HOW THE PIPES PLAYED DREARILY
WHILE the Lancashire farmers were watering their cattle, milking
them, tending the sheep whose fleeces were the great part of their
livelihood; while Lady Royd and Nance were querulous because they had
a roof above their heads, and fires in the house, and food in plenty;
while Rupert went doggedly about his drill of musket-practice, with a
heart yearning for the battles he pictured in the doing London way, the
Prince’s army came to Derby--came in the dusk of a wild November day,
with wind-driven rain across their faces, and every house-roof running
wet.
Derby was no fine town to see. It was commonplace and dull, to
the verge of dreariness. But, to those who marched into it to-day
on the Stuart’s business, it stood ever afterwards for a place of
tragedy--tragedy so poignant and so swift that it gathered round its
mean, ill-ordered streets a glamour not its own--the glamour of the
might-have-been.
Sir Jasper Royd, neither then nor afterwards, could piece together the
tumult and unrest that troubled those two days they spent at Derby. He
knew that Lord Murray was querulous, his temper shrewish; he saw the
Prince move abroad with unconquerable courage, but with the look in his
eyes that Skye men have when the sad mists hide the sun from them. He
was aware that some big issue, known only to the leaders, was calling
for prompt decision. For the rest, he wondered that loyal gentlemen had
any thought but one--to march on where Prince Charles Edward chose to
lead.
Once--it was on the second morning of their halt at Derby--he met Lord
Murray face to face in the street.
“You look trim and happy, Sir Jasper,” said Murray, uneasy in his
greeting since the duel he had fought with this odd gentleman from
Lancashire.
“My faith commands it. I obey. What else?” growled the older man.
“Then you’re lucky in your creed,” drawled the other--“or in your
obedience. Few gentlemen of the Prince’s could find a smile to-day,
as you do, if their heads depended on it. Give me the trick of it,
sir,” he went on, with clumsy raillery. “When all is lost--when we’re
trapped like foxes, with three armies closing in upon us--you take your
snuff-box out, and dust your nostrils, and smile as if these cursed
Midlands were a garden.”
Sir Jasper’s distrust of the man yielded to a slow, unwilling pity. He
had so much, as he counted riches, and Murray was so destitute, so in
need of alms, that he spoke with quiet friendliness, as if he taught a
child that two and two, since time’s beginning, added up to four.
“All the world’s a garden, to those who hold the Faith,” he said
slowly, searching for the one right word to express what was plain
to him as the road to London. “When all seems losing, or lost
altogether--are you so town-bred that you do not know the darkest hour
comes just before the dawn--the dawn, if a man can keep himself in hand
and wait for it?”
“Your sentiments, Sir Jasper, do you credit,” sneered Murray, stung
by the sheer strength, the reality, of this man’s outlook upon life.
“They should be written, in a round, fair hand, at the head of all
good children’s copybooks. For ourselves, we are men--and living in a
rough-and-ready world--and we know there are some dark hours that never
lift to dawn.”
“There are none,” said Sir Jasper bluntly. “Believe me, I talk of what
I know. The black night always lifts.”
Murray strode forward impatiently, turned back, regarded the other
with an evasive glance. It was plain that, whatever was his errand
down Derby’s rainy main-street, he brought a harassed mind to it. “You
may be proved, sir, sooner than you think. Suppose this Rising failed.
Suppose we were crushed like a hazel-nut between these three converging
armies; suppose the Prince were taken, and we with him, would you stand
on Tower Hill and say the dawn was coming?”
“My lord Murray,” the other answered gravely, “we none of us know,
until the hour, whether our courage will prove equal to our needs. But
I say this. If I’m the man I’ve drilled myself to be, if I can keep my
eyes clear as they are now--I will stand with you on Tower Hill, and
you will know that the dawn is very near to me.”
“Gad, sir, you’re tough!” growled Murray. Piety had shown to him till
now as a dour, forbidding thing that made fools or fanatics of men.
He had not understood--though the Highlanders should have taught him
so much--that it could be instinct with romance, and warmth, and
well-being, making endeavour and sacrifice a soldier’s road to the
steep hilltops of the certain dawn.
