CHAPTER XIX
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.