“After all, this is what I am good for,” he told himself as he stood to take breath after a mêlée which was at once the most serious and the last. “I was a fool to leave the regiment,” he continued, staunching a trickle of blood which ran from a cut on his cheek bone. “For, after all, better a good blow than a bad speech! Better, perhaps, a good blow than all the speeches, good and bad!” And in the heat of the moment he swung his staff. Then—then he thought of Mary and of Flixton, and his heart sank, and his joy was at an end.
“Don’t think they’ll try us again, sir,” said an old pensioner, who had constituted himself his orderly, and who had known the neigh of the war-horse in the Peninsula. “If we had had you at the beginning we’d have had no need of the old Blues, nor the Third either!”
“Oh, that’s rubbish!” Vaughan replied. But he owned the flattery, and his heart warmed to the pensioner, whose prediction proved to be correct. The crowd melted slowly but certainly after that. By eleven o’clock there were but a couple of hundred in the Square. By twelve, even these were gone. A half-dozen troopers, and as many tatterdemalions, slinking about the dark corners, were all that remained of the combatants; and the Mayor, with many words, presented Vaughan with the thanks of the city for his services.
“It is gratifying, Mr. Vaughan,” he added, “to find that Colonel Brereton was right.”
“Yes,” Vaughan agreed. And he took his leave, carrying off his staff for a memento.
He was very weary, and it was not the shortest way to the White Lion, yet his feet carried him across the dark Square and past the Immortal Memory to the front of Miss Sibson’s house. It showed no lights to the Square, but in a first-floor window of the next house he marked a faint radiance as of a shaded taper, and the outline of a head—doubtless the head of someone looking out to make sure that the disorder was at an end. He saw, but love was at fault. No inner voice told him that the head was Mary’s! No thrill revealed to him that at that very moment, with her brow pressed to the cold pane, she was thinking of him! None! With a sigh, and a farther fall from the lightheartedness of an hour before, he went his way.
Broad Street was quiet, but half a dozen persons were gathered outside the White Lion. They were listening: and one of them told him, as he passed in, that the Blues, in beating back a party from the Council House, a short time before, had shot one of the rioters. In the hall he found several groups debating some point with heat, but they fell silent when they saw him, one nudging another; and he fancied that they paid especial attention to him. As he moved towards the office, a man detached himself from them and approached him with a formal air.
“Mr. Vaughan, I think?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Arthur Vaughan?” the man, who was a complete stranger to Vaughan, repeated. “Member of Parliament for Chippinge, I believe?”