THE ROAD TO THE THRONE
SIR JASPER, riding sometimes at the head of his men, at others near the
Prince, had little time for backward thoughts during this surprising
march. Each day was full of peril; but each day, too, was full of
chance humours of the road, of those odds and ends of traffic by the
way which turn men’s thoughts from a too deep, unpractical thinking of
the high Cause only to the means by which step by step, it is to be
attained.
In full truth they were following the open road, these gentry of the
Prince’s. Marshal Wade was blundering down from the north to take them
in the rear. The Duke of Cumberland was waiting for them somewhere
round about the Stafford country. They rode through villages and towns
that were not hostile--hostility is a nettle to grasp and have done
with it--but indifferent or afraid. Throughout this cold and sloppy
march, wet through, with the keen wind piping through their sodden
clothes, the greatest hardship that met them was the lack of fierce and
stubborn fight.
The Highlanders grew tired and listless, and Prince Charles, who knew
their temper to a nicety, for it was his own, was forced at last to bid
the pipers cease playing reels and strathspeys down the road.
“With all submission, your Highness,” said Lord Murray petulantly,
riding to his side as they marched out of Lancaster, “I would ask your
reason. The pipers not to play? It is all the comfort these Highlanders
can find in England here.”
Sir Jasper, riding near, saw the Prince turn, with that quick, hardly
restrained impatience which Murray’s presence always caused. “I gave
the order,” he answered, with deliberate calm, “because I know your
Highlanders--I, who was bred in France--better than their leaders.
Give me an army in front, my lord Murray, give me Wade, or Cumberland,
or the Elector, barring the road ahead, and the pipes shall sing, I
promise you.”
Then suddenly he threw his head up. His face, grown old and tired,
furrowed by sleepless care for his five thousand men, was young again.
He was seeing far ahead, beyond the mud and jealousies of these wintry
English roads. And again Sir Jasper understood why the women up in
Edinburgh had gone mad about this Stuart with the yellow hair. The
decent women love a fighter always--a fighter for some cause that is
big and selfless; and the Prince’s face, just now, was lit by some glow
from the wider hills.
“The pipes shall sing,” he went on, his voice deep, tender, hurried.
“They’ll play like quicksilver, Lord Murray, when--when the Hanover men
care to meet us in the open.”
“But meanwhile, your Highness, we’ve to trudge on, and I say you’re
forbidding meat and drink to your troops when you’ll not let them hear
the pipes.”
Sir Jasper moved his horse forward. They were alone, the three of them,
a furlong ahead of the army. Lord Murray’s tone was so bitter, so like
a scolding woman’s that Sir Jasper’s instinct was to intervene, to take
the quarrel on his own shoulders and settle it, here by the wayside, in
the honest Lancashire way. He was checked by the Prince himself, who
returned from the hills of dreams with surprising quickness.
“We’ve to trudge on,” he said, with workaday grasp of the affairs in
hand. “You find the exact word, Lord Murray, as your habit is. What
use, then, to let the pipes go singing music into men’s feet? We have
to _trudge_.”
Murray, dour, unimaginative, possessed by a fever of jealousy which
would not let him rest, was scarcely civil. And manners, after all, are
the outward sign of character. “Your Highness issues commands, and we
obey----”
“Why, yes. I came from France to issue them,” broke in the other, with
a disdain that was royal in its quietness.
Sir Jasper thought of his windy house in Lancashire, of the dreams
he had fed upon, of the long preparation for this march that was to
light England with loyal fires. And he was here, riding at a footpace
through the dreary roads, watching the rift widen between the Prince
and Murray. He was oppressed by some omen of the days to come, or by
the sadness of the Highlanders, who sought a fight and could not find
it. He had dreamed of an army--loyal, compact, looking neither to
left nor right--that would march, at speed and with a single purpose,
on London, an army that would not rest until it drove the Hanoverian
abroad. Instead, there were divided counsels, a landscape dreary and
rain-shrouded, and Murray for ever at their elbows, sowing doubt and
dull suspicion.
“Your Highness,” said Sir Jasper, all in his quick, hill-bred way, “we
seem to be riding on a Lenten penance, and Christmas is six weeks off
as yet. Surely Lord Murray would be well quit of his dourness.”
The Prince turned in saddle. “My thanks, Sir Jasper,” he said, with an
easy laugh. “Lord Murray has never kept a Lenten fast--it smacks too
much of superstition, he says; but, by the God we serve, Sir Jasper, he
would likely be the better for it.”
So then Murray, seeing two against him and not relishing the odds,
lost his temper outright. “Superstition does not carry armies on to
victory,” he snapped.
“No,” assented the Prince, as if he reckoned up a sum in simple
addition. “But faith, my lord Murray--it carries men far and happily.”
Murray checked himself with obvious effort, and they rode on in silence
for a while. “Your Highness, I spoke hastily just now,” he said by and
by. His voice, try as he would, had no warmth in it, no true sincerity.
“I ask your pardon.”
“Oh, that is granted. Our royal purse is empty, but we can still be
spendthrift with forgiveness.”
Again Sir Jasper glanced at this many-sided Prince of his. The smile,
the grave rebuke hidden beneath gentlest courtesy, were not his own;
they were gifts entrusted to his keeping by many generations of the
Stuart race. They had not always done well or wisely, these Stuarts;
but wherever down the track of history they had touched a world made
dull and ugly by the men who lived in it, they had stood always for the
buoyant faith, the clean and eager hope, the royal breadth of sympathy
that sweeps shams and make-believes aside.
Sir Jasper, riding through this wet, unlovely country, found himself
once more in that mood of tenderness, of wrath and pity, which had
surprised him not long ago in Langton High Street. The islanders
of Skye--Skye, in the misty Highland country--had known this mood
from birth and were accustomed to it, as they were used to the daily
labour to win bread, from land or sea, for their wives and bairns.
