Chapter 20

A triumphant Stewart went back to Holyrood, an exultant army, calling itself, now with some good show of bearing it through, the "royal" army, carried into Edinburgh its confident step and sanguine hue. Victory was with the old line, the magnificent attempt! The erstwhile doubting throng began, stage by stage, to mount toward enthusiasm. It was the quicker done that Charles Edward, or his wisest advisers, put forth a series of judicious civic and public measures. And, now that Cope had fled, King George had in Scotland no regular troops. Every day there came open accessions to the Prince's strength. The old Stewarts up again became a magnet, drawing more and more the filings. The Prince had presently between five and six thousand troops. The north was his, Edinburgh, the Jacobites scattered through the Lowlands. The moderate Whig and Presbyterian might begin to think of compounding, of finding virtues in necessity. The irreconcilables felt great alarm and saw coming upon them a helplessness.

But the Stewarts, with French approval behind, aimed at the recovery of England no less than Scotland. Windsor might well overdazzle Holyrood. This interest had received many and strong protestations of support from a wide swathe of English nobility and gentry. Lift the victorious army over the border, set it and the young Prince bodily upon English ground, would not great family after great family rouse its tenants, arm them, join the Prince? So at least it seemed to the flushed Stewart hope. King George was home from Hanover, British troops being brought back from the Continent. Best to fan high the fire of the rising while it might with most ease be fanned--best to march as soon as might be into England!

On the 1st of November they marched, three detachments by three roads, and the meeting-place Carlisle. All went most merrily well. On the 10th of November began the siege of Carlisle. The Prince had cannon now, some taken at Prestonpans, some arrived, no great time before, from France, first fruits of French support. The English General Wade was at Newcastle with a larger army than that of the Jacobites. But the siege of Carlisle was not lifted by Wade. After three days city and castle surrendered. Charles Edward and his army entered England.

From Carlisle they marched to Penrith--to Kendal, Lancaster, Preston, Manchester--clear, well-conducted marches, the army held well together and in hand, here and there handfuls of recruits. But no flood of loyally-shouting gentry, no bearers of great names drawing the sword for King James III and a gallant, youthful Regent! Each dawn said they will come! Each eve said they have not come! One month from leaving Edinburgh found this army of Highland chiefs and their clans, Lowland Scots, a few Englishmen, a few Irishmen, and a few Frenchmen, led by skilful enough generals and by a Prince the great-grandson of Charles I, deep in England, but little advanced in bulk for all that. Old cavalier England stayed upon its acres. Other times, other manners! And how to know when an old vortex begins to disintegrate and a mode of action becomes antiquated, belated?

Wade was to one side with his army, and now there loomed ahead the Duke of Cumberland and ten thousand English troops. Battle seemed imminent, yet again the Scots force pushed by. The 4th of December found this strange wedge, of no great mass, but of a tested, rapier-like keenness and hardness, at the town of Derby, with London not a hundred and thirty miles away. And still no English rising for the rightful King! Instead Whig armies, and a slow Whiggish buzzing beginning through all the country.

The Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Wade, two jaws opening for Jacobite destruction, had between them twenty thousand men. Spies brought report of thirty thousand drawn up before London, on Finchley Common. The Prince might have so many lions of the desert in his Highlanders, but multitude will make a net that lions cannot break. At Derby also they had news from that Scotland now so dangerously far behind them. Royal Scots had landed from France, the Irish brigade from the same country was on the seas, and French regiments besides. Lord John Drummond had in Scotland now at least three thousand men and good promise of more. The Prince held council with the Duke of Perth, Lord George Murray, Lord Nairn, the many chiefs and leading voices. Return to Scotland, make with these newly gathered troops and with others a greater army, expect aid from France, stand in a gained kingdom the onslaught from Hanoverian England? Or go on--go on toward London? Encounter, defeat, with half his number, the Duke of Cumberland's ten thousand, keep Wade from closing in behind them, meet the Finchley Common thousands, come to the enemy's capital of half a million souls? Return where there were friends? Go on where false-promising friends hugged safety? Go on to London, still hoping, trusting still to the glamour and outcry that ran before them, to extraordinary events called miracles? Hot was the debate! But on the 6th of December the Jacobite army turned back toward Scotland.

It began its homeward march long before dawn. Not all nor most had been told the decision. Even the changed direction, eyes upon slow-descending not upon climbing stars, did not at first enlighten. It might mean some détour, the Duke being out-maneuvered. But at last rose the winter dawn and lit remembered scene after scene. The news ran. The army was in retreat.

Ian Rullock, riding with a kinsman, Gordon, heard, up and down, an angry lamenting sound. "Little do the clans like turning back!"

