Halliwell Sutcliffe

“ Men took hazards, these days, as unconcernedly as they swallowed breakfast before getting into saddle. Peril was part of the day’s routine, and custom endeared it to them, till love of wife and home grew like a garden-herb, that smells the sweetest when you crush it down.
Lady Royd watched her husband’s face, and saw him grow more full of cheeriness as the week went on. Oliphant’s news had been true enough, it seemed, for Scotland had proved more than loyal, and had risen at the Stuart’s call as a lass comes to her lover. ”

“ The Highlanders, trudging over hill-tracks to their shieldings, were buried in a mist of sorrow, that only battle could disperse. Lord Murray, riding for his own country, was reflective, soured, and peevish, because his cold arithmetic of war was disproven by results. Yet, through the disillusion and weariness of this wild scamper for the hills, the strong souls of the Rising proved their mettle. The Prince, Lochiel, the good and debonair, Sir Jasper and his hunting men of Lancashire—those who had lost most, because their hope had been most keen, were the strong men in retreat. ”

“ Lady Royd was standing apart, as if nothing mattered, now she had heard that Sir Jasper lay wounded at the farm; if her man had not been strong enough to ride in and guard her at such a time, he must be near to death, she felt. She had made him her idol, starving her sons of love because the father claimed it; and she was paying her debts now, in confusion and humiliation. Nance scarcely heeded her. Her eyes passed from Simon and Ben Shackleton to the slim, erect figure at the gate, and instinctively she crossed to Rupert’s side. ”

“ The wind blew cold and shrill, and all was empty loneliness; but to Nance it seemed that she was in a friendly land, where she was free to breathe. They would not let her fight for the true cause; she had no skill in arms; but here, on the naked, friendly heath, she was free at least to grasp the meaning of that stormy hardship which her folk had been content to undergo.
There was Sir Jasper—her father, and many who had ridden out from the Loyal Meet at Windyhough under her own eyes—and all of them had seemed instinct with this large, stormy air that lay above the moors. ”

“ Nance, too, lay awake. She was busy with what Lady Royd had named the rosemary of life. All her instincts rose in warm defence of that view of honour which Sir Jasper’s wife had slighted. And there were men, men in their own midst, who could love in the old knightly way. There was Will Underwood—and so she lost herself, half between waking and dreaming, in a maze of high perfection that she reared about his person. Of a truth Wild Will was in danger, had he known it. He had pressed his suit on Nance, had urged it, in and out of season, during the months that preceded this upset of the Rising. ”

“ The riders and the men on foot went by. The tread of hoofs, the tread of feet, was slow and measured, as the tread of mourners is; and down and up, and up and down, the echoes of the pipes’ lament roamed through Derby’s street. It was an hour—and there are few such—when men, with their strength and their infirmities, and their rooted need of battle, grow tender and outspoken as little children, who have found no need as yet to face life in the open.
The Prince and Sir Jasper were alone. The fighting men had passed them, and the chattering townsfolk. ”

“ At Windyhough, Rupert and his mother sat in the parlour, with its faded scents and tapestries. They waited for great happenings that did not come their way; and they were sick at heart. Rupert was hungry for news of the father who was braver and stronger than he—the father whom he missed at every turn of the day’s road. He had done his round of the house with Simon Foster; and Nance, who cheered his outlook for him whenever she came in sight, was absent on some wild hill-scamper, shared by the broken-winded horse who had grown close comrade to her. ”

“ He did not hear the sound of hoofs behind him, till Roger Demaine’s daughter rode close up, reined in, and sat regarding him with an odd look of pity, and liking, and reproach.
“You look out of heart, Rupert. What ails you?” she asked, startling him out of his day-dream.
“Life. It is life that ails me,” he muttered, then laughed as if ashamed of his quick outburst. “I’ve been tramping the moors since daybreak, Nance,” he went on, in a matter-of-fact voice, “and all for three brace of grouse. You know how much powder goes to every bird I kill.” ”

“ Sir Jasper had dreamed of this, since his first gladness that he had an heir, his first sorrow when he admitted to himself, grudgingly, that the boy was not as strong as he had wished. And Rupert, while his shoulders found their scholarly droop in reading old books at Windyhough, had shared the same dream—that one day, by a miracle, he might ride out with his father on the Stuart’s business.
And they were here together. And nothing mattered, somehow, as the way of men is when their souls have taken the open, friendly road. ”

