THE GALLOP
THE retreat had moved up through Staffordshire and Cheshire, always
evading the pursuit that followed it so closely from many separate
quarters. The Highlanders had ever their hearts turned backward to the
London road--the road of battle; but old habit made their feet move
briskly along the route mapped out for them. They set the pace for the
Lowland foot, less used to the swinging stride that was half a run; and
for this reason the Prince’s army went northward at a speed incredible
to Marshal Wade, the Duke of Cumberland, and other heavy-minded
generals who were eager in pursuit.
There was irony in the whole sad business. A few cautious leaders of
the clans apart, few men were anxious to succeed in this retreat. They
would have welcomed any hindrance by the way that allowed one or more
of the pursuing armies to come up with them. Food was often lacking,
because defeated folk are apt to find less wayside hospitality than
conquerors; their feet were sore from long contact with the wet roads,
that both chafed and softened them; yet their worst hardship was the
need for battle that found no food to thrive on. Behind them Cumberland
was cursing his luck because he could not catch them up; yet, had
he known it, he was the gainer by his failure. If he and his mixed
company of hirelings had met the Prince’s men just now, they would have
been ridden through and through, as Colonel Gardiner’s men had been
at Prestonpans in the first battle of the Rising. For the Highlander
is sad and gusty as the mist-topped hills that cradled him; but when
the mood is on him, when all seems lost, and he is gay because the
odds are ludicrously against him, he goes bare-sark to the fight and
accomplishes what more stolid men name miracles.
They went north--the men who wished to overtake and the men who yearned
to be overtaken. And the luck was all with Marshal Wade and Cumberland,
for the Prince’s army constantly evaded them. There are times, maybe,
when God proves His gentlemen by the road of sick retreat, by denial of
the fight they seek. But few win through this sort of hazard.
Sir Jasper was leading his own little troop of gentry, yeomen, and
farmer-folk when they crossed the Cheshire border and made up into
Lancashire, and neared the bluff heights that were his homeland. The
wind was shrewd still from the northeast, and sleet was driving from
the grey-black mist that swept the hilltops, yet Sir Jasper, by the
look of the shrouded hills, by the smell of the wind in his teeth, knew
that he was home again in Lancashire. Love of women is a hazardous and
restless enterprise, and a man’s leal liking for his friend is apt to
be upset by jealousies; but love of the hills that cannot lie, love
of the feel and scents and sounds of the country that he loves never
desert the native-born. They are there, like a trusty dog, running
eagerly before him when he is home again, biding on the threshold with
a welcome if he chances to be absent.
Until now Sir Jasper had been much with his men, had lightened their
spirits as best he could through this evil march toward reinforcements
in which few believed. But now some wildness seemed to come to him
from the windy moors that had bred him. He was tired of leading men
against the emptiness that met them day by day, and remembered the
lonely figure of his Prince, who was still obstinate, despite Captain
Goldstein’s late attack, in riding often behind the rear-guard of his
army. More than once, since leaving Derby, Sir Jasper had ridden back
along the route, had found the Prince separated by a few hundred yards
from the last of the stragglers, and had tarried with him, partly to
be near if the danger which he seemed to court recurred, and partly
because the close and friendly intimacy that was growing between them
had a charm that lightened the trouble of the road.
To-day, as they came nearer still to his own country--the march was
planned to reach Langton by nightfall--Sir Jasper yielded to his
restless mood. He turned to Maurice, who was riding at his bridle hand.
“Take our men forward, boy,” he said. “I’ll join you by and by.”
Maurice showed few traces of the high spirits that had set him
galloping once after Nance Demaine in a race for the glove she was to
forfeit if he caught her up, of the fiery eagerness with which he had
fought his brother Rupert on the moor. He could not understand the
reason of his turn about from Derby. Since childhood he had been used
to find action ready to his hand, used to the open life of the fields,
in saddle or with a gun under his arm; and he was baffled by this slow,
rain-sodden tramp over roads that led only to the next night’s bivouac.
The constant rains, moreover, had increased his saddle-soreness and had
given him a maddening toothache; and it is hard, at two-and-twenty, to
bear any pain of body, apart from that associated with heroic wounds.
“I will take them forward, sir,” he answered moodily, “though I’ve
no gift of heartening them, as you have. If you promised me all
Lancashire, I could not crack a jest with them just now.”
Sir Jasper turned his head sharply, glanced at Maurice with the shrewd,
steady eyes of middle age. “You were not out in the ’15 Rising, lad,”
he snapped. “I was through it--and thirty years have gone under the
bridge since then--and I’ve learned to wait. Waiting trains a man, I
tell you.”
“Waiting has given me the most devilish toothache, sir.”
And his father laughed. So had he felt himself when, long ago, an
untried boy, he had shared the troubles of a disastrous Rising.
“There’s a worse malady,” he said dryly.
“None that I can think of at this moment.”
“Try heartache, Maurice--the Prince can tell you what that means. And
I can tell you, maybe. It comes to older men, like gout. For the rest,
you take your orders. You’re in command of our Lancashire lads till I
return.”