"Hark! The chieftains are telling them it is for the best."

"Is it for the best? I do not like this month or aught that is done in it!"

A week later they were at Lancaster; three days after that at Kendal. Here Wade might have fallen upon them, but did not. A day or two and the main column approached Penrith. The no great amount of artillery was yet precious. Heavy to drag over heavy roads, the guns and straining horses were left in the rear. Four companies of Lowland infantry, Macdonald of Glengarry and his five hundred Highlanders, a few cavalrymen, and Lord George Murray himself tarried with the guns. The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort fell farther and farther behind.

Ian Rullock, acting still as aide, rode from the Prince nearing Penrith to Lord George Murray, now miles to the rear. Why was the delay? and 'ware the Duke of Cumberland, certainly close at hand! The delay was greater, the distance between farther, than the Prince had supposed. Rullock rode through the late December afternoon by huge frozen waves of earth, under a roof of pallid blue, in his ears a small complaining wind like a wailing child. He rode till nightfall, and only then came to his objective, finding needed rest in the village of Shap. Here he sought Lord George Murray, gave information and was given it in turn, ate, drank, and then turned back through the December night to the Prince.

He rode and the huge winter stars seemed to watch him with at once a glittering intentness and a disdain of his pygmy being. Once he looked up to them with a gesture of his head. "Are we so far apart and so different?" he asked of Orion.

He was several miles upon his way to Penrith. Before him appeared a crossroad, noted by him in the afternoon. A great salient of a hill overhung it, and on the near side a fir wood crept close. He looked about him, and as he rode kept his hand upon his pistol. He did not think to meet an enemy in strength, but there might be lurkers, men of the countryside ready to fall upon stragglers from the army that had passed that way. He had left behind the crossroad when from in front, around the jut of the hill, came four horsemen. He turned his head. Others had started from the wood. He made to ride on as though he were of their kindred and cause, but hands were laid upon his bridle.

"Courier, no doubt--"

All turned into the narrow road. Half an hour's riding brought in sight a substantial farm-house and about it the dimly flaring lights of a considerable camp, both cavalry and infantry. Rullock supposed it to be a detachment of Wade's, though it was possible that the Duke of Cumberland might have thrust advance troops thus far. He wished quite heartily that something might occur to warn Lord George Murray, the Macdonalds and the Prince's guns, asleep at Shap. For himself, he might, if he chose, pick out among the glittering constellations a shape like a scaffold.

When he dismounted he was brought past a bivouac fire and a coming and going of men afoot and on horseback, into the farm-house, where two or three officers sat at table. Questioned, threatened, and re-questioned, he had of course nothing to divulge. The less pressure was brought in that these troops were in possession of the facts which the moment desired. His name and rank he gave, it being idle to withhold them. In the end he was shut alone into a small room of the farm-house, behind a guarded door. He saw that there was planned an attack upon the detachment that with dawn would move from Shap. But this force of Wade's or of the Duke's was itself a detachment and apparently of no great mass. He could only hope that Lord George and the Macdonalds would move warily and when the shock came be found equal. All that was beyond his control. In the chill darkness he turned to the consideration of his own affair, which seemed desperate enough. He found, by groping, a bench against the wall. Wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down upon this and tried to sleep, but could not. With all his will he closed off the future, and then as best he might the immediately environing present. After all, these armies--these struggles--these eery ambitions.... The feeling of _out of it_ crept over him. It was an unfamiliar perception, impermanent. Yet it might leave a trace to work in the under-consciousness, on a far day to emerge, be revalued and added to.

This December air! Fire would be good--and with that thought he seemed to catch a gleam through the small-paned, small window, and in a moment through the opening door. He rose from the bench. A man in a long cloak entered the room, behind him a soldier bearing a lantern which he set upon a shelf above a litter of boards and kegs. Dismissed by a gesture, he went out, shutting the door behind him. The first man dropped his cloak, drew a heavy stool from the thrust-aside lumber, and sat down beneath the lantern. He spoke:

"Of all our many meeting-places, this looks most like the old cave in the glen!"

Ian moistened his lips. He resumed his seat against the wall. "I wondered, after Prestonpans, if you went home."

"Did you?"

"No, you are right. I did not."

"At all times it is the liar's wont still to lie. Small things or great--use or no use!"

"I am a prisoner and unarmed. You are the captor. To insult lies in your power."

"That is a jargon that may be dropped between us. Yet I, too, am bound by conventions! Seeing that you are a prisoner, and not my prisoner only, I cannot give you your sword or pistols, and we cannot fight.... The fighting, too, is a convention. I see that, and that it is not adequate. Yet so do I hold you in hatred that I would destroy you in this poor way also!"

