Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 6

The third, the resty one, springing backwards past me, almost on his haunches, jerked his halter wide of my clutch, and in a moment was galloping full flight down the slope.

With a call to the others to stand steady and wait for me, I wheeled my mare about and rode off in chase, to round him up. The almost total darkness made this hunting mighty unpleasant; but I knew that, bating the chance of being flung by a mole-hill, I had my gentleman safe enough. For, to begin with, he must soon find the pace irksome, with two firkin casks jolting against his ribs; and at the foot of the descent the river would surely head him off. To be sure it was frozen hard and he might have crossed it dry-footed, but the alders on the bank frighted him back, and presently I had him penned in an angle between hedge and stream. Here, as I slowed up and advanced to coax him, from out of the darkness behind him there broke suddenly a shouting and pounding of hoofs, and close in front of me (but hidden by the hedge) a troop of hors.e.m.e.n clattered down from the farther slope and up the lane where my comrades were gathered.

If for a moment I doubted what it all might mean, a couple of pistol-shots, followed by a loose volley that mixt itself with oaths and yells, all too quickly put this out of doubt. My men were being charged, without question or challenge, by a troop of the enemy, while separated by a quarter of a mile of darkness and stiff rising ground from me, who alone carried their credentials. Little need to say in what hurry I wheeled my mare about to the slope, struck spur, dragged my trumpet loose on its sling and blew, as best I could, the call that both armies accepted for note of parley. Belike (let me do the villains this credit), with the jolt and heave of the mare's shoulders knocking the breath out of me, I sounded it ill, or in the noise and scuffle they heard confusedly and missed heeding.

The firing continued, at any rate, and before I gained the gate the fight had swept up the lane.

I swung out upon the hard stones and dashed after it. But the enemy, by this, had my fellows on the run, and were driving them at stretch gallop. To worsen my plight, as I pursued I caught sound of hoofs pounding behind and, as it seemed, overtaking me; supposed that a horseman was riding me down; and, reining the mare back fiercely, slued about to meet his onset. It proved to be the poor pack-horse I had left in the valley! He must have galloped like a racer; but now he came to a halt, and thrust his poor bewildered face towards me through the darkness. Commending him to the devil, I wheeled about once more and struck spur; and as I galloped, he galloped anew behind.

This diversion had cost me a good fifty yards. I knew well enough that the lane sooner or later must lead out into the high-road, and made sure that if my fellows gained it first they would head back for Farnham. (What would befall me I left to Providence!) But some two or three of the enemy must have raced ahead and cut off that retreat; for when I came to it the way to the right lay open indeed, but the whole welter was pounding down the road to the left, straight for Alton. Again I followed, and in less than two hundred yards was pressing close upon three or four of the rearmost riders. This seemed to me good opportunity for another call on my trumpet, and I blew, without easing my speed. On the sound of it, one of the dark figures in front swung round in saddle and fired, I saw the flash and the light of it on his gorget and morion: and with that, the bullet glancing against my mare's shoulder, she swerved wildly, leapt high, and came down with forelegs planted, pitching me neck-and-crop out of saddle upon the frozen road.

CHAPTER III.

Doubtless the fall stunned me; but doubtless also not for more than a few seconds. For I awoke to the drum of distant hoofs, and before it died clean away I had recovered sense enough to take its bearing in the direction of Farnham. Strangely enough, towards Alton all was quiet. Sitting up, with both hands pressing my head, for just a moment I recognised the gallop for my own mare's. Another beat time with it. I asked myself, why another? She would be heading for home--wounded, perhaps--scared certainly. But why with a companion?

. . . Then, suddenly, I remembered the poor pack-beast; and as I remembered him, all my faculties grew clouded.

Or so, at least, I must suppose; for of the sudden silence on the Alton road I thought not at all. What next engaged me was a feeling of surprise that, of my two hands pressed on my temples, the right was cold, but the left, though it met the wind, unaccountably warm-- the wrist below it even deliciously, or so it felt until rubbing my palms together I found them sticky, with blood.

The blood, I next discovered, was welling from a cut on my left temple. Putting up my fingers, I felt the fresh flow running over a crust of it frozen on my cheek; and wondered how I might stanch it.