But Sir Jasper was young to it, and was disturbed by the simple,
tragic pity that seemed to cling about the Stuart--a something filmy
and impalpable, as if with him always there rode a phantom shape of
martyrdom to come.
He sought relief in action, glanced up and down the highway in hope
of straightforward, healthy battle. But Marshal Wade was a good three
days’ march in the rear, and the Duke of Cumberland was playing
hide-and-seek along the Staffordshire lanes without success.
Sir Jasper turned from looking up and down the road, and saw Lord
Murray riding close on his right. The man’s face was set and hard; and
Sir Jasper, with the intuition that comes to tired and heart-sick men,
knew that the enemy was here among them--not in the shape of an army
challenging endeavour, but of one cautious Scotsman who was busy saving
halfpennies while guineas were going down the wind.
As if to prove Sir Jasper’s judgment accurate, Lord Murray broke the
silence. “You spoke of faith just now, your Highness,” he said.
“Why, yes--because you asked it of me. One seldom speaks of such
matters unless compelled.”
“Then, with all submission, I say that faith is for kirk on Sabbaths,
for the quietness of a man’s bedchamber; but we’re here in open war.
War--I’ve seen it overseas, and have been wounded twice--is a cold,
practical affair, your Highness.”
So then the Prince glanced at Sir Jasper and laughed outright, and
after that was silent for a while. “My lord Murray,” he said quietly,
“faith, mine and Sir Jasper’s, goes into battle with us, goes into
every road we take. I’m ashamed, somehow, to speak so plainly of--of
what I know.”
“May I speak of what I, too, know?” put in Murray sharply. “It is of
war I speak, your Highness. I know the rules of it--know that this
hurried march of ours through England can end only in disaster. Retreat
in good order, even now, is our only course--retreat to Scotland, where
we can gather in the clans that were slow to join us----”
“Retreat?” said the Prince, his head lifted suddenly, his voice ringing
with command and challenge. “I never learned the word, at school or
afterwards. Retreat? My lord Murray, there’s only one plain rule of
war--to ride forward, and plant your blow where the first opportunity
serves.”
“That is our rule in Lancashire,” put in Sir Jasper dryly.
Murray glanced at the two of them. He had hoped much from the cold
logic that guided his days for him, had been sure that he could
persuade the Prince to his own view of the campaign; and these two,
resolute in faith and almost gay, were treating him as if he were
a stripling with much to learn in life beyond the rules of war and
mathematics.
“I say, your Highness, that we’ve hardened troops against us, officered
by men who have grown old in strategy----”
“And yet we’re here in spite of them, right through the northern
counties, and likely to keep Christmas in London. We’re here, my lord
Murray, because zeal laughs at strategy.”
“For all that,” put in Murray dryly, “you’ll not let the pipes be
played. They, surely, are musical with faith--your own sort of faith,
that bids men forget calculation and all else.”
Again the Prince moved impatiently in saddle. “I am not used to give
reasons for my conduct, but you shall have them now, since you persist.
My Highlanders, they take a dram to whet their appetite for meals; but
if there’s no meal waiting, why, my lord Murray, it is idle to offer
them the dram.”
“There’s no fight near at hand, you mean? Your Highness, there are
three big battles that I know of--and others, it may be--waiting close
about us on this road to London. Give the Highlanders their pipes
again. Their appetite needs sharpening if you persist in going forward.”
The Prince glanced at Sir Jasper. “We go forward, I think?” he asked,
with a whimsical, quick smile.
“That is our errand,” Sir Jasper answered simply.
“Then, Lord Murray, ride back and bid the pipers play their fill. And I
pray that one of your three phantom armies waiting for us on the London
road may prove flesh and blood.”
Murray was exact in his calculations. He was not greatly moved by the
bagpipes, for his own part, but he knew that they were as necessary as
food and drink to the Highlanders, who were the nerve and soul of this
army following the forlornest hope. He turned his horse and galloped
back.
And presently the footmen’s march grew brisker; jaded riders felt their
nags move less dispiritedly under them.
The pipes were singing, low at first, as if a mother crooned to her
child up yonder in the misty Highlands. And then the music and the
magic grew, till it seemed that windy March was striding, long and
sinewy of limb, across the land of lengthening days and rising sap and
mating beasts and birds. And then, again, there was a warmth and haste
in the music, a sudden wildness and a tender pity, that seemed like
April ushering in her broods along the nestling hedgerows, the fields
where lambs were playing, the banks that were gold with primroses, and
budding speedwell, and strong, young growth of greenstuff. And then,
again, from the rear of this tattered army that marched south to win
a kingdom for the Stuart, full June was playing round about this wet
and dismal Stafford country. The Prince knew it; 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. And then it stifles him with pity, with homesickness and longing
for the wife and bairns who, for all that, would not approve him if he
failed to take the road. And then, again, it sounds the fighting note,
till every fibre responds to the call for instant action.
No action met them. They rode forward through the driving wind, the
Prince and Sir Jasper; and now the pipes, hurried and unwearied, played
only mockery about them, rousing their strength while denying it an
outlet.
It was then Sir Jasper heard the first and last bitter word from the
leader who had summoned him to this drear adventure. “The pity of it!”
said the Prince. “I ask only a free hand, and they’ll not give it me.
Sir Jasper, what is amiss with Lord Murray? There was something left
out of him at birth, I think--soul, or heart--or what you choose to
name it. This march of ours--he will not listen when I tell him it is
bigger than the strict rules of warfare.”
Sir Jasper reined near and put a hand on the Prince’s bridle-arm, as
a father might who sees his boy attempting more than his strength
warrants. “I understand,” he said simply. “By your leave, I’ll play
watch-dog to Murray till we reach London. He stands for caution, and
I”--a sudden remembrance came to him of Windyhough, of the wife and
heir, and his loneliness bit so deep that, for shame’s sake, he had to
cover up his grief--“and I, your Highness,” he added, with a touch of
humour, “have been blamed for many things, but never yet for caution.”
