She turned to me very solemnly.
"If we fail," she said, "keep that word you pledged to me. I shall treasure the pledge, knowing you will not break it, Guard my father!"
"But it is of you that I am thinking."
"Of me?" she said; "why, if needs be, I suppose I—I can shoot another sheriff;" and with a plaintive little laugh she set the spur to her horse.
I rode across the hill, and, once upon the flat, galloped after our regiments. The expression of her confidence was as a renewal of my blood. It sang in my ears sweet, like a tune dimly remembered, and heard again across a waste of years. "I would fulfil that double trust," I cried with a leaping heart, and then in more humility fell to a prayer that so I might be permitted.
For it was a double trust I felt. It was not merely that I was pledged to the safeguarding of her father, but it seemed to me that I was no less firmly pledged to bring about that other and more difficult result. I must regain the right to hold her hand in mine, even though I might win no advantage from the right.
CHAPTER XVIII.
[AT PRESTON AND AFTERWARDS.]
The siege of Preston forms no part of this story, and fortunately so for me, since I saw and understood of its brief and fatal enactment no more than was done under my own nose. Why General Wills and his dragoons were allowed to pass the Ribble Bridge and the narrow lane which leads to it without so much impediment as a single shot might cause; why Mr. Forster made no attempt to break out down the Fishergate Street into the marshes beyond the town when General Carpenter closed in upon our rear; by what persuasions the Highlanders were finally induced to lay down their arms—these are questions for historians to dispute and find answer to, if they can. For my part, I fought at Macintosh's barrier a little below the church, where the first attack was made, with one eye upon Preston's regiment of foot in front and the other upon Mr. Curwen at my side; and what with the enemy and my friend, my hands were full.
The attack was made about eleven of the forenoon. I remember very distinctly the extraordinary hush that fell upon us when our friends from the windows of the houses above us signalled that the troops were approaching. In front stretched the empty street, so still, so bare in the sunlight, and taking on of a sudden an appalling significance. Half an hour before, messengers had ridden hither and thither with resounding hoofs, patrols tramped upon the footway, citizens peeped timorous from casement and door. We had glanced down it as we looked to our weapons with a matter-of-fact word: "This way they will come." Now it seemed to wait in a conscious expectation, the responsible agent of destiny. France, Scotland, England, every country in Europe had a stake to be played for in this street, and it was as though it had been new-swept and garnished for the game. I know that every cobble throughout its length seemed to gleam in the sunlight distinct and separate from its fellows. And then, whilst we stood silent behind the barrier, while from the windows the Highlanders bent forward craning their necks, grasping their muskets, the deadly silence was broken by the ringing tramp of a single horse, and from a passage at the side betwixt two houses in the middle distance, an officer rode out into the open causeway with his drawn sword in his hand. For a moment, every man of us, I think, held his breath. The officer looked up the street to the barrier and again down the street and at the windows to see how our men were posted. Then a shout went up, loud, unanimous, like a single voice; with a single movement every musket was raised to the shoulder, and in a second the air whistled with bullets and flashed in a hundred tiny flames. But it seemed the officer bore a charmed life. No bullet struck him then, and cantering back within the shelter of the passage, he presently led out and ranged his men. The men were Preston's regiment; the officer, their Lieutenant-colonel, the Lord Forrester, and with their appearance the battle was begun in earnest. I have hinted that I had some difficulty in restraining Mr. Curwen's ardour, and Lord Forrester gives me an instance pat to the point. For during that moment's silence, when the colonel stood alone in the street, Mr. Curwen climbs unsteadily to the top of the barrier, and with his white hair blowing from his shoulders, his dreamy eyes ablaze with I know not what fancies of antique chivalry, calls upon the colonel to settle then and there with him in single combat the succession to the Crown. Or, rather begins to call, I should say, for the moment at which he began to speak was precisely that moment at which I saw the muskets go up to the shoulders, and leaping after him I pulled him unceremoniously down.