I mis...o...b..ed my strength to find the lane again and creep down to the river; and the river, moreover, would be frozen. For a certainty I should freeze to death where I lay, and even more surely on the road back to Farnham I must faint and drop and, dropping, be frozen.

With that, I remembered the light we had seen shining ahead of us as we crossed the fields; and staggered along in search of it, after first groping for my morion, which had rolled into the hedge some paces away.

For a while, confused in my bearings, I sought on the wrong hand; but by-and-by caught the twinkle of it through a gate to the left, and studied it, leaning my arms on the bar. The house whence it shone could not be any part of Holibourne village, but must stand somewhere on high rising ground across the valley. I might reckon to reach it by turning back and taking the lane in which we had been surprised: but this meant fetching a long circuit. I was weakening with loss of blood, and--it coming into my mind that the river below would be hard--I resolved to steer a straight line and risk obstacles.

As it turned out, there were none, or none to throw me back. At the stream-side, holding by an elder-bough, I tested the ice with my weight, proved it firm, crossed without so much as cracking it, and breasted a bare gra.s.sy slope, too little to be called a down, where a few naked hawthorns chafed and creaked in the wind. Above it was an embankment rounded like a bastion, up the left side of which I crept--or, you might almost say, crawled--and, reaching the top, found myself close under the front of a dwelling-house.

It was coated with whitewash, the glimmer of which showed me the queer shape of the building even in the darkness. It consisted of two stories, both round as pepper-pots. Above the first ran a narrow circular thatch, serving as a mat (so to say) for the second and smaller pepper-pot. I could not discern how this upper story was roofed, but the roof had a hole in it, from which poured a stray ray of light. Light shone too, but through a blind, from a small window close under the eaves. The lower story showed none at all.

I rapped on the door. There came no response, though I waited and listened for a full minute. I rapped again and shouted; and was about to challenge for the third time, when the threshold showed a c.h.i.n.k of light. m.u.f.fled footsteps came down the pa.s.sage, and with much creaking the bolts were undrawn.

'Who knocks?' demanded a man's voice, somewhat shrill and querulous.

'Cannot a poor scholar rest in peace, and at this time o' night?'

'In the name of Charity!' I urged.

He flung the door open and stood with a hand-lamp held high, surveying me: a little old man, thin as a rat, in skullcap, furred gown, and list slippers. The lamp shone down on his silvered hair and on a pair of spectacles he had pushed up to the edge of his cap; and showed me a face mildly meditative from the brow down to the chin, which by contrast was extremely resolute.

'More soldiers!' he observed testily. 'The plague take it that they and the meteors must choose the same night to drop from heaven!

How many of you, this time?'

I answered that I was alone, and would have added a word on my plight; but this, beneath the lamp-light, he could not miss perceiving, for my face and the left shoulder of my buff coat were a mask of blood.

'H'm!'--he cut me short. 'It may sound to you unfeeling: but if Heaven persists in sending me soldiers I had rather physic than feed them:' and with that he stood aside as inviting me to enter. Be sure I obeyed him gladly, and, stepping inside, rested my hand for a moment against the jamb of a door that stood open to the right.

The ray of his lamp, as he held it near to examine me, gave me a glimpse of the room within--of a table with cloth awry, of overturned flagons lying as they had spilt their wine-stains, of chairs and furniture pushed this way and that.

'So your predecessors have left me,' said the old gentleman, catching the direction of my gaze and nodding. 'Whether or no they have left me enough for the morning's breakfast is a matter my servant must discover when he comes over from Holibourne at daylight.'

'They were Malignants, sir, as I guess: the Earl of Crawford's men.'

'Devil a groat care I what you call them, or they call themselves!

I study the heavens and take no heed of your sublunary divisions.

But they have eaten and drunk me out of house and home; at that hour, too, when the most meteors were predicted: and what is worse they invaded my garret in their clumsy jack-boots, and have thrown my Orchestra Coeli out of gear. I was mending it when you knocked.

By the way,' he added more kindly, 'I can go on mending it while you wash your wound, which will appear less horrid when cleansed of all this blood. I have a fire upstairs, and hot water. Come.'

He closed the outer door and, taking me gently by the elbow, half-supported me up the stairway, which was little better than a ladder, and led direct to the strangest room I have ever set eyes on.

