The whole town, though men’s voices were low and hushed, was alive with that stress of feeling which is like a brewing thunderstorm. Men gathered into crowds, saying little, affect each other, till each feels in his own person the sum total of his neighbour’s restlessness; and for that reason armies yield suddenly to a bewildering panic, or to a selfless courage that leads to high victories in face of odds.
The wind swept down the streets of Derby. The rain was tireless. It did not matter. To Sir Jasper—to the men of Lancashire, and the Highlandmen who were old to sorrow of the hills—there was nothing mattered, save the news for which they waited. And the time dragged on. And still the Council doors were shut.
Then, late in the afternoon, Lord Murray came out, and walked up the street, with half a dozen of his intimates beside him. And, a little later, Lochiel came out, alone, and, after him, the Duke of Perth, alone. And Sir Jasper, standing near the Council Chamber, knew at a glance which side had won the day.
Last of all—a long while after, so it seemed to Sir Jasper—the Prince crossed the threshold, stood for a moment, as if stunned, with the rain and the spiteful wind against his cheek. He was like one grown old before his time—one bent and broken up by some disaster that had met his manhood by the way.
Then, as Lochiel had done when he went down the street to this unhappy Council, the Prince lifted his head, squared his shoulders to the wind, and stepped out between the silent bystanders as if life were a jest to him. So then Sir Jasper was sure that retreat was the order of the day; was sure, too, that his Prince had never shown so simple and conspicuous a gallantry as he did now, when he moved through the people as if he went to victory, not to a heartache that would last him till he lay, dead and at peace, beside his Stuart kinsmen.
At dawn of the next day the retreat began. It was a red dawn and stormy, though the rain had ceased, and the wisp of a dying moon was lying on her back above the dismal housetops.
The Prince stood aside and watched it all. A little while before he had bidden Lord Murray ride at the head of the outgoing army. “I have no strategy, my lord,” he had said, with chiselled irony. “I lead only when attack comes from the front.” And Sir Jasper, with the instinct of old loyalty and new-found, passionate liking for the man, had drawn his own horse near to the Prince’s bridle; and they waited, the two of them, till the sad procession passed, as if to burial of their finest hopes.
Not till Derby’s life is ended will she hear such trouble and such master-music as went up and down her streets on that disastrous, chilly dawn. The Highlanders were strong and simple-hearted men. They had obeyed their leaders, rather than the Prince who had sounded the forward note of battle. But no old allegiance could silence their pipers, who played a dirge to Prince Charles Edward, heir to the English throne.
By one consent, it seemed, the pipers, as they went by their Prince, played only the one air. Low, insistent, mournful as the mists about their own wild hills, the air roamed up and down the wet, quiet streets, till it seemed there had been no other music since the world began. There was no hope, no quick compelling glamour, as of old; the pipes, it seemed, were broken-hearted like their leader, and they could only play for sorrow.
Up and down the long, mean street, and down and up, between the wet house-fronts that reared themselves to the dying moon and the red murk of the dawn, the music roamed. And always it was the same air—the dirge known as “The Flowers of the Forest,” which was brought to birth when the Scots lost Flodden Field. Since Flodden, generation after generation, men skilled at the pipes had taught their growing youngsters the way of it; and now the ripe training of the fathers had gathered to a head. No pipers ever played, or ever will again, as those who greeted the Prince as they passed by him—greeted him, with sadness and with music, as heroes salute a comrade proven and well-loved.