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.