“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——”