the baby
girl!--and I rapped her over the knuckles with my fan. It’s a humdrum
world we live in, Mr. Oliphant; and, by that token, you will come in to
supper before you carry on the news.”
“Not even a mouthful and a glass of wine out here; as for coming in
to the meal I crave--why, I dare not do it, by your leave. Sleep is
waiting so near to me, to trip me up in the middle of my errand.”
She glanced at him, with the instinct that is never far from women to
play the temptress. “You look so tired,” she said gently. “Surely your
news will wait? A warm hearth, Mr. Oliphant, and the meal you need----”
“You said just now that house-walls and food and drink were of little
consequence--unless you had strong hands about you.”
“But you’re strong of your hands already. And I am weak.”
“Yes,” said Oliphant, “passably strong; but it is each man to his
trade, my lady. The hands I need--they greet me on the uplands, when my
horse and I are so tired out that it is laughable. We get up into the
roomy moors--our business lies in that sort of country--and the curlews
go crying, crying, as if their sorrow could not rest since a Stuart
once was martyred. And we gather up our courage, my horse and I.”
“You men,” she broke in fretfully--“your thoughts run always up the
hills. And you find only the old feuds--a Stuart martyred near a
hundred years ago, a king who’s earth and bone-dust by this time, as we
shall be one day. It matters so little, Mr. Oliphant, when we come to
the end of our lives--to the end of our singing-time.”
Oliphant of Muirhouse had learned the hardest of life’s lessons--a
broad and catholic simplicity; and in the learning he had gained an
added edge to the temper that now was lithe as steel. “King Charles is
neither earth nor bone-dust,” he said pleasantly. “He is--alive, my
lady, and he knows that we remember.”
“Remembrance? What of that?” asked the other lazily. “Just last year’s
rose-leaves, sir, with the faded scent about them. By your leave, Mr.
Oliphant, I thought you more workmanlike and modern.”
It was Rupert who broke in. “Remember?” he said stormily. “My father
taught me just that word, when he used to come up into the nursery long
ago, and play with us. He did not know then how--how like God’s fool I
was to grow up, and he would tell me tales of Charles the First, how
likeable and kingly he was always; how he’d have been glad to take his
crown off, and live like a country gentleman, following field-sports
all the day, and coming back to the wife and bairns he loved, to spend
long evenings with them.”
Oliphant of Muirhouse felt pity stir about him. This lad--with the
simplicity of one who was seeing far back along the years, scarce
knowing that he was speaking his thoughts aloud--was a figure to rouse
any thinking man’s attention. He was so good a soldier wasted.
“Then father would tell me,” went on Rupert, the passion deepening in
his voice, “how the King was asked to leave it all; how he could have
saved his life, if he had given his Faith in exchange, and how he would
not yield. And then--father made it all so plain to me--the King went
out from Whitehall, one bitter January day, and the scaffold and the
streets were thick with snow, and he went with a grave, happy face, as
if he had many friends about him. And he knelt awhile at the scaffold
in decent prayer; and then he turned to Bishop Juxon, and said,
‘Remember!’ And then--black Cromwell had his way of him, for a little
while.”
“My dear, that is past history,” protested Lady Royd, with petulant
dislike of sorrow. “Of course he died well, and, to be sure, the snow
must have added to his great discomfort; but we live in other times.”
“No!” said Oliphant, sharp as a bugle-call. “We live in the same times,
my lady. The way of men’s hearts does not change. I’m tired, and not so
young as I was; but your son has marshalled all my courage up.”
So then Rupert stood aside. His chivalry and hero-worship, like his
love for Nance, were too delicate as yet, for lack of drill; and he was
ashamed that Oliphant of Muirhouse should praise his littleness.
“Mr. Oliphant,” said Lady Royd, with her roguish, faded laugh, “you’re
like the rest of my daft men-folk; you are all for remembrance of the
days behind----”
“Yes. We take a few steps back, the better to leap forward. That is the
strict method of leaping any five-barred gate. There’s been so much
surmise about that riddle of ‘Remember,’ and Rupert here has made it
plain to me for the first time.”
“‘Out of the mouths of babes,’” said Rupert’s mother, with a flippancy
that was born of this long idleness at Windyhough, the long anxiety for
the safety of her husband, whom, in some muddled way, she loved.
“He is no babe, by your leave. He is nearly a proven man, my lady, and
I think God finds no better praise than that for any of us.”
