THE END OF THE DAY
That night Merrylips slept on a form in the mess-room, with Lieutenant
Crashaw's cloak wrapped about her. She had meant to sit up all night,
to be ready when the attack came. Indeed, she had lain wide awake till
midnight, and had thought to herself that she was glad to be lying in
the lighted room, where the officers came in and out, rather than in
her own dark and lonely chamber.
But after midnight her eyelids grew heavy, and she heard the challenge
of the sentries and the hurrying of feet in the courtyard fainter and
farther away. Then she slept, and dreamed of Walsover. She was telling
Flip proudly that she should go to the wars, for all she was but a
wench, when she woke, with a sound of firing in her ears, and began a
day that seemed to her in after days to be itself a series of dreams.
A window in the mess-room stood open, and through it a dank wind was
blowing. The sky was still dark, but the stars were few. On the hearth
the logs had fallen into white ash, and the one candle on the table
was guttering into a pool of melted wax. The room was empty, and
awesomely still, but off in the darkness, where the dank wind blew,
strange noises could be heard. Footsteps echoed in the flagged courts,
muskets cracked, and then, like a tongue of flame, the clear call of a
trumpet cleft the dark.
Merrylips ran out into the great courtyard. She was cursed at, flung
aside, jostled by men who were hurrying to their posts. And the trumpet
called, and the shots cracked faster and faster, while overhead the
stars went out and the sky grew pale.
In the wan daylight Merrylips saw the banner that floated over
Monksfield. It was red, and by its hue it told to all the world that
the house was held for the king, and would be held for him while one
drop of blood ran red in the veins of his followers.
Against the stable wall sat a trooper whom Merrylips knew. He was
trying to tie a bandage about his arm, with his left hand and his
teeth. She helped him, fixing the bandage neatly, as she had been
taught by Lady Sybil. She asked him about the fight, in a steady little
voice that she scarcely knew for her own. While she was speaking, she
heard a great burst of shouting and of firing on the west side of the
house. The wounded man leaped to his feet. He caught up his carabine
in his sound hand and made off across the courtyard.
"God and our right!" he shouted as he ran.
Merrylips shouted too. She snatched her pistol from her sash and ran,
as the trooper had run, till she found herself at the foot of the
western rampart, where one twilight she had tried to comfort Rupert.
She found Rupert there now. His face was smudged with powder, and he
was loading guns and passing them up to the men on the rampart above
him. They were firing fast, all but one or two who lay quiet.
"Shall I aid thee?" Merrylips asked.
Rupert nodded, as if he had no time to quarrel now. So she knelt at
his side and helped him to load the guns for hours and hours, as it
seemed to her. Right overhead the sun came out from the gray film of
clouds. The light was reflected from the steel helmets and the gleaming
back-pieces of the troopers on the ramparts.
"Come!" said Rupert, suddenly.
Holding fast to the gun that he had just loaded, he scrambled up the
rampart, and Merrylips scrambled after him. She saw that the fields
below, which had been so peaceful on that twilight when she last had
looked upon them, were all alive now with mounted men. A line of low
trees that she remembered, some two hundred feet away, was now a line
of gray smoke, spangled with red flashes of fire. All round her little
clods of dirt kept spurting up so that she was sprinkled with dust. In
the air, every now and then, was a humming, as of monstrous bumblebees.
She did not know what had happened, in the moment of darkness and
outcry through which she had passed. She was off the rampart. She was
sitting on the porch of the great house, and over her stood a big,
surly fellow, a trooper who had been least among her friends.
"And if I catch thee again within range of the firing," she heard him
say, "for the sake of mine own bairn at home, I swear I'll twist thy
neck!"
The trooper was gone, and she sat staring at a red stain upon her
sleeve. It was blood, and yet she was not hurt, she knew. She wondered
what those cries had been that she had heard, and what had been the
weight that had fallen against her.
She was very hungry. She was ashamed to think of such a thing, but she
had not eaten since the night before. She stole into the mess-room and
from the table got a pocketful of bread.
While she was gnawing at it, she heard a louder noise that drowned
the cracking of the muskets. At first she thought that it was a sound
within her own ears, but when she had run out into the courtyard, she
heard the men about her saying:--
"'Tis the great guns from Ryeborough!"
Through the rattle of the muskets and the boom of the artillery, a
sharp cry rang through the courtyard: "Fire!" Against the gray sky a
spurt of pale flame could be seen on the thatched roof of one of the
great barns.