“No, no. 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. The music lacked its fulness, for in these Midlands there
were no mountains to echo it, to pass it on from rise to rise, till it
grew faint and elfin-like among the blue moor-tops; but even here the
pipes were swift and tender with persuasion.
“All this, Sir Jasper,” the Prince said by and by--“the pipes playing
fury into us, and in front of us the empty road. Murray promised us
three battles at the least, and we’re here like soldiers on parade.”
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.”
The Prince glanced behind, because the pipes were tired of battle
now, and were crooning lullabies--the strong, tender cradle-songs
that Highland mothers know. “No,” he said quietly. “We share the same
desire, but we’d relent.”
“Not I, for one.”
“Yes, you, for one, and I, for one, because we’re human. So few of your
English folk are human, somehow, as I’ve seen them since my Highlanders
crossed Annan River. They’re ill-clad, these Highland lads of mine, and
raw to look at, but they carry the ready heart, Sir Jasper, and the
simple creed--you can bend them till point meets hilt, like a Ferrara
blade, and yet not break them.”
“We are tempered steel in Lancashire, your Highness,” said Sir Jasper,
in passionate defence of his county. “Few of us have come to the
Rising, but I can answer for each man of mine that follows you.”
“I was hasty; the pipes play that mood into a man. When we planned this
Rising, years ago in France, the King--my father--bade me remember
always that Lancashire was staunch and its women beautiful. The east
wind must be excuse for me, too, Sir Jasper.”
“Your Highness, I spoke hastily. My temper, I tell you, is frayed at
the edges by winter and harsh weather.”
“I like your temper well enough, Sir Jasper. Let’s take a pinch of
snuff together, since there’s nothing else to do.”
It was in this mood that they rode into a little village clustered
round a stream. The hamlet was so small that the crowd of men and
women gathered round about the ford seemed bigger than its numbers.
The villagers, enticed by the news that the Rising neared their
borders, raised a sudden tumult when they saw the van of the army ride
into sight. Curiosity held them, while fear and all the rumours they
had heard prompted them to instant flight. Mothers clutched their
babies, and turned as if to run for shelter, then turned again and
halted between two minds, and must needs stay to see what these queer
Highlanders were like. The younger women, glad of this respite from
the day’s routine, ogled the Prince and Sir Jasper with unaffected
candour. The men looked on sheepishly, afraid for their own safety, but
not content to leave their women in the lurch.
“Here’s the cannibals from Scotland!” cried one big, shrill-voiced
woman. “They feed on English babies, so we’re told. Dear mercy, I hope
they’ve had their breakfast earlier on the road!”
The Prince checked his horse suddenly. His face was flushed, ashamed,
as if a blow had struck him on the cheek. “My good woman,” he said,
bending from saddle to look into her plump, foolish face, “have they
lied so deep to you as that?”
“Lies? Nay, I know what I’m talking about, or should do at my years.
There’ve been well-spoken gentry in and out these weeks past, and they
all had the same tale; so it stands to reason the tale was true as
Candlemas.” She set her arms akimbo. The quietness of this horseman who
talked to her, his good looks and subtle air of breeding, had killed
her terror and given her instead a bravado no less foolish. “Thou’rt
well enough to look at, lad, and I wish I was younger, I do, to kiss ye
on the sly when my man didn’t happen to be looking; but the rest o’ ye,
coming down the road, ye’re as ragged a lot o’ trampish folk as I’ve
set eyes on.”
The Prince laughed, not happily, but as if the pipes were bidding him
weep instead. Then he plucked his mare forward--Nance Demaine’s mare,
which he had borrowed--and splashed through the ford. And it was not
till the hamlet was a mile behind him that he turned to Sir Jasper.
“A lie chills me,” he said abruptly; “especially a lie that is foisted
on poor, unlettered folk. They told me this and that, Sir Jasper, of
Hanoverian methods, and I--what shall I say?--_disdained_, I think, to
believe it of an enemy. They will not fight us in the open since we
worsted them at Prestonpans, but instead they send ‘well-spoken gentry’
to honeycomb the countryside with lies.”
Sir Jasper, the more he followed the open road with this comrade
in adversity, found ever and ever a deeper liking for him. He could
be ashamed, this Stuart whom women had done their best to spoil in
Scotland--could be ashamed because his Highlanders were slighted;
could stand apart from his own danger and weariness, and grow hot with
punctilious care for the honour of the men who followed him. And the
older man thought no longer of Windyhough, of ties that had not been
sundered lightly; he was content to be in company with one who, by
instinct and by training, was a leader of the true royal fibre.
The Prince was glancing straight ahead as they jogged forward, and in
his eyes was the look which moorland folk know as “seeing far.”
“My Highlanders are cannibals?” he said, not turning his head, seeming
to need no listener, or to have forgotten that he rode in company. “The
men I’ve learned to know by heart during these last wintry months--is
that their reputation?”
“It was a silly woman’s gibe, your Highness,” put in the other, with
blunt common sense. “Surely you’re not moved by it?”
“It was more. They have been sending paid liars up and down the length
of this road to London--have fouled the going for us. I tell you, Sir
Jasper, that lies make me sick at heart. I tell you an enemy that will
go so far in cowardice will afterwards do anything, I think--kill
wounded men as they lie helpless on the battlefield----”
“No, no, your Highness! With all submission, your anger carries you
away.”
“I am not angry--only tired and sick at heart, and seeing far ahead.
I say that I am seeing it--a bleak moor in the Highland country, and
men lying on the ground, and a rough bullock of a man shouting, ‘Kill
these wounded rascals; put them out of pain!’ And the wounded are--my
Highlanders, who follow me for love. There are MacDonalds and Ogilvies
and men from the Isles--I see their faces, and the resolute, keen pain
that will not flinch. The wind’s whistling down the moor like Rachel
crying for her children, and the corbie-crows are looking on.”
