CHAPTER III.

Doubtless the fall stunned me; but doubtless also not for more than a few seconds. For I awoke to the drum of distant hoofs, and before it died clean away I had recovered sense enough to take its bearing in the direction of Farnham. Strangely enough, towards Alton all was quiet. Sitting up, with both hands pressing my head, for just a moment I recognised the gallop for my own mare's. Another beat time with it. I asked myself, why another? She would be heading for home—wounded, perhaps—scared certainly. But why with a companion? . . . Then, suddenly, I remembered the poor pack-beast; and as I remembered him, all my faculties grew clouded.

Or so, at least, I must suppose; for of the sudden silence on the Alton road I thought not at all. What next engaged me was a feeling of surprise that, of my two hands pressed on my temples, the right was cold, but the left, though it met the wind, unaccountably warm— the wrist below it even deliciously, or so it felt until rubbing my palms together I found them sticky, with blood.

The blood, I next discovered, was welling from a cut on my left temple. Putting up my fingers, I felt the fresh flow running over a crust of it frozen on my cheek; and wondered how I might stanch it. I misdoubted my strength to find the lane again and creep down to the river; and the river, moreover, would be frozen. For a certainty I should freeze to death where I lay, and even more surely on the road back to Farnham I must faint and drop and, dropping, be frozen. With that, I remembered the light we had seen shining ahead of us as we crossed the fields; and staggered along in search of it, after first groping for my morion, which had rolled into the hedge some paces away.

For a while, confused in my bearings, I sought on the wrong hand; but by-and-by caught the twinkle of it through a gate to the left, and studied it, leaning my arms on the bar. The house whence it shone could not be any part of Holibourne village, but must stand somewhere on high rising ground across the valley. I might reckon to reach it by turning back and taking the lane in which we had been surprised: but this meant fetching a long circuit. I was weakening with loss of blood, and—it coming into my mind that the river below would be hard—I resolved to steer a straight line and risk obstacles.

As it turned out, there were none, or none to throw me back. At the stream-side, holding by an elder-bough, I tested the ice with my weight, proved it firm, crossed without so much as cracking it, and breasted a bare grassy slope, too little to be called a down, where a few naked hawthorns chafed and creaked in the wind. Above it was an embankment rounded like a bastion, up the left side of which I crept—or, you might almost say, crawled—and, reaching the top, found myself close under the front of a dwelling-house.

It was coated with whitewash, the glimmer of which showed me the queer shape of the building even in the darkness. It consisted of two stories, both round as pepper-pots. Above the first ran a narrow circular thatch, serving as a mat (so to say) for the second and smaller pepper-pot. I could not discern how this upper story was roofed, but the roof had a hole in it, from which poured a stray ray of light. Light shone too, but through a blind, from a small window close under the eaves. The lower story showed none at all.

I rapped on the door. There came no response, though I waited and listened for a full minute. I rapped again and shouted; and was about to challenge for the third time, when the threshold showed a chink of light. Muffled footsteps came down the passage, and with much creaking the bolts were undrawn.

'Who knocks?' demanded a man's voice, somewhat shrill and querulous.
'Cannot a poor scholar rest in peace, and at this time o' night?'

'In the name of Charity!' I urged.

He flung the door open and stood with a hand-lamp held high, surveying me: a little old man, thin as a rat, in skullcap, furred gown, and list slippers. The lamp shone down on his silvered hair and on a pair of spectacles he had pushed up to the edge of his cap; and showed me a face mildly meditative from the brow down to the chin, which by contrast was extremely resolute.

'More soldiers!' he observed testily. 'The plague take it that they and the meteors must choose the same night to drop from heaven! How many of you, this time?'

I answered that I was alone, and would have added a word on my plight; but this, beneath the lamp-light, he could not miss perceiving, for my face and the left shoulder of my buff coat were a mask of blood.

'H'm!'—he cut me short. 'It may sound to you unfeeling: but if Heaven persists in sending me soldiers I had rather physic than feed them:' and with that he stood aside as inviting me to enter. Be sure I obeyed him gladly, and, stepping inside, rested my hand for a moment against the jamb of a door that stood open to the right. The ray of his lamp, as he held it near to examine me, gave me a glimpse of the room within—of a table with cloth awry, of overturned flagons lying as they had spilt their wine-stains, of chairs and furniture pushed this way and that.

