“Try heartache, Maurice—the Prince can tell you what that means. And I can tell you, maybe. It comes to older men, like gout. For the rest, you take your orders. You’re in command of our Lancashire lads till I return.”
Maurice answered, not the words but the quiet hardihood of this father who had licked him into some semblance of a man. “I’m in charge, sir—till you return,” he answered gravely.
Sir Jasper drew apart, to the edge of the rising, heathery bank that flanked the road; and he watched the horsemen and the foot go by. Highlanders passed him with bowed shoulders, moving like dullards who have forgotten hope; for they had the temperament which does high deeds to set the world’s songs aflame, or which refuses hope of any sort. The Lowlanders wore a grim and silent air, carrying disillusion with dourness and reserve. But grief was manifest in every face.
Whether he died soon or late, Sir Jasper would not forget this long pageant of despair that went by him along the sodden northward tracks. Five thousand men, with souls keen and eager, had been ready for the fight; and they were marching north unsatisfied. Sir Jasper by habit, was careful of his tongue; but now he cursed Lord George Murray with quiet and resolute exactness. The wind was cold, and the sleet nipped his face; but the chilliest thing that he had met in life was this surrender of leal folk to such a man as Murray. It was unbelievable, and he was compelled to take a new, firmer grip of the faith which had heartened him through lesser storms.
The last of the army passed, and Sir Jasper sighed sharply as he reined his horse toward the south and looked for the one figure—the figure prominent among them all—that had been missing. And presently a solitary horseman came round the bend of the highway. He carried his shoulders square, his head erect; yet, under his royal disdain of circumstances, there was the Stuart sadness plainly marked.
The Prince glanced up as he saw the other ride to meet him. “Ah! you, Sir Jasper,” he said quietly. “You were ever of my mind—to be where our soldiers need us most.”
“You give me too much praise,” began Sir Jasper, and could get no farther.
The Prince and he were alone on this barren road—alone in the world, it seemed, comrades in the bitter sleet-time of adversity—and he was shaken by a sudden, desperate pity, by a loyalty toward this royal fugitive and a gladness that he was privileged to share a moment of defeat with him. He knew, to a heart-beat, what the other was suffering. They had the like aims, the like hardihood; and intuition taught them to be brothers, the older man and the young, here on the northern road.
“Your Highness, I have—I have no words,” he said at last.
“Ah, there!” said the Prince, with a gentleness that was cousin to abiding sorrow. “I know what you would say. Best leave it unsaid.”