“I pledge my honour that I will lead you to Windyhough.”
“Oh, your honour! That will be safe enough. You will lead, and my men carry their muskets loaded; and if anything goes wrong between this and Windyhough—you’ll die for the Stuart, sir,” he finished, with a savage grin.
“I make one condition only,” went on the other suavely—“that I ride at my own pace.”
“How far is Windyhough from here?” asked Goldstein, with suspicion.
“Ten miles.”
“Then ride at any pace you like. If we crawl, we shall be there before the Pretender has well got through with supper, and our horses are none too fresh, I own.”
Sir Jasper took a pinch of snuff, and rode out in silence from the quarry-face. He was easily master in this enterprise, and wondered that the gross body of the man could dull Goldstein’s reason so completely.
“You will want to share the thirty thousand pounds with us?” said Goldstein, feeling now that his men were with him, answering to his brutal jests. “You’ve saved your skin, sir, and your house of Windyhough; and you need a little ready money in your pocket. Well, we shall see.”
Sir Jasper was suddenly ashamed of what these men were thinking of him. Sensitive, alert, he gauged the meaning of Goldstein’s insolence, of the troopers’ careless laughter. They fancied this was the stuff the Prince’s gentlemen were made of—to talk loftily one moment, and the next to play the traitor and the coward. They believed, these shock-headed rascals gathered from the foreign kennels, that a gentleman of Lancashire could rate his own life dearer than the Stuart’s, could afterwards accept blood-money. And then, because he knew himself, Sir Jasper shrugged his shoulders, as if to rid them of an evil burden.
“We ride forward,” he said, moving from the quarry-face and trotting to the head of the company.