I tell you!"
When Michael came out of his sleep, and Drunken Barnaby out of his
rhyming, they sat in judgment on the gaoler. They tried him for high
treason to King Charles. They sentenced him to detention in His
Majesty's gaol _sine die_, and went into the street, locking the door
behind them.
"You shall have the key, Mr. Barnaby," said Michael. "Release him when
and how you like. For ourselves, we ride to Oxford."
"Nay, you walk," said Barnaby, with great solemnity. "Oh, I know your
breed! You're all for going to the tavern for your horses. It will not
do, gentles. The town is thick with Roundheads."
"How can we walk twenty miles, with our errand a day or two old
already?" said Kit.
"Beggars must foot it, when need asks. Do you want to sing 'Christmas
Pie' again all down Banbury street, and have your errand spoiled?
Listen, sirs. This town does not suit my health just now; it does not
suit yours. Permit me to guide you out of it along a byway that I
know."
Kit was impatient for the risk, so long as they found horses; but
Michael saw the wisdom underlying Barnaby's counsel. The three of them
set out, along a cart-track first, that led between labourers' cottages
on one hand and a trim farmstead on the other, then into the open
fields. A league further on they struck into the Oxford highway, an
empty riband of road, with little eddies of dust blown about by the
fingers of the quiet breeze.
"Here we part, gentles," said Barnaby, with his air of humorous
pedantry. "Oxford is for kings and prelates. I know my station, and my
thirst for a brew of ale they have four miles over yonder hill."
They could not persuade him that, drunk or sober, he had rescued them
from Banbury, that they would be glad of his further company. He turned
once, after bidding them farewell, and glanced at Kit with his merry
hazel eyes. "I've got that song of Banbury," he said. "It all came to
me when I saw you dandling the gaoler with the blue-bottle nose. Strife
and battle always helped the poets of a country, sir, since Homer's
time."
"There goes a rogue," laughed Michael, listening to the man's song of
Banbury as he went chanting it up the rise. "Well, I've known worse
folk, and he untied our hands."
*CHAPTER IX.*
*THE LOYAL CITY.*
They jogged forward on the road, and the day grew hot with thunder. The
slowness of a walking pace, after months in the saddle, the heat to
which they were unused as yet, after the more chilly north, seemed to
make a league of every mile. Then the storm burst, and out of nowhere a
fierce wind leaped at them, driving the rain in sheets before it. The
lightning played so near at times that they seemed to be walking through
arrows of barbed fire.
"A pleasant way of reaching Oxford, after all one's dreams!" grumbled
Kit.
"Oh, it will lift. I'm always gayest in a storm, my lad. The end on't
is so near."
The din and rain passed overhead. A league further on they stepped into
clear sunlight and the song of soaring larks. Here, too, their walking
ended, for a carrier overtook them. He had a light load and a strong,
fast horse in the shafts; and, if their way of entry into the city of
his dreams jarred on Kit's sense of fitness, he was glad to have the
journey shortened.
The carrier pulled up at the gateway of St. John's, and the wonder of
their day began. Oxford, to men acquainted with her charm by daily
intercourse, is constantly the City Beautiful; to these men of Yoredale,
reared in country spaces, roughened by campaigning on the King's behalf,
it was like a town built high as heaven in the midst of fairyland. As
they passed along the street, the confusion of so many streams of life,
meeting and eddying back and mixing in one great swirling river, dizzied
them for a while. Then their eyes grew clearer, and they saw it all
with the freshness of a child's vision. There were students, absurdly
youthful and ridiculously light-hearted, so Kit thought in his mood of
high seriousness. There were clergy, and market-women with their
vegetables, hawkers, quack doctors, fortune-tellers, gentry and their
ladies, prosperous, well-fed, and nicely clothed. A bishop and a dean
rubbed shoulders with them as they passed. And, above the seemly hubbub
of it all, the mellow sun shone high in an over-world of blue sky
streaked with amethyst and pearl.
"Was the dream worth while?" asked Michael, with his easy laugh.
"A hundred times worth while. 'Twould have been no penance to walk
every mile from Yoredale hither-to, for such an ending to the journey."
They went into the High Street, and here anew the magic of the town met
them face to face. Oxford, from of old, had been the cathedral city,
the University, the pleasant harbourage of well-found gentry, who made
their homes within sound of its many bells. Now it was harbouring the
Court as well.
