THE PRINCE COMES SOUTH
RUPERT stood in the little wood that bordered the Langton road, waiting
for Sir Jasper’s company of horse to pass. It would have been chilling
work for hardier folk. The rain soaked him to the skin; the wind
stabbed from behind, as the sly northeaster does. He had no prospect
of joining his friends as yet; his one hope was to follow them, like
a culprit fearing detection, until they and he had ridden so far from
Windyhough that they could not turn him back to eat his heart out among
the women.
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.
Sir Jasper, meanwhile, had got to Langton High Street, had drawn his
men up on either side of the road. Their horses were muddied to the
girths. The riders were wet to the skin, splashed and unheroic. Yet
from the crowd that had gathered from the rookeries and the by-streets
of the town--a crowd not any way disposed to reverence the call of a
Stuart to his loyal friends--a murmur of applause went up. They had
looked for dainty gentlemen, playing at heroics while the poor ground
at the mill named “daily bread.” They saw instead a company of horse
whose members were not insolent, or gay, or free from weariness. They
saw working farmers, known to them by sight, who were not accounted
fools on market-days. Some glimmering of intelligence came to these
townsfolk who led bitter lives among the by-streets. There must be
“some queer mak’ o’ sense about it,” they grumbled one to another,
as they saw that the Loyal Meet was wet to the skin, and grave and
resolute. It was the like resolution--dumb, and without help from
loyalty to a high Cause--that had kept many of them faithful to their
wives, their children, their houses in the back alleys of Langton Town.
The rain ceased for a while, and the sun came struggling through a
press of clouds. And up through the middle of the street, between the
two lines of horsemen and the chattering crowd behind, a single figure
walked. He was big in length and beam, and he moved as if he owned the
lives of men; and the shrill wind blew his cassock round him.
Sir Jasper moved his horse into the middle of the street, stooped, and
grasped the vicar’s hand.
“We’re well met, I think,” he said. “What’s your errand, Vicar?”
“Oh, just to ring the church bells. My ringer is a George’s man--so’s
my sexton; and I said to both of them, in a plain parson’s way, that
I’d need shriving if Langton, one way or t’other, didn’t ring a Stuart
through the town. I can handle one bell, if not the whole team of six.”
Sir Jasper laughed. So did his friends. So did the rabble looking on.
“It’s well we’re here to guard you,” said Sir Jasper, glancing at the
crowd, whose aspect did not promise well for church bells and such
temperate plain-song.
“By your leave, no,” the Vicar answered with a jolly laugh. “I know
these folk o’ Langton. They should know me, too, by now, seeing how
often I’ve whipped ’em from the pulpit--and at other times--yes, at
other times, maybe.”
The Vicar, grey with endeavour and constancy to his trust, was vastly
like Rupert, riding hard in quest of a boy’s first adventure. He stood
to his full height, and nodded right and left to the townsmen who were
pressing already between the flanks of Stuart horses.
“Men o’ Langton,” he said, his voice deep, cheery, resonant, “Sir
Jasper says I need horsemen to guard me in my own town. Give him your
answer.”
The loyal horse, indeed, were anxious for the Vicar’s safety, seeing
this rabble swarm into the middle of the High Street, through the
double line of riders that had kept them back till now. They were
riding forward already, but the parson waved them back.
The Vicar stood now in the thick of a roaring crowd that had him at
its mercy. Sir Jasper, who loved a leal man, tried to get his horse a
little nearer, but could not without riding down defenceless folk; and,
while he and his friends were in grave anxiety and doubt, a sudden hum
of laughter came from the jostling crowd.
“Shoulder him, lads!” cried one burly fellow.
Five other stalwarts took up the cry, and the Vicar, protesting with
great cheeriness, was lifted shoulder high. And gradually it grew clear
to the Loyal Meet that the parson, as he had boasted, was safe--nay,
was beloved--among these working-folk of Langton.
They moved up the street, followed by the rabble, and the two lines of
the Loyal Meet were facing each other once more across the emptying
roadway. And by and by, from the old church on the hill, a furious peal
rang out. The Vicar, who was a keen horseman himself, had named his
bells “a team of six”; and never in its history, perhaps, had the team
been driven with such recklessness. The parson held one rope--one rein,
as he preferred to call it--and knew how to handle it. But his five
allies had only goodwill to prompt them in their attempt to ring a peal.