It was all quick in the saying, this talk of folk who heard disaster
sing down the bitter wind; but Nance, looking on and seeking some
forward grip of life since Will Underwood had fallen by the way, was
aware that Rupert had sounded the rally-call when all seemed lost. He
was no longer scholarly, unpractical; from the background, with the
murky gloaming round him, he was a figure dominant among them. And
from that background he stepped forward, lightly, with self-assurance,
because there was no pageantry about this game of sorrow, but only the
quick need to take hold of the every-day routine of hardship.
“It might happen that the retreat came up by way of Windyhough?” he
asked, straightening the scholarly stoop of his shoulders.
Oliphant looked gravely at him--measured him, with an eye trained to
quick judgment of a man--and dared not lie to this son of Sir Jasper’s
who stayed here among the women, seeking better work. “There’s no
chance of it,” he said gruffly. “They are taking the Langton road. I--I
am sorry, Rupert. I wish the thick of it were coming this way. You’re
in need of exercise, my lad.”
And Rupert laughed suddenly. “Mr. Oliphant,” he said, with his quiet,
disarming humour, “I’ve had drill enough--a useless sort of drill--and
I’m praying these days for assault, and musketry, and siege--anything
to save us stay-at-homes from sleep.”
Oliphant looked down at the years of his own misshapen boyhood, saw
himself a weakling, unproven, hidden by the mists of his own high
desires. And he gripped Rupert’s hand, said farewell to Lady Royd, and
got to saddle.
“Is that all?” asked Rupert, with sharp, disconsolate dismay. “Take
me with you, sir. There’s a broken-winded horse or two still left in
stable.”
“I obey orders,” snapped Oliphant, with brusque command. “You will do
no less, and Sir Jasper was exact in his wish that you should guard the
women here.”
Rupert was sick at heart, restless to be in the open, lest faith and
courage were killed outright by these stifled days at Windyhough.
“They’re safe, you tell me,” he said, yielding to the queer, gusty
temper that few suspected in him. “Then I’m free to breathe again.
With you, or without you, I shall join the Rising at long last.”
Oliphant’s heart went out to the mettle of this ill-balanced, stormy
lad. For there are many who are keen to follow victory at the gallop;
but Oliphant was a man who knew his world--knew it through all its
tricks of speech and manner--and he had met few who were eager to ride
out along the unsung, unhonoured road where retreat goes slowly through
the mire.
“You know what this retreat means?” he asked, in the same sharp tones,
as if on parade. “Sullen men, and sullen roads, and northeast winds
that cut the heart out of a man’s body? Hard-bitten soldiers find it
devilish hard to follow, Rupert--and there are the pipes, too, to
reckon with. These daft Highland bodies will ever go playing ‘The
Flowers of the Forest,’ till the pity of it goes up and down the
wind, like Rachel seeking for strayed children. It is all made up of
emptiness and sorrow, I tell you, this road from Derby.”
“I should go from worse emptiness and sorrow, here at Windyhough,” said
Rupert stubbornly. “I fear house-walls, Mr. Oliphant, and the foulest
road would seem easy-going----”
Oliphant broke sharply in. This was his own feeling, but it was
not the time to give sympathy to Sir Jasper’s heir. “You come of a
soldier-stock, lad. You want to learn soldiery one day? Well, you’ll
learn it--I’ve trust absolute in that--and you begin to-night.”
“Then I’ll go saddle,” said Rupert, eager to try a second fall from
horse again.
“No, by your leave!” snapped Oliphant. “You’ll play sentry here. Your
orders are precise. You guard the house and women, as Sir Jasper bade
you.”
“Because Sir Jasper knew that no assault would come,” said Rupert, with
a return of the old heartache. “You leave me as you found me, sir--a
toy soldier guarding a house that could only tempt fools to capture it.”
Oliphant straightened himself, clicked his heels together. His voice
was tired and husky, but precise. “Your officer commands. You obey.
What else? Men do not question at these times.” Then, with sudden
understanding of the man he had to deal with--with some remembrance
of his own rebellious and lonely boyhood--Oliphant stood, rugged and
uncompromising, a lean, hard six-foot-two of manhood. “To your post,
sentry!” he said sharply.
And Rupert found his heart leap out to the command.
Instinctively--because breed shapes us all--he lost the scholarly stoop
of shoulders, lost his ill-temper and loneliness. He saluted stiffly.