“ Into the scented room, with its candles shining from their silver sconces, Lady Royd came, tremulous and white of face, from watching Oliphant of Muirhouse ride out.
“Nance, my dear, I—I am tired,” she said.
“I think we all are,” Nance answered, rising from the spinet with a deference that had no heart in it.
“Oh, you’re querulous, and so am I,” said the other, with a shrewd glance at the girl’s face. “If our men could see us now—our men who fight for us—they would be astonished, Nance. We’re so little like their dreams of us. ”

“ The sleet was drifting in quiet flakes before a wind that was tired for a while of its own speed. From the western spur of moor a long, slanting gleam of sunlight lit up this bleak land’s loneliness—lit up Sir Jasper’s figure as he sat, unconcerned, disdainful, in the saddle of a restive horse. For a moment the dragoons drew back; they had lived in a world where each fought for his own advancement only, and they were perplexed by this spectacle of a man who, alone and far behind retreating comrades, made open confession of his faith. ”

“ Looking back on these days, Rupert knew that no ball at Holyrood here, no triumph-march to London, could have proved the Stuart as those Highland journeyings had done. The Prince and he had learned the way of gain in loss, and with it the gaiety that amazes weaker men.
From Holyrood—the moon free of clouds and the grey walls finding faith again—a friendly message came to him. He caught the Stuart glamour up—the true, abiding glamour that does not yield to this world’s limitations. What he had read in the library at Windyhough was now a triumph-song that he had found voice to sing. ”

“ Sir Jasper knew it. Even Lord Murray, riding far behind was aware that life held more than strategy and halfpennies.
“Dear God, the pipes!” said the Prince, turning suddenly. “D’ye hear them, Sir Jasper?”
“I’m hill-bred, too, your Highness. Could I miss their note?”
And they fell silent, for there is something in this hill music that touches the soul of a man. It finds out his need of battle, his instinct to be up and doing along the wide, human thoroughfares of life. ”

“ The silence was so intimate, so full of the strife that hinders comrade souls at times, that Nance knew she was not alone. She glanced up, saw Rupert standing in the doorway, read the misery and longing in his face. For women have a gift denied to men—they see us as an open book, clear for them to read, while we can only sight them at odd moments, like startled deer that cross the mountain mists. ”

“ They had been laggards in the Prince’s service; they were recusants, come at the last hour to prove themselves; but they felt, seeing Nance step down between them, her face stained with weariness and long vigil, that a royal lady had come into their midst.
Nance went through the charred doorway, and halted a moment as the pleasant frost-wind met her. The moonlight and the clean face of the sky gave her a sense of ease and liberty, after the cramped days indoors. The siege’s uproar, its stealthy quiet, were lost in this big silence of the frosty spaces overhead. ”

“ Oliphant looked back along the years—saw the weakness of body, the tired distrust of himself that had hindered him, the groping forward to the light that glimmered faint ahead.
“Oh, by misadventure and by sorrow—how else? I’ll take another pinch of snuff, Sir Jasper, and ride forward.”
“If they but knew, Oliphant!” The older man’s glance was no less direct, but it was wistful and shadowed by some doubt that had taken him unawares. “We’ve all to gain, we loyalists, and George has left us little enough to lose. And yet our men hang back. Cannot they see this Rising as I see it? ”

“ Lady Royd, with the new-found motherhood that made her comelier, guessed what was passing in the boy’s mind; and she fussed about him, when he was asking only for free air and the chance to fight like other men. And Rupert thought, with a shame that deadened all his outlook, of the years when he had stood, scholarly, ironical, apart from the blood and tears that meet wayfarers who take the open road. He saw it all, to-night when the peevish wind was beating through the draughty house—saw the weakness that had divided him from the open-air, good fellows who liked and pitied him. ”

“ But as each short day closed in there was the return to the silence of the house at Windyhough, to Lady Royd’s wonder if her husband were lying dead in some south country ditch, to the yapping of the toy spaniel that harassed Rupert because, soul and body, he was tired of mimic warfare.
They had come home this afternoon from musket-drill, and Simon had left them in the courtyard. A little, sobbing wind was fluting round the gables, and the red light on the hills foretold, unerringly, that snow would come. ”

“ And Rupert laughed as he trotted forward. He had faced many things during his odd, disastrous five-and-twenty years—loneliness hard to bear, good-humoured liking that was half-contempt from the men who counted him a scholar, distrust and loathing of himself. But now he felt strength come into his right hand, as a sword-hilt does. His feet were set on the free, windy road. He had gone a little way to prove himself, and the zest of it was like rare wine, that warms the fancy but leaves both head and heart in a nice poise of sanity. ”

