Sir Jasper, riding near, saw the Prince turn, with that quick, hardly restrained impatience which Murray’s presence always caused. “I gave the order,” he answered, with deliberate calm, “because I know your Highlanders—I, who was bred in France—better than their leaders. Give me an army in front, my lord Murray, give me Wade, or Cumberland, or the Elector, barring the road ahead, and the pipes shall sing, I promise you.”
Then suddenly he threw his head up. His face, grown old and tired, furrowed by sleepless care for his five thousand men, was young again. He was seeing far ahead, beyond the mud and jealousies of these wintry English roads. And again Sir Jasper understood why the women up in Edinburgh had gone mad about this Stuart with the yellow hair. The decent women love a fighter always—a fighter for some cause that is big and selfless; and the Prince’s face, just now, was lit by some glow from the wider hills.
“The pipes shall sing,” he went on, his voice deep, tender, hurried. “They’ll play like quicksilver, Lord Murray, when—when the Hanover men care to meet us in the open.”
“But meanwhile, your Highness, we’ve to trudge on, and I say you’re forbidding meat and drink to your troops when you’ll not let them hear the pipes.”
Sir Jasper moved his horse forward. They were alone, the three of them, a furlong ahead of the army. Lord Murray’s tone was so bitter, so like a scolding woman’s that Sir Jasper’s instinct was to intervene, to take the quarrel on his own shoulders and settle it, here by the wayside, in the honest Lancashire way. He was checked by the Prince himself, who returned from the hills of dreams with surprising quickness.
“We’ve to trudge on,” he said, with workaday grasp of the affairs in hand. “You find the exact word, Lord Murray, as your habit is. What use, then, to let the pipes go singing music into men’s feet? We have to trudge.”
Murray, dour, unimaginative, possessed by a fever of jealousy which would not let him rest, was scarcely civil. And manners, after all, are the outward sign of character. “Your Highness issues commands, and we obey——”
“Why, yes. I came from France to issue them,” broke in the other, with a disdain that was royal in its quietness.
Sir Jasper thought of his windy house in Lancashire, of the dreams he had fed upon, of the long preparation for this march that was to light England with loyal fires. And he was here, riding at a footpace through the dreary roads, watching the rift widen between the Prince and Murray. He was oppressed by some omen of the days to come, or by the sadness of the Highlanders, who sought a fight and could not find it. He had dreamed of an army—loyal, compact, looking neither to left nor right—that would march, at speed and with a single purpose, on London, an army that would not rest until it drove the Hanoverian abroad. Instead, there were divided counsels, a landscape dreary and rain-shrouded, and Murray for ever at their elbows, sowing doubt and dull suspicion.
“Your Highness,” said Sir Jasper, all in his quick, hill-bred way, “we seem to be riding on a Lenten penance, and Christmas is six weeks off as yet. Surely Lord Murray would be well quit of his dourness.”