But Sir Jasper, riding close beside the Prince, did not hear him. His heart, in its own way, was simple as Giles’s, and he was full of pride. “I wish my god-daughter could know,” he said.
“Your god-daughter?” echoed the other.
“Yes—Nance Demaine. It is her mare you’ve borrowed, sir—and I should know, seeing I gave it her—though for the life of me I can’t guess how she chanced to join the Rising.”
The Prince smiled as his glance met Sir Jasper’s. “There’s no chance about this Rising,” he said pleasantly, as if he talked of the weather or the crops. “We’re going to the Throne, my friend, or to the death; but, either way, there’s no chance about it—and no regrets, I think.”
Sir Jasper felt again that sharp, insistent pity which had come to him at sight of the yellow-haired laddie who had left women’s hearts aching up across the border. In this wild campaign it seemed that he had met a friend. And he spoke, as comrades do, disdaining ceremony.
“That is the faith I hold,” he said, with an odd gentleness that seemed to have the strength of the moors behind it. “Comrades are few on the road o’ life, your Highness.”
The Prince glanced at him, as he had glanced at Giles not long ago—shrewdly, with mother-wit and understanding. “They’re few,” he said—“and priceless. I would God, sir, that you’d infect my lord Murray with something of your likeable, warm spirit.”
And Sir Jasper sighed, as he looked far down the road to London, and reckoned up the leagues of hardship they must traverse. Their task was perilous enough for men united in common zeal; dissension from within, of which he had already heard more hints than one, was a more dangerous enemy than Marshal Wade and all his army of pursuit.
Yet Sir Jasper had relief in action, in the need to meet every workaday happening of the march. With his son, thrown on the Langton Road, and listening to the hoof-beats of the runaway horse as he went to join the Rising, the case was otherwise. His one comrade had deserted him. He was here on the empty road, with failure for his sole companion. His first impulse was the horse’s—to run fast and hard, in the hope of overtaking his own kind. He ran forward dizzily, tripped over a stone that some wagoner had used to check his wheel while he rested his team, got up again, and felt a sharp, throbbing pain in his right ankle. He tried to plod on, for all that, his face set London way—failed, and sat down by the wet roadside. And the wheels of circumstance passed over him, numbing his faith in God.
They all but crushed him. He had dreamed of Prince Charles Edward; had learned at last to sit a horse, because he needed to follow where high enterprise was in the doing; had known the luxury of a gallop in pursuit of men who had thought him short of initiative.