And Oliphant got to horse, and was riding, slowly forward, when Lady
Royd ran to his saddle.
“I have the most dismaying curiosity, Mr. Oliphant,” she said, lifting
the pretty, faded face that would always keep its charm. “It is the
woman’s curse, they tell us. What _did_ King Charles mean when he said
‘Remember’? We’ve been guessing at the riddle for a hundred years or
so, and it still baffles us.”
Oliphant glanced up at the roomy hills, at the red snow-gloaming that
was dying slowly round their crests. “What did he mean--that day he
went to death? No words could tell you. It was something high, and
strong, and lasting, like your moors up there.”
“Oh, no; that could not be. He was so full of courtesy, so gentle--so
like the warm south-country I left long ago. King Charles, sir, was
never like these hills that frighten me.”
Oliphant looked down at her, with some pity and a great chivalry. “You
hold the woman’s view of him,” he said, with the simplicity inborn in
him. “As a man sees him, Lady Royd, he did what few among us could. His
wife and bairns were pulling him back from the scaffold--and he loved
them; his ease, his love of life, his fear of the unknown--all were
against him. He could have saved the most comely head in England, and
would not, because his faith was stubborn. By your leave, I bow my head
when the thought of Martyred Charles goes by me.”
Lady Royd looked at this man, so hard of body, so tired and resolute.
“I thought you practical, Mr. Oliphant.”
“None more so. I’m a Scotsman,” he put in, with a laugh that struck no
discordant note. “If it had not been for King Charles, I should not be
here--riding evil roads as if I danced a pleasant measure.”
“You’re beyond me, sir; but then, men always were. They never seem to
rest; and when the wind blows keenest, they run out into it, as if it
were warmer than the fireside.”
“And there the secret’s out. That was King Charles’s meaning when he
bade all Christian royalists remember. It was your son who explained it
all to me just now.”
“Ah, Rupert! The poor boy dreams too much. You’re indulgent, Mr.
Oliphant.”
They fell silent, as people do when feeling throbs and stirs about them
like thunder that is brewing up, but will not break. And Oliphant, out
of this thunder-weather that he knew by heart, found sudden intuition.
Sir Jasper’s wife had not followed him to learn what the last message
meant of a King dead these hundred years; she had sought cover, as
women do when they are harassed, had waited till she found courage to
ask the question that was nearest to her heart.
“You’re thinking of your husband, Lady Royd?” he said, with blunt
assurance. “I shall see him soon, if all goes well, and I shall tell
him--what?”
Women undoubtedly are as Heaven made them, a mystery past man’s
understanding. Lady Royd, deep in her trouble, chose this moment to
remember how Sir Jasper had wooed her as a girl--chose to grow younger
on the sudden, to carry that air of buoyancy and happiness which makes
the tired world welcome all daft lovers. “You’ve read my heart, sir,
in some odd way. My husband--I cannot tell you what he means to me. I
was not bred to soldiery. I--I hated the sword he carried out with him,
because sharp steel has always been a nightmare to me, and he was cruel
when he bade me buckle it on for him.”
“As God sees us, he was kind,” broke in Oliphant, moved by extreme pity
for this spoiled wife who had fallen on evil days. “He loves you. The
summons came. It was for your sake--yours, do you not understand?--that
he kept faith with the Prince.”
“For my sake--he could have stayed at home. I--I needed him. I told him
so.”
Oliphant was so tired that even compassion could not soften the rough
edge of his temper. “And if he’d stayed? You would have liked your tame
cat about the house? You’d have fussed over him and petted him--but
you’d never in this life have found the medicine to cure his shame.”
“Oh, there!” said the other fretfully. “You worship honour. It is
always honour with you men who need excuse for riding far away from
home.”
“Honour?” snapped Oliphant, eager again for the relief of miry roads
and saddle-soreness. “It is the Prince’s watchword. His heart is
broken--or near to it--and honour is the one light left him. It keeps
him gay, my lady, through fouler trouble than you or I have strength to
face. And so--good-night, I think.”
“No, no! We must not part like this. I--I am so foolish, Mr.
Oliphant--and you are angry----”
“Your pardon,” he said, with quick and gay compunction. “It was my
temper--my accursed temper. I’m too tired just now to keep a tight rein
on the jade.”