Maurice answered, not the words but the quiet hardihood of this father
who had licked him into some semblance of a man. “I’m in charge,
sir--till you return,” he answered gravely.
Sir Jasper drew apart, to the edge of the rising, heathery bank that
flanked the road; and he watched the horsemen and the foot go by.
Highlanders passed him with bowed shoulders, moving like dullards who
have forgotten hope; for they had the temperament which does high deeds
to set the world’s songs aflame, or which refuses hope of any sort.
The Lowlanders wore a grim and silent air, carrying disillusion with
dourness and reserve. But grief was manifest in every face.
Whether he died soon or late, Sir Jasper would not forget this long
pageant of despair that went by him along the sodden northward tracks.
Five thousand men, with souls keen and eager, had been ready for the
fight; and they were marching north unsatisfied. Sir Jasper by habit,
was careful of his tongue; but now he cursed Lord George Murray with
quiet and resolute exactness. The wind was cold, and the sleet nipped
his face; but the chilliest thing that he had met in life was this
surrender of leal folk to such a man as Murray. It was unbelievable,
and he was compelled to take a new, firmer grip of the faith which had
heartened him through lesser storms.
The last of the army passed, and Sir Jasper sighed sharply as he
reined his horse toward the south and looked for the one figure--the
figure prominent among them all--that had been missing. And presently
a solitary horseman came round the bend of the highway. He carried
his shoulders square, his head erect; yet, under his royal disdain of
circumstances, there was the Stuart sadness plainly marked.
The Prince glanced up as he saw the other ride to meet him. “Ah! you,
Sir Jasper,” he said quietly. “You were ever of my mind--to be where
our soldiers need us most.”
“You give me too much praise,” began Sir Jasper, and could get no
farther.
The Prince and he were alone on this barren road--alone in the world,
it seemed, comrades in the bitter sleet-time of adversity--and he was
shaken by a sudden, desperate pity, by a loyalty toward this royal
fugitive and a gladness that he was privileged to share a moment
of defeat with him. He knew, to a heart-beat, what the other was
suffering. They had the like aims, the like hardihood; and intuition
taught them to be brothers, the older man and the young, here on the
northern road.
“Your Highness, I have--I have no words,” he said at last.
“Ah, there!” said the Prince, with a gentleness that was cousin to
abiding sorrow. “I know what you would say. Best leave it unsaid.”
They jogged up the road together in silence, each busy with thoughts
that were the same.
“It is incredible,” growled Sir Jasper presently, as if the words
escaped him unawares.
The Prince shrugged his shoulders, with a touch of the French habit
that still clung to him. “But so is life, my friend--each day of it
the most astounding muddle of surprises. They said I could not land in
Scotland and bring an ill-trained army through the heart of England. I
did it, by grace of God. And then we said that the road from Derby to
the throne was open to us--and so it was, but for one obstacle we had
forgotten.”
“Your Highness,” said the other, with sharp remembrance of the past, “I
could have removed that obstacle--and would not. I did not serve you
well.”
“What! removed the Highlanders’ gospel that they serve their own
chieftain first and after that their king? With faith you might do it,
sir--the faith that removes mountains; but otherwise----”
“I had my lord Murray’s life at command--and--I did not take it.”
The Prince’s face was hard when he heard the way of that duel in the
wood. He was thinking not at all of pity and chivalrous scruples,
but of the men entrusted to his care who had been routed by Murray’s
prudent obstinacy. “God forgive you, sir!” he said gravely. “I wish you
had not told me this. With Murray laid aside I should have had my way
at Derby.”
Sir Jasper peeped now behind the veil of that disastrous Council,
guessed how disordered the party of retreat would have been without
their leader. And he glanced at the Prince’s face--he who loved and
had followed him into the unknown for sake of warm, unquestioning
loyalty--and read only condemnation there. And because he was wearier
than he knew, it seemed that all his strength and steadfastness were
leaving him. Until now the cold and hardship had touched his body, but
not the soul of him--the soul that passed sorrows through the mills of
faith, and made forward battle-songs of them.
His comrade in adversity glanced round on him suddenly, saw how hardly
he was taking the rebuke. And the Prince, as his habit was, forgot the
bitter might-have-beens and rallied to the help of one in need.
“Sir Jasper,” he said, with a grace boyish in its candour, “we’re bred
of the same stuff, you and I. We are hot and keen, and we hate--as far
as the gallows, but not as far as the rope. It seems idle that one
Stuart should chide another of the breed.”
“I served you ill,” said the other. “He was known already as the weak
link of the chain--and I did not snap it.”
“It would have lain on your conscience. You could not do it, that was
all.”
“You are kind,” said Sir Jasper slowly--“but you struck deep just now.
I’ve feared many things in my time, but never once that I should fail
the Stuart.”