There was noise enough, to be sure; and across the uproar another music
sounded--music less full-bodied, but piercing, urgent, not to be denied.
Sir Jasper lifted his head, as a good hound does when he hears the
horn. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the pipes, the blessed pipes! D’ye hear
them? The Prince is near.”
They scarcely heard the jangling bells. Keen, swift, triumphant, the
sweetest music in the world came louder and louder round the bend
of Langton Street. The riders could not sit still in saddle, but
were drumming lightly with their feet, as if their stirrups were a
dancing-floor. Their horses fidgeted and neighed.
And then Prince Charles Edward came into Langton, and these gentry
of the Loyal Meet forgot how desolate and cold the dawn had been.
Some of them had waited thirty years for this one moment; others, the
youngsters and the middle-aged, had been reared on legends of that
unhappy ’15 Rising which had not chilled the faith of Lancashire. And
all seemed worth while now, here in the sunlit street, that was wet and
glistening with the late persistent rain.
The Prince rode alone, his officers a few yards in the rear, and behind
them the strange army, made up of Scottish gentry, of Highlanders
in kilts, of plain Lowland farmers armed with rusty swords, with
scythe-blades fixed on six-foot poles, with any weapon that good luck
had given to their hands.
It was not this motley crew that Sir Jasper saw, nor any of his
company. It was not Lord Murray, a commanding figure at another time;
not Lochiel, lean and debonair and princely, though both rode close
behind the Prince.
The Prince himself drew all men’s eyes. His clothes, his Highland
bonnet, had suffered from the muddy wet; the bright hair, that had
pleased ladies up in Edinburgh not long ago when he danced at Holyrood,
was clotted by the rain. He stood plainly on his record as a man,
without any of the fripperies to which women give importance.
And the record was graven on his tired, eager face. Forced marches had
told on him. His sleepless care for the least among his followers had
told on him. He knew that Marshal Wade was hurrying from Northumberland
to overtake him, that he was riding through a country worse than
hostile--a country indifferent for the most part, whose men were
reckoning up the chances either way, and choosing as prudence, not
the heart, dictated. Yet behind him was some unswerving purpose; and,
because he had no doubt of his own faith, he seemed to bring a light
from the farther hills into this muddy street of Langton.
He drew rein, and those behind him pulled up sharply. The pipes ceased
playing, and it seemed as if a healthy, nipping wind had ceased to blow
from these sleet-topped hills of Lancashire. The Loyal Meet rose in
their stirrups, and their uproar drowned the Vicar’s bells. They were
men applauding a stronger man, and the pipes themselves could find no
better music.
Sir Jasper rode forward with bared head, and the Prince, doffing his
bonnet in return, reached out a capable, firm hand.
“Leal and punctual, sir. I give you greeting,” he said.
And the tears, do as he would, were in Sir Jasper’s eyes. This man
with the fair, disordered hair and the face that laughed its weariness
away, was kingly, resolute, instinct with the larger air that comes
of long apprenticeship to royalty. He and the Loyal Meet and all the
ragged army might be on their way to execution before the week was out;
but the Prince was following this day’s business without fear of the
morrow, as creed and training taught him.
“All Langton gives your Highness greeting,” answered Sir Jasper,
faltering a little because his feelings were so stirred. “Our bells are
ringing you into your kingdom.”
The Prince glanced keenly at him, at the faces of the Loyal Meet. He
was quick of intuition, and saw, for the first time since crossing the
Border, that light of zeal, of courage to the death, which he had hoped
to find in England.
“We’re something wet and hungry,” he said, with the quiet laugh that
had less mirth than sadness in it. “You hearten us, I think. My father,
as I was setting sail, bade me remember that Lancashire was always the
county of fair women and clean faith.”
Lord Murray was tired and wet, like the rest of the army; and, to add
to his evil plight, he was consumed by the jealousy and self-importance
that were his besetting luxuries. “The church bells, your Highness,” he
said, glancing up the street--“I trust it’s no ill omen that they ring
so desperately out of tune.”
Sir Jasper saw the Prince move impatiently in saddle, saw him struggle
with some irritation that was not of yesterday. And he felt, rather
than framed the clear thought, that there were hot-and-cold folk among
the Scots, as here in Lancashire.
