“Because you look underfed and over-ridden, man. Stay here the night, I say. The Prince himself would not ask more of you if he could see you now.”
“The Prince least of all, perhaps. It is his way to shift burdens on to his own shoulders—if we would let him.”
Lady Royd found a moment’s respite from her spoiled and stunted outlook, from the sense of foreboding and of coming loss—loss of the husband whom, in some queer way, she loved. She looked at Oliphant of Muirhouse, standing in the doorway and looking backward at them; and she wondered by what gift he could be sleepless and saddle-sore, serene and temperately gay, all at the one time.
“Mr. Oliphant,” she said, “this lad with the Stuart name gets more than his deserts. He has few men like yourself among his following, surely?”
“He has many better men.” Oliphant, weary of everything except the need to get his ten-mile errand done and snatch the sleep he needed, bowed prettily enough to his hostess. “The Prince, God bless him, sets the keynote for us all. He makes weaklings into—something better, Lady Royd.”
Royd’s wife, she knew not why, thought suddenly of Rupert, her elder-born, and she yielded to the temper that had not been curbed throughout her married life. “Then would God my son could come under the Prince’s discipline! He’s the heir to Windyhough—laugh with me, Mr. Oliphant, while I tell you what a weakling he is. He can ride, after a fashion—but not to hounds; he can only read old books in the library, or take his gun up to these evil moors my husband loves.”
Sir Jasper’s temper was slow to catch fire, but it was burning now with a fierce, dismaying heat. He would have spoken—words that would never be forgotten afterwards between his wife and him—if Oliphant had not surprised them both by the quietness of his interruption.
“He has had no chance to prove himself, I take it?” he broke in, with a certain tender gravity. “I was in that plight once—and the chance came—and it seemed easy to accept it. Good-night to you, Lady Royd, and trust your son a little more.”
Sir Jasper was glad to follow his guest out of doors into the courtyard, where a grey-blue moon was looking down on the late-fallen sleet. Oliphant’s horse, tied to the bridle-ring at the door, was shivering in the wind, and his master patted him with the instinctive, friendly comradeship he had for all dumb things.
“Only ten more miles, old lad,” he muttered, hunting for sugar in the pockets of his riding-coat, and finding two small pieces.