Merrylips

by Beulah Marie Dix

It was Captain Norris that gave Merrylips her brother's room for her very own. It was Captain Norris that promised to send her, by the first safe convoy, to her kinsfolk at Walsover. Above all, it was Captain Norris that from the very first made all his followers, both officers and men, understand that little Tibbott Venner was under his special care. After that it would have been a very bold man that would have harmed little Tibbott by word or deed.

So Merrylips passed her days at Monksfield, safe and unafraid. Indeed she would have been quite happy, if she had not had two causes for grief that never let her be.

The first was, of course, the loss of her brother Munn. At night, when she lay in his bed, she would think of all the stories that she had heard from the troopers of the cruel way in which the Roundheads used their prisoners. Then she would seem to see her brother, haggard and pale and hungry, shivering half-clad in some dismal prison, and perhaps even struck and abused by his jailers. Often, when she called up that sorrowful picture, she would have cried, if she had not promised Munn that she would bear herself as became a boy.

The second trouble, not so deep as the loss of Munn, but always present, was the unfriendliness that Rupert showed her. He seemed the only soul in the Monksfield garrison that disliked her, and all the time she was so eager to be friends with him!

At the outset, to be sure, Merrylips had been shy of Claus and Rupert, for she remembered how her godmother had suspected them for spies. But when she found that Claus was trusted as a good soldier by all the officers, who were her friends, she dared to think that her godmother perhaps had been mistaken.

So now there was nothing to keep her from being Rupert's playfellow, as she had planned to be, long ago at Larkland. At least, there was nothing except their squabble on her first day at Monksfield. And that she was ready to forgive and forget.

She tried to show Rupert that she was willing to meet him halfway, if he wished to make up. She put herself into his path, but he only scowled at her and so passed by. She hung about, smiling and trying to catch his eye, but he would not even look at her. She could not guess why he should hate her so.

But one day she heard a horseboy jeer at Rupert.

"Thou mayst carry thy crest lower now, young Hinkel," the horseboy laughed. "Thou art level wi' the rest of us, my lad, now that some one else is white-boy, yonder 'mongst the gentry coves."

Very slowly Merrylips began to see what she had done to Rupert. From a word here and a sentence there she gathered that before she came to Monksfield he had been by several years the youngest lad in the garrison, and, as such, a favorite with the officers. They had had him into the mess-room to sing for them, when they were idle, and had laughed and jested with him as a towardly lad. But now that she was there, a younger child and a newer plaything, Rupert was forgotten by his patrons.