'So your predecessors have left me,' said the old gentleman, catching the direction of my gaze and nodding. 'Whether or no they have left me enough for the morning's breakfast is a matter my servant must discover when he comes over from Holibourne at daylight.'

'They were Malignants, sir, as I guess: the Earl of Crawford's men.'

'Devil a groat care I what you call them, or they call themselves! I study the heavens and take no heed of your sublunary divisions. But they have eaten and drunk me out of house and home; at that hour, too, when the most meteors were predicted: and what is worse they invaded my garret in their clumsy jack-boots, and have thrown my Orchestra Coeli out of gear. I was mending it when you knocked. By the way,' he added more kindly, 'I can go on mending it while you wash your wound, which will appear less horrid when cleansed of all this blood. I have a fire upstairs, and hot water. Come.'

He closed the outer door and, taking me gently by the elbow, half-supported me up the stairway, which was little better than a ladder, and led direct to the strangest room I have ever set eyes on.

It was circular—in diameter perhaps twelve feet—with a high conical roof. The roof had an inner lining of wood, and through a hole in it—where a panel had been slid back—a large optic-glass, raised on a pivot-stand, thrust its nose out into the night. Close within the door stood an oaken press, and beside it, on a tripod, a brazier filled with charcoal and glowing. A truckle-bed, a chair, and two benches made up the rest of the furniture: and of the benches one was crowded with all manner of tools—files by the score, pliers, small hammers, besides lenses, compasses, rules, and a heap of brass filings; the other, for two-thirds of its length, was a litter of books and papers. But the end nearest to the working-bench had been cleared, and here stood a mighty curious intricate mechanism of wheels and brass wire and little brass balls, with fine brass chains depending through holes in the board. My host flung a tender look at it across his shoulder as he stepped to the press to fetch basin and towel.

'The oaf has dislocated the pin of the fly-wheel,' he grunted. 'Praise Heaven, he never guessed that it worked on a diamond, or slight chance had my poor toy with his loutish fingers stuck in it!'

He filled the basin with water from a copper ewer that rested close to the brazier on a file of folios, and set it to heat. 'I doubt I must give up the meteors to-night,' he continued, and went back to his machine, with which, I could see, his fingers were itching to be busy.

I asked, 'Is that, sir, an invention of yours?'

'Ay, soldier,' he answered; 'mine solely; the child of my brain's begetting.' His hands hovered over the delicate points and wires. 'And to be murdered thus by a great thumb-fingered dragoneer!' With a lens and a delicate needle, he began to peer and prise in it; and anon, fixing the lens in his eye, reached out for his hand-lamp.

'To what use have you designed it, sir?' I asked, after a while spent in watching him.

'To no use at all, soldier,' he answered, more tartly. 'The water is warm, and you can bathe your hurt and afterwards I will plaster it.' While I laved my temple with the edge of the towel, between the dip of the water I heard his voice in broken sentences: 'To no use at all. . . . Would a man ask the sun to what use it danced? . . . or the moon and planets? . . .'

I looked up, dabbing my wound gently. His voice had risen and stretched itself on a high, monotonous pitch. He was declaiming verse.

     'Who doth not see the measures of the Moon?
      Which thirteen times she dances every year,
      And ends her Pavane thirteen times as soon
      As doth—

Hey? Do you know the lines, soldier?' He stepped forward and peered close at my head while I shook it. 'Tush! a cut, a trifle! Go on bathing. . . . The lines, sir, were writ by Sir John Davies, the first of English poets.'

'Indeed, sir,' said I. 'Now at the Inner Temple, before mixing myself in these troubles, I used to read much poetry and dispute on it with other young men. We had our several laureates; but believe me-and despise if you will—although we had heard tell of Sir John Davies, I doubt if one in six of us had read a line of him.'

'Ay, indeed,' he caught me up, 'I have scarce read a line of any other. Having discovered him I had no need. For allow me to observe—although I know nothing about it—that in poetry the Subject is nine points of excellence; and, Sir John Davies having hit on the most exalted subject tractable by the Muse, it follows that he must be the most exalted poet. Let me tell you—if it will shorten argument—that in general, and in all walks of life, I hate the second-best.'

'I have heard, sir,' said I, 'that this masterpiece was a poem on
Dancing. But you must be thinking of another.'

