“I served you ill,” said the other. “He was known already as the weak link of the chain—and I did not snap it.”
“It would have lain on your conscience. You could not do it, that was all.”
“You are kind,” said Sir Jasper slowly—“but you struck deep just now. I’ve feared many things in my time, but never once that I should fail the Stuart.”
The Prince fumbled in the tail pocket of his riding-coat, took out a battered pipe, filled and lit it—with some difficulty, for the tinder in his box was none too dry. “I’ve found three good things in my travels,” he said, blowing clouds of smoke about him—“a dog, a pipeful of tobacco, and friends like yourself, Sir Jasper; they seldom fail a man. I was hasty just now, for I was thinking of—of my Highlanders, God help them!”
And again a silence fell between them as they rode up and down the winding road that lay now a short six miles from Langton. It was all odd and unexpected to Sir Jasper, this ride at a foot pace through the lonely, hill-girt lands that were his homeland. He was with the yellow-haired laddie who had painted dreams for him on the broad canvas of endeavour. And the dreams had had their end at Derby; and they were here, beaten men who looked each other in the face and were content to be together.
“You are oddly staunch, sir,” said the Prince by and by. “It is good to meet a man in all this wilderness of sleet and cold arithmetic.”
“I was bred to be staunch, your Highness. My father taught me the way of it—and his father in the days before. There’s no credit to the tree because its roots happen to be planted deep.”
The other smiled at Sir Jasper’s childlike statement of his case, as if it were a truth plain to all men. “You’ve sons to follow you, I trust? They’ll be the better for training of that sort.”
The wind blew in bitter earnest now against Sir Jasper’s face. All his love for Rupert, all his hidden shame that the heir could not ride out with him, were so many weights added suddenly to the burden he was carrying already. “I have one son with me in the Rising,” he said gravely. “I presented him to your Highness—at Langton, I think, when we rode south.”
“Why, yes.” The Prince seldom forgot a man’s record or his face. “A ruddy, clean-built youngster, who went pale at sight of me, as if—as if, comrade, I were made of less common clay than he. I remember him. He tried to stammer out some hero-worship, and I reminded him that his record was probably cleaner than my own, because the years had given him less chance of sinning. And he was shocked by my levity, I think. Yes, it was at Langton, just before the Vicar went up the street to ring his bells for me.”