Part 16

The Squire of Nappa explained that those under Newcastle's command had suffered during the late siege--men and horses were so weak from illness that no zeal in the world could bring them faster than a foot-pace. He knew this, because he had passed them on the road, had had speech of them. Lord Newcastle himself, a man no longer young, had kept a long illness at bay until the siege was raised, and now he was travelling in his coach, because he had no strength to sit a horse.

"Oh, I had forgotten!" said Rupert. "All's in the losing, if they take overlong. I should have remembered, though, that the garrison needed one night's sleep at least."

While they talked, Ezra Wood returned with the trooper sent to give him safe-conduct through the lines and back again. He did not salute--simply regarded Rupert with dour self-confidence. "General Cromwell sends this word to Prince Rupert--that, if his stomach is for fighting, he shall have it filled."

Rupert was silent. Cromwell, it seemed, had missed all the meaning of the challenge sent him; war had not taught him yet the nicer issues that wait on bloodshed. He stooped to pat Boye's head with the carelessness that had angered many a council of war at Oxford. Then he glanced at Ezra Wood.

"There is no General Cromwell. The King approves all commissions of that kind. Go tell Mr. Cromwell that we are waiting for him here."

Cromwell, when Ezra Wood returned and found him, was standing in the knee-deep rye, apart from his company. His eyes were lifted to the sky, but he saw none of the signs of brewing storm. He was looking into the heaven that he had pictured day by day and year by year when he rode in the peaceful times about his snug estate in Rutland. Then, as now, he was cursed by that half glimpse of the mystic gleam which hinders a man at times more than outright savagery. Always he was asking more than the bread and meat of life; always he was seeking some antidote to the poisonous self-love, the ambition to be king himself, which was his hidden sore. And now he was praying, with all the simplicity his tricky mind permitted, for guidance in his hour of need.

As one coming out of a trance, he listened to Ezra Wood, repeating his message for the fourth time. The light--half false because it was half mystic only--left his face. Its borrowed comeliness passed by. He showed features of surprising plainness--eyes heavy-lidded, thick nostrils, and a jaw broad with misplaced obstinacy.

"So he is waiting?" he said grimly. "Well, princes must wait these days. We shall seek him by and by."

In that queer mood of his--half prayer and half keen calculation--which went before his battles, Cromwell had found a plan of action. He crossed the field with quick, unwieldy steps, found the other leaders, and stated his own view of the attack. As usual, his ruggedness of mind and purpose carried the day; and Rupert, down below, was left to wonder why the enemy did not take advantage of his rash challenge and attack before the main body of his reinforcements came.

It was an eerie day--clouds that came packing up, livid and swollen with rain that would not fall--a wind that was cold and scorching hot by turns--a frightened rustle of the leafage in Wilstrop Wood--a rustle that sounded across the flat waste of Marston Moor like the sound of surf beating on a distant shore. Boye kept close to Rupert's side, and whined and growled by turns. He knew his master's restlessness, as four of the afternoon came and still Lord Newcastle had not reached the field.

At half-past four the pick of Newcastle's men rode in, and were marshalled into their appointed place between the left wing and the right. Rupert galloped down to give them the good cheer he lacked himself.

"Welcome, Whitecoats. You look tired and maimed; but they tell me you have sworn to dye those coats of yours a good, deep crimson--your own blood or the Roundheads'."

The sound of his voice, his strong simplicity of purpose that burned outward like a fire, lifted their jaded spirits. York was forgotten, and its hardships.

"For God and the King!" they answered lustily.

"I need you, gentlemen," said Rupert, and passed on to where Lord Newcastle's coach was standing at the roadside.

He was shocked to see the change in Newcastle--the weariness of mind and body palpable, now that an end had come to his guardianship of York.

"My lord, you have served the King too well," he said, putting a hand on the other's shoulder with instinctive deference to age and great infirmity.

"Oh, nothing to boast of--a little here and there, to keep our walls secure. Tell me, is there to be a battle to-day? I'm good for a gallop yet, if the battle does not last too long."

"There's no chance of it at this late hour. They saw our weakness from the hill, and yet would not attack. They're tired out, I think, as we are."