'Not at all, young man,' my host replied, poring anew into his toy. '"Orchestra" is the name of it; the subject, Dancing. But what dancing!—the sun, the moon, the stars—Eh? Halleluia, but it goes again!'

Sure enough, bending over the basin, I heard a buzz of wheels, and looked up to see the whole machine springing like a score of whipping-tops gone mad, the brass balls swinging and rotating so fast that the eye lost them in little twinkling circles and ellipses, the wheels whirring and filling the room with their hum.

My astronomer had dived under the bench. I saw for the moment little more than his posterior and the soles of his list slippers.

'You'll pardon me,' I heard him grunt, and the speed of the machinery slackened as he attached a couple of leaden weights to the dependent chains. He backed, crawled out, and stood erect; adjusted his spectacles, and stood beaming upon his invention.

'But what is the signification, sir?' I asked, rising from my chair and stepping close.

'Ah! You improve, soldier. It hath signification, not use: and it signifies the motion of the heavens. See—this larger ball is the sun; and here, on their several rods, the planets—all swinging in their courses. By a pointer on this dial-plate—observe me now—I reduce the space of a day to one, two, three minutes, as I chose, retarding or accelerating, but always in just proportion. 'Tis set for these December days; you will remark the sun's ambit—how it lies south of the zenith, and how far short it rises and falls from the equinoctial points. But wait awhile, and in a few minutes—that is to say, days—you shall see him start to widen his circuit. Here now is Saturn, with his rim: and here Venus—mark how delicately she lifts, following the motion of her lord—`

'Just with the Sun her dainty feet doth move—'

'And this is Dancing—Orchestra Coeli—the Dancing of the Firmament.'

'Wonderful!' I cried.

'You shall say so presently! So far you have only seen: now hear!'

He drew out a small brass pin from the foot of the mechanism, and at once it began to hum, on three or four notes such as children make with a comb and a scrap of paper.

The notes lifted and fell, and the little balls—each in his separate circle—wheeled and spun, twinkling in time with them, until my head, too, began to swim.

'It will run for an hour now,' my host assured me. 'Indeed, with one to watch and draw up the weights at due intervals, it will run for ever.'

'It dizzies me,' said I.

'Your head is light, belike, with the loss of blood. Sit you back in the chair, and I will try now what may be done with ointment and plaster.'

He forced me to seat myself and, fetching a small medicine-box from the press, began to operate. His fingers were extraordinarily quick and thin, and so delicate of touch that I felt no pain, or very little: but though I lay with my head far back and saw the machine no longer, it had set my brain spinning, and the pressure of his hands appeared to be urging it round and round, while his voice (for he talked without intermission) mingled and interwove itself with the drone of the music from the table. He was reciting verses; from his favourite poem, no doubt. But though the sound of them ran in my ears like a brook, I can remember one couplet only,—

     'And all in sundry measures do delight,
      Yet altogether keep no measure right. . . .'

I dare say that, yielding to the giddiness, I swooned: and yet I can remember no interval. The circles seemed to have hold of me, to be drawing me down, and yet down; until, like a diver half-bursting for breath, I found strength, sprang upwards, and reached the surface with a cry.

The cry rang in my ears yet. But had it come, after all, from my own lips? I gripped the arms of the chair in a kind of terror, and leaned forward, staring at my host, who had fallen back a pace, and stood between me and the lamp.

'Pardon me, sir,' I found voice to say after a pause 'I must have fallen into a doze, I think. My head—' I put a hand up to it and discovered that it was bandaged. He did not answer me, but appeared to be listening. 'My head—' I repeated, and again stopped short— this time at sound of a cry.

It came from the night without: and at once I knew it to be a repetition of the sound that had aroused me. Nor was it, in fact, a cry, though it rose like a cry against the wind: rather, a confused uproar of voices, continuous, drawing nearer and nearer.

Then, as I stared at my host and he at me, the noise became articulate as drunken singing—'Tow, row, row! Tow, row, row! . . . Crop-headed Puritans, tow, row, row. . . . Boot and saddle, and tow, row, row!—and, nearing so, broke into chorus,—

     'Waller and Hazelrigg, Stapleton, Scroop—
      Way! Make way for His Majesty's troop!
      Crop-headed Puritans durstn't deny
      His Majesty's gentlemen riding by,
      With boot and saddle and tow-row-row!'

