the other dryly, taking full advantage of an old servant’s tyranny. “Your father was weaned on thirst and brimstone, maister; and he was reared, he was, on good, hot Gospeller’s stuff, such as they used to preach at Rigstones Chapel; and he never lost the habit when he gat up i’ the world. Nay, there’s naught Stuart about ye.” Will Underwood, standing with a foot in either camp, was accused not so much by Eli’s blunt, unlovely harshness as by his own judgment of himself. He knew, now that he was compelled to ask questions of himself, that all his instincts, tap them deeply enough, were against monarchy of any sort—against monarchy of soul over body, against the God these Catholic gentry worshipped, against restraints of all kinds. He saw Rigstones Chapel, standing harsh against the moor—the home of a lonely, obscure sect unknown beyond its own borders, a sect that had the east wind’s bitterness for creed, but no remembrance of the summer’s charity. He remembered, as a little chap, going to service at his father’s side, recalling the thunder and denunciation from the pulpit, the scared dreams that had shared his bed with him when afterwards he went to sleep on Sabbath nights. Underwood got himself in hand again. Those days were far off, surely. Despite Eli’s unbelieving face, confronting him, he was striving to forget that he had ever shared those moorland walks to Rigstones Chapel. His father had learned gradually that it was absurd to credit a score of people, assembled in a wayside chapel, with the certainty that, out of the world’s millions, they alone were saved; and afterwards this same father had bought a fine house, because the squire who owned it had gambled credit and all else away. And the son had found a gift for riding horses, had learned from women’s faces that they liked the look of him; and, from small and crude beginnings, he had grown to be Wild Will, the[39] hunter who never shirked his fences, the gay lover who had gathered about himself a certain fugitive romance that had not been tested yet in full daylight. [39] Eli watched his master’s face. The hour was late. The wind was shrill and busy here, as it was at Windyhough. The world of the open moor, with its tempests and its downrightness, intruded into this snug house of Underwood. Will was shut off from his intimates, from the easy, heedless life, that had grown to be second nature to him. He was aware of a great loneliness, a solitude that his bailiff’s company seemed, not to lessen, but to deepen. In some odd way he was standing face to face with the realities of this Stuart
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