Along the street--so long as they lived, Christopher and Michael would
remember the vision, as of knighthood palpable and in full flower--a
stream of Cavaliers came riding. At their head, guarded jealously on
either side, was a horseman so sad and resolute of face, so marked by a
grace and dignity that seemed to halo him, that Kit turned to a butcher
who stood nearest to him in the crowd.
"Why do they cheer so lustily? Who goes there?" he asked.
"The King, sir. Who else?"
So then a great tumult came to Christopher. When he was a baby in the
old homestead, the Squire had woven loyalty into the bones and tissues
of him. Through the years it had grown with him, this honouring of the
King as a man who took his sceptre direct from the hands of the good
God. Let none pry into the soul of any man so reared who sees his King
for the first time in the flesh.
With Michael it was the same. He did not cheer as the crowd did; his
heart was too deeply touched for that. And by and by, when the
townsfolk had followed the cavalcade toward Christ Church, the brothers
found themselves alone.
"It was worth while," said Kit, seeking yet half evading Michael's
glance.
They shook themselves out of their dreams by and by, and, for lack of
other guidance, followed the route taken by the King. The Cavaliers had
dispersed. The King had already gone into the Deanery. So they left the
front of Christ Church and wandered aimlessly into the lane that
bordered Merton, and so through the grove where the late rains and the
glowing sun had made the lilacs and the sweet-briars a sanctuary of
beaded, fragrant incense.
From Merton, as they dallied in the grove--not knowing where to seek
Rupert, and not caring much, until the wine of Oxford grew less heady--a
woman came between the lilacs. Her walk, her vivacious body, her air of
loving laughter wherever she could find it, were at variance with the
tiredness of her face. She seemed like sunlight prisoned in a vase of
clouded porcelain.
Perhaps something of their inborn, romantic sense of womanhood showed in
the faces of the Metcalfs as they stepped back to make a way for her.
One never knows what impulse guides a woman; one is only sure that she
will follow it.
However that might be, the little lady halted; a quick smile broke
through her weariness. "Gentlemen," she said, with a pretty foreign lilt
of speech, "you are very--what you call it?--so very high. There are
few men with the King in Oxford who are so broad and high. I love big
men, if they are broad of shoulder. Are you for the King?"
"We are Metcalfs of Nappa," said Kit. "Our loyalty is current coin in
the north."
The little lady glanced shrewdly at them both, her head a little on one
side like a bird's. "Are you of the company they call the Riding
Metcalfs? Then the south knows you, too, and the west country, wherever
men are fighting for the King. Gentlemen, you have a battle-cry before
you charge--what is it?"
"A Mecca for the King!"
She laughed infectiously. "It is not like me to ask for passwords. I
was so gay and full of trust in all men until the war came. The times
are _difficile, n'est pas_, and you were unknown to me. What is your
errand here?"
"We came to find Prince Rupert," said Kit, blurting his whole tale out
because a woman happened to be pretty and be kind. "The north is
needing him. That is our sole business here."
"Ah, then, I can help you. There's a little gate here--one goes through
the gardens, and so into the Deanery. My husband lodges there. He will
tell you where Rupert finds himself."
Michael, because he knew himself to be a devil-may-care, had a hankering
after prudence now and then, and always picked the wrong moment for it.
If this unknown lady had chosen to doubt them, and ask for a password,
he would show the like caution. Moreover, he felt himself in charge
just now of this impulsive younger brother.
"Madam," he answered, his smile returning, "our errand carries with it
the whole safety of the north. In all courtesy, we cannot let ourselves
be trapped within the four walls of a house. Your husband's name?"
"In all courtesy," she broke in, "it is permitted that I laugh! The
days have been so _triste_--so _triste_. It is like Picardy and apple
orchards to find one's self laughing. You shall know my husband's name,
sir--oh, soon! Is it that two men so big and high are afraid to cross
an unknown threshold?"
Michael thrust prudence aside, glad to be rid of the jade. "I've seldom
encountered fear," he said carelessly.
"Ah, so! Then you have not loved." Her face was grave, yet mocking.
"To live one must love, and to love--that is to know fear."