“Ah, there! You were always generous. It is a quality that keeps men
lean, I notice.” She looked him up and down, again with the hint of
coquetry that became her well. “It is a gallant sort of leanness, after
all. For myself, I’m growing--a little plump, shall we say?”
“More graceful in the outline than myself. I was always a figure to
scare corbie-crows away with.”
Sir Jasper’s wife, from the depth of her own trouble, knew how weary
and in need of solitude he was. She wondered that he could keep up this
game of ball--nice coquetry and chiselled answer--when all the sky
was red about the moor up yonder, and all the hazard of retreat was
singing at their ears.
“You will see my husband soon?” she said softly. “I--I have a message
for him----”
“My trade lies that way. You can trust me with it.”
“You may tell him that I--I miss him, sir; and if he seems to miss me,
too--why, go so far as to say that my heart is aching.”
Oliphant, moved by a gust of feeling, stooped to her hand. “I never had
a wife, myself. God was not kind that way. I’ll take your message, and
Sir Jasper will forget the miry roads, I think.”
He rode out, a trim, square-shouldered figure, carrying hardship as a
man should. And Lady Royd, because he reminded her of the husband whose
memory was very fragrant now, went down to the gate, and watched horse
and rider merge into the gloaming. And, long after they were out of
sight, she stood and listened to the tip-tap of hoofs, faint and ever
fainter, down and up the track that was taking Oliphant along his road
of every-day, hard business.
Behind her, Rupert and Nance Demaine were standing, facing each other
with mute dismay. Without knowing that they were eavesdroppers,
they had heard Lady Royd’s voice, with its half-pleasant note of
querulousness, and the rider’s low, tired answers to her questions.
And they had not heeded overmuch--for each was busy with the ill news
brought from Derby--until, merciless, exact, they heard across the
courtyard Oliphant’s rough, “And if he’d stayed? You would have liked
your tame cat about the house?”
Nance had looked sharply up at Rupert, had seen his soldierly, straight
air desert him, and she understood.
“My dear,” she said, broken up by sharp sympathy, “he--he did not mean
that you----”
“So you, too, fit the fool’s cap on? I’m going indoors, Nance--to my
post, to find Simon Foster.”
He was hard hit; and the strength of the fathers stiffened his
courage, now in the hour of shame, so that he was almost gay. And Nance
could make nothing of this mood of his, because she was born a woman,
and he a man.
“You always brought your troubles to me, Rupert,” she pleaded, laying a
hand on his sleeve.
“Yes, till they grew too big for you. And now--why, Nance, I think I’ll
shoulder them myself.”
He seemed to stand far away, not needing her. It seemed, rather, in
this moment of despair, that she went in need of him. Will Underwood
had deserted her, had trodden her first love underfoot; she was bruised
and tired; and the Rising news was wintry as her loneliness.
Rupert, his voice firm again, turned at the porch. “Good-night, Nance,”
he said, with the gaiety that hurt her. “You may sleep well--the tame
cat guards the house, my dear.”
There was bitterness and heartache about this house of Windyhough. The
wind would not be still, and men’s sorrows would not rest. And the
stark moor above lay naked to the wintry moon, and shivered underneath
her coverlet of sleet.
Nance, by and by, followed Rupert indoors, and went into the parlour,
with its scent of last year’s rose-leaves, its pretty, useless
ornaments, its air of stifled luxury, warring with the ruddy gloaming
light that strode down from the moors and peeped through every window,
as if to spy out the shams within doors.
She sat down to the spinet, and touched a mellow, tender chord or two;
and then, because needs must, she found relief in song. Her singing
voice was like herself, dainty, well-found, full of deep cadences where
tenderness and laughter lurked. It was no voice to take the town by
storm, but one to hearten men, when they came in from the open, against
the next day’s warfare. And she sang Stuart songs, with a little lilt
of sorrow in them, because of Oliphant’s news from Derby and because
of Will Underwood’s sadder retreat from honour, and hoped somehow that
Rupert would hear her and come to her, because she needed him. He was
so fond of ballads--those, most of all, that had the Stuart constancy
about them--and Nance was sure that she could entice him down, could
sing some little of his evil mood away from him.
Instead, as she halted with her fingers on the keys, she heard Rupert
tramping overhead, and Simon Foster’s heavy footfall, as they went
their round of what, in irony and bitterness, they named the defences.