"Good," said Newcastle, with his gentle laugh. "For my part, I shall claim an old man's privilege--to step into my coach and smoke a pipe or two, and then get off to sleep. I shall be ready when you need me."

"Would my hound, Boye, disturb you?" asked Rupert, turning after he had said good-night. "I like to have him out of harm's way at these times."

"Is he a good sleeper?" demanded Newcastle whimsically.

"With a friend, the staunchest sleeper that I know."

Boye demurred when he was bidden to get inside the coach; but, like Rupert's cavalry, he knew the tone of must-be-obeyed, and scrambled in with no good grace.

Near seven of the evening a strange thing happened on Marston Moor. On the hill above there was the spectacle of Parliament men standing with bowed heads as Cromwell sent up fervent prayers. On the moor below, the chaplain of the King's men was reading evensong. Over both armies was a sky of sullen wrath.

As the service closed, Lord Eythin protested, with an oath, that now this child's play was over, he proposed to go in search of food.

"My lord," said Rupert sharply, "wise men do not mock at prayer, in face of what is waiting for us all to-morrow."

Eythin, nettled by the hum of approbation, lost his temper. "I was never wise, your Highness, as you know, but wise enough to advise you that this escapade is madness."

"We shared another battle, long ago when you were General King." Rupert's voice was icy. "Do you remember it?"

The Riding Metcalfs, this once again, were dismayed by the private quarrels, the jealousies, that were threaded through the skein of war. Eythin's insolence of bearing, his subtle incitement to distrust of his commander, asked no less from Rupert; but the pity of it, to bluff Squire Metcalf, single of heart, owing none a grudge except the King's enemies, was hard to bear.

From the extreme left of the camp, just as the Royalists were settling down for a brief night's slumber, there came a running yelp, a baying, and a splutter of wild feet. Lord Newcastle had left the window of his coach open when he had smoked his third pipe and found the sleep he needed; and Boye, his patience ended, had leaped out into the freedom that spelt Rupert to him. When he found him, he got to his hind legs, all but knocked down his master in his tender fury, and licked his face with a red and frothy tongue.

"Boye!" said Rupert. "Oh, down, Boye--you smother me. I was to have a lonely supper, I fancied, and you come. There's all in the world I care for, come to sup with me."

From over the hill, where the Parliament men had scarcely finished their devotions, there came a clap of thunder and a light spit of rain.

"We shall be wet to the skin to-night, Boye, you and I," laughed Rupert. "We've proved my tent, and it is not weather-sound."

He had scarcely finished some beef collops, ready for him in his tent, and was cajoling Boye to perform a newly-taught trick of begging for a morsel, when the flap was pulled aside. Michael Metcalf, framed by the red light out of doors, showed bigger even than his wont.

"They are coming down from the rye-fields," he said, with a reckless laugh. "Let it go how it will, sir, so long as we drive Cromwell out of bounds."

"I have promised him as much," said Rupert gravely.

*CHAPTER XVIII.*

*MARSTON MOOR.*

Rupert got to horse, and rode through the press and uproar of the camp. Confusion was abroad. To the Cavaliers, though some of them might regard evensong lightly, it meant at least a truce until the next day's dawn; and now they were attacked by an enemy who did not scruple to combine prayer with craftiness. Down from the rye-fields they saw the horsemen and the footmen come, and only Rupert could have steadied them in this black hour.

"We meet Cromwell's horse," he cried, getting his own men into line this side the little ditch, "and, gentlemen, we owe Cromwell many debts."

Stiff and stour it was, that fight at the ditch. The old, stark battles were recalled--Crecy, and Agincourt, and Flodden--for it was all at pitiless close quarters. First they exchanged pistol-shots; then, throwing their pistols in each other's faces with a fury already at white heat, they fell to with sword and pike. Overhead the storm broke in earnest. The intermittent crackle of gunshots, from the sharpshooters lining the hedges, mingled with the bellow of the thunder and that clamour of hard-fighting men which has the wild beast note.