Sir Jasper crossed himself with instinctive piety. So had he felt, up
yonder on the hills of Lancashire, when the winds raved through the
heather and down the glens, teaching him sorrow, and the second sight,
and the need to prove himself a man in a world of doubt and mystery.
“What then, your Highness?” he asked soberly.
“What then?” The Prince passed a hand across his eyes, turned with the
smile that drew men to his side. “Your pardon, Sir Jasper. I’ve been up
the hill o’ dreams, since action is denied me. What then? Why, the road
ahead, and each day’s hazard as it comes.”
The next day, as they marched out of Leek, in Staffordshire, Sir Jasper
rode back along the line of march to see that Maurice, his younger
born, was proving himself a good deputy in command of the Lancashire
men. On his way through the scattered units that made up this army
of the Prince’s, he was met by a Highlander who came down the road
on foot, carrying a mirror--a little, oak-framed thing that he had
begged from a cottage where they had given him food and drink--and he
was halting, now and then, to hold it up and look into it with pious
fervour. And then again he would dance and caper like a child with a
new toy before halting for another glance at it.
The man’s antics were so droll, the humour of it all so unexpected,
that Sir Jasper checked his horse. “What do you see there, my friend?”
he asked, pointing to the mirror. He spoke a little Gaelic, which he
had learned, with some hardship, from Oliphant of Muirhouse and other
night-riders who had called at Windyhough during the past years.
The Highlander, hearing his own tongue, spoke as to a friend. “What do
I see? My own face, and I’ve not seen it since I left Skye.”
“Well, it’s a face worth looking at,” said the other, passing an easy
jest. “You’ll not be taken--alive--by any man in England; but I fear
for you among the women.”
And the man laughed pleasantly. And then, with surprising swiftness,
the Skye gladness, that is never far from the mists o’ sorrow, gave way
to passionate tears. “It carried me back, this bit o’ magic,” he said,
in the swift, tender speech for which there are no English words--“back
to Skye, and the blue hills i’ the gloamingtide, and the maid who would
not have me at a gift. I used to go down by the burn, where the deep
pool lies under the rowans, and see my face there--that was when I was
courting Jock Sinclair’s maid in last year’s summer, and she said I’d a
face to scare crows away with, but none for a lass that had the pick o’
Skye to choose from.”
“And you lost her, and came south to see if the yellow-haired laddie
could give you likelier work?”
“Nay, I married her,” said the Highlander, with a gravity complete and
childlike. “She changed her mind in a week, and we’d a bonnie wooing;
and since then she’s led me the de’il’s own dance ower dyke and ditch.
And I used to get up to the hills and play the pipes, all by my lone
among the whaups and eagles, and wish myself unwedded. And then the
Prince called me, and I had to follow; and ’twas then I knew I loved
her very well.” He paused for a moment to glance into the mirror
which, to him, was the pool in Skye where the rowans waved above the
stream. “And now I’m missing her, and the pipes go skirling, skirling,
and there’s no man at all to fight with. It’s thirsty I am to whet my
claymore for a while, and then get home again to the de’il’s dance Jock
Sinclair’s lass has waiting for me up in Skye.”
Sir Jasper, by and by, rode back in search of his own company of horse,
and his thoughts ran hither and thither. This Highlander, with the eyes
and the sinewy, lean shoulders that any man or woman might approve,
this passionate and simple child who went down the highway hugging his
mirror because it brought Skye and the wooingtide to mind--he was no
more to these Midlands than a savage from the northern wilds. “They
feed on English babies”--the lie set abroad by agents of a king who
doubted his own cause, the lie repeated by a lazy, unkempt woman at
the village ford, was chilling Sir Jasper now, though not long ago he
had chidden the Prince for the same fault. It was in the breed of him
to hate a lie at sight as healthy men loathe vermin. And yet they were
powerless to meet this stealthy mode of warfare, because the Prince’s
men, with all their faults, were accustomed only to the open fight and
honest tactics.
Then, little by little, Sir Jasper sought for the cause of all this
unrest and unhappiness that was dogging the steps of an army that had
fought Prestonpans, that had taken Carlisle, that had marched through
half England with a security which in itself was triumph. They were
heading straight for London. The men, undaunted by forced marches,
were in keen fighting temper, asking constantly for the enemy to show
himself. Fortune was with them; the glow of old allegiance was with
them. Each league they covered was so much added proof to the waverers
that they followed a winning cause. And yet somehow a chill was
settling on them all, a cold, intangible distrust. Sir Jasper felt it
against his will. The Prince was feeling it.
Sir Jasper had set out on this enterprise with a single aim; but
already his view of it was muddied a little by the politics, the
jealousies, the daily friction that creep into the conduct of all
human ventures. He could not stand far off, as yet, from the bigness
and simplicity of the dreams he had nursed at Windyhough. Up yonder on
the moors, as he mapped out the campaign, it had been a gallop against
odds, a quick battle, death on the field, or a ride into London to see
the Stuart crowned with fitting pomp and thanksgiving. And instead,
there had been these days and days of marching at a foot pace, without
a chance skirmish to enliven them--days spent in ploughing through
roads fetlock-deep in mud, with the east wind harrying them like a
scolding tongue, days spent in watching the leaders of the Highland
clans drifting each day nearer to the whirlpool of unrest that revolved
about Lord Murray.
The men who passed Sir Jasper, as he rode back to join his company,
were awed by the sheer fury in his face. He did not see them. Kilted
men on foot met him, and Lowlanders in tattered breeks, riding nags
as rough-coated as themselves. And some from the pick of Scotland’s
chivalry glanced at him for a nod of recognition, and saw him looking
straight ahead with murder in his eyes.