“I’ve need to be,” said Sir Jasper, with the same unalterable
simplicity. “There are too many weak-kneed folk with us.” There was
a pause, and he looked Murray in the face as he had done just before
their duel in the wood. “You go to the Prince’s Council?” he went on.
“Well, since you’ve guessed as much--yes.”
“And you will air your knowledge of arithmetic--will argue that all’s
lost already according to the known rules of warfare. No, you need not
disclaim. We know your mind. My lord, I am in command only of a ragged
company from Lancashire, and not privileged to share your Council. But
I ask you to listen to a plain gentleman’s view of this adventure. We
follow no known rules, save that the straight road is the readiest. We
have one thought only--of advance. There is the London road open to us,
and no other, and God forgive you if you sound the note of retreat that
will ruin all.”
“My good Sir Jasper, my mind was made up long ago. The world’s as it’s
made, and battle is a crude reckoning up of men, and arms, and odds----”
“And the something more that you will not understand--the something
that has carried us to Derby, as by a miracle. Listen, my lord! I
ask you to listen. You go to this Council. In an hour or so all will
be settled, one way or the other. Remember that you Highland chiefs
have the Stuart’s honour in your hands, the lives of all these simple
Highlanders. You know that the Prince has one mind only--to push
forward--but that you can overrule him if you will.” Sir Jasper’s
voice was strained and harsh, so eager was he to bring his voice to
the Council, if only by deputy. “You know, Lord Murray, that the
Highlanders are with their Prince, in thought, in faith, in eagerness
to run the gauntlet. You know, too, that your Scots tradition bids
them, liking it or no, follow their chieftains first, their Prince
afterwards.”
“I am well aware of it. That is the weapon I mean to make full use of,
since you compel my candour.”
It was a moment when men are apt to find unsuspected, gusty feelings
stir and cry for outlet. For neither to Sir Jasper nor Lord Murray was
there any doubt that the whole well-being of England--England, thrifty,
pleasant, mistress of the seas, and royalist to the core of her strong,
tender heart--rested on this Council that was soon to make its choice
between opposing policies. And Lord Murray, in his own cold fashion,
believed that he was the wise counsellor of the enterprise, enforcing
prudence on hot-headed zealots; for Murray was three parts honest,
though he was cursed from birth by lack of breadth and that practical,
high imagination which makes fine leaders.
“I am sorry,” said Sir Jasper unexpectedly. “Till you die, Lord
Murray, you’ll regret your share in this. You’ve gained many to your
side, and may carry what you have in mind; but, if you have your
way, I’d rather die on Tower Hill than lie on the bed you’re making
for yourself. You’ll think better of it?” he broke off, with a quick
tenderness that surprised him. “You’re brave, you’re capable; surely
you will see the open road to London as I see it now--the only road of
honour. For your own sake----”
“For my own sake?” snapped Murray, moved against his will. “Why should
you care so much, sir, for what concerns my happiness?”
And then again Sir Jasper did not know his mood, was not master of the
words that found their own heedless outlet. “Why? Because, perhaps, we
fought together--long ago, it seems--because the man who wins a duel
has always some queer, tender liking for his adversary. My lord Murray,
I would wish to see you a strong man in this Council--strong as the
Prince himself. I wish--dear God! I wish to ride the London road beside
you, forgetting we once quarrelled.”
Murray’s face was hard as ever, but he was moved at last. This
Lancashire squire, whose strength could not be bought, or tamed, or
killed by ridicule, had found a way through all defences of prudence
and arithmetic. It was the moment, had they known it, when the whole
fate of the Rising was at issue; for the great councils are shaped
often by those haphazard meetings in the streets that sway men’s moods
beforehand.
And, as it chanced, Lochiel came swinging down the street, on his
way to join the Council--Lochiel, with his lean, upright body, his
gaiety, not lightly won, that made sunshine between the mean, grey
house-fronts--Lochiel, his wet kilt swinging round his knees, and in
his face the strong, tender light that is bred of the big hills and the
big, northern storms.
Murray glanced up the street, saw Lochiel. All finer impulses were
killed, as if a blight had fallen on them; for Murray was ridden by the
meanest of the sins, and was an abject slave to jealousy.
Lochiel halted, and the three of them passed the time of day together,
guardedly, knowing what was in the issue, and reticent.
