His men recovered from a surprise equal to his own. The light was wan and sleety, with mist coming down from the hills; but the fugitive was well in sight still as they brought their muskets to the shoulders. A sharp volley rang out between the silent hills, as if every trooper had pulled his trigger in instant answer to command. It seemed that one here and there of the shots would tell; but Sir Jasper went galloping over the level, and dipped down the further rise, and their horses would not answer when they tried to gallop in pursuit.
“So that is all the wars in Flanders taught you?” said Goldstein savagely. “You should have brought your wives to shoot for you.”
A low growl went up. These men were tired of Goldstein’s leadership, tired of the hardship and bad weather. And their leader knew the meaning of that growl.
“Keep your cursed tempers,” he said, with what to him was suavity. “There’s the Pretender at the end of this day’s journey—and a price on his head.”
At Windyhough, Rupert and his mother sat in the parlour, with its faded scents and tapestries. They waited for great happenings that did not come their way; and they were sick at heart. Rupert was hungry for news of the father who was braver and stronger than he—the father whom he missed at every turn of the day’s road. He had done his round of the house with Simon Foster; and Nance, who cheered his outlook for him whenever she came in sight, was absent on some wild hill-scamper, shared by the broken-winded horse who had grown close comrade to her.
Lady Royd, with the new-found motherhood that made her comelier, guessed what was passing in the boy’s mind; and she fussed about him, when he was asking only for free air and the chance to fight like other men. And Rupert thought, with a shame that deadened all his outlook, of the years when he had stood, scholarly, ironical, apart from the blood and tears that meet wayfarers who take the open road. He saw it all, to-night when the peevish wind was beating through the draughty house—saw the weakness that had divided him from the open-air, good fellows who liked and pitied him.
“There’s powder and shot stored here, and I know how to use them,” he said, with light contempt of himself. “And yet nothing happens, mother. It is as Simon Foster says—‘we’re needing storms and earthquakes, just to make to-day a little different, like, fro’ yesterday.’”
“Oh, your chance will come,” said Lady Royd, with the pitiful feigning of belief that she thought was faith. “Your father taught you, just before he went, how to direct a siege. You remember that he taught you?” she insisted. “He trusted you to hold Windyhough for the Prince.”
Rupert laughed—a sudden, dreary laugh that startled her. “He taught me well. I’ve not forgotten the lesson, mother. But he knew there would be no siege. I heard him tell you so.”
There was no sharp riding-in of enemies. The night was still, and empty, and at peace. Yet Lady Royd was plunged deep, by her own son, into tragedy and battle. She remembered the night of Sir Jasper’s departure—the talk they had had in hall—her husband’s weary confession that he had lied to Rupert, telling him a fairy-tale of the coming attack on Windyhough.