Then the Prince’s face cleared. “My lord Murray,” he said suavely,
“all bells ring in tune when loyal hands are at the ropes. Your ear, I
think, is not trained to harmony. And now, gentlemen, what food is in
your town? Enough to give a mouthful to us all? Good! We can spare an
hour in Langton, and after that we must be jogging forward.”
The hour was one of surprise to Sir Jasper and his friends. Here was
an army strong enough to raid the town, to break into the taverns, to
commit licence and excess; yet there was no licence, nor thought of it.
A Stuart, his fair hair muddied and unkempt, had charge of this march
south; and his will was paramount, because his army loved him. No fear,
no usual soldier’s obedience to discipline, could have hindered these
Scots from rapine when they found the town’s resources scanty for their
hunger; but the fearlessness, the comradeship of their leader had put
honour, sharp as a sword, between temptation and themselves.
“We must foot our bill here, Sir Jasper,” said the Prince as they were
preparing to ride out again.
“Oh, that can wait----”
“No, by your leave! Theft is the trade of men who steal thrones. I will
not have it said that any town in England was poorer because a Stuart
came that way. Lochiel, you carry our royal purse,” he broke off, with
a quick, impulsive laugh. “Peep into it and see how much is left.”
“Enough to pay our score, your Highness.”
“Then we’re rich, Lochiel! We may be poor to-morrow, but to-day we’re
rich enough to pay our debts.”
A half-hour later they rode out into the wintry, ill-found roads, into
the open country, wet and desolate, that was guarded by sleet-covered
uplands. And Sir Jasper, who had the countryman’s superstitious outlook
on the weather, remembered Lord Murray, his cold, easy smile, as he
said that the Langton bells were ringing out of tune.
A mile south from Langton, as Giles, the bailiff at Windyhough, was
riding not far behind the gentry--having at heart the need to keep his
master well in sight--a fiddle-headed horse came blundering down the
road. The beast was creamed with foam, and he scattered the footmen
right and left as he made forward. Only when he reached Giles’s side
he halted, stood shivering with the recoil from his own wild gallop,
and pushed his nose up against the bailiff’s bridle-hand. And Giles,
with scant respect for the mare that had carried him so far, slipped
from the saddle, and fussed about the truant as if he were a prodigal
returned. Giles did not heed that he was holding up all the men behind,
that the gentlemen in front had drawn rein, aware of some disturbance
in the rear, and that the Prince himself was asking what the trouble
was.
“Where hast thou been, old lad? I thought thee lost,” the bailiff was
muttering, with all a countryman’s disregard of bigger issues when
his heart was touched. And the horse could not tell him that, after
throwing Rupert, he had lost sight of the master he pursued and had
wasted time in seeking him down casual by-roads. “Ye’ve had an ill
rider, by the look o’ thee. Ye threw him, likely? Well, serve him
right--serve him varry right.”
Giles, with a slowness that suggested he had all the time in the world
to spare, got to the back of the fiddle-headed chestnut, and felt at
home again.
“What mun I do wi’ this lile nag?” he asked dispassionately, still
holding the reins of Nance’s borrowed mare.
Sir Jasper, seeing that his bailiff was the cause of this unexpected
check, could not keep back his laughter.
“What is the pleasantry?” asked the Prince. “Tell it to me. I think we
need a jest or two, if we’re to get safely over these evil roads of
yours.”
“Oh, it is naught, your Highness--naught at all, unless you know Giles
as I do. He thinks more of that fiddle-headed horse of his than of the
pick amongst our Lancashire hunters--and he’s holding up our whole
advance.”
“What mun I do wi’ the mare?” repeated Giles, looking round him with a
large impassiveness. “I can’t take a led mare to Lunnon and do my share
o’ fighting by the way. It stands to reason I mun have one hand free.”
The Prince, whose instinct for the humour of the road had put heart
into his army since the forced march began, looked quietly for a moment
at Giles’s face. Its simplicity, masking a courage hard as bog-oak,
appealed to him. “By your leave, Sir Jasper,” he said, “my horse will
scarcely last the day out--these roads have punished him. I shall be
glad of the mare, if you will lend her to me.”
When the march was moving forward again, the Prince in the grey mare’s
saddle, Lord Murray turned to an intimate who rode beside him. “His
Highness forgets old saws,” he murmured, with the insolent assurance
that attaches to the narrow-minded. “‘Never change horses when crossing
a stream’--surely all prudent Scotsmen know the superstition.”
