The Adventures of Harry Revel

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

I was alone now; and, as it seemed, in a forsaken town. Here and there a light shone beneath a house-door or through the chinks of a shutter. I felt that behind the windows I passed Ciudad Rodrigo was awake and waiting for its punishment. Behind me, along the ramparts, the uproar still continued. But the town, here and for the moment, I had to myself: and it was waiting, trembling to know what my revenge would be.

I came next to a small open square; and was crossing it, when in the corner on my right a door opened softly, showing a lit passage within, and a moment later was as softly shut. Scarcely heeding, I ran on; my feet sounding sharply on the frozen cobbles. And with that a jet of light leapt from under the door-sill across the narrow pavement, almost between my legs: and I pitched headlong, with a shattered foot.

Doubtless I fainted with the pain: for it could not have been—as it seemed—only a minute later that I opened my eyes to find the square crowded and bright with the glare of two burning houses. A herd of bellowing oxen came charging past the gutter where I lay, pricked on by a score of redcoats yelling in sheer drunkenness as they flourished their bayonets. Two or three of them wore monks' robes flung over their uniforms, and danced idiotically, holding their skirts wide. I supposed it had been raining, for a flood ran through the gutter and over my broken ankle. In the light of the conflagration it showed pitch black, and by and by I knew it for wine flowing down from a whole cellarful of casks which a score of madmen were broaching as they dragged them forth from a house on the upper side of the square. A child—he could not have been more than four years old—ran screaming by me. From a balcony right overhead a soldier shot at him, missed, and laughed uproariously. Then he reloaded and began firing among the bullocks, now jammed and goring one another at the entrance of a narrow alley. And his shots seemed to be a signal for a general salvo of random musketry. I saw a woman cross the roadway with a rifleman close behind her; he swung up his rifle, holding it by the muzzle, and clubbed her between the shoulders with the butt.

All night these scenes went by me—these and scenes of which I cannot write; unrolled in the blaze of the houses which burnt on, as little regarded as I who lay in my gutter and watched them to the savage unending music of yells, musketry, and the roar of flames.

In the height of it my ear caught the regular footfall of troops, and a squad of infantry came swinging round the corner. I supposed it to be a patrol sent to clear the streets and restore order. A small man in civilian dress—a Portuguese, by his look—walked gingerly beside the sergeant in charge, chatting and gesticulating. And, almost in the same instant, I perceived that the men wore the uniform of the North Wilts and that the sergeant he held in converse was George Leicester.

By the light of the flames he recognised me, shook off his guide and stepped forward.

"Hurt?" he asked. "Here, step out, a couple of you, and take hold of this youngster. He's a friend of mine, and I've something to show him: something that will amuse him, or I'm mistaken."

They hoisted me, not meaning to be rough, but hurting me cruelly nevertheless: and two of them made a "chair" with crossed hands; but they left my wounded foot dangling, and I swooned again with pain.

When I came to, we were in a street—dark but for their lanterns— between a row of houses and a blank wall, and against this wall they were laying me. The houses opposite were superior to any I had yet seen in Ciudad Rodrigo and had iron balconies before their first-floor windows, broad and deep and overhanging the house-doors.

On one of these doors Leicester was hammering with his side-arm, the Portuguese standing by on the step below. No one answering, he called to two of his men, who advanced and, setting the muzzles of their muskets close against the keyhole, blew the door in. Leicester snatched a lantern and sprang inside, the two men after him. The Portuguese waited. The rest of the soldiers waited too, grounding arms—some in the roadway, others by the wall at the foot of which they had laid me.