And they fell silent, for there is something in this hill music that touches the soul of a man. It finds out his need of battle, his instinct to be up and doing along the wide, human thoroughfares of life. And then it stifles him with pity, with homesickness and longing for the wife and bairns who, for all that, would not approve him if he failed to take the road. And then, again, it sounds the fighting note, till every fibre responds to the call for instant action.
No action met them. They rode forward through the driving wind, the Prince and Sir Jasper; and now the pipes, hurried and unwearied, played only mockery about them, rousing their strength while denying it an outlet.
It was then Sir Jasper heard the first and last bitter word from the leader who had summoned him to this drear adventure. “The pity of it!” said the Prince. “I ask only a free hand, and they’ll not give it me. Sir Jasper, what is amiss with Lord Murray? There was something left out of him at birth, I think—soul, or heart—or what you choose to name it. This march of ours—he will not listen when I tell him it is bigger than the strict rules of warfare.”
Sir Jasper reined near and put a hand on the Prince’s bridle-arm, as a father might who sees his boy attempting more than his strength warrants. “I understand,” he said simply. “By your leave, I’ll play watch-dog to Murray till we reach London. He stands for caution, and I”—a sudden remembrance came to him of Windyhough, of the wife and heir, and his loneliness bit so deep that, for shame’s sake, he had to cover up his grief—“and I, your Highness,” he added, with a touch of humour, “have been blamed for many things, but never yet for caution.”
“No, no. We might be old in friendship, you and I. We see the like world, Sir Jasper—the world that caution is too mean to enter. And yet my lord Murray—who has been bred among the hills, while I have not—has never learned their teaching, as I learned it at my first coming to the misty Highlands.”
The pipes would not be quiet, behind them on this sloppy road. The Prince, as his habit was, had seen far and wisely when he forbade the music. To and fro the uproar went, wild, insistent, friendly as the cry of moor-birds—snipe and curlew and wide-roving plover—to men who love the uplands. The music lacked its fulness, for in these Midlands there were no mountains to echo it, to pass it on from rise to rise, till it grew faint and elfin-like among the blue moor-tops; but even here the pipes were swift and tender with persuasion.
“All this, Sir Jasper,” the Prince said by and by—“the pipes playing fury into us, and in front of us the empty road. Murray promised us three battles at the least, and we’re here like soldiers on parade.”
Sir Jasper had cherished dreams of this Rising, but war, in the hot fighting and in the dreary silences between, is not made up of dreams. The poetry of it comes before and after, when peace smooths her ruffled plumage and sings of heroism; the prose of it is so commonplace that men sensitively built need dogged loyalty to keep them safe from disillusionment.
“The wind blows east, your Highness,” he said. “You’ll pardon me, but an east wind sets my temper all on edge. My sympathy is catholic, but I’d hang the nether millstone round Lord Murray’s neck if I had my way.”
The Prince glanced behind, because the pipes were tired of battle now, and were crooning lullabies—the strong, tender cradle-songs that Highland mothers know. “No,” he said quietly. “We share the same desire, but we’d relent.”