Merrylips ran to the spot, screaming "Fire!" too, with all her might,
yet she could not hear her own voice in the din. All the men who were
not on the firing line--horseboys and cooks and farriers and wounded
troopers--flocked to the barn. They scrambled to the roof. They tore
off the blazing thatch by handfuls and cast it into the court below.
They fetched buckets of water.
Merrylips worked with the rest. She was drenched to the skin with spilt
water. She burned her hands with the blazing thatch. She was hoarse
with shouting and half choked with smoke.
All about her, on the sudden, sounded a clatter of hoofs. She felt
herself caught roughly by the arm and dragged against the wall of the
barn. Past her a line of horses, that plunged and struggled as they
sniffed the fire, were heading for the great gate of Monksfield.
"'Tis a sally they go upon, God speed 'em!" cried a voice beside her.
She looked, and saw that it was Rupert that had spoken. It must have
been he that had dragged her back from the hoofs of the horses. Still
holding her arm, he led her across the court and down the flagged
passage to the buttery hatch.
"Give us to drink!" he cried.
The man at the hatch gave them a leathern jack, half full of water that
was dashed with spirits. They drank from it, turn and turn about, and
Merrylips felt new courage rise in her.
Through the flagged passage she looked out at the barn, where the smoke
rose murkily against the sunset sky. She saw that with every puff it
sank lower. She listened, pausing as she drank, and she heard, in what
seemed blank stillness, only the feeble crackling of hand-arms.
Rupert took the words from her lips.
"They've silenced the great guns!" he cried. "The day is ours, young
Venner! Hurrah!"
Side by side they dashed out into the courtyard. They found it full of
men who shouted and cast up their caps. The day was theirs! The day was
theirs! they cried on all sides. In the nick of time Captain Brooke
had led a charge that had silenced the great guns from Ryeborough. God
and our right! Long live the king! Long live his loyal garrison of
Monksfield!
In the midst of the shouting and the rejoicing, the sallying party
came riding back, with the captured guns. Among horses' heels and
dismounting men Merrylips went shouting with the loudest: "Long live
the king! Down wi' the Parliament! Death to all rebels!" till she found
herself in the thickest of the crowd.
A young man stood there, staggering, held up by the grasp that one
of the troopers had laid upon his shoulder. His helmet was off. His
chestnut hair was clotted with blood, and there was a long smear of it
upon his cheek. He wore no sword, and his officer's sash was of orange,
the color of the Parliament.
Scarcely had Merrylips grasped the fact that he was a rebel officer and
a prisoner in the hands of her friends, when Miles Digby came smashing
his way through the crowd. He was coatless and powder-blackened, and
his face was the face that he had shown on the day when he had beaten
Rupert.
"So 'tis thou, Dick Fowell?" said he, with such words as Merrylips knew
not the meaning of, and full and fair he struck the rebel officer a
blow in the face.
The young man reeled and fell heavily, full length, upon the cobbles
of the courtyard. A savage shout broke from those that stood near. One
of the horseboys kicked him as he lay. But Merrylips stood with the
outcry against the rebels struck dumb upon her lips. For this rebel
Dick Fowell had chestnut hair, like Munn, and if any one had struck
Munn like that, when he was a prisoner--Merrylips caught her breath.
Suddenly Miles Digby's eye had lighted on her. He seized her by the
shoulder.
"Here, you, Tibbott Venner!" he shouted madly. "'Tis time you were
blooded, little whelp! Kick this dog--d'ye hear me? He won't strike
back. They've got your brother prisoner amongst 'em. Serve him as
they'll serve your brother! Kick the fellow--or 'twill be the worse for
you!"
"I will not!" screamed Merrylips.
She saw the savage faces about her, the savage face of Miles Digby
bending over her, and at her feet she saw the limp figure of the
helpless man that might have been Munn. In that moment it seemed to her
that she smelled blood, that she tasted it, bitter upon her tongue, and
should not lose the taste for all her days. Maddened with fear, she
struggled in Digby's grasp.
"Let me go! Let me go!" she screamed. "You vile coward! A pest choke
you! Let me go!"
"Digby!" a stern voice shouted above the uproar of the crowd.
It might have been Captain Norris that spoke, or it might have been
George Brooke. Merrylips never knew. But she did know that the grasp
was taken from her arm, and blindly she turned and ran from the spot.