Squire Demaine glanced dryly at Sir Jasper. “The young pup and the old pup, Royd. Maurice here has better judgment than I thought. I always said that Rupert was true to the Royd breed. Your own encounter in the wood just now——”
“Your encounter, sir?” broke in Maurice eagerly. “Giles was saying to me just now that he’d rather be riding on his bailiff’s business up among the hills than be following this dog-trot through the rain. He said—and he was so quiet that I knew his temper was red-raw—he said that naught was ever like to happen again, so far as he could see, and he was longing for a thunderstorm, just to break up the quietness, like.”
The boy was so apt in his mimicry of Giles that Squire Demaine gave out the frank, hearty bellow that did duty for a laugh. “We’re all of the same mind, my lad. Thunder—or a straight, soon over fight—clears up one’s troubles.”
“Your encounter, father?” said Maurice, persistent in his curiosity. “Did you meet a spy of George’s, and kill him?”
Sir Jasper looked at this younger-born of his, at the frank, open face and sturdy limbs. And then he thought, with that keen, recurrent stab of pain that had been bedfellow to him since first he knew his heir a weakling, of Rupert, left up at Windyhough to guard a house that—so far as he could see just now—was in need of no defence.
“It was not—not just a spy of George’s I met,” he said, with a grave smile. “He may come to that one day. And I did not kill him, Maurice, though I had the chance.”
“Why, sir?” said Maurice, downright and wondering.
“Why? God knows. We’d best be pushing forward.”
At Windyhough, where the wind had piled a shroud of snow about the gables, they were thinking, all this time, that those who had ridden out were fortunate. As day by day went by, and Rupert found himself constantly alone in a house where only women and old men were left, he found it harder to stay at home, drilling the household to their separate parts in an attack whose likelihood grew more and more remote.
Rupert, with a body not robust and a twisted ankle that was still in bandages, was holding fast to his allegiance. His mother, less pampered and less querulous, grew each day a more sacred trust. Each day, as she watched him go about the house, he surprised more constantly that look of the Madonna which stood out against the background of her pretty, faded face. He had something to defend at last, something that played tender, stifled chords about that keyboard which we call the soul. He was alone among the women and the old men; but he was resolute.