Once—it was on the second morning of their halt at Derby—he met Lord Murray face to face in the street.
“You look trim and happy, Sir Jasper,” said Murray, uneasy in his greeting since the duel he had fought with this odd gentleman from Lancashire.
“My faith commands it. I obey. What else?” growled the older man.
“Then you’re lucky in your creed,” drawled the other—“or in your obedience. Few gentlemen of the Prince’s could find a smile to-day, as you do, if their heads depended on it. Give me the trick of it, sir,” he went on, with clumsy raillery. “When all is lost—when we’re trapped like foxes, with three armies closing in upon us—you take your snuff-box out, and dust your nostrils, and smile as if these cursed Midlands were a garden.”
Sir Jasper’s distrust of the man yielded to a slow, unwilling pity. He had so much, as he counted riches, and Murray was so destitute, so in need of alms, that he spoke with quiet friendliness, as if he taught a child that two and two, since time’s beginning, added up to four.
“All the world’s a garden, to those who hold the Faith,” he said slowly, searching for the one right word to express what was plain to him as the road to London. “When all seems losing, or lost altogether—are you so town-bred that you do not know the darkest hour comes just before the dawn—the dawn, if a man can keep himself in hand and wait for it?”
“Your sentiments, Sir Jasper, do you credit,” sneered Murray, stung by the sheer strength, the reality, of this man’s outlook upon life. “They should be written, in a round, fair hand, at the head of all good children’s copybooks. For ourselves, we are men—and living in a rough-and-ready world—and we know there are some dark hours that never lift to dawn.”
“There are none,” said Sir Jasper bluntly. “Believe me, I talk of what I know. The black night always lifts.”
Murray strode forward impatiently, turned back, regarded the other with an evasive glance. It was plain that, whatever was his errand down Derby’s rainy main-street, he brought a harassed mind to it. “You may be proved, sir, sooner than you think. Suppose this Rising failed. Suppose we were crushed like a hazel-nut between these three converging armies; suppose the Prince were taken, and we with him, would you stand on Tower Hill and say the dawn was coming?”
“My lord Murray,” the other answered gravely, “we none of us know, until the hour, whether our courage will prove equal to our needs. But I say this. If I’m the man I’ve drilled myself to be, if I can keep my eyes clear as they are now—I will stand with you on Tower Hill, and you will know that the dawn is very near to me.”