“ We might be old in friendship, you and I. We see the like world, Sir Jasper—the world that caution is too mean to enter. And yet my lord Murray—who has been bred among the hills, while I have not—has never learned their teaching, as I learned it at my first coming to the misty Highlands.”
The pipes would not be quiet, behind them on this sloppy road. The Prince, as his habit was, had seen far and wisely when he forbade the music. To and fro the uproar went, wild, insistent, friendly as the cry of moor-birds—snipe and curlew and wide-roving plover—to men who love the uplands. ”

“ He and Nance were alone here on the uplands. A ragged, crimson sunset lingered over the moor. A cock-grouse got up from the heather on their right, and whirred down the bitter wind, chuckling harshly as it went. It was a man’s land, this, full of hills that stepped, sleety and austere, to the red of the stormy sky. A man should have been easily the master here; and yet Underwood knew that he was dwarfed, belittled, by this slim lass of Demaine’s, whose eyes held truth and looked him through and through. ”

“ At Will Underwood’s house, meanwhile, the laggard gentry of Lancashire were sitting over their wine, and were cursing this snowfall that would not let them hunt to-morrow. And they were troubled, all of them; for they knew that better men were facing hardship on the London road, while they, from faults of sloth or caution, were sheltered by house-walls. They were men, after all, under the infirmities that hindered them; and ease, for its own sake, never yet appealed for long to hearts built for weather and adventure. They needed hard exercise, to blunt the edge of conscience ”

“ And he fell again to looking through the loophole on to the empty, moonlit courtyard; and suddenly, from the far side of the house, he heard Nance’s voice again, as she tried to sing a little of Lady Royd’s heart-sickness away.
The voice, so low and strong and charitable, the thought of her face, her brown, waving hair, her candid eyes, struck Rupert with intolerable pain and sense of loss. He recalled the years when he should have been up and doing, winning his spurs like other men. His shy, half-ironic, half-scholarly aloofness from the life of every day showed as a thing contemptible. ”

“ Sir Jasper had cherished dreams of this Rising, but war, in the hot fighting and in the dreary silences between, is not made up of dreams. The poetry of it comes before and after, when peace smooths her ruffled plumage and sings of heroism; the prose of it is so commonplace that men sensitively built need dogged loyalty to keep them safe from disillusionment.
“The wind blows east, your Highness,” he said. “You’ll pardon me, but an east wind sets my temper all on edge. My sympathy is catholic, but I’d hang the nether millstone round Lord Murray’s neck if I had my way.” ”

“ Their very hatred of weakness, of swerving from the straight, loyal path, reacts on them, and they find temptation doubly strong. Sir Jasper, as he rode down into the nipping frost that hung misty about the chimney-stacks below him, had never seen this house of his so comely, so likeable. Temptation has a knack of rubbing out all harsher lines, of showing a stark, midwinter landscape as a land of plenty and of summer. There were the well ordered life, the cheery greetings with farmer-folk and hinds who loved their squire. ”

“ Through her anxieties, through her womanish picturing of the wounds and sickness that were lying in wait along this high-road that led south to victory and the Stuart, she was glad that “Wild Will” would need her prayers, her trust in him.
She rode slowly up by way of Hangman’s Snout—a bluff, round hill that once had carried a gallows-tree. Line by swarthy line the heath widened out before her as she climbed. Crumpled hillocks, flat wastes of peat, acre after acre of dead bracken intermixed with ling and benty grasses, swept out and up to the sky that was big with sunrise and with storm. ”

“ She saw him riding through the dangerous night roads, and prayed for his safety, at each corner of a highway peopled with assassins. She saw him galloping recklessly in open daylight, meeting odds laughable in their overwhelming number, killing his men, not singly but by scores, as he rode on, untouched, and gay, and loyal to his trust. It is so that young love is apt to make its idol a knight miraculous, moving through a cloud-land too ethereal for the needs of each day as it comes. Nance Demaine could hold her own in the open country ”

“ Simon Foster glanced sharply at Rupert. He knew the lad through and through, was prepared for the whiteness of his face, the withdrawal as if a friend had struck him wantonly. “Miss Nance,” he said bluntly, “shame is for folk that’s earned it. There’s three of us here, and we’d all be marching into London, if only it could have happened that way, like.”
Nance would not look at Rupert, though she guessed how she had wounded him. She did not know this mood that had settled on her since coming to the draughty, loyal house of Windyhough. ”