Newcastle, asleep in his coach at the far side of the Moor, was roused by the uproar. He did not know what had chanced, but the waking was of a piece with the nightmares that had haunted his brief slumber. His limbs ached, the weariness of York's long siege was on him, but he ran forward, sword in hand, and asked the first man he met what was in the doing. Then he sought for his company and could not find them, except a handful of the gallant Leightons; so he pressed forward, unmounted, crying his name aloud, and asking all who heard him to make up a troop. He gathered drift and flotsam of the running battle--he whose dream had been of a mounted charge, with picked cavalry behind him--and they fought on the left wing with a wild and cheery gallantry.

On the right, the Ironsides still faced Rupert's men, and neither would give way. Once, in a lull of the berserk struggle, when either side had withdrawn a little to take breath, a great hound pressed his way through the Royalists and came yelping forward in search of Rupert. He came into the empty space between the King's men and Cromwell's, and a gunshot flashed; and Boye struggled on the sodden ground, turned his head in dying search for Rupert, the well-beloved, and so lay still.

From the Ironsides a storm of plaudits crossed a sudden thunder-clap. "There goes the arch-Papist of them all," came a voice drunk with battle.

And something broke at Rupert's heart. It was as if he stood alone entirely--as if the world were ended, somehow. "Ah, Boye," he murmured. And then he led a charge so furious that the Ironsides all but broke. It was Cromwell rallied them, and for an hour the fight went forward. The hedge was levelled now, and the ditch filled in by the bodies of the slain. Time after time Rupert found himself almost within striking distance of Cromwell. They were seeking each other with a settled, fervent purpose. And the fight eddied to and fro; and the rain came down in wild, unending torrents.

The chance sought by Rupert came to Michael Metcalf, as it chanced. Pushed to one side of the press, he found himself facing a rough-hewn Parliament man in like case, and parried a fierce sword-cut with his pike. Then he drew back the pike, felt it quiver like a live thing in his hands, and drove it through the other's fleshy neck. It was only when the man wavered in saddle, and he had leisure for a moment's thought, that he knew his adversary. A trooper of the Parliament snatched the wounded rider's bridle, dragged his horse safely to the rear, and Michael raised a wild, impulsive shout:

"Cromwell is down! A Mecca for the King."

Rupert heard the cry, and drew his men a little away, to get speed for the gallop. His crashing charge drove back the Roundheads twenty paces, and no more. They were of good and stubborn fibre, and the loss of Cromwell bade them fight with sullen hardihood. At the end of, it might be, fifteen minutes they had regained a foot or two of their lost ground, and Cromwell, getting his wound bandaged at the thatched cottage up above, asked another wounded Roundhead, who came for the like succour, how it fared.

"As may be," growled the other. "If so thou'rt not dead, as we fancied, get down and hearten them."

"I've a thick throat, and the pike took the fleshy part," said Cromwell, with a deep, unhumorous laugh. "I'll get down."

He mounted with some difficulty. Pluck cannot always conquer in a moment great loss of blood and weakness of the body. Once in the saddle, his strength returned to him; but he rode down too late. Rupert's men had followed their old tactics, had retreated again to gain speed for the onslaught, and were driving the enemy before them in hot pursuit.

Cromwell, after narrow escape of being ridden down by his own folk, after vain efforts to rally them again, found himself alone. The wound in his throat was throbbing at its bandages. The rain ran down him in rivulets, and the world seemed filled with thunder and the cries of men. Word reached him that Eythin, too, had broken through, and that all Parliament men were bidden to save themselves as best they might. And so he left the field; and the sickness of defeat, more powerful than body-sickness, caught him as he neared the smithy, this side of Tockwith village. A farm-lad, returning from selling a cow at Boroughbridge, found him in the roadway, fallen from his horse, and carried him into the smithy-house. They tended his wound. Within an hour his lusty strength of purpose came to his aid. He asked for meat and ale, and said he must get ready for the road. He was known by this time; but even the blacksmith, Royalist to the core of his big body, would not hinder his going. A man of this breed must be given his chance, he felt.

"After all," he muttered, watching Cromwell ride unsteadily down the moonlit road, "they say Marston Moor has lost Yorkshire to the Parliament for good and all. Some call him Old Noll, and othersome Old Nick--but he'll do little harm i' these parts now, I reckon."

"A soft heart and a big body--they go always fools in company," said his goodwife. "I'd not have let him go so easy, I."