Sir Jasper was in the mood that, now and then, had frightened his wife
up yonder on the moors of Lancashire. He had kept the Faith. He had
given up wife and bairns and lands if things chanced to go astray. And
there was one man in this Rising who was the traitor in their midst.
Scholarly, yet simple in his piety, Sir Jasper was in the thick of that
stormy mood which hillmen know--a mood pitiless and keen as the winds
bred in the hollows of the wintry moor, a mood that goes deeper than
training, and touches, maybe, the bedrock of those stormy passions
known to the forefathers of the race when all the heath was lit with
feuds.
It was now that good luck found Sir Jasper. There was an empty stretch
of road in front of him. He was alone with the black mood that he
hated--the mood he could not kill; and the bitter wind was finding
out the weak places in a body not too young. And then round the bend
of the highway rode Lord Murray; and Sir Jasper felt a little stir of
gladness, as if the wind had shifted to a warmer quarter.
Murray was unaccompanied, save for his aide-de-camp--a careless,
pleasant-faced youth of twenty, Johnstone by name, who was destined
afterwards to write a diverting and boyishly inaccurate account of a
campaign whose shallows only, not its depths, were known to him.
“Of all men, I’ve hoped most to meet you, my lord Murray,” said Sir
Jasper, drawing rein. “Your friend can ride apart; I’ve much to say to
you.”
Murray, too, drew rein, glanced hard and uncivilly at Sir Jasper, and
turned with a smile to his aide-de-camp. “The Lancashire manner is
curt, Mr. Johnstone,” he said. “What is this gentleman’s name again?
He joined us at Langton, I remember, and his Highness was pleased to
overdo the warmth of his greeting. It is a way the Prince has, and it
answers well enough with the women, to be sure.”
“My name is Jasper Royd,” broke in the other, his temper at a smooth
white heat, “and it is entirely at your service after this campaign is
ended. I permit no man to sneer at his Highness, and you’ll give me
satisfaction later.”
Lord Murray took a pinch of snuff, smiled again behind his hand at
Johnstone. “There’s something--what shall I say, sir?--something
old-fashioned in your loyalty, though it sits well enough on you, if
’twere a play we acted.”
“My loyalty is--just loyalty. There’s no change of fashion can alter
the clean faith of a man.”
“Your pardon, but was this all you had to say to me? The wind is
shrewd, Sir Jasper, and we can discuss loyalty--and punctilio and the
duel you are eager for--when we next find an inn to shelter us.”
Murray’s harsh, narrow egotism had seldom shown to worse advantage than
now. Since first Sir Jasper rode into Langton Street with the big air
about him that simple-minded gentlemen are apt to carry, since Murray
had seen the Prince’s welcome, his jealousy had taken fire. It had
slumbered during the last days of hardship, but this meeting on the
road had quickened it.
“I had more to say, much more,” Sir Jasper answered, quiet and
downright. “Again I ask you to bid Mr. Johnstone ride behind.”
“No, by your leave; he has my full confidence. You may speak your
mind at once; but be speedy, for I would remind you that this is not
midsummer.”
Young Johnstone laughed, as youth will at unlikely times; and the laugh
added a fine edge to Sir Jasper’s temper.
“Then, as you’ll have it so, Mr. Johnstone shall be a listener. It is
of this Rising I mean to speak--and of your share in it. You are young,
Lord Murray, and I am getting old. You’re riding to the warfare you
learned in set battles overseas, but we--the Prince, God bless him! and
the Highlanders and my good lads from Lancashire--are out on a wider
road.”
“You will explain?” drawled Murray.
“D’ye think five thousand of us, ill-armed, can win to London by rules
of war and maps and compasses?”
“I did not think from the first we had a chance of reaching London,”
snapped the other.
“Yes,” put in Sir Jasper adroitly. “We knew as much. You said, before
Annan was reached, that we’d no chance of getting beyond Carlisle.”
“Who told you that?” said Murray, flurried and unguarded.
“Oliphant of Muirhouse, who never lies, my lord. Well, we’re here in
Staffordshire, and the London road still open to us; and your prophecy,
somehow, has miscarried.”
Murray grew fidgety. Hot temper he knew, and suavity he knew, but not
this subtle mixture of the two. “Thank our good luck for that. They say
Heaven guards all fools.”
“But more especially all true believers. That is my point. We’re
adventurers, Lord Murray, not seasoned troops. We ride by faith, we
ride for love of the Prince, of what he stands for--and we have come
through odds that cautious generals would shirk--but we are here, in
Staffordshire, and the London road, I say, is open to us.”
“Well, then, it’s a sermon, after all, you wish to preach. The clergy,
my good Sir Jasper, are wiser than you; they preach between four snug
walls that shut off this cursed wind.”
“Not a sermon,” said Sir Jasper doggedly. “I preach common sense, to
one whose faith is dulled by tactics.”
Murray lost the bullying air that had carried him fairly well through
life. He felt dwarfed, ashamed, by some quality in Sir Jasper that
overrode his self-importance and trampled it in the mire. “Sir Jasper,”
he asked sullenly, “may I ask you for plain speech? What is your
quarrel with me?”
“You ask for plain speech? And you’ll not ask Mr. Johnstone to ride out
of earshot? No? Then he, too, shall listen to plain speech.”
There was a moment’s silence. Murray wondered at the tense, lean
carriage of this Lancashire squire, whose loyalty had been a jest among
the cynics of the army, but for the others a steady beacon-light. He
wondered more that Sir Jasper’s face, grey and lined a while since, was
comely now in its heat and youthfulness.
“I say--deliberately, my lord--that you’re the Judas in this
enterprise. I’m getting old, as I said, and I’ve looked about me
during these last days, and I speak of what I know.” His temper cooled
suddenly, but not his purpose. There was no pleasure now in lashing
Murray--only the need to do his duty, as if he were bidden to shoot a
deserter, made up of the same human clay and the same human frailty as
he who pressed the trigger. “The Highlanders--the rank and file--you
cannot reach. But their leaders, my lord Murray--you know as well as I
that you’re at work each day undermining the faith of better men and
cleaner-hearted soldiers than yourself. It’s no secret that you wish to
retreat----”
“To retreat, the better to spring forward,” put in Murray, with
half-hearted effrontery.