“You come in a good hour, Lochiel” said Murray, with the disdain that
had never served him well. “Sir Jasper here has been talking moonshine
and high Faith. You’ll be agreed.”
Lochiel stood, just himself, schooled by hardship to a chivalry that
few men learn. “I think on most points we’re agreed, Sir Jasper and
I. It is a privilege to meet these gentlemen of Lancashire; they know
their mind and speak it. They’ll not be bought, Murray, not even by
Dame Prudence, whose lap you sit in.”
So then Murray’s chilliness took fire. There was need, even in his
sluggish veins, to set the troubles of this venture right by casual
quarrels.
“When we find leisure, I shall seek satisfaction, Lochiel; you’ll not
deny it me.”
And Lochiel laughed gently. “Dear Murray, I ask nothing better. The
only trouble is that we’ll be dead, the two of us, long before the
promised meeting, if you have your way with the Council that is going
to end old England or to mend her.”
“I shall have my way,” growled the other, and passed down the street.
Lochiel put his arm on Sir Jasper’s shoulder. He had no gaiety now; his
heart was aching, and he spoke as friend to friend. “I believe him,” he
said quietly. “Murray had always the gift of rallying doubters round
him. The Duke of Perth is staunch. Elcho is staunch, and a few others.
For the rest, they’ve been tempted by this glib talk of strategy.
Murray has persuaded them that we’ve marched to Derby simply to retreat
in good order; that we shall do better to fall back on some imaginary
host of friends who happened to be late for the Rising, and who are
eager now to join us.”
“Retreat?” snapped Sir Jasper. “The devil coined that word, Lochiel.
Murray’s shrewd and a Scotsman and no coward; he should know that the
good way lies forward always.”
And then Lochiel, because he was so heart-sick and so tired of
strategy, fell into that light mood which touches men at times when
they’re in danger of breaking under stress of feeling.
“I can only think of one case where your gospel fails,” he said, with
the quick, boyish smile that sat oddly on his harassed face. “Retreat
in good order, sir, has been known to carry honour with it.”
“I know of none, Lochiel,” insisted the other, in his downright way.
“Oh, Potiphar’s wife, perhaps. And, there, Sir Jasper, you think
me flippant; and I tell you that my heart is as near to breaking
as any Hielandman’s in Derby. It is a queer, disastrous pain, this
heartbreak.” Lochiel’s shoulders drooped a little. The wind came raving
down the street and made him shiver as with ague. Then his weakness
passed, and he lifted his trim, buoyant head to any hardship that was
coming. “Fools’ hearts may break,” he said sharply. “For me, I’ll see
this trouble through. I’ll find a glimpse of blue sky somewhere; aye,
Sir Jasper, though Murray sets the darkness of the pit about us.”
The two men looked gravely at each other, as comrades do. They were of
the like unalterable faith; they were chilled by this constant drag
upon a march that, left to the leader of it, would have gone forward
blithely.
Most of all, perhaps, they felt the weakness that was the keystone
of their whole position. The Highlanders were eager for the Prince,
would have laid down their lives for him, wished only for the forward
march and the battle against odds; but, deep in those hidden places of
the soul where the far-back fathers have planted legacies, they were
obedient to the tradition that a Highlandman follows his own chief,
though the King himself bids him choose a happier and more pleasant
road.
Lochiel knew this, as a country squire knows the staunch virtues,
whims, and failings of his tenantry; and because his knowledge was so
sure, he feared the issue of this Council. Murray could never have won
the rank and file; but he had captured the most part of the chiefs, who
had been leading too easy lives these late days and had softened to the
call of prudence. And the Council, in its view of it, had come already
to a decision shameful and disastrous.
“Sir Jasper,” said Lochiel suddenly, “we go pitying ourselves, and that
is always waste of time. What of the Prince? I cannot tell you the
love--the love proven to the hilt--I have for him. We give our little
to this rising; but he, brave soul, gives all. No detail of our men’s
comfort in this evil weather, no cheery word when the world goes very
ill with us, has been neglected. And, above the detail--oh, above the
detail that frets his nerves to fiddle-strings--he keeps the single
goal ahead. He keeps the bridge of faith, Sir Jasper, with a gallantry
that makes me weak about my mother’s knees again, as if--as if I did
not need to be ashamed of tears.”
