No Quarter! Part 28

They listened. To hear music, with the hum of many voices afar off; but two near, and drawing nearer.

"My sister!" said Sabrina, almost instantly recognising one of them; then, after another brief interval of silence, adding, "and Reginald Trevor!"

Continuing to advance, the two were soon up to the pavilion; and made stop, on the same spot where but five minutes before stood their respective cousins.

Now, however, it was the gentleman who spoke first--after their coming to a stand--and as if changing the subject of the dialogue already in progress.

"My cousin Eust seems beside himself with Mademoiselle Lalande. I never saw man so madly in love with a woman. I wonder if she reciprocates it?"

He was pouring gall into Vaga Powell's heart, and apparently without being conscious of it. For, by this, he had reached full confidence that his own love was reciprocated by her with whom he was conversing.

"Like enough," was the response, in tones so despairingly sad, that, but for his being a fool in his own conceit, he might have drawn deductions from it to make him suspect his folly. More, could he have but seen the expression upon her features at that moment--pain, almost agony. The pantomimic dance--just over, all its acts, incidents, and gestures were still fresh before her mind--the latest the most vivid--the dropping of the glove; its being taken up, as she supposed, with eager alacrity; then, the man she loved throwing wide open his arms to receive into them the woman she hated! All this was in her thoughts, a very tumult of trouble--in her heart as a flaming fire.

The darkness favoured her, or Reginald Trevor could not have failed perceiving it on her face. But, indeed, she would have little cared if he had. Dissembling with him all the night, she meant doing so no more.

Though the play was not with him, the game had gone against her; she had lost the stakes, as she supposed, irretrievably; and now would retire into the shadow and bitterness of solitude.

Little dreamt he of how she was suffering, or the cause. Knowing it, he might have sprung away from her side, quickly and angrily as had Clarisse from that of Eustace.

Continuing the conversation, he said, insinuatingly,--

"On second thoughts, I'm wrong, Mistress Vaga. I _have_ known a man as much in love with a woman as my cousin is with yours--know one now?"

"Indeed?"

The exclamatory rejoinder was purely mechanical, she who made it not having enough interest in what had been said to inquire who was the individual he alluded to. Yet this was the very question he courted.

He had to angle for it further, saying,--

"May I tell you who it is?"

"_Oh_, certainly; if you desire to do so."

Even this icy response failed to check him. He either did not perceive its coldness, or mistook it for reticence due to the occasion. Several times, since his first abortive attempt, he had been on the eve of making fuller declaration to her--in short, a proposal of marriage. But she had been dancing with others besides himself, and no good opportunity had as yet offered. That seemed to have come now. So, taking advantage of it, and her permission, he said, in an impressive way,--

"The man is Reginald Trevor--myself."

If he expected her to give a start of feigned surprise, and follow it up by the inquiry, "Who is the woman?" he was disappointed. For he but heard repeated the laconic exclamation she had already used, and in like tones of careless indifference.

"Indeed!" That, and nothing more.

Still unrepulsed he returned to the attack; again, as it were, begging the question,--

"Shall I name the woman?"

"Not if you don't wish it, sir." Response that should have made him withhold the information, if not driven him from her presence. A very rebuff it was; and yet Reginald Trevor looked not on it in this light.

Instead, still strong in his false faith and foolish hope, he persisted, saying,--

"But I do wish it, and will tell you; though you may little care to know. I cannot help the confession. She I love is yourself--yourself, Vaga Powell; and 'tis with all my heart, all my soul!" The avowal, full and pa.s.sionate, affected her no more than the hints he had already thrown out. In the same calm tone, firm, and with the words measured, she made response,--

"Captain Trevor, you've told me almost as much before. And if I never gave you answer to say the feeling you profess for me was not reciprocated, I say it now. It is not--never can be. Friends, if you wish, let us remain; but for the other--"

"You needn't go on!" he interrupted, impatiently, almost rudely. "I've heard enough; and now know what's the obstacle between us. Not your father, as I once supposed, but my cousin. Well, have him, if you can get him. As for myself, I'm consoled by thinking there are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it, and I go to catch one of them.