“To _retreat_, I said. The Prince goes forward always. It is his habit.
You’ve won many of the Highland chiefs to your side, but the best of
them you cannot tempt.”
“You are curiously exact in your knowledge of my doings,” sneered
Murray.
“I made it my business since the day I first set eyes on you at
Langton. That is neither here nor there. And yet there are some of us
you cannot tempt. The Duke of Perth----”
“Yes, he, too, is mediæval,” snarled Murray. “You and he are out of
date, Sir Jasper, and I tell you so.”
Again young Johnstone laughed, though at heart his sympathy and liking
went out to this queer, downright squire from Lancashire.
“Then Lochiel,” went on Sir Jasper buoyantly--“is he, too, old and out
of date? Lochiel--you know how the very name of him sings music to the
Highlanders. Lochiel--dear God! the tears are in my eyes; he’s so like
the free open moors I’ve left behind me.”
Murray’s thin lips came together. It was plain now where the weakness
lay in a face that otherwise was strong and manly. The mouth was that
of a nagging woman querulous, undisciplined, lined with bygone sneers.
He was jealous of the Prince--jealous of this fine, upstanding squire
who spoke his mind with disconcerting openness; but, most of all, he
was jealous of Lochiel--Lochiel, the whisper of whose name set fire
to loyal Highlandmen; Lochiel, who was gay and courtly and a pleasant
comrade; Lochiel, who was hard as granite when men touched his inner
faith; he was all that Lord Murray hated, all that Murray wished to be,
and could not be.
“Sir Jasper, you’ve been plain of speech,” he said, with sudden fury.
“Our quarrel need not be delayed. I ask Mr. Johnstone here if I can
wait to give you satisfaction--until”--again the smile that was a
sneer--“until after we are all beheaded on Tower Hill.”
Sir Jasper glanced up and down the road. They had it to themselves,
though at any moment a company might ride into view along the
straggling route. It was a grave breach of discipline, this duel in the
midst of warfare; and yet, somehow, he found it welcome. He turned to
the aide-de-camp, glanced quietly at him.
“Mr. Johnstone,” he said, “you cannot be friendly to Lord Murray and
myself--it’s too wide a gulf for young legs to jump--but I can trust
you, by the look of you, to see fair play between us. I have no friend
at hand, and it happens that this business must be settled quickly.”
They rode apart from the route, into a little wood where sycamores and
oaks were bending to the keen, whipping gale. They found an open space,
and got from horse, and took off their coats. To Lord Murray, a good
swordsman, it was a chance to put out of action one who, in breed and
temper, was too near akin to the Stuart and Lochiel. To Sir Jasper it
was a call, clear, unhurried, to remove a traitor from the midst of
honest men.
They faced each other in the little glade. Murray was mathematical,
exact, secure in his gift of fence. Sir Jasper was as God made him--not
reckoning up the odds, but trusting that honesty would win the day.
Young Johnstone watched; and, despite himself, his heart ached for the
older man who pitted Lancashire swordcraft against Murray’s practised
steel.
The fight was quick and brief; and the unexpected happened, as it had
done throughout this march of faith against surprising odds. Sir Jasper
was not fighting for his own hand, but for the Prince’s; and his gift
of fence--to himself, who knew how time had rusted his old bones--was
a thing magical, as if a score of years or so had been lifted from his
shoulders.
At the end of it he got clean through Murray’s guard; and it was now
that the duel grew dull and tragic to him, robbed altogether of its
speed, its pleasant fire. He had fought for this one moment; he had
his chance to strike wherever he chose, to kill or lay aside the worst
enemy Prince Charles had found, so far, in England. And yet, somehow,
his temper was chilled, and the struggle with himself, short as the
flicker of an eyelid, seemed long, because it was so sharp and bitter.
With an effort that was palpable to young Johnstone, looking on, he
drew back his blade, rested its point in the sodden turf, and stood
looking at his adversary.
The action was so deliberate, so unexpected, that Murray let his own
point fall; and even he was roused for the moment from his harshness.
He knew that this Lancashire squire, with the uncompromising tongue and
the old-fashioned view of loyalty, had given him his life just now--had
given it with some sacrifice of inclination--knew that, in this wet
and out-of-the-way corner of the world, he was face to face with a
knightliness that he had thought dead long ago.
And then Sir Jasper grew ashamed, in some queer way, of the impulse
that had bidden him let Murray go unscathed. He sheathed his sword,
bowed stiffly, untethered his horse, and got to saddle.
“I give you good-day, Lord Murray,” he said curtly. “God bring you
nearer to the Prince in days to come.”
Murray watched him ride through the glade, out toward the open
road where wayfaring loyalists were on the march. And from his
shame and trouble a quiet understanding grew. His starved soul was
quickened. A gleam from the bigger life cut across his precision, his
self-importance, his gospel of arithmetic.
His aide-de-camp looked on. Johnstone was unused to the tumults that
beset older heads; and he had made a hero of this man who had been
defeated--a little more than defeated--at his own game of swordcraft.
And he was puzzled because Murray did not curse his fortune, or
bluster, or do anything but stand, hilt to the ground, as if he were in
a dream.
It was all quick in the doing. Murray got himself in hand, shrugged his
shoulders, searched for his snuff-box. “This is all very dismaying, Mr.
Johnstone,” he drawled. “I said from the start that we were forgetting
every rule of warfare in this mad Rising. And yet--to be honest, Sir
Jasper is something near to what I dreamed of before the world tired
me--he’s very like a man, Mr. Johnstone. And there are few real men
abroad these days.”