'Good Lord!' muttered my host, casting out his two hands in despair.
'More soldiers!'

But by this time I had my hand on the door. 'Guide me down the stairs,' I commanded; 'down to the door! And, before you open it, quench the light!'

By the time we reached the door the voices were close at hand, coming down the lane: and by each note of them I grew more clearly convinced. 'Sir,' I asked in a whisper, 'does this lane lead off from the road on the near side of Alton?

For a moment it seemed that he did not hear me. 'Pray Heaven I dowsed the light in time!' he chattered. 'Three visits in one night is more than my sins deserve. . . . Yes; the lane enters a half-mile this side of Alton, and returns back—'

'Well enough I know where it returns back' said I. 'Man, did you bewitch them?—as, a while ago, you bewitched me?'

'Eh?'

I felt that he was peering at me in the dark.

'Something has bewitched them,' I persisted. 'Either the wine or that devil's toy of yours has hold of them; or the both, belike. These are the same men, and have travelled full circle, listen to them!—'tis the music of the spheres, sir.'

'I believe you are right,' said my host, with a chuckle.
'O, Copernicus!'

I drew the door open gently and looked aloft. The night, before so starry, was now clouded over. The troopers—I could hear their horses' hoofs above the whoops and yells of their chorusing—were winding downhill by a sunken way within ten yards of me. A gravel path lay between me and the hedge overlooking it. This I saw by the faint upcast rays of the lanterns they had lit for guidance. I tip-toed across to the hedge, and, peering over, was relieved of my last doubt: for at the tail of the procession and under charge of one drunken trooper for whipper-in, rode all my poor comrades with arms triced behind them and ankles lamentably looped under their horses' bellies.

Even as they passed a thought came into my head: and the face of the whipper-in—seen dimly in the shadow of a lantern he joggled at his saddle-bow—decided me. I slipped off my sash, looped it loosely in my hand, and so, without waiting to say farewell to my host, slid down the bank into the lane.

Though I shot over the frozen bank a deal faster than ever I intended and dropped on the roadway with a thud, the trooper, bawling his chorus, did not turn in his saddle. I tip-toed after him, between a walk and a run, and still he did not turn. Not till I was level with his stirrup did he guess that I was on him; and even so he could scarcely roar out a curse before I had my sash flung over him and with a jerk fetched him clean out of his saddle. As he pitched sideways, the lantern fell with a clatter and rolled into the hedge.

'What the devil's up with you, back there!' At the noise, I heard two or three of the midmost troopers rein up.

'Right! All right!' I called forward to them, catching the horse's bridle and at the same time stooping over the poor fool—to gag him, if need were. He lay as he had fallen. I hope I have not his death to my account, and for certain no corpse lay in the road when I passed along it a few hours later.

'Right!' I called sturdily, deepening my voice to imitate that of my victim as nearly as I could match it—

'Crop-headed Puritans, tow-row-row!'

Still shouting the chorus, I mastered the reluctant horse, swung myself into saddle, and edged up towards my comrades.

'Carey! Shackell!' I called softly, overtaking them.

At the sound of my voice, they came near to letting out a cry that had spoilt all. Masters, indeed, started a yell: but Small Owens (whose bands I had fortunately cut the first) reached out a hand and clapped it over his mouth.

'How many be they?' I asked as we rode.

'Twenty-two,' answered Randles, chafing his wrists, 'and all drunk as lords.'

'If we had arms,' said Carey, 'we might drive the whole lot.'

'But since you have not,' said I, 'we must pitch our attempt lower. In three minutes we shall reach the high-road; and then strike spurs all to the right for Farnham!'

But our luck proved better than we hoped. For as we drew near the exit of the lane, I heard a voice challenge. The chorus, which had lasted us all the way, ceased on a sudden, and was taken up by a pistol-shot. At once I guessed that here must be help, and, feeling for my trumpet, found it and blew the call. Naked of weapons as my comrades were, we charged down on the rear, broke it, and flung it upon the darkness, where by this time we could hear the voice of Wilkins, our sergeant-major, bellowing above the tumult.

Within five minutes this double charge settled all. The pack-horses were ours again, with twenty-one inebriate prisoners. My mare, galloping home with the third pack-horse at her heels, had alarmed the picket, and Wilkins, with twenty men, had turned out to scour the Alton road.

So, while we secured our drunkards to the last man, I had leisure to bless my fortune.