Adieu, Mistress Vaga Powell!" Saying which, he strode off in true Cavalier swagger, humming a gay _chanson_; having left her alone in the darkness of night, and the gloom of despair.

Only for an instant was she thus. Then she felt arms flung around her, tenderly, lovingly, while listening to speech which promised to relieve her of her misery.

"I was so glad, Vag," said Sabrina, "hearing what you said. And I've heard something said by another, at which you'll be glad, when I tell it you."

Almost at the same instant of time, though in a different part of the grounds, Sir Richard Walwyn was in like manner promising to let light into the heart of Eustace Trevor.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX.

AFTER ROUNDWAY DOWN.

An hundred hors.e.m.e.n riding at their hardest--not in any military formation, but strung out in a straggled ruck--hors.e.m.e.n steel-clad from crown to hip, some with helmets battered; others bare-headed, the head-piece gone; cuira.s.ses showing dints, as from stroke of halberd or thrust of pike; on back and breastplate blood splashes, dried and turned purple-black; boots, mud-bespattered and _delabre_--this damaged cohort all that remained of "William the Conqueror's" army!

They were the remnant of Hesselrig's Horse, the "Lobsters" in retreat from Roundway Down, where the chivalrous, but too reckless, too confident Waller, had given battle to the outnumbering enemy under Byron and Wilmot; been defeated, and put to utter rout.

It was the wind up of a series of sanguinary engagements with the Marquis of Hertford and Prince Maurice, commencing with an encounter on the low-wooded bottom between Tog and Friznoll hills, so hotly contested that veterans there engaged, who had gone through all the Low Country and German campaigns, declared the most furious fights they ever had abroad were but sport to it.

Carried up to the adjacent height of Lansdown, from which, after another fierce conflict, the Parliamentarians were forced to retire, the two armies--what remained of them--again came face to face on the elevated plateau of Roundway Down; the final scene of the struggle and Waller's discomfiture.

Hesselrig's Cuira.s.siers had especially suffered. With ranks broken, and many of them unhorsed, they were all but helpless in their unwieldy armour, and scores got tumbled over the cliffs of the Down. Of a well-appointed regiment, over five hundred strong, which but a few days before had filed out through the gates of Bristol, only this straggling troop--less than a fifth of the force, still kept the saddle.

Waller was himself along with it--for the "Lobsters" formed his body-guard--so too Hesselrig, severely wounded. Crestfallen both--it could not be otherwise--but with no cowed or craven look. The blood upon their gauntlets and sword-hilts, on their blades still unwiped, told both had been where cowards would not be--in the thick of the fight. Only to superior numbers had they yielded, and were now retiring sullenly as disabled lions. If they rode hard and fast it was through the urgency of their followers, who feared pursuit behind with the fiendish cry, "No Quarter!"

Morn was just dawning as the retreating troop caught sight of Bristol's towers--glad to their eyes, giving promise of refuge and rest. This last they needed as much as the first. For days and nights they had scarce ever been out of the saddle; looked wan for the want of sleep, and were weak from fatigue and hunger. Their horses blown and dead-beat, many of them staggering in their gait. No wonder the sight of that city was welcome to them.

But what a spectacle they themselves to those inside it, to the hundreds, nay thousands, who gazed off and out from turret, wall, and window! The first glimpse got of them was by the warder in the Castle's keep, just as the brightening sky enabled him to descry objects at a distance. Then other sentries saw them from the watch towers of the gates on that side; and the signal of alarm ran along the line of fortification, round and round. Soon bells rang, trumpets brayed, and drums beat all over the city, startling the citizens out of their sleep and beds. Before the sun had yet shown above the horizon, not one but was awake, and most out of doors. Men rushed wildly through the streets--women too--or stood aperch, cl.u.s.tering on every eminence, every pinnacle and parapet thick as bees, with eager, anxious glances scanning the country outside. At length to fix them on the long, glittering line--for the sheen of the cuira.s.ses were not all gone--that now approached in slow, laboured pace, as the crawl of a scotched snake.

