“Sir Jasper,” said Lochiel suddenly, “we go pitying ourselves, and that is always waste of time. What of the Prince? I cannot tell you the love—the love proven to the hilt—I have for him. We give our little to this rising; but he, brave soul, gives all. No detail of our men’s comfort in this evil weather, no cheery word when the world goes very ill with us, has been neglected. And, above the detail—oh, above the detail that frets his nerves to fiddle-strings—he keeps the single goal ahead. He keeps the bridge of faith, Sir Jasper, with a gallantry that makes me weak about my mother’s knees again, as if—as if I did not need to be ashamed of tears.”
Sir Jasper passed a hand across his eyes. He had kept, through the rough journey of his sixty years, a passionate devotion to the Stuart; and he had travelled with Prince Charles Edward, as wayfarers do with wayfarers, through sleety roads, and had found, as few men do, that his fine, chivalrous ideal was less than the reality. “I’ve been near his Highness often,” he said slowly. “He kept his temper firm on the rein when I could not have done. He went about the camp o’ nights, when most of his gentry were asleep, and tended ailing Highlanders. He’s as big as Pendle Hill in Lancashire; and, Lochiel, keep a good heart through this Council, for he was cast in a bigger mould than most of us.”
“He—is royal,” said Lochiel softly. “That is all. Put him in peasant’s homespun, with his love-locks shorn, he’d be still—why, just the Stuart, reigning from the hilltops over us.”
“And, Lochiel, you talked of heartbreak. We’re lesser men, and can jog along somehow if the worst comes. The Prince cannot. The heart of him—it’s like a well-grown oak, Lochiel; it will stand upright to the storm, or it will break. There is no middle way.”
So then Lochiel remembered he would be late for the Council if he stayed longer in the windy street. “There never was a middle way,” he said. “You, sir—and the Prince, God bless him!—and Lochiel of the many weaknesses, we never trod the middle way.”
And somehow a great sorrow and great liking came to them, as if they were brothers parting in the thick of a stormy night where ways divided.
“We shall meet soon again,” said Lochiel, the foolish trouble in his voice. “And, either way this Council goes, we’ll find a strip of blue sky over us, Sir Jasper.”
He swung down the street, his head upright and his figure lithe and masterful. He might, to all outward seeming, have been going to his own wedding. For that was Lochiel’s way when hope and courage were at their lowest ebb, when he conquered his weakness by disdaining it.
And Sir Jasper watched him go—watched other chieftains hurrying, with grave, set faces, to the Council. And then, for three long hours, he paced the streets. What Rupert, his heir, was learning there at Windyhough the father learned during this time of waiting for the news. The chiefs were in the thick of debate, were speaking out their minds, were guessing, from the shifting issues of the Council, which way the wind was sitting. They were in the fighting-line at least; but he, whose heart was centred wholly on this Council that would settle all, was compelled to stand by helpless to serve his Prince by word or deed.
He was not alone. It was an open secret that, behind the closed doors of the Council Chamber, men were deciding whether retreat or advance should be the day’s marching-order. Discipline was ended for awhile. The Highlanders could not rest in their lodgings, but stood about the streets in crowds, or in little knots, seeking what make-believe Derby town could give them of the free air and the big, roomy hills that, in gladness or in sorrow, were needful to them as the food they ate. The townsfolk, stirred from their sleepiness by all this hubbub of tattered, rain-sodden men who were bent on some errand dimly understood, mixed with the soldiery, and asked foolish questions, and got few answers, because the most part of the army spoke only Gaelic.