Sir Jasper passed a hand across his eyes. He had kept, through the
rough journey of his sixty years, a passionate devotion to the Stuart;
and he had travelled with Prince Charles Edward, as wayfarers do with
wayfarers, through sleety roads, and had found, as few men do, that his
fine, chivalrous ideal was less than the reality. “I’ve been near his
Highness often,” he said slowly. “He kept his temper firm on the rein
when I could not have done. He went about the camp o’ nights, when most
of his gentry were asleep, and tended ailing Highlanders. He’s as big
as Pendle Hill in Lancashire; and, Lochiel, keep a good heart through
this Council, for he was cast in a bigger mould than most of us.”
“He--is royal,” said Lochiel softly. “That is all. Put him in peasant’s
homespun, with his love-locks shorn, he’d be still--why, just the
Stuart, reigning from the hilltops over us.”
“And, Lochiel, you talked of heartbreak. We’re lesser men, and can
jog along somehow if the worst comes. The Prince cannot. The heart of
him--it’s like a well-grown oak, Lochiel; it will stand upright to the
storm, or it will break. There is no middle way.”
So then Lochiel remembered he would be late for the Council if he
stayed longer in the windy street. “There never was a middle way,” he
said. “You, sir--and the Prince, God bless him!--and Lochiel of the
many weaknesses, we never trod the middle way.”
And somehow a great sorrow and great liking came to them, as if they
were brothers parting in the thick of a stormy night where ways divided.
“We shall meet soon again,” said Lochiel, the foolish trouble in his
voice. “And, either way this Council goes, we’ll find a strip of blue
sky over us, Sir Jasper.”
He swung down the street, his head upright and his figure lithe and
masterful. He might, to all outward seeming, have been going to his own
wedding. For that was Lochiel’s way when hope and courage were at their
lowest ebb, when he conquered his weakness by disdaining it.
And Sir Jasper watched him go--watched other chieftains hurrying, with
grave, set faces, to the Council. And then, for three long hours,
he paced the streets. What Rupert, his heir, was learning there at
Windyhough the father learned during this time of waiting for the news.
The chiefs were in the thick of debate, were speaking out their minds,
were guessing, from the shifting issues of the Council, which way the
wind was sitting. They were in the fighting-line at least; but he,
whose heart was centred wholly on this Council that would settle all,
was compelled to stand by helpless to serve his Prince by word or deed.
He was not alone. It was an open secret that, behind the closed doors
of the Council Chamber, men were deciding whether retreat or advance
should be the day’s marching-order. Discipline was ended for awhile.
The Highlanders could not rest in their lodgings, but stood about
the streets in crowds, or in little knots, seeking what make-believe
Derby town could give them of the free air and the big, roomy hills
that, in gladness or in sorrow, were needful to them as the food
they ate. The townsfolk, stirred from their sleepiness by all this
hubbub of tattered, rain-sodden men who were bent on some errand dimly
understood, mixed with the soldiery, and asked foolish questions, and
got few answers, because the most part of the army spoke only Gaelic.
The whole town, though men’s voices were low and hushed, was alive
with that stress of feeling which is like a brewing thunderstorm. Men
gathered into crowds, saying little, affect each other, till each feels
in his own person the sum total of his neighbour’s restlessness; and
for that reason armies yield suddenly to a bewildering panic, or to a
selfless courage that leads to high victories in face of odds.
The wind swept down the streets of Derby. The rain was tireless. It
did not matter. To Sir Jasper--to the men of Lancashire, and the
Highlandmen who were old to sorrow of the hills--there was nothing
mattered, save the news for which they waited. And the time dragged on.
And still the Council doors were shut.
Then, late in the afternoon, Lord Murray came out, and walked up the
street, with half a dozen of his intimates beside him. And, a little
later, Lochiel came out, alone, and, after him, the Duke of Perth,
alone. And Sir Jasper, standing near the Council Chamber, knew at a
glance which side had won the day.
Last of all--a long while after, so it seemed to Sir Jasper--the Prince
crossed the threshold, stood for a moment, as if stunned, with the rain
and the spiteful wind against his cheek. He was like one grown old
before his time--one bent and broken up by some disaster that had met
his manhood by the way.
