“Your protest will doubtless be considered by the officer I referred to.”
“General Cromwell, I surmise?”
“Or one delegated by him. Mount, we have far to go.”
Armstrong leaped into the saddle, and the troop set off, with the captain at the head, and himself in the midst of it. There was no chance of escape, even if he meditated such an attempt, which apparently he did not. The direction tended south and east, and as the sun was setting they came to Corbiton Manor, a large country house, which was seemingly the headquarters of a considerable section of the army encamped in the neighbourhood. Into a room in this mansion Armstrong was conducted and left under guard, and he was pleased to see by the spread table that there was at least no design on the part of his captors to starve him.
CHAPTER IV.—PREPARATION.
The mansion of Corbiton was a large and rambling structure, two stories in height for the most part, although in some places it rose to three, as in others it subsided into one. It was built partly of stone, partly of brick, and partly of timber and plaster, with many gables, and picturesque windows in the wide extending roof. Each of its owners had added to it as his needs required or his taste dictated, and now it was composed of many styles of architecture; but the jumble, as a whole, was beautiful rather than incongruous, as might have been expected. Time, moss, and ivy had blended the differing parts into one harmonious mass. The house faced the south, fronting a broad lawn that had once been smooth and level as a table, but was now cut up by horse’s hoofs. A mutilated sun-dial leaned from the perpendicular in the centre. One gable contained a wide and tall mullioned window, which had formerly been filled with painted glass, but the soldiers, knowing nothing of art, and strenuous against idolatry, had smashed many of the pictured panes, but, finding that glass, whether colored or plain, kept out wind and rain, they had partially remedied the results of their own enthusiasm by stuffing the apertures with gaily-colored cloths, remnants of doublets or silken trousers, until the window was a gaudy display of brilliant rags, the odds and ends of a cavalier wardrobe; and thus the gay gable, from being an allegory of the days of chivalry, had become typical of the ruin that had overtaken the cause of the King.
Sir Richard Corbiton had been one of the first to fall in the Civil War, dashing with gallant recklessness against the pikes of the yeomen. Theoretically these coarsely garbed pikemen were the scum of the earth, cowardly dogs who, when they saw gentlemen bearing down upon them, should have turned and fled; but actually they stood grim and silent, and when the charge broke against this human rock, although many a lowly hut was then masterless, many a mansion was without an owner, Corbiton among the rest. Sir Richard, dying, paid the price of a fool, and in the struggle exacted the same tribute from others.
As evening drew on, the thin crescent of a new moon shed a faint mysterious light over the scene, as if it were a white sickle hung up in the sky, useless because there was no harvest in England to reap, save that of death. The dim lustre outlined the mansion, but failed to reveal the wounds it had received, and the aspect was one of peace, scarcely troubled by the footfall of a sentinel slouching along the grass in front, carelessly trailing his pike, with nothing of alert military manner about him. From one wing of the building came the somnolent drone of a hymn, but this was counterbalanced by the more intermittent hoarse chorus of a ribald song, mingled with a rattle of flagons from another part of the house, for the ale in the cellars was strong, and not all of the Parliamentary army were Praise-God-Bare-Bones. The torches within the house struck flamelike color from the remnants of the pictured glass in the great window, which gave a chromatic touch to an otherwise sombre scene unrelieved by the pallid half-light of the moon.