“Well?” asked the younger.
“You never would have claimed that glove.”
The boy’s temper, easy-going as it was, was roused. “Would you have hindered me?”
“Yes. I—I love her. That is all.”
So young Maurice laughed aloud, and Rupert ran in suddenly and hit him on the mouth, and the fight began. In his dreams the heir of Windyhough had revelled in battles, in swift assaults, forlorn and desperate hopes; for he had known no waking pleasures of the kind. And always, in his dreams, there had been a certain spaciousness and leisure; he had found time, in between giving and receiving blows, to feel himself the big man of his hands, to revel in the sheer bravery of the thing.
In practice, here on the open moor, with snow coming up across the stormy, steel-grey sky, there was no leisure and no illusion. He had no time to feel, no luxury of sentiment. He knew only that, in some muddled way, he was fighting Nance’s battle; that, by some miracle, he got a sharp blow home at times; that twice Maurice knocked him down; that, by some native stubbornness, he got up again, with the moor dancing in wide circles round him, and hit his man.
It was swift and soon over, as Rupert thought of this battle afterwards. No pipes were playing up and down the hills, to hearten him. Even the wind, whose note he loved, blew swift from the east about deaf ears. He and his brother were alone, in a turmoil of their own making, and his weakening arms were beating like a flail about the head of Maurice, the supplanter. Then the moors whirled round him, a world big with portent and disaster; and dimly, as from a long way off, he heard Maurice’s voice.
“I’ll have to kill him before he gives in. Who ever thought it of the scholar?”
The gibe heartened Rupert. He struggled up again, and by sheer instinct—skill he had little, and strength seemed to have left him long ago—he got another swift blow home. And then darkness settled on him, and he dreamed again of battle as he had known it in the fanciful days of boyhood. He revelled in this lonely moorland fight, counted again each blow and wondered at its strength, knew himself at last a proven man. His dreams were kind to him.
Then he got out from his sickness, little by little, and looked about him, and saw a half-moon shining dimly through a whirl of snow. The east wind was playing shrewdly round his battered face, as if a man were rubbing salt into his wounds. He tried to get up, looked about him again, and saw Maurice stooping over him.