But Sir Jasper, riding close beside the Prince, did not hear him. His
heart, in its own way, was simple as Giles’s, and he was full of pride.
“I wish my god-daughter could know,” he said.
“Your god-daughter?” echoed the other.
“Yes--Nance Demaine. It is her mare you’ve borrowed, sir--and I should
know, seeing I gave it her--though for the life of me I can’t guess how
she chanced to join the Rising.”
The Prince smiled as his glance met Sir Jasper’s. “There’s no chance
about this Rising,” he said pleasantly, as if he talked of the weather
or the crops. “We’re going to the Throne, my friend, or to the death;
but, either way, there’s no chance about it--and no regrets, I think.”
Sir Jasper felt again that sharp, insistent pity which had come to him
at sight of the yellow-haired laddie who had left women’s hearts aching
up across the border. In this wild campaign it seemed that he had met a
friend. And he spoke, as comrades do, disdaining ceremony.
“That is the faith I hold,” he said, with an odd gentleness that seemed
to have the strength of the moors behind it. “Comrades are few on the
road o’ life, your Highness.”
The Prince glanced at him, as he had glanced at Giles not long
ago--shrewdly, with mother-wit and understanding. “They’re few,” he
said--“and priceless. I would God, sir, that you’d infect my lord
Murray with something of your likeable, warm spirit.”
And Sir Jasper sighed, as he looked far down the road to London, and
reckoned up the leagues of hardship they must traverse. Their task was
perilous enough for men united in common zeal; dissension from within,
of which he had already heard more hints than one, was a more dangerous
enemy than Marshal Wade and all his army of pursuit.
Yet Sir Jasper had relief in action, in the need to meet every
workaday happening of the march. With his son, thrown on the Langton
Road, and listening to the hoof-beats of the runaway horse as he
went to join the Rising, the case was otherwise. His one comrade had
deserted him. He was here on the empty road, with failure for his sole
companion. His first impulse was the horse’s--to run fast and hard, in
the hope of overtaking his own kind. He ran forward dizzily, tripped
over a stone that some wagoner had used to check his wheel while he
rested his team, got up again, and felt a sharp, throbbing pain in his
right ankle. He tried to plod on, for all that, his face set London
way--failed, and sat down by the wet roadside. And the wheels of
circumstance passed over him, numbing his faith in God.
They all but crushed him. He had dreamed of Prince Charles Edward;
had learned at last to sit a horse, because he needed to follow where
high enterprise was in the doing; had known the luxury of a gallop in
pursuit of men who had thought him short of initiative.
And now he was the Scholar again. His horse had failed him. His own
feet had played him false. He sat there, wet and homeless, and from the
cloudy hills a smooth, contemptuous voice came whispering at his ear.
Best be done with a life that had served him ill. He was a hindrance to
himself, to his friends. Best creep down to the pool at the road-foot;
he had bathed there often in summer and knew its depth. Best end it
all--the shame, the laughter of strong men, the constant misadventure
that met him by the way. He was weak and accursed. None would miss him
if he went to sleep.
“No,” he said deliberately, as if answering an enemy in human shape, “a
Royd could not do it.”
Sir Jasper’s view of his first-born was finding confirmation. The soul
of the lad had been tempered to a nicety, and the bodily pain scarce
troubled him, as he set his face away from London and the Prince,
and limped toward home. Now and then he was forced to rest, because
sickness would not let him see the road ahead; but always he got up
again. Self-blame had grown to be a mischievous habit with him, and
he was ashamed now that he had deserted his allotted post. True, his
father, in bidding him guard Windyhough, had practised a tender fraud
on him; but he had given his word, and had been false to it when the
first haphazard temptation met him by the way. It had been so easy to
steal Giles’s horse, so easy to scamper off along the road of glamour,
so bitter-hard to stay among the women.
The lad was over-strained and heart-sick, ready to make molehills into
mountains; yet his shame was bottomed on sound instinct. He came of a
soldier-stock, and in the tissues of him was interwoven this contempt
for the sentry who forsook his post. No danger threatened Windyhough.
He was returning to a duty which, in itself, was idle; but he had
pledged his word.
He struggled forward. The road to London was not for him; but at least
he could keep faith with the father who was riding now, no doubt,
beside the Prince.