Then, as Lochiel had done when he went down the street to this unhappy
Council, the Prince lifted his head, squared his shoulders to the
wind, and stepped out between the silent bystanders as if life were a
jest to him. So then Sir Jasper was sure that retreat was the order of
the day; was sure, too, that his Prince had never shown so simple and
conspicuous a gallantry as he did now, when he moved through the people
as if he went to victory, not to a heartache that would last him till
he lay, dead and at peace, beside his Stuart kinsmen.
At dawn of the next day the retreat began. It was a red dawn and
stormy, though the rain had ceased, and the wisp of a dying moon was
lying on her back above the dismal housetops.
The Prince stood aside and watched it all. A little while before he
had bidden Lord Murray ride at the head of the outgoing army. “I have
no strategy, my lord,” he had said, with chiselled irony. “I lead only
when attack comes from the front.” And Sir Jasper, with the instinct
of old loyalty and new-found, passionate liking for the man, had drawn
his own horse near to the Prince’s bridle; and they waited, the two of
them, till the sad procession passed, as if to burial of their finest
hopes.
Not till Derby’s life is ended will she hear such trouble and such
master-music as went up and down her streets on that disastrous,
chilly dawn. The Highlanders were strong and simple-hearted men. They
had obeyed their leaders, rather than the Prince who had sounded the
forward note of battle. But no old allegiance could silence their
pipers, who played a dirge to Prince Charles Edward, heir to the
English throne.
By one consent, it seemed, the pipers, as they went by their Prince,
played only the one air. Low, insistent, mournful as the mists about
their own wild hills, the air roamed up and down the wet, quiet
streets, till it seemed there had been no other music since the world
began. There was no hope, no quick compelling glamour, as of old; the
pipes, it seemed, were broken-hearted like their leader, and they could
only play for sorrow.
Up and down the long, mean street, and down and up, between the wet
house-fronts that reared themselves to the dying moon and the red murk
of the dawn, the music roamed. And always it was the same air--the
dirge known as “The Flowers of the Forest,” which was brought to
birth when the Scots lost Flodden Field. Since Flodden, generation
after generation, men skilled at the pipes had taught their growing
youngsters the way of it; and now the ripe training of the fathers had
gathered to a head. No pipers ever played, or ever will again, as those
who greeted the Prince as they passed by him--greeted him, with sadness
and with music, as heroes salute a comrade proven and well-loved.
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. And from afar, down the silence of the
empty street, the sorrow of the pipes came with a low, recurring lilt.
Lochiel, not long ago, had sounded the right note. They were children,
Sir Jasper and his Prince, gathered round their mothers’ knees again;
and, through the murk of Derby’s street, and through the falling sorrow
of the music, God spoke to them, as if they needed, in this hour of
extreme weakness, to reach out and hold with firm hands the faith that
was slipping from their grasp.
And the moment passed, leaving them the sadder, but the stronger for
it. And they were men again--comrades, facing a disastrous world. And
presently they rode slowly out of Derby, and took the long road north
again; and between them fell a silence chill and heavy as the rain that
never ceased to whip the puddles of the highway.
“Your eyes are wet, Sir Jasper,” said the Prince, turning sharply from
the thoughts that were too heavy to be borne.
“So are yours, your Highness,” the other answered gruffly.
“Well, then, we’ll blame the pipes for it. I think--there’s something
broken in me, sir, since--since Derby; but no man in my army, except
yourself, shall ever guess as much. We shall be gay, Sir Jasper, since
need asks.”
A few hours later a motley company of horse--three-and-twenty
strong--rode into Derby. Some half-dozen of the riders were English,
but the rest, and the officer in command, were Hessian soldiery. The
officer, one Captain Goldstein, spoke English with some fluency; and
his business here, it seemed, was to gather from the townsfolk such
details of the retreat as they could furnish.
They spent less than an hour in the town, snatched a hurried meal--for
which, unlike the Prince’s men, they did not pay--and rode back as
fast as they could set hoofs to ground to the main body of the Duke of
Cumberland’s army, which had been hanging on the rear of the Stuart’s
men for many days, hoping always to overtake them, and always finding
them a few leagues nearer London than themselves.
