The riders and the men on foot went by. The tread of hoofs, the tread of feet, was slow and measured, as the tread of mourners is; and down and up, and up and down, the echoes of the pipes’ lament roamed through Derby’s street. It was an hour—and there are few such—when men, with their strength and their infirmities, and their rooted need of battle, grow tender and outspoken as little children, who have found no need as yet to face life in the open.
The Prince and Sir Jasper were alone. The fighting men had passed them, and the chattering townsfolk. And from afar, down the silence of the empty street, the sorrow of the pipes came with a low, recurring lilt.
Lochiel, not long ago, had sounded the right note. They were children, Sir Jasper and his Prince, gathered round their mothers’ knees again; and, through the murk of Derby’s street, and through the falling sorrow of the music, God spoke to them, as if they needed, in this hour of extreme weakness, to reach out and hold with firm hands the faith that was slipping from their grasp.
And the moment passed, leaving them the sadder, but the stronger for it. And they were men again—comrades, facing a disastrous world. And presently they rode slowly out of Derby, and took the long road north again; and between them fell a silence chill and heavy as the rain that never ceased to whip the puddles of the highway.
“Your eyes are wet, Sir Jasper,” said the Prince, turning sharply from the thoughts that were too heavy to be borne.
“So are yours, your Highness,” the other answered gruffly.
“Well, then, we’ll blame the pipes for it. I think—there’s something broken in me, sir, since—since Derby; but no man in my army, except yourself, shall ever guess as much. We shall be gay, Sir Jasper, since need asks.”
A few hours later a motley company of horse—three-and-twenty strong—rode into Derby. Some half-dozen of the riders were English, but the rest, and the officer in command, were Hessian soldiery. The officer, one Captain Goldstein, spoke English with some fluency; and his business here, it seemed, was to gather from the townsfolk such details of the retreat as they could furnish.
They spent less than an hour in the town, snatched a hurried meal—for which, unlike the Prince’s men, they did not pay—and rode back as fast as they could set hoofs to ground to the main body of the Duke of Cumberland’s army, which had been hanging on the rear of the Stuart’s men for many days, hoping always to overtake them, and always finding them a few leagues nearer London than themselves.
Captain Goldstein went straight to the Duke’s lodgings, and the sentry passed him in without demur when his challenge had been answered.