“This loophole covers the main door, Simon,” she heard Rupert say, with
his tired laugh. “In case of a direct attack from the front, I station
myself here with six muskets, aim sure and quickly, picking my man
carefully each time, and disorder them by making them think we are in
force.”
“That’s so, master,” growled Simon. “And while you’re busy that way, I
make round to the left wing, and get a few shots in from there across
the courtyard. Oh, dangment!” he broke off. “We have it all by heart,
and there’s only one thing wanting--the attack itself. I’m nigh wearied
o’ this bairn’s play, I own. It puts me i’ mind, it does, of Huntercomb
Fair, last October as ever was.”
“What happened there?” asked Rupert, as if the other’s slow, unhurried
humour were a welcome respite.
“Well, they were playing a terrible fine piece where soldiers kept
coming in, and crossing th’ stage, till you counted ’em by scores.
But, after I’d seen what was to be seen, I went out; and I happened to
go round by the back o’ the booth, and I saw how it was done. There
were just five soldiers, master--one was Thomas Scatterty’s lad, I
noticed, who’s said to run away from a sheep if it bleats at him--and
these durned five, why, they went in at one end o’ the booth, and
marched across th’ stage, and out a t’other end. Then they ran round at
th’ back, and in again; and so it went on, like, till th’ sweat fair
dripped from them, what with hurrying in and out.”
Nance, listening idly, could hear that low, recurrent laugh of
Rupert’s--the laugh that was tired, and hid many troubles.
“Yes, Simon, yes,” he said, with high disdain of himself and
circumstance, “it is all very like Huntercomb Fair; but at
Huntercomb they had the jostling crowd, the lights, the screech of
the fiddles. Here at Windyhough we have--just silence--a silence so
thick and damnable, Simon, that I’m praying for a gale, and fallen
chimney-stacks, and the wind piping through the broken windows.”
“Aye, you were ever a dreamer. The dreamers are all for speed, and
earthquakes, and sudden happenings. Life as it’s lived, master, doesn’t
often gallop. It creeps along, like, same as ye and me are doing, and
keeps itself alive for fear of starving, and gets up, some durned way
or another, for th’ next day’s work. Well, have we done, like, or must
we finish this lad’s game?”
And then Nance heard a sharper note in Rupert’s voice. She had heard it
once before, that day he fought with his brother on the moor because he
thought her honour was in question. “We finish, Simon. What else?”
“Now you’re at your faith again, master. I can hear it singing like a
throstle. Well, I’m a plain man myself, asking plain proof. Just as man
to man--and want o’ respect apart--has your pretty, gentleman’s faith
done much for you?”
“Yes,” said Rupert, unexpectedly. “It has given me pluck to see this
business through. A houseful of women and cripples--my father taking
all the burden on his shoulders while I skulk at home--dear God! I’d be
in a coward’s grave by now, Simon, if faith had not stood by me.”
“Then there’s summat in it, after all?”
“It is powder in the musket,” said Rupert, as if there could be no
further argument. “No more, no less. But you and I, Simon, have to find
the spark that fires it.”
Nance heard them pass overhead, heard the sound of Simon’s heavy boots
die along the corridor. And she turned again to the spinet, and her
fingers moved up and down the keys, their colour mellowed by long
service, and played random melodies that were in keeping with her
thoughts--not Stuart airs, because these asked always sacrifice, and
the big heart, and the royal laugh that comes when things go wrong in
this world.
Nance was too tired to-night for the adventurous road. To-morrow
she would be herself again, eager, resolute, prepared for the day’s
journey. But just now she needed the sleep, that stood far away from
her; needed some charitable, firm voice to tell her she was foolish and
unstrung; needed Rupert, as she had not guessed that she could lack
any man. And Rupert had tramped overhead, concerned with make-believe
defences.
“Oh, he does not care!” she said, believing that she hated him. “Simon
Foster, crippled in both legs, and musty loopholes, and powder that
he’ll never use--they’re more to him than all this heartbreak gathering
over Windyhough.”
Into the scented room, with its candles shining from their silver
sconces, Lady Royd came, tremulous and white of face, from watching
Oliphant of Muirhouse ride out.
“Nance, my dear, I--I am tired,” she said.
“I think we all are,” Nance answered, rising from the spinet with a
deference that had no heart in it.
