Yet he was aglow with a sense of adventure. He was looking ahead, for the first time in his life, to the open road that he could share at last with braver men. The horse he had borrowed from Giles was tugging at the bridle. He checked it sharply, with a firmness that surprised the pair of them. He was conscious of a curious gaiety and strength.
Far down the road at last he heard the clink of hoofs, then a sharp word of command, and afterwards the gaining tumult of horsemen trotting over sloppy ground. His horse began to whinny, to strain at the bridle, wondering what the lad was at. He quieted him as best he could, and the Loyal Meet that swept past below him had neither thought nor hearing for the uproar in the wood above.
Rupert saw his father and Squire Demaine riding with set faces at the head of their motley gathering. Then, after all had passed and the road seemed clear, there came again the beat of hoofs from the far distance—the hoofs of one horse only, drumming feverishly along the road. And soon Giles, the bailiff, passed him at a sweltering gallop; and Rupert saw that he was riding Nance’s mare.
The scholar laughed suddenly. Intent on his own business, he had not guessed until now that Giles would be troubled when he found his fiddle-headed horse stolen. He could picture the bailiff’s face, could hear his broad and Doric speech, when he found himself without a mount. It was astonishing to Rupert that he could laugh at such a time, for he was young to the open road, and had yet to learn what a solace laughter is to hard-bitten men who fear to take big happenings over-seriously.
He heard Giles gallop out of earshot. Then he led his horse through the wood and down into the high-road. There was no onlooker to smile at his clumsy horsemanship, and for that reason he mounted lightly and handled the reins with easy firmness; and his horse, doubtful until now, found confidence in this new rider.
The sun was well up, but it had no warmth. Its watery light served only to make plainer the cold, sleety hills, the drab-coloured slush of the trampled highway. Only a fool, surely—a fool with some instinct for the forlorn hope—could have woven romance about this scene of desolation. Yet Rupert’s courage was high, his horse was going blithely under him. He was picturing the crowd of wiser men whom he had watched ride by—the gentry, the thick-thewed yeomen whose faces were known to him from childhood, the jolly farmers who had taken their fences on more cheery hunting days than this. Something stirred at the lad’s heart as he galloped in pursuit—some reaching back to the olden days, some sense of forward, eager hope. So had the men of Craven, just over the Yorkshire border, ridden up to Flodden generations since—ridden from the plough and hunting-field to a battle that gave them once for all their place in song and story.
And he, the Scholar, was part, it seemed, of this later riding out that promised to bring new fame to Lancashire. All was confused to him as he urged Giles’s fiddle-headed nag to fresh endeavour. Old tales of warfare, passed on from mouth to mouth along the generations, were mingled with this modern battle that was in the making London way; voices from the elder days stole down and whispered to him from the windy, driven moors that had been his playmates. As if some miracle had waited for him at the cross-ways of the Rising, where many had chosen the road of doubt and some few the track of faith, Rupert knew himself the heir at last—the heir his father had needed all these years.
His seat in the saddle was one that any knowledgable horseman might praise. The bailiff’s chestnut was galloping with a speed that had taken fire from the rider’s need to catch up the Loyal Meet. Rupert was so sure of himself, so sanguine. He had let his friends ride forward without him because he had not known how to tell them that at heart he was no fool; and now, when he overtook them, they would understand at last.
They pounded over a straight, level stretch of road just between Conie Cliff Wood and the little farm at the top of Water Ghyll, and Rupert saw Bailiff Giles half a mile in front of him. Giles was doing his best to ruin Nance’s mare for life in his effort to catch up the hunt; and so Rupert, in the man’s way, must needs ask more of his own horse, too, than need demanded. He would catch up with the bailiff, he told himself, would race past him, would turn in saddle with a careless shout that Giles would be late for the Meet unless he stirred himself. His mood was the more boyish because until he fought with his brother on the moors a while since he had not tasted real freedom.
It was not his fault, nor his horse’s, that they came heedlessly to a corner of the road where it dipped down a greasy, curving slope. In the minds of both there was the need for haste, and they were riding straight, the two of them. His fiddle-headed beast slipped at the turning of the corner, reeled half across the road in his effort to recover, and threw his rider. When Rupert next awoke to knowledge of what was going forward he found himself alone. Far down the road he could hear the rattle of his horse as it galloped madly after its brethren that carried Sir Jasper’s company.