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.”