The Prince fumbled in the tail pocket of his riding-coat, took out a
battered pipe, filled and lit it--with some difficulty, for the tinder
in his box was none too dry. “I’ve found three good things in my
travels,” he said, blowing clouds of smoke about him--“a dog, a pipeful
of tobacco, and friends like yourself, Sir Jasper; they seldom fail a
man. I was hasty just now, for I was thinking of--of my Highlanders,
God help them!”
And again a silence fell between them as they rode up and down the
winding road that lay now a short six miles from Langton. It was all
odd and unexpected to Sir Jasper, this ride at a foot pace through
the lonely, hill-girt lands that were his homeland. He was with the
yellow-haired laddie who had painted dreams for him on the broad canvas
of endeavour. And the dreams had had their end at Derby; and they were
here, beaten men who looked each other in the face and were content to
be together.
“You are oddly staunch, sir,” said the Prince by and by. “It is good to
meet a man in all this wilderness of sleet and cold arithmetic.”
“I was bred to be staunch, your Highness. My father taught me the way
of it--and his father in the days before. There’s no credit to the tree
because its roots happen to be planted deep.”
The other smiled at Sir Jasper’s childlike statement of his case, as if
it were a truth plain to all men. “You’ve sons to follow you, I trust?
They’ll be the better for training of that sort.”
The wind blew in bitter earnest now against Sir Jasper’s face. All his
love for Rupert, all his hidden shame that the heir could not ride
out with him, were so many weights added suddenly to the burden he
was carrying already. “I have one son with me in the Rising,” he said
gravely. “I presented him to your Highness--at Langton, I think, when
we rode south.”
“Why, yes.” The Prince seldom forgot a man’s record or his face. “A
ruddy, clean-built youngster, who went pale at sight of me, as if--as
if, comrade, I were made of less common clay than he. I remember him.
He tried to stammer out some hero-worship, and I reminded him that his
record was probably cleaner than my own, because the years had given
him less chance of sinning. And he was shocked by my levity, I think.
Yes, it was at Langton, just before the Vicar went up the street to
ring his bells for me.”
Once again Sir Jasper was surprised by this Prince’s close touch with
the road of life as men follow it every day, his catholic, broad
understanding of his fellows. It was the Stuart gift--the gift that had
carried them to the throne or to the scaffold--that they had a kingly
outlook on men’s needs and their infirmities, and would not surrender,
for any wind of circumstance that blew about them, their royal love for
big or little of the men who trusted them. Sir Jasper was learning,
indeed, what afterwards the folk in Skye were to learn--in Skye and in
Glenmoriston and in a hundred lonely glens among the Highlands--that
the Prince he served was the simplest and most human man, perhaps,
among them all.
The wind dropped as they rode, and the sleet ceased falling for a
while; and the sun, an hour before its setting, struck through the
clouds that had hindered it all day. Lights, magical and vivid, began
to paint the land’s harsh face. The moorland peaks, to right and left,
were crowned with fugitive, fast-racing mists of blue and green and
rose colour; and ahead of them, astride the steep, curving rise of the
highway, there was a belt of scarlet that seemed to flame the hills
with smoky fire.
“Your land is beautiful, Sir Jasper,” said the Prince, halting a moment
to breathe his horse as they reached the hilltop. “I did not guess it
when we rode south through sunless mire.”
It is in time of defeat and stress that the deep chords of a man’s
soul are struck, and now Sir Jasper’s face lit up. “My land of
Lancashire--it is always beautiful to me. It cradled me. There’s no
midwinter bleakness can drive away remembrance of the pleasant days
we’ve shared.”
“You speak as men do who are married happily,” laughed the Prince.
“This barbarous country is just a wife to you, I think--her temper may
be vile, but you remember gentler days.”
Sir Jasper fell in with his mood, and smiled as if he jested; but
he talked of matters very dear to the honest, simple heart of him.
“I can count on my fingers, your Highness, the things in life that
are of importance to me--my Faith, my Prince, the wife who’s waiting
for me over yonder at Windyhough, and my lads--and the dear moors o’
Lancashire that bred me.”
Their eyes met; and, somewhere from his tired, hunted mood, the Prince
found a candour equal to Sir Jasper’s own. “Faith first,” he said
quietly, “but your wife before your Prince, by your leave. I--I have
not deserved well of you, Sir Jasper. I asked you to take me to the
throne, and--I have given you this.”
Sir Jasper thought of his wife, her weak caprices, the yapping
of the toy spaniel that had its mimic cradle in their bedroom at
Windyhough--thought of Rupert, who should have been beside him
now--thought of all that had hindered him through these years. For he
was not as young as his keen ardour wished, and these empty days of
bodily hardship, with no reward of fight to hearten them, had sapped
his courage. Yet he responded, bravely enough, to the challenge.
“My wife, God bless her! is--so dear that we’ll not give her any place,
your Highness. She claims her own, by right.”
The Prince puffed gently at the disreputable, blackened pipe he
cherished. He glanced at the hills, saw the next storm creep grey
and wan across the sunset lights. “It is a savage land,” he said
dispassionately. “I never guessed it could breed courtiers. Your
wife, if she were near, would be pleased to know the temper of your
constancy--it is hard and lithe as whipcord, sir, like a sword-blade
forged by old Andrew Ferrara.”