“Oh, you’re querulous, and so am I,” said the other, with a shrewd
glance at the girl’s face. “If our men could see us now--our men who
fight for us--they would be astonished, Nance. We’re so little like
their dreams of us. You in a bad temper, and I ready to cry if a mouse
threatened me, and our men, God bless them! thinking only of old
England, and our beautiful bright eyes, Nance--your eyes and mine--just
red, my dear, if you’ll forgive me, with the tears men think our
luxury.”
Nance, made up of hill-rides, and free winds, and charity, looked
quietly at Lady Royd, read some fellowship in the pretty, faded face.
“I have--a few griefs of my own,” she said, with the sudden penitence
that was always like April’s sunshine after rain. “I forgot that you
had yours.”
The older woman grasped Nance’s hand, and held it, and looked into the
young, faithful eyes. She needed youth just now; for she felt that she
was growing old.
“Nance, he is out with the Rising. And they’ve retreated. And--and,
girl, when you come to my age, and have a husband and a son who will go
fighting for high causes--oh, you’ll know, Nance, how one’s heart aches
till it goes near to breaking.”
“You will tell me,” said Nance, laying a gentle hand on the other’s arm.
And Lady Royd looked gravely at her for a moment, through the tears
that lay thick about the babyish, blue eyes. And then she laughed--with
gallantry and tiredness, as Rupert had laughed not long ago when he
listened to Simon Foster’s tale of Huntercomb Fair.
“My dear, I should be glad to tell you--if I could. How should I find
words? I’ve loved him for more than six-and-twenty years, Nance, and
guessed as much long since, but was never sure of it till he rode out.
And now--he’s in the thick of danger, and I cannot go to him.”
“He is happy,” said Nance, with stormy wish to help this woman, stormy
grasp of the courage taught her by the hills. “Our men are bred that
way; they are happiest when they’re like to lose their necks--in the
hunting-field, or on Tower Hill, or wherever the good God wills. I
think Sir Jasper is happier than you or I.”
“That is true.” Lady Royd made the most of her slender height. She
was learning the way of royalty at last, after Sir Jasper had tried
patiently to teach it to her all these years. “And I? My heart is
breaking, Nance; but I’ll carry my wounds as--as he would carry his.
They’re in retreat, I tell you, and--and we shall not meet again, I
think--I, and the husband whom I love.”
“Oh, you will meet--and--and, if not----” said Nance, with that nice
handling of high faith and common sense which made her charm so human
and so likeable--“you love him, and his one thought is for you; and
Rupert would tell you that death is so little, after all.”
“I suppose it is,” said Lady Royd, with a petulant shrug of the
shoulders; “but it is tiresome of you, Nance, to remind one of the end
of all things pleasant. Oh, by your leave, my dear, no talk of faith!
I’ve had no other food to live on these last months, and I need a
change of diet, girl, need--just my man’s arms about me, and his voice
bidding me take heart again. I tell you, we’re not strong, we women,
without our men to help us.”
Nance remembered her liking for Will Underwood, the shameful end of it;
remembered Rupert, tramping overhead not long ago with Simon Foster and
disdaining all the songs that should have brought him to her side. And
her grasp of life grew firmer on the sudden. It was true, as spoiled,
wayward Lady Royd had said, that women, since the world’s beginning,
need the strong arms of their men about them.
Simon Foster, meanwhile, had done his round of the house, had said
good-night to Rupert; and afterwards he had gone down to the kitchens,
his step like a lover’s. He did not find Martha there, and answered the
sly banter of the women-servants by saying that he needed to cross to
the mistals, to see how the roan cow, that was sick of milk-fever, was
faring.
“You’ll find Martha there,” said a pert scullery-maid; “and I’m sorry
for the roan cow, Simon.”
“And why?” asked Simon, tired long since of all women except one.
“Well, you alone--or Martha alone--you’re kindly with all ailments.
But, put the two o’ you together--within kissing distance--and the roan
cow must learn to bellow if she needs be heard.”
Simon Foster turned about. He was the lone man fighting for his
liberty. “I’m fair blanketed with women these days,” he growled.
“Their lile, daft ways go meeting a plain man at every turning of the
stairs.”
“One maid’s lile, daft ways have sent your wits astray, Simon,” purred
his adversary.
Simon straightened his bent shoulders. The young light was in his eyes
again. He looked comely; for a man at bay shows always the qualities
that are hidden by sleek prosperity. “Well, yes,” he said; “but Martha
happens to be worth twenty of you silly kitchen wenches--that’s why I
chose her.”