"Ay, but ye wod, if I'd been for keeping him. Ye're like a weather-cock, daft wife. When I point south, thou'st always for veering round to north--or t'other way about, just as it chances."

Cromwell rode back toward Marston, to find his men. He was kin to Rupert in this--disaster or triumph, he must find those who needed him. At the end of a half-mile he met a rider cantering up the rise. The moonlight was clear and vivid, after the late storm, and the rider pulled his horse up sharply.

"The battle is ours, General, and I've my Lord Fairfax's orders for you."

"The battle is ours?" demanded Cromwell gruffly. "I do not understand."

"None of us understand. Fairfax was three miles away, sleeping in a farmstead bed-chamber, when we roused him with the news. It was Leslie's men who broke their centre and drove round Rupert's flank. The thunder was in all our brains, I fancy."

Cromwell laughed. All his austerity, his self-pride warring against the humility he coveted, were broken down, as Rupert's cavalry had been. "Then it's for the siege of York again?" he asked.

"Fairfax says the risk is too great. The Moor is full of our dead, and we're not strong enough. He bids you get your men together and hold Ripley, going wide of Knaresborough--which is a hornet's nest--until further orders reach you. That is my message, General."

"Good," said Cromwell, tightening the bandage round his throat. "Where are my men?"

He found them--those who were left--in scattered companies. And a lusty roar went up as they saw him ride through the moonlight, swaying on the thick farm-cob that carried him.

"It's fourteen miles to Ripley, lads, but we'll cover it."

On Marston Moor the Royalists had pursued their advantage to the full. Rupert's men and Eythin's had run wild on the ridge-fields up above. And Leslie saw his chance. With his Scots he charged down on the White Coats, weakened by siege before the fight began. They kept their pledge; their coats were dyed with crimson martyrdom--and so they died to a man, resisting Leslie's charge.

Leslie himself paused when the work was done. "They were mettled thoroughbreds," he said huskily. "And now, friends, for the ditch that Rupert leaves unguarded."

It was so, in this incredible turmoil of storm and fight and havoc, that the battle of Long Marston was lost to the King. Rupert, getting his men in hand at long last, returned to face another hand-to-hand encounter. With the middlewing past sharing any battle of this world, the affair was hopeless. Rupert would not admit as much. The Metcalfs, a clan lessened since they joined in evensong an hour ago, would not admit it. To the last of their strength they fought, till all were scattered save a few of them.

Down the rough lane past Wilstrop Wood--a lane pitted deep with ruts--the Royalists fled headlong. And at the far side of the wood, where the lane bent round to a trim farmstead, there was a piteous happening. A child, standing at the gate in wonderment at all the uproar and the shouting, saw a press of gentry come riding hard, and began to open the gate for them, bobbing a curtsey as the first horseman passed. He did not see her. Those behind did not see her, but, pressing forward roughly--pressed in turn by those behind--the weight of them was thrust forward and broke down the gate.

After their passing a woman came from the farmsteading, eager to go out and see how it had fared with her husband, a volunteer for Rupert. Under the broken gate she found a little, trampled body; and all her heart grew stony.

"Lord God," she said, "Thou knows't men make the battles, but the women pay for them."

On Marston Moor the Squire of Nappa had found his coolness return when it was needed most. The Prince, and he, and Christopher, their horses killed under them long since, had just won free of a hot skirmish at the rear of their retreating friends, and were left in a quiet backwater of the pursuit.

"Best get away," he said. "You're needed to see to the aftermath of this red harvest."

His sturdy common sense had struck the true note. Rupert had had in mind to die fighting, since all else was lost. And now the little, fluting note of trust came to him through the havoc. He was needed.

They came, these three, to the clayey lands--wet and sticky to the feet--that bordered Wilstrop Wood. The storm, tired of its fury, had rent the clouds apart with a last soaking deluge, and the moon shone high, tender as a Madonna yearning to bring peace on earth.

A fresh pursuit came near them, and they turned into a field of flowering beans on their left. They heard the pursuit go by. Then they heard a litany of pain come out from Wilstrop Wood, where wounded Cavaliers had taken refuge. And from Marston Moor there was the ceaseless crying--not good to hear--of horses that would never again, in this world, at least, find the stride of a gallop over open fields.