Sir Jasper himself, as he rode back into the highway, was in a sad and
bitter mood. He had spoken his mind, had fought and won the duel he
had welcomed, and reaction was telling heavily on him just now. After
all, he had done more harm than good by this meeting with Lord Murray.
Private quarrels, carried as far as this had been, were treasonable,
because they weakened all the discipline and speed of an attack against
the common enemy. Moreover, a man of Murray’s temper could never
understand how serviceable it is to admit defeat, and forget it, and go
forward with the business of the day; he would plant the grudge, would
tend and water it, till it grew from a sapling into a lusty, evil tree.
He drew rein as he came through the ill-found bridle-track into the
open road. Scattered men, on horse or on foot, passed by him; for the
fight in the wood had been brief, and an army of five thousand takes
long to straggle over slushy, narrow highways. And then Sir Jasper’s
face grew cheery on the sudden. A company, in close and decent order,
rode into view. He saw Lancashire faces once again--his son’s, and
Squire Demaine’s, and Giles the bailiff’s, and fifty others that he
knew by heart.
They met him at the turning of the way, drew up, saluted him. And Sir
Jasper found his big, spacious air again, because he was at home with
men who knew his record--with men reared, like himself, within sight of
Pendle’s round and friendly hill.
“We’re full of heart, lads from Lancashire,” he said, taking the salute
as if he led a pleasant partner out to dance the minuet. “By gad!
we’re full of heart, I tell you,” he broke off, with sharp return to
his habit of command. “The London road is open to the Prince; there
are three armies chasing us, so I’m told, but they seem to shun close
quarters. Lancashire men, I’m old, and all my bones are aching--and yet
I’m gay. Giles, your face is sour as cream in thunder weather; Maurice,
though you’re my son, you look lean and shrivelled, as if the wind
had nipped you; is it only the old men of this Rising who are full of
heart?”
“We’re spoiling for a fight, sir,” said Maurice, with a boy’s outspoken
fretfulness, “and instead there’s only this marching through dull
roads, and no hazards to meet us----”
“No heroics, you mean,” broke in Squire Demaine, who was riding
close beside Maurice. “See you, my lad, this is open war,” he went
on--gruffly, because he, too, was weary of inaction. “And war is not
the thing the ballads sing about. It’s not crammed with battles,
and all the ladies watching, ready with tears and lollipops for the
wounded; it’s a bleak affair of marching, with little porridge and less
cream to it--until--until you’re sick from hunger and fatigue. And then
the big battle comes--and it sorts out the men from the weaklings. And
that is war, I tell you.”
Sir Jasper reined up beside him, and the two older men rode forward,
and the interrupted march moved stolidly again along the road to
London--pad of hoofs, slush of tired footmen through the sleety mire,
whinnying of dispirited horses and murmur of round Lancashire oaths
from the farmers who had left plough and fieldwork behind them, as they
thought, and were finding the like dour routine on this highway where
no adventures met them.
“You heartened our men just now--and, gad! they needed it,” said Squire
Demaine, as they trotted out of earshot. “But you carry a sad face, old
friend, for all that. What ails you?”
“Lord Murray ails me,” snapped the other. “He’s like a pestilence among
us.”
“You’re precise. He is a pestilence. If we could persuade Marshal
Wade--or George--to take him as a gift, why, we’d reach London sooner.
Give away a bad horse, if you can’t sell him, and let him throw the
other man--there’s wisdom in the old saws yet.”
“I’m ashamed, Demaine,” said Sir Jasper, turning suddenly. “You gave
Maurice sound advice just now, when he was headstrong and asking for
a battle as children cry for toys. And yet it was I who needed your
reproof.”
And then he told of his meeting with Lord Murray on the road, of the
fury that he could not check, of the duel in the wood. His tale was
told so simply, with such diffidence and surety that he had been in the
wrong, that Squire Demaine laughed gently.
“There’s nothing to your discredit, surely, in all this,” he
said--“except that you spared the Prince’s evil-wisher. Gad! I wish my
blade had been as near Murray’s heart. I----”
“You would have done as I did. We know each other’s weaknesses,
Demaine--that is why our friendship goes so deep, may be. You’d have
done as I did. We relent--as soon as we are sure that we have proved
our case--have proved it to the hilt.”
So then Squire Demaine blustered a little, and denied the charge, then
broke into a laugh that was heard far back along the line of march.
“Squire’s found his hunting-laugh again,” said one Lancashire yeoman to
his neighbour.
“Aye. We need it, lad,” the other answered. “There’s been no hunting
these last days.”
The Squire himself rode silently beside his friend, then turned in
saddle. “Yes, we relent,” he said, with his happy-go-lucky air. “Is
that our weakness, Royd--or our strength?”
“I do not know.” Sir Jasper’s smile was grave and questioning. “The
devil’s sitting on my shoulders and I do not know. A week since I’d
have said that faith----”
“Aye, faith. We hold it fast--we know it true--but, to be honest, I’ve
lost my bearings. I’d have dealt more gently with Maurice if I’d not
shared his own longing for a fight.”
“Faith is a practical affair.” Sir Jasper was cold and self-reliant
again, as when he had fought with Murray in the wood. “When the road
is at its worst, and sleet blows up from the east, and we ask only to
creep into the nearest ditch, and die as cowards do--when all seems
lost. Demaine--surely, if faith means anything at all, it means----”
“You’re more devout than I,” snapped the Squire. “So is the Prince. I
talked with him yesterday. He was wet to the skin, and had just given
his last dram of brandy to one Hector MacLean who had cramp in the
stomach--and I was hasty, may be, as I always am when I see royalty
of any sort go beggared. ‘Your Highness,’ I said, ‘the Blood Royal
should receive, not give, and you needed that last dram, by the look
of your tired face.’ And what did he answer, think ye? ‘You’ve an odd
conception of royalty, sir,’ said the Prince, his eyes hard and tender
both. ‘The Blood Royal--my father’s and mine--gives till it can give no
more. It lives, or it dies--but it goes giving to the last hour.’ He’s
a bigger man than I am, Royd.”