Captain Goldstein went straight to the Duke’s lodgings, and the sentry
passed him in without demur when his challenge had been answered.
“Ah, good!” said Cumberland gruffly, looking up from a map which he was
studying. “What news from Derby?”
“The best news. They’ve turned tail, though we could not credit the
rumours that came into camp. Derby is empty, your Grace.”
The two men were oddly like each other, as they stood in the lamplit
room. They were big and fleshy, both of them; and each had the thick,
loose lips, the heavy jaw, that go with an aggressive lust for the
coarser vices, an aggressive ambition, and a cruelty in the handling of
all hindrances.
Cumberland drained the tankard at his elbow, thrust his boots a little
nearer to the fire-blaze. “What fools these Stuarts are!” he said
lazily.
“By your leave, no,” said Captain Goldstein, wishing to be exact in
detail. “From all I gathered, it was not the Pretender, but the leaders
of the clans, who forced the retreat.”
“Well, either way, it’s laughable. The Elector bars their way at
Finchley with ten thousand men; it sounds formidable, Goldstein,
eh? but we know what a rotten nut that is to crack. And I could not
overtake them; they march with such cursed speed; and poor old Marshal
Wade, supposed to be converging from the north, is always a week late
for the fair. They held the cards; and, Goldstein, are you jesting when
you say that they’ve retreated?”
“I never jest, your Grace. Derby is empty, I say; and it is not my
place to suggest that you order boot-and-saddle to be sounded.”
“No,” snarled Cumberland, facing round on this officer whom he was wont
to kick or caress, according to his mood. “No, Goldstein, it is not
your place. Your place? You’d be housed in the kennels if you had your
proper lodgings. I rescued you from that sort of neighbourhood, because
you seemed to have the makings of a soldier in you.”
“They’ll retreat with speed, as they advanced. The wind’s in the feet
of these Highlanders,” said Goldstein stubbornly.
“We shall catch them up. To-day I’ve much to do, Goldstein--an
assignation with the miller’s buxom daughter, a mile outside the camp;
she’s waiting for me now.”
“She’ll wait, sir, till your return. You have that gift with women.”
Cumberland stirred lazily, got to his feet. He was pleased by this
flattery that was clumsy as his own big, unwholesome body. “She’ll
wait, you think? Well, let her wait. Women are best trained that way.
There, Goldstein, I was only jesting. You broke the good news too
sharply. They’ve retreated? Say it again. Oh, the fools these Stuarts
are! I must drink another measure to their health.”
A little later the whole Hanoverian army moved north. Cumberland was
keen and happy, because he saw butchery and renown within his grasp.
Through days and weeks of hardship over sloppy roads he had hunted
the Stuart whom he loathed, had found him constantly elude pursuit.
And now, it seemed, his hour of triumph was at hand. And triumph, to
his Grace of Cumberland, meant always, not pardon of his enemies, but
revenge.
“They leave us a plain track to follow,” he said to Goldstein as, near
midday, after riding slantwise from their camp to strike the northern
road, eight miles north of Derby, they came from muddied bridle-paths
to a highway that was deep in trampled slush. “They were nimble in
advance, but retreat will have another tale to tell. We shall catch
them to-morrow, or the next day after.”
And Goldstein agreed; but he did not tell all he knew--how he had
learned from the Derby townsfolk that the Prince rode far behind
his army, attended only by one horseman. Instead, he spoke of the
commission he held, as officer in command of a roving troop of cavalry,
and asked if he might be free to harass the retreat.
“We ride lighter than your main body, your Highness, and could pick off
stragglers as well as bring news of the route these ragged Pretender’s
men are taking.”
“Yes, ride forward,” growled Cumberland. “You’ve the pick of my
scoundrels with you, Goldstein--hard riders and coarse feeders--they’ll
help you pick off stragglers.”
The two men exchanged a glance of understanding. Difference of rank
apart, they were brotherly in the instincts that they shared; and his
Grace of Cumberland, from his youth up, had had a gift for choosing
his friends among those who rode unencumbered by conscience, or pity,
or any sort of tenderness. And, as he had said just now, he found them
mostly in the kennels.
“One word,” said Cumberland, as the other prepared to ride forward.
“There’s no quarter to be given. For the country’s sake--for the safety
of the King--we shall make an example of these rebels.”
