The check lasted beyond the patience of the hunters, and Sir Jasper chose his moment well.
“Gentlemen,” he said, rising in his stirrups—“gentlemen, the meet is at my house of Windyhough to-morrow. Who rides with me?”
The field gathered round him. He was a man commanding men, and he compelled attention.
“What meet?” asked Squire Demaine, his ruddy face brick-red with sudden hope.
“The Loyal Meet. Who’s with me, gentlemen?”
Sir Jasper was strung to that pitch of high endeavour which sees each face in a crowd and knows what impulse sways it. They gathered round him to a man; but as he glanced from one to the other he knew that there were many waverers. For loyalty, free and unswerving, sets a light about a man’s face that admits no counterfeit.
Yet the din was loud enough to promise that all were of one mind here. Hounds and fox and huntsmen were forgotten. Men waved their hats and shouted frantically. Nance Demaine and the half-dozen ladies who were in the field to-day found little kerchiefs and waved them, too, and were shrill and sanguine in their cries of “The Prince, God bless him!—the Prince!—the Stuart home again!”
It was all like Bedlam, while the austere hills, lined here and there with snow that would not melt, looked down on this warmth of human enterprise. The horses reared and fidgeted, dismayed by the uproar. Hounds got out of hand and ran in and out between the plunging hoofs, while the huntsman, a better fox-hunter than King’s man, swore roundly and at large as he tried to bring them out of this outrageous riot.
“Where’s Will Underwood?” asked a youngster suddenly. It was young Hunter of Hunterscliff, whose lukewarmness had angered Nance not long ago. “It’s the first meet he’s missed this winter.”
A horseman at his elbow laughed, the laugh that men understood. “He had business in the south, so he told me when I met him taking the coach. Wild Will, from the look of his face, seemed tired of hunting.”