To these three, hidden in the bean-field, came an odd detachment from the pity and the uproar of it all. Nothing seemed to matter, except sleep. The heat, and rain, and burden of that bitter hour just ended were no more than nightmares, ended by this ease of mind and body that was stealing over them. It was good to be alive, if only to enjoy this pleasant languor.

The Squire of Nappa laughed sharply as he got to his feet. "At my age, to go sleeping in a field of flowering beans! As well lie bed-fellow with poppies. D'ye guess what I dreamed just now? Why, that I was crowned King in London, with Noll Cromwell, dressed as Venus, doing homage to me."

"Ah, don't rouse me, father," grumbled Kit. "I'm smelling a Yoredale byre again, and hear the snod kine rattling at their chains."

But Rupert, when at last he, too, was roused, said nothing of his dream. It had been built of moons and Stardust--made up of all the matters he had lost in this queer life of prose--and he would share it with no man.

When they got to the pastures again--blundering as men in drink might do--the free, light air that follows thunder blew about their wits. It was Rupert who first spoke. He remembered that men in flight were trusting him, were needing a leader.

"Friends," he said, "I'm for York. Do you go with me?"

The noise from Wilstrop Wood, the cries from the Moor, grew small in the hearing as they made their way to a speck of light that showed a half-mile or so in front. Two farm-dogs sprang out on them when they reached the farmstead; but the fugitives knew the way of such, and passed unhindered.

"Are ye fro' Marston, gentles?" asked the farmer, limping out to learn what the uproar was about. "Ay? Then how has the King sped?"

"We are broken," said Rupert simply.

"Well, I'm sorry. Step in and shelter. Ye'd be the better for a meal, by the look o' ye. 'Tis the least I can do for His Majesty, seeing my two rheumy legs kept me fro' riding to his help."

"Have you three horses we can borrow, friend?"

"Nay, I've but two. You're welcome to them; and they're sound-footed, which is more than their master can say of himself."

While they snatched a meal of beef and bread, Christopher glanced at the Prince. "I know my way on foot to Ripley, and they may need me there," he said.

"The fields will be packed with danger, lad. Run at my stirrup, till by good luck we find a third horse on the road to York."

"Let him be," growled the old Squire. "There's a lady lives at Ripley. Lovers and drunkards seldom come to harm, they say."

"Ah, so!" For a moment there was a glow of tenderness in Rupert's sombre eyes. "It is good to hear the name of lady after the late happenings. Get forward, sir, and guard her."

Christopher saw them get to horse and take the track that led to York. Then he fared out into the moonlit pastures, took his bearings, and headed straight for Ripley. The distance was less than twelve miles by the field-tracks; but, by the route he took, it was slow to follow. The clay-lands were waterlogged by the late storm; the hedges to be broken through were high and thorny; but these were not the greatest of his troubles. It had been no velvet warfare, that hour's fight on the Moor. Constantly, as Kit went forward, he heard a groan from the right hand or the left, and stayed to tend a wounded comrade. There was peril, too, from horses roaming, maddened and riderless, in search of the masters they had lost.

The first two miles were purgatory, because Kit's heart was young, and fiery, and tender, because he felt the sufferings of the wounded as his own. The flight, on this side of the Moor, went no further; and for the rest of the journey he had only trouble of the going to encounter. He came late to Ripley Castle; and the sentry who answered to his knocking on the gate opened guardedly.

"Who goes?" he asked.

"Christopher Metcalf, sick with thirst and hunger."

The door was thrown open suddenly. In the ill-lighted hall he saw Ben Waddilove, the old manservant of the Grants, who had ridden--long since, when last year's corn was yellowing to harvest--in charge of Mistress Joan.

Marston Moor was forgotten. The troubles of the day and night were forgotten, as sunlight dries the rain. Kit was a lover. "How is the mistress, Ben?" he asked.

"Oh, her temper's keen and trim. Mistress Grant ails naught. I suppose Marston's lost and won? Well, it had to be, I reckon. Who brought the news to Ripley, think ye?"

"I couldn't guess, you old fool."