She unlocked the gate with a key she carried at her girdle, and passed
through. They followed her into gardens lush, sweet-smelling, full of
the pomp and eager riot of the spring. Then they passed into the
Deanery, and the manservant who opened to them bowed with some added
hint of ceremony that puzzled Michael. The little lady bade them wait,
went forward into an inner room, then returned.
"My husband will receive you, gentlemen," she said, with a smile that
was like a child's, yet with a spice of woman's malice in it.
The sun was playing up and down the gloomy panels of the chamber, making
a morris dance of light and shade. At the far end a man was seated at a
table. He looked up from finishing a letter, and Christopher felt again
that rush of blood to the heart, that deep, impulsive stirring of the
soul, which he had known not long ago in the High Street of the city.
They were country born and bred, these Yoredale men, but the old Squire
had taught them how to meet sharp emergencies, and especially this of
standing in the Presence. Their obeisance was faultless in outward
ceremony, and the King, who had learned from suffering the way to read
men's hearts, was aware that the loyalty of these two--the inner
loyalty--was a thing spiritual and alive.
The Queen, for her part, stood aside, diverted by the welcome comedy.
These giants with the simple hearts had learned her husband's name.
"I am told that you seek Prince Rupert--that you are lately come from
York?" said the King.
He had the gift--one not altogether free from peril--that he accepted or
disdained men by instinct; there were no half measures in his greetings.
Little by little Christopher and Michael found themselves at ease. The
King asked greedily for news of York. They had news to give. Every word
they spoke rang true to the shifting issues of the warfare in the
northern county. It was plain, moreover, that they had a single
purpose--to find Rupert and to bring him into the thick of tumult where
men were crying for this happy firebrand.
The King glanced across at Henrietta Maria. They did not know, these
Metcalfs, what jealousies and slanders and pin-pricks of women's tongues
were keeping Rupert here in Oxford. They did not know that Charles
himself, wearied by long iteration of gossip dinned into his ears, was
doubting the good faith of his nephew, that he would give him no
commission to raise forces and ride out. The King and Queen got little
solace from their glance of Question; both were so overstrained with the
trouble of the times, so set about by wagging tongues that ought to have
been cut out by the common hangman, that they could not rid themselves
at once of doubt. And the pity of it was that both loved Rupert, warmed
to the pluck of his exploits in the field, and knew him for a gentleman
proved through and through.
"Speak of York again," said the King. "London is nothing to me, save an
overgrown, dull town whose people do not know their minds. Next to
Oxford, in my heart, lies York. If that goes, gentlemen, I'm widowed of
a bride." He was tired, and the stimulus of this hale, red-blooded
loyalty from Yoredale moved him from the grave reticence that was eating
his strength away. "It is music to me to hear of York. From of old it
was turbulent and chivalrous. It rears strong men, and ladies with the
smell of lavender about them. Talk to me of the good city."
So then Michael, forgetting where he stood, told the full tale of his
journeying to York. And the Queen laughed--the pleasant, easy laughter
of the French--when he explained the share a camp-follower's donkey had
had in the wild escapade.
"You will present the donkey to me," she said. "When all is well again,
and we come to praise York for the part it took in holding Yorkshire for
the King, you will present that donkey to me."
And then the King laughed, suddenly, infectiously; and his Queen was
glad, for she knew that he, too, had had too little recreation of this
sort. They went apart, these two, like any usual couple who were mated
happily and had no secrets from each other.
"How they bring the clean breath of the country to one," said Charles.
"Before they came, it seemed so sure that Rupert was all they said of
him."
"It was I who made you credit rumours," she broke in, pretty and
desolate in the midst of her French contrition. "I was so weary, and
gossip laid siege to me hour by hour, and I yielded. And all the while
I knew it false. I tell you, I love the sound of Rupert's step. He
treads so firmly, and holds his head so high."
The King touched her on the arm with a deference and a friendship that
in themselves were praise of this good wife of his. Then he went to the
writing-table, wrote and sealed a letter, and put it into Michael's
hands.
"Go, find the Prince," he said, "and give him this. He is to be found
at this hour, I believe, in the tennis-court. And when you next see the
Squire of Nappa tell him the King knows what the Riding Metcalfs venture
for the cause."