It was circular--in diameter perhaps twelve feet--with a high conical roof. The roof had an inner lining of wood, and through a hole in it--where a panel had been slid back--a large optic-gla.s.s, raised on a pivot-stand, thrust its nose out into the night. Close within the door stood an oaken press, and beside it, on a tripod, a brazier filled with charcoal and glowing. A truckle-bed, a chair, and two benches made up the rest of the furniture: and of the benches one was crowded with all manner of tools--files by the score, pliers, small hammers, besides lenses, compa.s.ses, rules, and a heap of bra.s.s filings; the other, for two-thirds of its length, was a litter of books and papers. But the end nearest to the working-bench had been cleared, and here stood a mighty curious intricate mechanism of wheels and bra.s.s wire and little bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s, with fine bra.s.s chains depending through holes in the board. My host flung a tender look at it across his shoulder as he stepped to the press to fetch basin and towel.

'The oaf has dislocated the pin of the fly-wheel,' he grunted.

'Praise Heaven, he never guessed that it worked on a diamond, or slight chance had my poor toy with his loutish fingers stuck in it!'

He filled the basin with water from a copper ewer that rested close to the brazier on a file of folios, and set it to heat. 'I doubt I must give up the meteors to-night,' he continued, and went back to his machine, with which, I could see, his fingers were itching to be busy.

I asked, 'Is that, sir, an invention of yours?'

'Ay, soldier,' he answered; 'mine solely; the child of my brain's begetting.' His hands hovered over the delicate points and wires.

'And to be murdered thus by a great thumb-fingered dragoneer!'

With a lens and a delicate needle, he began to peer and prise in it; and anon, fixing the lens in his eye, reached out for his hand-lamp.

'To what use have you designed it, sir?' I asked, after a while spent in watching him.

'To no use at all, soldier,' he answered, more tartly. 'The water is warm, and you can bathe your hurt and afterwards I will plaster it.'

While I laved my temple with the edge of the towel, between the dip of the water I heard his voice in broken sentences: 'To no use at all. . . . Would a man ask the sun to what use it danced? . . .

or the moon and planets? . . .'

I looked up, dabbing my wound gently. His voice had risen and stretched itself on a high, monotonous pitch. He was declaiming verse.

'Who doth not see the measures of the Moon?

Which thirteen times she dances every year, And ends her Pavane thirteen times as soon As doth--

Hey? Do you know the lines, soldier?' He stepped forward and peered close at my head while I shook it. 'Tush! a cut, a trifle! Go on bathing. . . . The lines, sir, were writ by Sir John Davies, the first of English poets.'

'Indeed, sir,' said I. 'Now at the Inner Temple, before mixing myself in these troubles, I used to read much poetry and dispute on it with other young men. We had our several laureates; but believe me-and despise if you will--although we had heard tell of Sir John Davies, I doubt if one in six of us had read a line of him.'

'Ay, indeed,' he caught me up, 'I have scarce read a line of any other. Having discovered him I had no need. For allow me to observe--although I know nothing about it--that in poetry the Subject is nine points of excellence; and, Sir John Davies having hit on the most exalted subject tractable by the Muse, it follows that he must be the most exalted poet. Let me tell you--if it will shorten argument--that in general, and in all walks of life, I hate the second-best.'

'I have heard, sir,' said I, 'that this masterpiece was a poem on Dancing. But you must be thinking of another.'

'Not at all, young man,' my host replied, poring anew into his toy.

'"Orchestra" is the name of it; the subject, Dancing. But what dancing!--the sun, the moon, the stars--Eh? Halleluia, but it goes again!'

Sure enough, bending over the basin, I heard a buzz of wheels, and looked up to see the whole machine springing like a score of whipping-tops gone mad, the bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s swinging and rotating so fast that the eye lost them in little twinkling circles and ellipses, the wheels whirring and filling the room with their hum.

My astronomer had dived under the bench. I saw for the moment little more than his posterior and the soles of his list slippers.

'You'll pardon me,' I heard him grunt, and the speed of the machinery slackened as he attached a couple of leaden weights to the dependent chains. He backed, crawled out, and stood erect; adjusted his spectacles, and stood beaming upon his invention.