Rupert, blind and heart-sick, fumbled for his dispatches—dispatches that, twice to-day, had all but cost him his life—and handed them to the Prince, who turned them over carelessly and put them down.
“By your leave,” said the Prince, with a quiet laugh, “these can wait a little. There’s battle on the moor to-morrow.”
Then Rupert learned what was in the doing; and his first grief for Oliphant grew dulled, because the chance of open fight had come, after incessant riding through the nights that had brought him little company.
“There, you’ll need rest!” said the Prince, with a kindly touch on his arm.
And again Rupert smiled, with disarming frankness. “I’ve had five-and-twenty years of rest, your Highness. It is better to be up Culloden braes to-morrow.”
“Gad, sir! you’re Oliphant—just Oliphant, come to life again, with all his obstinate, queer zeal. Make your peace, lad, and sleep a while—we come into our kingdom either way to-morrow.”
Through that night, in between the slumber that was forced on him by sheer weight of tiredness, Rupert held fast the last words of the Prince. It was their strength—the Stuart’s strength and his, that, either way, they came into their kingdom. The Georgian troops, sleeping or waking till the dawn’s bugle notes rang out, had only one way of victory; they must conquer, or lose all, in this world’s battle; it was a sealed riddle to them that a man may find true gain in loss.
The dawn came red and lonely over Culloden Moor, and the austere hills, as they cleared their eyes of mist-grey sleep, looked down on a fury in the making, on preparations for a battle whose tragedy is sobbing to this day.
Rupert, his heart on fire as he went through that day’s eagerness—the Prince, who found recompense in action for the indignities of Derby—the Highlanders, who were fighting with the zest of children dancing round a village Maypole—could never afterwards reconstruct the sharp and shifting issues of the battle, could not guess how it came that all their gallantry, their simple hope, were broken by the stolid foreign soldiery.
Even at the bridge, where they came on with shield and dirk and claymore against the Duke’s three lines of musketry—the first line kneeling, the second stooping, the third standing to full height—when they lay in tangled, writhing heaps, shot down at twenty paces, those of the Highlanders whose eyes were clear above disasters of the body were surprised that love of their Prince had not disarmed the musketry; and they tried to get up again, and died in the simple faith that had taught them how to fight and how to die.