Seeing Kit hesitate and glance at him with boyish candour, the King
asked if he had some favour to request. And the lad explained that he
wished only to understand how it came that the Riding Metcalfs were so
well known to His Majesty.
"We have done so little," he finished; "and the north lies so far away."
The King paced up and down the room. The fresh air these men had
brought into the confinement of his days at Oxford seemed again to put
restlessness, the need of hard gallops, into his soul.
"No land lies far away," he said sharply, "that breeds honest men, with
arms to strike shrewd blows. Did you fancy that a company of horsemen
could light the north with battle, could put superstitious terror into
the hearts of malcontents, and not be known? Gentlemen, are you so
simple that you think we do not know what you did at Otley Bridge--at
Ripley, when the moon shone on the greening corn--at Bingley, where you
slew them in the moorland wood? It is not only ill news that travels
fast, and the Prince, my nephew, never lets me rest for talk of you."
To their credit, the Metcalfs bore it well. Bewildered by this royal
knowledge of their deeds, ashamed and diffident because they had done so
little in the north, save ride at constant hazard, they let no sign
escape them that their hearts were beating fast.
The King asked too much of himself and others, maybe, stood head and
shoulders above the barter and cold common sense of everyday. The
Metcalf spirit was his own, and through the dust and strife he talked
with them, as if he met friends in a garden where no eavesdroppers were
busy.
They went out by and by, the Queen insisting, with her gay, French
laugh, that the donkey should be presented to her later on. They found
themselves in the street, with its pageantry of busy folk.
"Well, Kit," asked Michael. "We've fought for the King, and taken a
wound or so. Now we've seen him in the flesh. How big is he, when
dreams end?"
"As big as dawn over Yoredale pastures. I never thought to meet his
like."
"So! You're impulsive, lad, and always were, but I half believe you."
They came again into the High Street. It was not long, so far as time
went, since these Nappa men had fancied, in their innocence, that
because a messenger rode out to summon them to Skipton, the King and all
England must also know of them. Now the King did know of them, it
seemed. Six months of skirmish, ambush, headlong gallops against odds,
had put their names in all men's mouths. Quietly, with a sense of
wonder, they tested the wine known as fame, and the flavour of it had a
sweetness as of spring before the languor of full summer comes.
"We were strangers here an hour since," said Kit, watching the folk
pass, "and now we come from Court."
"What did I tell you, babe Christopher, when I tried in Yoredale to lick
your dreaming into shape? Life's the most diverting muddle. One hour
going on foot, the next riding a high horse. We'd best find the
tennis-court before the King's message cools."
A passer-by told them where to find the place. The door was open to the
May sunlight, and, without ceremony or thought of it, they passed
inside. Prince Rupert was playing a hard game with his brother Maurice.
Neither heard the Metcalfs enter; in the blood of each was the crying
need for day-long activity--in the open, if possible, and, failing that,
within the closed walls of the tennis-court. The sweat dripped from the
players as they fought a well-matched game; then Rupert tossed his
racquet up.
"I win, Maurice," he said, as if he had conquered a whole Roundhead
army.
"It is all we do in these dull times, Rupert--to win aces from each
other. We're tied here by the heels. There's the width of England to
go fighting in, and they will not let us."
Rupert, turning to find the big surcoat that should hide his frivolous
attire between the street and his lodging, saw the two Metcalfs standing
there. He liked their bigness, liked the tan of weather and great
hardship that had dyed their faces to the likeness of a mellowed wall of
brick. Yet suspicion came easily to him, after long association with the
intrigues of the Court at Oxford, and instinctively he reached down for
the sword that was not there, just as Michael had done when he came
dripping from Ouse river into York.
"You are Prince Rupert?" said Michael. "The King sends this letter to
you."
Rupert broke the seal. When he had read the few lines written
carelessly and at speed, his face cleared. "Maurice," he said, "we need
play no more tennis. Here's our commission to raise forces for the
relief of York."
He was a changed man. Since boyhood, war had been work and recreation
both to him. In his youth there had been the Winter Queen, his widowed
mother, beset by intrigue and disaster, with only one knightly man about
her, the grave Earl of Craven, who was watch-dog and worshipper.