They jogged on again, at the foot pace to which the Prince had trained
himself since Derby; and presently they came to a broad, grassy lane
that led, wide to the left hand, into the sunset moors. And Sir Jasper
checked his horse and sat rigidly in saddle, looking up the byway.
“What ails you?” asked the Prince.
“Remembrance,” said Sir Jasper, turning his horse’s head away from the
road it knew by heart. “It is no time for rosemary, you think? And
yet----”
“You talk in riddles.”
“No, pardon me; I talk--of the road that leads to my own house of
Windyhough--and to my wife--and to the son I left at home.”
“Why, then, ride across and snatch a glimpse of them,” said the other,
quick to respond to the need of a man’s heart.
“And desert a retreating army, your Highness?”
“There’s no desertion. We are near our quarters for the night--and
nothing happens, as you know, in the way of sudden battles. Our luck is
out just now. Go, see your wife, sir--you’ve earned the holiday--and
then ride across country to Langton. We march from there at daybreak.”
“I do not ask ease,” said Sir Jasper stubbornly. “We’re following the
road of discipline, and wives, I think, must wait.”
The Prince glanced pleasantly at him. “Probe light or deep, sir,
you’re most amazingly a soldier.” He smiled--so had Mary Stuart
smiled once amid disaster, and so had Charles when he stepped to the
scaffold--secure and gravely happy. “You will take your orders,” he
went on, “as good soldiers do. There was a breach of discipline--I
forgot to chide you when you spoke of it just now. I mean the duel you
provoked with Lord Murray in the wood. Your punishment is--just to ride
through the vile weather you breed up here and give my thanks to Lady
Royd for the husband she lent so recklessly to barren leadership. And
rejoin me with the dawn. I command you, sir!” he added sharply, seeing
that Sir Jasper hesitated still.
“Then I obey, your Highness; but you will let me watch you out of
sight.”
“But why? Langton is so near. Are you afraid that another band of
cavalry--cart-horse cavalry--will catch me up? Miss Demaine’s mare,
that carries me, will show them light heels enough.”
Sir Jasper looked at this man, whose body and whose soul were kingly,
this man to whom he had entrusted many dreams and sacrifices. And the
tears were in his eyes again, he knew not why. “When a man loves deep,
your Highness, he fears. I ask you to let me guard the road behind you.”
“You love me? After this retreat--after the cursed roads and
hopelessness--you--you love me? Say it again, sir.”
“What else? None ever loved a Stuart yet by halves.”
The Prince tapped him gently on the shoulder. “When better days come
in,” he said, “I shall make you acquainted with my Highlanders. They
love as deep as you, and, knowing myself, I wonder at their blindness.”
It was so they parted, wayfarers who had found leal comradeship and
trust. And no momentary parting of the ways could ever sunder them
again; for trust is not born among the crowded shows of life, but in
the lonely byways where man meets man and finds him likeable.
Sir Jasper sat in saddle at the parting of the ways, and watched the
Prince go slowly up the road. The long strain was telling on him,
and the bitter wind chilled all his outlook for a moment. A sense of
foreboding took him unawares. It seemed that the Prince, in riding
so far behind his army, was courting death; as if he preferred to be
overtaken, here in England, rather than go back, a broken man, to his
own land across the border.
“No!” he growled, with sharp contempt of the thought. “He’s
heart-sick--but no coward.”
He gave a last glance up the road, as one follows a departing friend
long after he is lost to sight, sighed impatiently, and turned his
horse into the bridle-way that led to Windyhough. Then he reined about,
suddenly aware of galloping hoofs, of the fret of horses checked too
sharply on the curb, of a harsh voice that bade him halt.
Goldstein’s men had tracked their quarry, day after patient day, since
their first attempt at Derby to capture the Prince’s person. Three
times they had found him so far behind his army that he seemed an
easy prey; and three times--following what some would call a random
whim, and others the guidance of the God he served--the Prince, not
knowing his enemies were near, had grown tired of guarding the rear and
had galloped forward suddenly to join his men and pass a jest among
them. And Goldstein knew that his hold on the rough cavalry he led
was weakening day by day. He had kept them to heel only by crude and
persistent reminders that thirty thousand pounds, as represented by the
Stuart, were worth some patience in the gaining.
Sir Jasper, reining sharply round, saw a company of men--a score or
so--who wore the Hanoverian livery; and at the head of them was a
blunt, red-featured officer who looked singularly like a farmer who had
lived neighbour to the ale-barrel. And he knew them for the men who had
given chase at Derby, though as yet they had no answering recollection
of the friend who had ridden close beside the Prince’s bridle-hand that
day.
“Your business, sir?” asked Goldstein sharply. “You’re too near the
retreat to be let pass without a challenge. Besides”--with a laugh,
following long scrutiny--“you’ve the look, somehow, of one of those
cursed Jacobites.”