The pert maid took up a clout from the table, aimed it at Simon, and
missed him by three feet or so.
“The master could teach you a lesson,” he chuckled. “We’ve been up the
pastures these days, shooting. And master has got a bee in his bonnet,
like, about this gunshot business. ‘Simon,’ he says to me, no further
back than yesterday, ‘there’s nothing matters, except to see straight
and to aim straight. We may be needed by and by.’”
It was so that Simon got away, and went out a conqueror for his little
moment, because he had silenced the strife of women’s tongues. Across
the darkness of the mistal-yard a lanthorn came glimmering fitfully, as
Martha crossed from the byres to the house.
“Well, Martha?” said Foster, striding into the flickering belt of light.
“Well, Simon?” she answered, without surprise. She was no lass in her
teens, to think that grown men welcome fright; and so she did not
scream, sudden as his intrusion was.
“I’ve been thinking, lass.”
“And so have I. The roan cow is easier, thanks to me; and all the
while I put the salt-bags on, and cosseted her, and teased her back to
health, I thought a deal, Simon.”
“What, of me?” he asked, with a sprightly air.
An owl, far down the sloping fields, sounded her call as she swooped to
kill rats and field-mice for her larder. And Martha, though the light
from her lanthorn was dim enough to hide it, could not forego a touch
of coquetry.
“Of you?” she laughed, setting a finger to her dimpled cheek. “Hark
to yond owl. You’re all alike, you hunting-folk; you’ve the masterful,
sharp voice with you.”
“Seems somebody has got to be masterful these days. I’ve driven sheep
to market, and I’ve tried to drive pigs, and I’ve handled skew-tempered
horses; but for sheer, daft contrariness, give me a houseful o’ women,
with few men to guide ’em.”
“You’re not liking women these days?” said Martha tartly.
“Aye, by ones or twos. It’s when they swarm about a house, like a hive
o’ bees, that lone men get feared, like, o’ your indoor fooleries.
Anyway, Martha, I wish I were out with Sir Jasper--just as Master
Rupert does.”
“And you talked of--of liking me--not so very long since.”
“Aye, and meant it; but how’s a man to find speech wi’ the one lass he
wants, when yard and kitchen’s filled wi’ women he’s never a need for?”
“Well, that’s how I feel,” said Martha, unexpectedly. “Women are made
that way, Simon; they’re silly when they herd too thick together.”
“There’s like to be a change before so very long,” put in the other
hurriedly, as if he talked of the next day’s ride to market. “It seems
this bonnie Prince they make such a crack of has turned back from
Derby. And we’re near the line they’ll take, Martha; and, please God,
there’s a chance the fight will come Windyhough way.”
“And you’ll be killed, Simon?” she said, coming so close to him that
the horn-top of her lantern scorched his hand.
“Maybe not. There’s two sides go to a killing, same as to a bargain. It
might happen, like, that t’other lad went down.”
“But what of me, Simon, if--if it chanced otherwise?”
“I’m not meaning to let it chance otherwise, my lass. I’ve you to think
of these days.” And then he drew apart, after the fashion of men when
war is in the air. “Master Rupert shapes gradely,” he said. “I always
said he had the makings of a soldier in him.”
“Oh, he’s a scholar,” said Martha. “I like him well enough--we all
do--but he wears his head i’ the clouds, Simon.”
“Tuts! He’s never had his chance. You’re all for young Master Maurice;
he’s stronger and more showy, as second bairns are apt to be; but gi’e
me the young master’s settled pluck.”
“Gi’e me,” said Martha, with bewildering tenderness, “the end of all
this Rising trouble, and us two in a farm together, wi’ a churn to work
at, and an inglenook to sit by when the day’s work is over wi’. I’d not
sell that farm I’ve dreamed of, Simon, for all your bonnie Prince’s
love-locks.”
“Well, as for love-locks,” said the other, his thoughts still busier
with war than peace, “he has none so many left these days. He’s a plain
man, riding troubled roads; and he carries himself like a man, they
say, or near thereby.”
Martha lifted her lanthorn suddenly to his face. “Aye, you carry
the ‘far’ look,” she said jealously. “Cattle i’ the byre, the quiet
lowing o’ them, and a hearth-place warm and ready for ye--they’re
windle-straws to ye just now, my lad.”