Goldstein glanced warily at him, to see if he jested and looked for
an answering wink. But it pleased the Duke to assume an air which he
thought royal.
“An example, you understand?” he repeated. “Tell these gentle
devils of yours that they can ride on a free rein. If you scotch a
Pretender’s man, put your heel on him and kill him outright. Our royal
safety--England’s safety--depends on it.”
Goldstein, as he spurred forward to gather his cavalry together,
grinned pleasantly. “Our royal safety--England’s safety,” he muttered,
mimicking the Duke’s rough, broken accent. “He’s got it pat by heart,
though it seems yesterday he crossed from Hanover.”
He gathered his men, and rode forward at their head through the rain
and the sleety mud that marked the passage of the Highlanders. And when
they had gone three miles or so on the northern road, they captured a
frightened countryman, who was getting his sheep down from the pastures
in anticipation of the coming snow. It was the first blood they had
drawn in this campaign, and Goldstein made the most of it. He liked
to have a weak thing at his mercy, and he spared the farmer no threat
of what would follow if he failed to tell the truth. For his pains,
he learned that the Highlanders were marching fast along the northern
road, five hours ahead of them. He learned, too, that one who answered
to the Prince’s description still rode behind his army, and that he was
accompanied only by one gentleman on horseback.
They went forward, leaving the countryman half-dazed with fright; and
presently Goldstein’s men began to murmur at the hardships of the
road. A rough company at best, united only by a common lust of pillage
and rapine, they needed a firmer hand on them than one promoted from
their own ranks could give.
Goldstein, knowing this, drew them up in line. And first he stormed
at them, without avail; for they were harder swearers than himself,
and missed that crisp, adventurous flow of tongue which comes to
gentlemen-officers at these times. So then, seeing them mutinous
and like to get further out of hand the more he stormed, he grinned
pleasantly at them. “My orders from the Duke,” he said, “are to capture
the Pretender, dead or alive, before he gets back to Scotland. There’s
thirty thousand pounds on his head. He rides alone behind his army, as
you heard just now, and we shall share the plunder.”
The appeal went home this time, for Goldstein knew his men. They
bivouacked that night four miles wide of Macclesfield, in Cheshire,
and the next day--the sun showing his face at last through tattered,
grey-blue clouds--they came in sight of the Stuart army. They had
crossed by a bridle-track which, from a little knoll, gave them a view
of the long, straight highway that stretched, a grey, rain-sodden
ribbon, between the empty fields. They saw kilted men go by, and
horsemen riding at a foot pace; and they heard the pipes that could
not anyway be still, as they played that air of “The Flowers of the
Forest” which was both dirge and battle-song. And Goldstein, somewhere
under the thick hide he carried like a suit of armour, was stirred by
the strength and forlornness of it all. He saw great-hearted men go by,
shoulders carried square against retreat, and, in some crude, muddled
fashion, he understood that they were of fibre stronger than his own.
He sat there in saddle, moodily watching the horse and foot go by.
There was no chance as yet to pick off stragglers, for the army kept
in close order; yet Goldstein waited after the last company had ridden
by--they chanced to be the MacDonald clan--as if he looked for some
happening on the empty road below.
And presently, while his men began to fidget under this inaction in
the rain, two horsemen came round the bend of the highway. The Prince
and Sir Jasper were riding together still, but were talking no longer
of the Rising and retreat. Instead, they were laughing at some tale the
Prince had lately brought from France; and Sir Jasper was bettering
French wit by a story, rough and racy and smelling of the soil, which
he had heard at the last meet of hounds in Lancashire before he set out
on this sterner ride. For women, when they are heart-sick, find ease in
rending characters to shreds, especially sister-women’s; but men need
the honest ease of laughter, whether the jest be broad or subtle.
“Sir Jasper,” said the Prince, “you’re vastly likeable. When I come
to my own, you shall dine with me and set the table in a roar.
Meanwhile--a pinch of snuff with you.”
Sir Jasper dusted his nostrils, with the spacious air that set well on
him. And then, from old habit, he glanced up, in search of the hills
that were food and drink to him in time of trouble. He saw no hills
worth the name; but, for lack of them, his eyes rested on a mound, wide
of his bridle-hand, which from lack of true proportion the country-folk
named Big Blue Hill. There was little inspiration to be gathered from
the mound; so he looked out with his world’s eyes again, and saw that
there were horsemen gathered on the rise, and that they wore the
enemy’s livery.
