THE END OF THE DAY
That night Merrylips slept on a form in the mess-room, with Lieutenant Crashaw's cloak wrapped about her. She had meant to sit up all night, to be ready when the attack came. Indeed, she had lain wide awake till midnight, and had thought to herself that she was glad to be lying in the lighted room, where the officers came in and out, rather than in her own dark and lonely chamber.
But after midnight her eyelids grew heavy, and she heard the challenge of the sentries and the hurrying of feet in the courtyard fainter and farther away. Then she slept, and dreamed of Walsover. She was telling Flip proudly that she should go to the wars, for all she was but a wench, when she woke, with a sound of firing in her ears, and began a day that seemed to her in after days to be itself a series of dreams.
A window in the mess-room stood open, and through it a dank wind was blowing. The sky was still dark, but the stars were few. On the hearth the logs had fallen into white ash, and the one candle on the table was guttering into a pool of melted wax. The room was empty, and awesomely still, but off in the darkness, where the dank wind blew, strange noises could be heard. Footsteps echoed in the flagged courts, muskets cracked, and then, like a tongue of flame, the clear call of a trumpet cleft the dark.
Merrylips ran out into the great courtyard. She was cursed at, flung aside, jostled by men who were hurrying to their posts. And the trumpet called, and the shots cracked faster and faster, while overhead the stars went out and the sky grew pale.
In the wan daylight Merrylips saw the banner that floated over Monksfield. It was red, and by its hue it told to all the world that the house was held for the king, and would be held for him while one drop of blood ran red in the veins of his followers.
Against the stable wall sat a trooper whom Merrylips knew. He was trying to tie a bandage about his arm, with his left hand and his teeth. She helped him, fixing the bandage neatly, as she had been taught by Lady Sybil. She asked him about the fight, in a steady little voice that she scarcely knew for her own. While she was speaking, she heard a great burst of shouting and of firing on the west side of the house. The wounded man leaped to his feet. He caught up his carabine in his sound hand and made off across the courtyard.
"God and our right!" he shouted as he ran.
Merrylips shouted too. She snatched her pistol from her sash and ran, as the trooper had run, till she found herself at the foot of the western rampart, where one twilight she had tried to comfort Rupert. She found Rupert there now. His face was smudged with powder, and he was loading guns and passing them up to the men on the rampart above him. They were firing fast, all but one or two who lay quiet.
"Shall I aid thee?" Merrylips asked.