“You flatter me, sir,” said Sir Jasper coolly. “It has been my
business in life to feel like one--and, by your leave, it is pleasant
that you know my breed at sight.”
The sleet was drifting in quiet flakes before a wind that was tired
for a while of its own speed. From the western spur of moor a long,
slanting gleam of sunlight lit up this bleak land’s loneliness--lit up
Sir Jasper’s figure as he sat, unconcerned, disdainful, in the saddle
of a restive horse. For a moment the dragoons drew back; they had lived
in a world where each fought for his own advancement only, and they
were perplexed by this spectacle of a man who, alone and far behind
retreating comrades, made open confession of his faith.
Goldstein swore roundly--not as the gently-born do in times of stress,
but like a ploughboy when his team refuses to obey him. “Are you a
fool, sir?” he sputtered.
“Well, yes,” Sir Jasper answered gravely. “As much as my fellows. I’m
human, sir, as you are.”
The troopers laughed, and Goldstein felt his hold on them grow ever
a little and a little less. “You’re one of the Pretender’s men?” he
snarled. “We shoot all vermin of that sort at sight.”
“No, sir. I am attached to the army of Prince Charles Edward. No man is
a pretender when he asks only for his own again.”
“Then you’re tired of life?” said Goldstein, trying clumsily to catch
something of Sir Jasper’s easy handling of the situation.
“Again you are in the wrong. I never guessed, till now, how good life
is. I have been riding with one stronger and better than myself--and
after that I ride, when you are tired of questioning me, to the wife
and the home I love. It is all so simple, if you would believe me.”
Sir Jasper, under all his honesty of speech, was aware that he was
delaying the advance of these rough-riders along the Langton road,
was helping the Prince to safety while he rode so perilously behind
his army. He was aware, too, in some random way, as he listened to
Goldstein’s queer, guttural English, that he had been exact when he
told Lady Royd, over and over again, that it was no civil war the
Rising men had stirred up, but simply the resistance of the English to
the foreign invader; a resistance old and stalwart as that of Hereward
the Wake; a resistance that would last the English till they triumphed
or they died.
Goldstein, his muddied wits stirred, may be, by some vision borrowed
from Sir Jasper, knew his man at last. “It was you who rode with the
Pretender, when we went near to capture you after Derby?”
“I was with the Prince,” said Sir Jasper, with a smile that bewildered
Goldstein and his troopers; “but, sir, you did not come near to
capturing us. You were too--too clumsy, shall I say?”
Goldstein’s troopers liked the free, courageous bearing of the man, and
he knew it. “Well, we’re here,” he said dourly. “You admit little, but
your life--it’s not worth a poor man’s purchase, surely?”
Sir Jasper took a look at the hills, as moor-bred men will do at these
times. “It was worth a poor Man’s purchase once--near two thousand
years ago,” he said, with the bearing of a man and the simplicity of a
child who does not fear or doubt.
Goldstein had gone through many a rugged fight, overseas in Flanders;
but the way of this man’s courage was unfamiliar, and it daunted him.
“There are one-and-twenty of us,” he said irresolutely, “and you’re
alone. You’ll not fight single-handed?”
“No,” said Sir Jasper, handling his snuff-box lazily and giving no
outward sign that he had crossed himself. “No, in any case I shall not
fight single-handed. Have you any further questions to ask, sir? The
sun is getting down, and I’ve a ride before me.”
To Goldstein this man’s calm was insolence, and he knew that he
was losing ground constantly with the men behind him. “Yes, I’ve
a question or two to ask,” he snapped. “You can buy your life by a
straight answer.”
“But the price may be too heavy,” protested Sir Jasper.
“You were with the Pretender soon after Derby, on your own confession.”
“With Prince Charles Edward, by your leave,” the other corrected, with
the same pleasant smoothness.
“Oh, curse you! what do titles matter? The pretty boy with the
love-locks--you were with him, that day we nearly took you both.”
“I was with him, and it was a privilege. Believe me, sir, I have some
miles to go, and dusk is coming on. Can I answer any other doubts you
have--of my honesty, shall I say?”
Sir Jasper had glanced round, had seen a sheer wall of rock, twenty
paces behind him, from which some farmer long ago had quarried
the stones for his homestead on the moor above. He had chosen his
vantage-ground; and still, through all this talk that gained a few
moments by the way, he had only the one, simple-minded plan--to get
his back to the wall, and fight single-handed till he dropped, and
give his life to earn for his Prince a few more precious moments. He
edged his horse backward gently--pretending that it was fidgeting on
the curb--and drew near the quarry-face. He thought of Windyhough, of
his wife and Rupert, of the free, hard-riding days behind; and then
he thought no more of these things, but only of the narrow track of
loyalty. It was so that the Lancashire gentry--the strong men among
them--had trained themselves to live for the Stuart cause. And, as a
man lives, so he finds himself prepared to die.
“You’re the Prince’s watch-dog,” said Goldstein.
“May be. I wish he had a better.”
“He’s somewhere near then.”