Craven, hard-bitten, knowledgeable, with the strength of the grey
Burnsall fells in the bone and muscle of him, had taught Rupert the
beginnings of the need for warfare, had sown the first seeds of that
instinct for cavalry attack which had made Rupert's horsemanship a
living fear wherever the Roundheads met them. First, he had had the
dream of fighting for his mother's honour; when that was denied him he
had come into the thick of trouble here in England, to fight for King
Charles and the Faith. And then had come the cold suspicion of these
days at Oxford, the eating inward of a consuming fire, the playing at
tennis because life offered no diversion otherwise. It is not easy to
be denied full service to one's king because the tongues of interlopers
are barbed with venom, and these weeks of inaction here had been eating
into his soul like rust.
The first glow of surprise over, Rupert's face showed the underlying
gravity that was seldom far from it. The grace of the man was rooted in
a rugged strength, and even the charm of person which none denied was
the charm of a hillside pasture field, flowers and green grass above,
but underneath the unyielding rock.
"Maurice, these gentlemen are two of Squire Metcalf's lambs," he said,
"so the King's letter says. For that matter, they carry their
credentials in their faces."
"Tell us just how the fight went at Otley Bridge," said Maurice, with
young enthusiasm. "We have heard so many versions of the tale."
"It was nothing," asserted Kit, still astonished to find their exploits
known wherever they met Cavaliers. "Sir Thomas Fairfax came back one
evening from a skirmish to find we held the bridge. He had five-score
men, and we had fifty. It was a good fight while it lasted. Forty of
our men brought back wounds to Ripley; but we come of a healthy stock,
and not a limb was lost."
Rupert had no easy-going outlook on his fellows; his way of life did not
permit such luxury. He was aware that rumour had not lied for
once--that the magic of the Metcalf name, filtering down from Yorkshire
through many runnels and side-channels, was no will-o'-wisp. Two of the
clan were here, and one of them had told a soldier's tale in a soldier's
way, not boasting of the thirty men of Fairfax's they had left for dead
at Otley Bridge.
"I shall be for ever in your debt," he said impassively, "if you will
answer me a riddle that has long been troubling me. Who taught you
Metcalfs the strength of cavalry, lightly horsed and attacking at the
gallop?"
"Faith, we were never taught it," laughed Michael. "It just came to us
as the corn sprouts or the lark sings. The old grey kirk had something
to do with it, maybe, though I yawned through many a sermon about
serving God and honouring the King. One remembers these little matters
afterwards."
"One does, undoubtedly," said Rupert. "Now, sir," he went on, after a
grave silence, "I have a great desire. I'm commissioned to raise forces
for the relief of York, and I want you men of Yoredale for my first
recruits. They are already busy in the north, you'll say. Yes, but I
need them here. Six-score of your breed here among us, or as many as
their wounds permit to ride, would bring the laggards in."
"With you here?" said Kit impulsively. "The laggards should be stirred
without our help."
"By your leave, they are tiring of me here in Oxford. The tales of your
doings in the north are whetting jaded appetites. Bring your big men
south on their white horses, and show the city what it covets. I'll
send a horseman to York within the hour."
"That need not be," said Michael. "We wasted a whole night in Banbury,
and your messenger need ride no further than that town, I fancy. The
first of our outposts should be there by now."
"You will explain, sir," put in Rupert, with grave question.
"It is simple enough. Six-score men--and I think all of them will ride,
wounded or no--cover a good deal of country, set two miles apart. That
was my father's planning of our journey south--a horseman playing
sentry, on a fresh horse, at every stage, until we sent news that you
were coming to the relief of York."
"Thorough!" said Rupert. "Strafford should be here, and Archbishop
Laud--they understand that watchword."
The Prince was housed at St. John's, where Rupert had known
light-heartedness in his student days. That evening the Metcalfs supped
there--just the four of them, with little ceremony about the crude
affair of eating--and afterwards they talked, soldiers proven in many
fights, and men who, by instinctive knowledge of each other, had the
self-same outlook on this dizzy world of battle, intrigue, and
small-minded folk that hemmed them in. To them the King was England,
Faith, and constancy. No effort was too hard on his behalf; no east
wind of disaster, such as Rupert had suffered lately, could chill their
steady hope.
"There's one perplexity I have," said Rupert, passing the wine across.
"Why are your men so sure that they can find fresh horses for the asking
at each two-mile stage? Horses are rare to come by since the war broke
out."