And Simon laughed. “I’d like one straight-up fight, I own, before I
settle down. It’s i’ the blood, ye see. I carried a pike i’ the last
Rising, and killed one here and there, and took my wounds. A man no way
forgets, Martha, the young, pleasant days. And there’s danger near the
house, if all Mr. Oliphant said be true.”
“Well, gang in and meet it, then,” snapped Martha, “if your stiffened
joints will let you.”
She was sore with jealousy, though Simon’s battle-hunger was her only
rival, and struck at random, cruelly, as women do at these times,
because God made them so. And Simon, because men are made so, winced,
and recovered, and said never a word as he crossed to the kitchen door.
“Simon!” she called, with late-found penitence.
He did not turn his head, but strode indoors, through the running
banter that met him by the way, and went upstairs to find Rupert
standing by the loophole that overlooked the main doorway.
“At your post, master?” he said dryly.
Rupert turned sharply. “You disturbed a dream of mine,” he said, in his
well-bred, scholarly voice. “I was fancying men were out in the moonlit
courtyard, that I aimed straight, Simon, and shot a few of those black
rats from Hanover.”
Simon chuckled soberly. He liked to hear his favourite lapse from the
orderly speech that was his usual habit.
“They’ll come, sure enough,” he said gruffly. “We’ve waited over-long,
you and me, to miss some chance o’ frolic at the last.”
Rupert, with his large, royal air, disdaining always the lean,
scholarly form he carried, laughed gently. “My faith is weak to-night,
Simon. So little happens, and God knows I’ve prayed for open battle.”
“Well, bide,” said Simon. “I’ve my own fancy, too, though I was never
what you might call a prayerful man, that the battle’s coming up this
way. My old wounds are plaguing me, master, like to burn me up; and you
may say it’s th’ change i’ the weather, if it pleases ye, but I think
different.”
Rupert welcomed the other’s guarded prophecy, for to-night he needed
hope. And he fell again to looking through the loophole on to the
empty, moonlit courtyard; and suddenly, from the far side of the house,
he heard Nance’s voice again, as she tried to sing a little of Lady
Royd’s heart-sickness away.
The voice, so low and strong and charitable, the thought of her face,
her brown, waving hair, her candid eyes, struck Rupert with intolerable
pain and sense of loss. He recalled the years when he should have been
up and doing, winning his spurs like other men. His shy, half-ironic,
half-scholarly aloofness from the life of every day showed as a thing
contemptible. He magnified his shortcomings, accused himself of
cowardice, not physical cowardice, but moral. All these years, while
his love for Nance was growing, he should have been conquering the
weakness that separated him from his fellows, should have been climbing
the steep path of hardship, training himself to be strong as his
passion for Nance Demaine.
To-night, as he thought of these things, he understood, to the last
depth, this love that possessed him utterly. It was a soldier’s love, a
strong man’s. It was content to forego, content to watch and guard and
work, so long as Nance was happy, though to himself it brought tumult
and unrest enough. The keen, man’s longing to claim her for his own, to
take her out of reach of such as Will Underwood, had given him many an
evil day and night; but through it all, unconquerable, had come that
strong, chivalrous desire to keep her feet from the puddles and the
mire of life, to serve her hand and foot, and afterwards, since he was
needful to her in no other way, to stand by and watch her happiness
from some shadowed corner.
There was all his life’s training, all the tenor of his long, boyhood’s
thoughts, in this fine regard he brought Squire Demaine’s daughter.
There was, too, the Stuart training that had deepened the old Royd
instincts given him at birth. It was, in part, the devotion he would
have given a queen if he had been her cavalier; and, through it all,
there went that silver skein of haplessness and abnegation bravely
borne which is in the woof and weft of all things Stuart. He knew
the unalterable strength and beauty of his love; and, with a sudden
overmastering shame, he saw himself--himself, unfit to join the Rising,
useless and a stay-at-home, beside this other picture of his high,
chivalrous regard for Nance. He laughed bitterly. It was grotesque,
surely, that so fine a passion should be in charge of such a weakling.
And then, from the midst of his humiliation and pain, he plucked
courage and new hope. It was his way, as it had been his father’s. If
this dream of his came true--if the retreat swept up this way, as
Simon hoped, and gave work into his hands--he would give Nance deeds at
last.
“The night is not so empty as it was, Simon,” he said, turning
sharply. “We’ll patrol the house.”