The two sat not eight feet apart. Time was when either, finding himself in deadly straits, would have seen in the other a sure rescuer, or a friend to perish with him. One would have come to the other in a burst of light and warmth. So countless were the associations between them, so much knowledge, after all, did they have of each other, that even now, if they hated and contended, it must be, as it were, a contention within an orb. To each hemisphere, repelling the other, must yet come in lightning flashes the face of the whole.

Glenfernie, under the lantern-light, looked like the old laird his father. "No long time ago," he said, "'revenge,' 'vengeance,' seemed to me words of a low order! It was not so in my boyhood. Then they were often to me passionate, immediate, personal, and vindicated words! But it grew to be that they appeared words of a low order. It is not so now. As far as that goes I am younger than I was a year ago. I stand in a hot, bright light where they are vindicated. If fate sets you free again, yet I do not set you free! I shall be after you. I entered this place to tell you that."

"Do as you will!" answered Ian. Scorn mounted in his voice. "I shall withstand the shock of you!"

The net of name and form hardened, grew more iron and closer meshed. Each _I_ contracted, made its carapace thicker. Each _I_ bestrode, like Apollyon, the path of the other.

"Why should I undertake to defend myself?" said Ian. "I do not undertake to do so! So at least I shall escape the hypocrite! It is in the nature of man to put down other kings and be king himself!"

"Aye so? The prime difficulty in that is that the others, too, are immortal." Glenfernie rising, his great frame seemed to fill the little room. "Sooner may the Kelpie's Pool sink into the earth than I forego to give again to you what you have given! What is now all my wish? It is to seem to you, here and hereafter, the avenger of blood and fraud! Remember me so!"

He stood looking at the sometime friend with a dark and working face. Then, abruptly turning, he went away. The door of the small room closed behind him. Ian heard the bolt driven.

The night went leadenly by. At last he slept, and was waked by trumpets blowing. He saw through the window that it was at faintest dawn. Much later the door opened and a man brought him a poor breakfast. Rullock questioned him, but could gain nothing beyond the statement that to-day at latest the "rebels" would be wiped from the face of the earth. When he was gone Ian climbed to the small window that, even were it open and unguarded, was yet too small for his body to pass. But, working with care, he managed to loosen and draw inward without noise one of the round panes. Outside lay a trampled farm-yard. A few soldiers, apparently invalided, lounged about, but there was no such throng such as he had passed through when they brought him here. He supposed that the attack upon the force at Shap might be in progress. If the Duke of Cumberland's whole power was at hand the main column might be set upon. All around him the hills, the farm inclosure, and these petty walls cut off the outer world. The hours, the day, limped somehow by. He walked to keep himself warm. Back and forth and to and fro. December--December--December! How cold was the Kelpie's Pool? Poisoned love--poisoned friendship--ambition in ruin--bells ringing for executions! To and fro--to and fro. He had always felt life as sensuous, rich, and warm, with garlands and colors. It had been large and aglow, with a profusion of arabesques of imagination and emotion. Thought had not lacked, but thought, too, bore a personal, passional cast, and was much interested in a golden world of sense. Just this December day the world seemed the ocean-bed of life, where dull creatures moved slowly in cold, thick ooze, and annihilation was much to be desired.... The day went by. The same man brought him supper. There seemed to be triumph in his face. "They'll be bringing in more prisoners--unless we don't make prisoners!" Nothing more could be gained from that quarter. In the night it began to rain. He listened to its dash against the window. Black Hill came into mind, and the rain against his windows there. He was cold, and he tried, with the regressive sense, to feel himself in that old, warm nest. His Black Hill room rose about him, firelit. The fire lighted that Italian painting of a city of refuge and a fleeing man, behind whom ran the avenger of blood.... Then it was July, and he was in the glen with Elspeth Barrow. He fought away from the recollection of that, for it involved a sickness of the soul.... Italy! Think of Italy. Venice, and a month that he had spent there alone--Old Steadfast being elsewhere. It had been a warm season, warm and rich, sun-kissed and languorous, like the fruit, like the Italian women.... Leave out the women, but try to feel again the sun of Venice!

He tried, but the cold of his prison fought with the sun. Then suddenly sprang clamor without. The uproar increased. He rose, he heard the bolts open, the door open. In came light and voices. "Captain Rullock! We beat them at Clifton! We learned that you were here! Lord George sent us back for you...."

Three days later Scotch earth was again beneath their feet. They marched to Glasgow; they marched to Stirling; they fought the battle of Falkirk and again there was Jacobite victory. And now there was an army of eight thousand.... And then began a time of poor policy, mistaken moves. And in April befell the battle of Culloden and far-resounding ruin.