When near enough for the bare heads and battered helmets to be distinguished, the blood smouches on dress, arms, and accoutrements, the gloom on brows and in eyes, with lips compressed and features hard set as in sullen anger--when these sure insignia of disaster were fully before them, a feeling of despondency came over the hearts of the Bristolians. Intensified, doubled, when at the head of this figment of a force, crushed and shattered, they saw Sir William Waller, and by his side Sir Arthur Hesselrig--the two leaders so long victorious as to be deemed invincible! They had seen them ride out with an army numbering nigh 6,000 men, and now saw them returning, in retreat, with but a bare hundred! These so down-looking and dispirited, that, as Waller himself--candid as he was brave--confessed in his report to the Lord General, "a corporal with an ordinary squadron could have routed them."

To many who witnessed their re-entry within Bristol's gates it was as much spectre as spectacle--the presentiment of misfortune for themselves.

But not all viewed it in this light. There were eyes into which it brought a sparkle of gratification; some even the glow of antic.i.p.ated vengeance. During Fiennes's iron rule, the "malignants" had been much humiliated, and the prospect of a change, themselves to have the upper hand, made them jubilant. And there were the relatives and friends of the so-called "State Martyrs," with the fate of these fresh in their mind, burning for revenge. Citizens affected to the King's cause, Cavaliers, whether prisoners on parole or otherwise, the tapsters, gamesters, and tricksters of every speciality; in a word, all the reprobacy and blackguardism of Bristol, high and low, male and female, were gleeful at a sight giving them forecast of that for which they had long been yearning--an opportunity of pillage and plunder. It was just with them, as it would be with their modern representatives the Jingoes, at any mischance to Liberalism, likely to give the Jew of Hughenden another spell at despoiling and dishonouring England. For they, too, were doughty champions of beer and Bible, with whom national honour was but a name, the nation's glory an empty boast. They, as Tories now, cared not for the wrongs and sufferings of an over-taxed people, any more than recks Arab slave-trader the tears and lamentations of the poor human beings with black skins he drives, brute-like, across the burning sands of Africa. For is not the whole history of Toryism, from its commencement up to the latest chapter and verse, a record of sympathy with the wronger and unpitying regardlessness for the wronged--an exhibition of all the ferocity known to the human heart, with all its falsehood and meanness?

By a coincidence in no way singular, but simply from two events chancing to occur at the same time, they were dancing at Montserrat House, while Waller was riding in retreat from Roundway Down. Madame Lalande's ball was on the night after the battle, July 13th.

It was about to break up, for day was dawning, and cheeks growing pale.

Less than a month after mid-summer, the hour was not so much into morning, and there were some tireless votaries of Terpsich.o.r.e inclined for still another _contredanse_, by way of wind up. This came, however, in a manner more sudden and unexpected. First, the call notes of a distant bugle, taken up and responded to by others, till a very chorus of them sounded all over the city. Then a _tantara_ of drums, and the jangling of church bells, with the boom of a great gun from the Castle!

Too early for the _reveillee_--before the hour of _orisons_--what could it all mean? So queried they in the grounds of Montserrat House, gathering into groups. Certainly, something unusual; as the fracas not only continued but seemed growing greater. To the instrumental sounds were added human voices, shouting in the streets, calls and responses, with a hurried trampling of feet--men rushing to and fro!

Only for a short while were Madame Lalande's guests in suspense. Nor had they to go outside for explanation. There was an eminence in the grounds which commanded a view of most part of Bristol, with the country beyond the fortified line, south-eastward. On its summit stood a pavilion; the same which on that night had been the means of revealing more than one secret. And now from this spot an anxious crowd--for scores had rushed up to it--learnt the cause of the excitement. Close in to the city's walls, about to enter one of the gates, was the shattered remnant of Hesselrig's Horse--all that was left of Waller's defeated army!

If the dresses of those who cl.u.s.tered round the pavilion--most in fancy costume--were diversified, varied also were the feelings with which they regarded this new spectacle presented to them. A surprise to all; to many an unpleasant one, but most viewing it with delighted eyes. For, unlike as with the crowds cl.u.s.tering other eminences outside, within that precinct, hitherto almost sacred to Cavalierism, this was, of course, in the ascendant. And what they saw seemed sure evidence of a crushing defeat having been sustained by their adversaries; so sure, that many who had all the night behaved modestly, and worn masks, now pulled them off and began to swagger in true Cavalier fashion.