“Your Highness, we must gallop,” he said briefly.
The Prince, following his glance, saw Goldstein plucking his horse into
a trot. “I prefer to wait,” he said lazily. “It is a skirmish of this
sort I hoped for.”
“And your Highlanders? We’re in the open without a wall to set our
backs to. You _dare_ not leave your Highlanders.”
“True, I dare not.” He glanced wistfully at the down-riding men, as if
death in the open were easier to him just now than life. “It is retreat
once more? Dear God, I must have sinned, to have this sickness put on
me!”
“Our horses are fresh. We’ll give them Tally-Ho, your Highness.”
Through the darkness and the trouble of his soul, through the wish to
die here and now and lie in forgetfulness of Derby and retreat, the
Prince caught up some tattered remnants of the Stuart courage. It was
easy to wait, sword ready, for the oncoming; but it was hard to gallop
from an enemy he loathed. Yet from the discipline of that long peril
shared with his men, since they came on the forlorn hope from Scotland,
the strength that does not fail returned to Prince Charles Edward. He
set his mare--Nance Demaine’s mare--to the gallop; and Sir Jasper rode
keen and hard beside him; and Goldstein found his heavy horse slip
and lurch under him, as all his company did while they blundered in
pursuit. Goldstein followed headlong. Three of his troopers came to
ground in galloping down a greasy slope, and their leader, if he had
been a worse horseman, would have shared the same fate. As it was, he
kept forward, and at a bend of the road saw, half a mile ahead, the
company of MacDonalds who kept the rear of the Stuart army.
“Well, it’s not to-day we catch him,” he snapped, reining up and facing
the ill-tempered men behind him. “We can bide our time.”
“Aye, we’ve been biding a good while,” growled a weather-beaten
trooper. “Whichever way his back’s turned, this cursed Pretender always
slips out of reach.”
“The money’s on his head, you fools!” snapped Goldstein. “You’ll mutiny
against God or man, but not against thirty thousand pounds, if I know
your breed. There’s to-morrow; we shall catch him soon or late, while
this mood is on him to ride behind his army.”
They were sobered by this hint of money. For they were men who plied
for hire, and only hire. And that night they encamped on the outskirts
of Manchester, where the Prince’s army lay, and dreamed they were rich
men all. And the next morning they were almost cheerful, this ragged
cavalry of Goldstein’s, because the day’s hunt was up, and because
their view of the Rising was narrowed to each man’s share of the
blood-money when they took Prince Charles Edward, dead or alive.
Up at Windyhough, in Lancashire, this same red dawn had shone through
the open window of Rupert’s bedchamber, rousing him from uneasy
slumber. He had gone to the casement, and was looking out at the grim
majestic moors. Line after line the rugged spurs and knolls strode
up from the night mists into the crimson and purple that gained in
splendour every moment. Of a truth, it was a man’s land; and the
thought goaded Rupert into deep and passionate self-pity, as it
had always done. Over the hills yonder his father rode beside the
Stuart--men going on a manly errand. Perhaps they had fought their
big battle already, were hastening to a London eager to receive the
conquerors. And he? He was playing at the defence of a house remote
from any chance of action. And there was Nance, waiting for him to
prove himself, growing cold and contemptuous because each new day found
him still Rupert the Dreamer, inept, irritable, a burden to himself and
others.
Perhaps, out of the sympathy that had always bound Sir Jasper and his
heir together, the like mood had come to both just now, the like need
to face a stern and awful sickness of the soul, to win through it, to
plant Faith’s standard in the wilderness of defeat and hope deferred.
“Nance was right. Nothing will ever again happen at Windyhough, until
my father returns from the crowning--and then the work will be done,
and no more need of me.”
Stubbornly, slowly, he came to a better heart and mind. Undoubtedly
this scholar had pluck.
“I will not give in,” he said, lifting his head to the ruddy heath as
if answering a challenge.
And at that hour the Prince and his father were riding north from
Derby--were riding nearer to him than he thought, on a journey whose
end no man could foresee.