Rupert took fire on the sudden, as he had done not long since when he had fought with his brother on the moor. Old indignities were brought to a head. He did not know what he said; but Lady Royd bent her head, as if a moorland tempest beat about her. It seemed as if the whole unrest, the whole passion and heedlessness, of the Stuart battle against circumstance had gathered to a head in this wind-swept courtyard of the old fighting house of Windyhough.
And the combatants were a spoilt wife on one hand, on the other a scholar who had not yet found his road in life. The battle should have given food for laughter; yet the scholar wore something of his father’s dignity and spirit, and the woman was slow to admit a mastery that pleased and troubled her.
Again there was a silence. The east wind was piping through and through the courtyard, and rain was falling; but on the high moors there were drifts of snow that would not yield to the gusty warmth. All was upset, disordered—rain, and snow, and wind, were all at variance, as if they shared the unrest and the tumult of the times.
“You—you hurt me, Rupert,” she said weakly.
“I had no right, mother,” he broke in, contrite. “Of course I am the heir—and I was never strong, as you had wished—and—and I spoke in heat.”
“I like your heat, boy,” she said unexpectedly. “Oh, you were right, were right! You never had a chance.”
He put his hand on her arm—gently, as a lover or a courtier might. “Maurice should have been the heir. It cannot be helped, mother—but you’ve been kind to me through it all.”
Lady Royd was dismayed. Her husband had yielded to her whims; the folk about her had liked her beauty, her easy, friendly insolence, the smile which comes easily to women who are spoilt and have luxury at command. She had been sure of herself till now—till now, when the son she had made light of was at pains to salve her conscience. He was a stay-at-home, a weakling. There was no glamour attaching to him, no riding-out to high endeavour among the men who were making or were marring history. Yet now, to the mother’s fancy, he was big of stature.
She yielded to a sharp, dismaying pity. “My dear,” she said, with a broken laugh, “you talk like your father—like your father when I like him most and disagree with his mad view of life.”
Rupert went to bed that night—after his father and Maurice had returned muddied from a hunt he had not shared, after the supper that had found him silent and without appetite—with a sense of keen and personal disaster that would not let him sleep. Through all his dreams—the brave, unspoiled dreams of boyhood—he had seen this Rising take its present shape. His father’s teaching, his stealthy reading in the library of books that could only better a sound Stuart faith, had prepared him for the Loyal Meet that was to gather at Windyhough with to-morrow’s dawn. But in his dreams he had been a rider among loyal riders, had struck a blow here and there for the Cause he had at heart. In plain reality, with the wind sobbing round the gables overhead, he was not disciplined enough to join the hunt. He was untrained.