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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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