So that was the end of the long song. Gone the velvet and steel of a great crusade, the honourable hopes, the chivalry and the high adventure, and what was left was this furtive banditti slinking through the mud like the riffraff of a fair. … It was too hideous to envisage, and the young man’s mind was mercifully dulled after the first shattering certainty. Mechanically the three turned into the street.
The courage of the inhabitants was reviving. One or two men had shown themselves, and one fellow with a flageolet was starting a tune. Another took it up, and began to sing.
“O Brother Sawney, hear you the news?”
and presently several joined in the chorus of
“Twang ’em, we’ll bang ’em, and
Hang ’em up all.”
“Follow me,” said Midwinter, and they followed him beyond the houses, and presently turned off into a path that ran among woods into the dale. In Alastair’s ears the accursed tune rang like the voice of thousands, till it seemed that all England behind him was singing it, a scornful valedictory to folly.
He dismounted in a dream and found himself set by the hearth in the well-scrubbed kitchen of a woodland inn. Midwinter disappeared and returned with three tankards of home-brewed, which he distributed among them. No one spoke a word, Johnson sprawling on a chair with his chin on his breast and his eyes half-closed, while his left hand beat an aimless tattoo, Midwinter back in the shadows, and Alastair in the eye of the fire, unseeing and absorbed. The palsy was passing from the young man’s mind, and he was enduring the bitterness of returning thought, like the pain of the blood flowing back to a frozen limb. No agony ever endured before in his life, not even the passion of disquiet when he had been prisoner in the hut and had overheard Sir John Norreys’s talk, had so torn at the roots of his being.
For it was clear that on him and on him alone had the Cause shipwrecked. At some hour yesterday the fainthearts in the Council had won, and the tragic decision had been taken, the Prince protesting—he could see the bleached despair in his face and hear the hopeless pleading in his voice. He imagined Lochiel and others of the stalwarts pleading for a day’s delay, delay which might bring the lost messenger, himself, with the proofs that would convince the doubters. All was over now, for a rebellion on the defensive was a rebellion lost. With London at their mercy, with Cumberland and the Whig Dukes virtually in flight, and a dumb England careless which master was hers, they had turned their back on victory and gone northward to chaos and defeat. And all because of their doubt of support, which was even then waiting in the West for their summons. Mr. Nicholas Kyd had conquered in his downfall, and in his exile would chuckle over the discomfiture of his judges.
But it had been his own doing—his and none other’s. Providence had provided an eleventh-hour chance, which he had refused. Had he ridden straight from Brightwell, he could have been with the Prince in the small hours of the morning, time enough to rescind the crazy decision and set the army on the road for Loughborough and St. James’s. But he had put his duty behind him for a whim. Not a whim of pleasure—for he had sacrificed his dearest hopes—but of another and a lesser duty. A perverse duty, it seemed to him now, the service of a woman rather than of his King. Great God, what a tangle was life! He felt no bitterness against any mortal soul, not even against the oafs who were now singing “George is magnanimous.” He and he alone must bear the blame, since in a high mission he had let his purpose be divided, and in a crisis had lacked that singleness of aim which is the shining virtue of the soldier. … His imagination, heated to fever point, made a panorama of tragic scenes. He saw the Prince’s young face thin and haggard and drawn, looking with hopeless eyes into the northern mists, a Pretender now for evermore, when he might have been a King. He saw his comrades, condemned to lost battles with death or exile at the end of them. He saw his clan, which might have become great again, reduced to famished vagrants, like the rabble of Macdonalds seen an hour ago scurrying at the tail of the army. … That knot of caterans was the true comment on the tragedy. Plunderers of old wives’ plenishing when they should have been a King’s bodyguard in the proud courts of palaces!
The picture maddened him with its bitter futility. He dropped his head on his breast and cried like a heartbroken child. “Ah, my grief, my grief! I have betrayed my Prince and undone my people. There is no comfort for me any more in the world.” At the cry Johnson lifted his head, and stared with eyes not less tragic than his own.
Midwinter had carried that day at his saddlebow an oddly shaped case which never left him. Back in the shadow he had opened it and taken out his violin, and now drew from it the thin fine notes which were the prelude to his playing. Alastair did not notice the music for a little, but gradually familiar chords struck in on his absorption and awoke their own memories. It was the air of “Diana,” which was twined with every crisis of the past weeks. The delicate melody filled the place like a vapour, and to the young man brought not peace, but a different passion.
A passion of tenderness was in it, a wayward wounded beauty. Claudia’s face again filled his vision, the one face that in all his life had brought