“That is vastly probable, sir.” Sir Jasper glanced at the hills again,
as if seeking counsel. These men had followed the retreat persistently.
If he denied all knowledge of the Prince’s whereabouts, they would
spur forward up the main road, would come in sight of that desolate,
square-shouldered figure who stood, in his own person, for the
strength, the gallantry, the hoping against odds, of this disastrous
’Forty-Five.
He sat in saddle, looking from the hills to the faces of these
one-and-twenty troopers. He needed a ready tongue, and was more
accustomed to straightforward action than to play of stratagem. He must
keep these rascals dallying for as long as might be, must afterwards
lengthen the fight to the last edge of his strength. He had a single
purpose, and his hold on it was firm--to keep pursuit at bay until the
Prince rode nearer to Langton and the night’s bivouac than he did just
now.
And as he tried to find words to relieve the burdensome, tense silence,
Captain Goldstein blundered into one of those seeming inspirations that
lead callous folk into the marshes, as moorland will-o’-wispies do.
“The Pretender is afraid of the thirty thousand pounds on his head,” he
said, turning to the men behind him. “The watch-dog is waiting here at
the turning that leads to his own home; the Pretender is out of sight;
the plot is all so childish. Our road lies this way, and you, sir, will
show it to us. The Pretender, I take it, is your guest to-night--if we
don’t catch him first? You will lead us, sir, I say.”
Sir Jasper, his back to the quarry-wall now, could not grasp at once
the help this captain of rough-riders was giving him. His mind was set
on the simple business of gaining time by a fight to the death, and his
hand was on his sword-hilt. “I never led a rabble yet,” he said, with
easy condescension, “and I am too old to learn new exercises.”
Goldstein was in the company of a gentleman; and, knowing it, he
winced. But he kept his temper; for his view of life was bounded by
advancement, and he wished to make all sure in this big affair of
capturing the Prince, dead or alive.
“You do not deny that the Pretender is making for your own house?”
he asked, with a sharp glance. “You’re shepherding him along this
bridle-track?”
“I would God that his Highness might lie safe at my own house of
Windyhough to-night.” Even now Sir Jasper found it hard to lie
outright, though he realised suddenly that there was a better way of
service than death at the quarry-face.
As it chanced, however, his words suggested evasion to
Goldstein--evasion, and a manifest desire to cloak his errand. “You’ll
not show us the way, then? You’re bent on being riddled through with
bullets? Your sword’s out--but it can whistle as it will. You shall
answer it with musketry.”
It was like Sir Jasper that he had forgotten their firearms when he
drew his sword. Long companionship with those of his own breed had
led him to expect, instinctively, that a score men, coming up against
one, would at least meet him with his own weapon. He laughed at his
own simplicity--laughed the more quietly because now it was of no
consequence either way. His view of the Prince’s safety grew broader
every moment. It was not enough that he should head off pursuit from
him until he had reached safety in to-night’s camp at Langton. This
company of horse had followed the retreat so diligently that to-morrow
there would be danger to Stuart’s person, and the next day after, and
every day that found him riding at the rear of his sad Highlanders.
The plain way of service, as Sir Jasper saw it now, was to take these
nondescript cavalry across country, wide between the Lancashire hills,
and so give the Prince a longer respite from pursuit.
“Am I privileged to change my mind?” he asked, putting his sword in
sheath again.
“Allowed to save your skin?” said Goldstein, the bully in him quick to
take advantage of any show of weakness in an adversary. “As for your
mind--you may change it once, my friend, but not twice.”
“I pledge my honour that I will lead you to Windyhough.”
“Oh, your honour! That will be safe enough. You will lead, and my men
carry their muskets loaded; and if anything goes wrong between this and
Windyhough--you’ll die for the Stuart, sir,” he finished, with a savage
grin.
“I make one condition only,” went on the other suavely--“that I ride at
my own pace.”
“How far is Windyhough from here?” asked Goldstein, with suspicion.
“Ten miles.”
“Then ride at any pace you like. If we crawl, we shall be there before
the Pretender has well got through with supper, and our horses are none
too fresh, I own.”
Sir Jasper took a pinch of snuff, and rode out in silence from the
quarry-face. He was easily master in this enterprise, and wondered that
the gross body of the man could dull Goldstein’s reason so completely.
“You will want to share the thirty thousand pounds with us?” said
Goldstein, feeling now that his men were with him, answering to
his brutal jests. “You’ve saved your skin, sir, and your house of
Windyhough; and you need a little ready money in your pocket. Well, we
shall see.”
Sir Jasper was suddenly ashamed of what these men were thinking of
him. Sensitive, alert, he gauged the meaning of Goldstein’s insolence,
of the troopers’ careless laughter. They fancied this was the stuff
the Prince’s gentlemen were made of--to talk loftily one moment,
and the next to play the traitor and the coward. They believed,
these shock-headed rascals gathered from the foreign kennels, that
a gentleman of Lancashire could rate his own life dearer than the
Stuart’s, could afterwards accept blood-money. And then, because he
knew himself, Sir Jasper shrugged his shoulders, as if to rid them of
an evil burden.