They jogged forward. And presently Sir Jasper broke the silence. “We
are hurrying to dodge two armies, and we’re succeeding; would God
they’d both find us, here on the road, and give us battle! That is our
need. One battle against odds--and our men riding free and keen--and
Murray would find his answer. I’d rather be quit of him that way
than--than by striking at the bared breast of the man.”
“I know, I know,” murmured the Squire, seeing how hard Sir Jasper took
this battle in the wood. “Let Murray run his neck into the nearest
halter; he’s not fair game for honest gentlemen. You were right. And
yet--my faith runs low, I tell you, and you might have spared a better
man. The mouth of him--I can see it now, like a rat’s, or a scolding
woman’s--you’ve a tenderer conscience than I.”
Into the middle of their trouble rode Maurice, tired of shepherding men
who blamed him because he found no battle for them.
“I was sorry that Rupert could not ride with us,” he said, challenging
Sir Jasper’s glance.
Sir Jasper winced, for his heir was dear to him beyond the knowledge
of men who have never bred a son to carry on the high traditions of
a race. “If pluck could have brought him, he’d have been with us,
Maurice,” he said sharply.
“I was not denying his pluck, sir; he gave me a taste of it that day
he fought like a wild cat on the moor.” His face flushed, for he had
not known, until the separation came, how deep his love went for his
brother. The novelty and uproar of the march had stifled his heartache
for a day or two, but since then he had missed Rupert at every turn.
“It was because I--because I know his temper, sir,” he went on, with a
diffidence unlike his usual, quick self-reliance. “He’d have been all
for high faith, and a battle at the next road-corner; and these days of
trudging through the sleet would have maddened him. I’m glad he stayed
at home. He’d have picked a quarrel long since with one of our own
company, just to prove his faith.”
Squire Demaine glanced dryly at Sir Jasper. “The young pup and the old
pup, Royd. Maurice here has better judgment than I thought. I always
said that Rupert was true to the Royd breed. Your own encounter in the
wood just now----”
“Your encounter, sir?” broke in Maurice eagerly. “Giles was saying to
me just now that he’d rather be riding on his bailiff’s business up
among the hills than be following this dog-trot through the rain. He
said--and he was so quiet that I knew his temper was red-raw--he said
that naught was ever like to happen again, so far as he could see, and
he was longing for a thunderstorm, just to break up the quietness,
like.”
The boy was so apt in his mimicry of Giles that Squire Demaine gave out
the frank, hearty bellow that did duty for a laugh. “We’re all of the
same mind, my lad. Thunder--or a straight, soon over fight--clears up
one’s troubles.”
“Your encounter, father?” said Maurice, persistent in his curiosity.
“Did you meet a spy of George’s, and kill him?”
Sir Jasper looked at this younger-born of his, at the frank, open face
and sturdy limbs. And then he thought, with that keen, recurrent stab
of pain that had been bedfellow to him since first he knew his heir a
weakling, of Rupert, left up at Windyhough to guard a house that--so
far as he could see just now--was in need of no defence.
“It was not--not just a spy of George’s I met,” he said, with a grave
smile. “He may come to that one day. And I did not kill him, Maurice,
though I had the chance.”
“Why, sir?” said Maurice, downright and wondering.
“Why? God knows. We’d best be pushing forward.”
At Windyhough, where the wind had piled a shroud of snow about the
gables, they were thinking, all this time, that those who had ridden
out were fortunate. As day by day went by, and Rupert found himself
constantly alone in a house where only women and old men were left,
he found it harder to stay at home, drilling the household to their
separate parts in an attack whose likelihood grew more and more remote.
Rupert, with a body not robust and a twisted ankle that was still in
bandages, was holding fast to his allegiance. His mother, less pampered
and less querulous, grew each day a more sacred trust. Each day, as she
watched him go about the house, he surprised more constantly that look
of the Madonna which stood out against the background of her pretty,
faded face. He had something to defend at last, something that played
tender, stifled chords about that keyboard which we call the soul. He
was alone among the women and the old men; but he was resolute.
And then there came a night when he had patrolled the house, had looked
out through his window, before getting to bed, for a glance at the
hilltops, white under a shrouded moon. He was tired, was seeking an
answer to his faith. And, instead, a darkness came about him, a denial
of all he had hoped for, prayed and striven for. Hope went by him.
Trust in God grew dim and shadowy. There was no help, in this world or
another, and he was a weak fool, as he had always been, drifting down
the path of the east wind.
He recalled, with pitiless clearness, how he had played eavesdropper
before the Rising men rode out, had heard his father say that no
attack on Windyhough was possible, that the guns and ammunition were
nursery toys he had left his heir to play with in his absence.
Rupert--namesake of a cavalier whose name had never stood for wisdom,
but always for high daring--stood with bowed shoulders, unmanned and
desolate. He did not know that the wise, older men he reverenced were
compelled to stand, time and time, as he was doing, with black night
and negation at their elbow. He knew only that it was cold and dark,
with no help at hand. It is moments such as this that divide true men
from the feeble-hearted; and Rupert lifted his head, and, though he
only half believed it, he told himself that dawn would follow this
midwinter night.
And that night he slept like a child, and dreamed that all was well.
And he woke the next day to find Simon Foster watching by his bedside,
patient and trusty as the dogs whose instinct is toward loyalty.
“You’ve slept, maister!” said Simon. “By th’ Heart, I never saw a body
sleep so sound.”
“We must patrol the house, Simon. The attack is coming--and we’ll not
be late for it, after all these days of waiting.”
“Who says the attack is coming?” growled the other.
“I dreamed it--the clearest dream I ever had, Simon.”
But Simon shook his head. He had no faith in dreams.