“We ride forward,” he said, moving from the quarry-face and trotting to
the head of the company.
“That is so,” said Goldstein, with rough banter; “and remember, sir,
that your honour--your Stuart honour--is guarded by one-and-twenty
muskets, ready primed.”
Again the troopers laughed; and again Sir Jasper’s instinct was to
vindicate himself. Then he remembered the dogged patience of another
who rode--in safety, so far--at the rear-guard of his army. And he
disdained the ill-favoured mob behind him.
They went up and down the bridle-track that threaded this white land
of hills and cold austerity. It was a track whose every turning was
a landmark to Sir Jasper, reminding him of other days. He had ridden
it when he went hunting--when he went south to the wooing; when,
afterwards, he needed respite from the lap-dog follies of his wife,
from the knowledge that his heir was never likely, in this world, at
least, to prove himself a man of action. This lane was thick with
memories for him; but never, until now, had he ridden it a fugitive.
He thought of Derby and the sick retreat. He thought of many
might-have-beens, and because the pain of it was so sharp and urgent he
gathered up his courage. He held the Faith; he was strong and stubborn;
and out of this windy ride to his own home he plucked new resolution.
They came--he and Goldstein’s men--to Lone Man’s Cross, a wayside
monument that marked the spot where a travelling pedlar had been
murdered long ago. And as he passed it Sir Jasper recalled how, as
a boy, he had been afraid to ride by the spot at dusk. They came to
the little kirk of St. Michael’s on the Hill, and passed it wide on
the left hand, and went down by way of Fairy-Kist Hollow, where the
leafless rowans were gowned in frosted sleet. From time to time some
ribald jest would come to him from one or other of the troopers; but
he did not heed. One half of him was thinking of the memories this
bridle-track held for him, of the hopes and fears and gallant dreams
that had kept him company along it in the years gone by; the other
half--the shrewd-witted, practical half--was content to know that each
mile they traversed was leading danger farther from the Prince, that
each step of the rough, up-and-down track was telling on horses that
were too southern in the build for this cross-country work. His own
mare was lithe and easy under him, for she was hill-bred.
They rode forward slowly through a land that turned constantly a cold
and sleety shoulder to them at every bend of the way. And they came to
the Brig o’ Tryst--a small and graceful bridge--to which, so country
superstition said, the souls truly mated came at last.
“You live in a cursed climate, Sir Jasper,” said Goldstein gruffly;
“and gad! Your roads match it.”
Sir Jasper was alert again. Some quality in Goldstein’s voice roused
in him a loathing healthy and inspiriting. Dreams went by him. He took
hold of this day’s realities, saw the strip of level going ahead,
remembered that he was a short five miles now from Windyhough, with a
game mare under him. There would be time to get into his own house,
to barricade the doors; and afterwards there would be the swift, hard
battle he had hungered for at Derby.
He put spurs to his mare, and she answered blithely. And Goldstein
understood on the sudden what this gentleman of Lancashire had meant
when he passed his word to lead them, at his own pace, to Windyhough.
“Halt! Fire!” he roared. “Are you daft, you fools?”
His men recovered from a surprise equal to his own. The light was wan
and sleety, with mist coming down from the hills; but the fugitive was
well in sight still as they brought their muskets to the shoulders. A
sharp volley rang out between the silent hills, as if every trooper had
pulled his trigger in instant answer to command. It seemed that one
here and there of the shots would tell; but Sir Jasper went galloping
over the level, and dipped down the further rise, and their horses
would not answer when they tried to gallop in pursuit.
“So that is all the wars in Flanders taught you?” said Goldstein
savagely. “You should have brought your wives to shoot for you.”
A low growl went up. These men were tired of Goldstein’s leadership,
tired of the hardship and bad weather. And their leader knew the
meaning of that growl.
“Keep your cursed tempers,” he said, with what to him was suavity.
“There’s the Pretender at the end of this day’s journey--and a price on
his head.”
At Windyhough, Rupert and his mother sat in the parlour, with its faded
scents and tapestries. They waited for great happenings that did not
come their way; and they were sick at heart. Rupert was hungry for
news of the father who was braver and stronger than he--the father
whom he missed at every turn of the day’s road. He had done his round
of the house with Simon Foster; and Nance, who cheered his outlook for
him whenever she came in sight, was absent on some wild hill-scamper,
shared by the broken-winded horse who had grown close comrade to her.
Lady Royd, with the new-found motherhood that made her comelier,
guessed what was passing in the boy’s mind; and she fussed about him,
when he was asking only for free air and the chance to fight like other
men. And Rupert thought, with a shame that deadened all his outlook,
of the years when he had stood, scholarly, ironical, apart from the
blood and tears that meet wayfarers who take the open road. He saw it
all, to-night when the peevish wind was beating through the draughty
house--saw the weakness that had divided him from the open-air, good
fellows who liked and pitied him.
“There’s powder and shot stored here, and I know how to use them,” he
said, with light contempt of himself. “And yet nothing happens, mother.
It is as Simon Foster says--‘we’re needing storms and earthquakes, just
to make to-day a little different, like, fro’ yesterday.’”
“Oh, your chance will come,” said Lady Royd, with the pitiful feigning
of belief that she thought was faith. “Your father taught you, just
before he went, how to direct a siege. You remember that he taught
you?” she insisted. “He trusted you to hold Windyhough for the Prince.”
Rupert laughed--a sudden, dreary laugh that startled her. “He taught me
well. I’ve not forgotten the lesson, mother. But he knew there would be
no siege. I heard him tell you so.”
There was no sharp riding-in of enemies. The night was still, and
empty, and at peace. Yet Lady Royd was plunged deep, by her own son,
into tragedy and battle. She remembered the night of Sir Jasper’s
departure--the talk they had had in hall--her husband’s weary
confession that he had lied to Rupert, telling him a fairy-tale of the
coming attack on Windyhough.
Rupert had overheard them, it seemed; and through all these days of
strain and waiting he had not spoken of his trouble, had let it eat
inward like a fire. As if in punishment for the indifference of earlier
years, Lady Royd’s perception of all that touched her son was clear to
the least detail now. With her new gift of motherhood, of courting pain
for its own sake, she retraced, step by step, the meaning of these last
few days to Rupert. He had grown used to the sense that he stood apart
from stronger men, unable to share full life with them; but always,
behind it all, he had been sure, until a little while ago, that his
father trusted him to prove his manhood one day.
She went to him, and put her arms about him, as any cottage mother
might have done. “Oh, my boy--my boy!” she cried, understanding the
fierceness, the loneliness, of this last trouble.
In this mood of his, with his back to the wall which no man asked him
to defend, Rupert could have withstood many dangers; but sympathy
exasperated him.
“It is hard for my father,” he said, with desperate simplicity. “There
was never a weak link in the Royd chain till I was born the heir. Why
did I come to--to bring him shame?”
Some ruggedness, borrowed from the land that was hers by marriage, bade
Lady Royd stand straight and take her punishment.
“I will tell you why,” she said, her voice passionate and low; “I
hindered you before your birth. I went riding when your father bade me
rest at home--and my horse fell----”
“Just as mine did when I went to join the Rising,” said Rupert,
following his own train of thought. “Mother, I should have been with
the Prince’s army now if--if my horse had not stumbled.”
Lady Royd crossed to the mantel, leaned her head awhile on the cool oak
of it. “Yes,” she said, turning sharply. “Yes, Rupert. It has taken
five-and-twenty years--but I’m answering for that ride of mine.”
He looked at her in wonder. And suddenly he realised that this
beautiful, tired mother of his was needing help. She had not guessed
what strength there was in her son’s arms until he drew her close to
him.
“What ails us, mother?” he asked, with surprising tenderness. “We’ve
Windyhough, and powder and ball, and Lancashire may need us yet.”
Hope took her unawares. This boy was transformed into a man of action;
for only active men can glance from their own troubles to understand
the weakness that is planted, like lavender, in the heart of every
woman.
“I would God it needed us,” she said, with a touch of her old
petulance. “Lancashire men can sing leal songs enough----”
“Can live them, too. The hills have cradled us.”
Lady Royd smiled, as if her heart were playing round her lips. “You’re
no fool, son of mine,” she said. “I wish the Retreat were sweeping
straight to Windyhough, instead of leaving us in peace. I wish you
could be proved.”
Rupert glanced shyly at her. He was son and lover both, diffident,
eager, chivalrous. “Suppose there’s no attack on the house,
mother--suppose I were never proved? I have learned so much
to-night--so much. Surely there’s something gained.”
It was a moment of simple, intimate knowledge, each of the other. And
the mother’s face was flower-like, dainty; the spoilt wife’s wrinkles
were altogether gone.
“It is my turn to ask why,” she said, with a coquetry that was rainy as
an April breeze. “I’ve not deserved well of you, my dear--not deserved
well at all, and have told you so; and you choose just this time--to
honour me. Men are perplexing, Rupert. One never knows their moods.”
Her toy spaniel began barking from somewhere at the far end of the
house; and the old inconsequence returned from habit.
“Oh, there’s poor Fido crying!” she said eagerly. “Go find him, Rupert.
The poor little man is so sensitive--you know he’s almost human, and he
is crying for me.”
And Rupert went out on the old, foolish quest--willingly enough this
time. He had seen beneath the foolish, pampered surface of his mother’s
character, and was content to hold secure this newborn love for her,
this knowledge that she needed him. He was needed--at long last.
“You look gay, master,” said Simon Foster, meeting him down the
corridor. “Well, it’s each man to his taste; but I shouldn’t have said,
like, there was much to hearten a man these days.”
“You’ve not sought in the right place,” laughed the master.
And then Simon grinned, foolishly and pleasantly. For he remembered how
he had helped Martha the dairymaid to milk the cows not long ago. “I’m
not complaining,” he said, guardedly.