The Lady of Loyalty House Part 38

"And when are you or I afraid of danger?"

Brilliana accepted this.

"Then I go with you."

Instantly Evander paused.

"No, no," he said.

Brilliana repeated his words.

"Why, when are you or I afraid of danger?"

There was a noise of running feet in the garden, and then Thoroughgood sped across the moat and into the room.

"Captain Halfman has been shot," he gasped.

"Oh, by whom?" Brilliana wailed, her eyes wide with horror.

"Is he killed?" Evander asked.

Thoroughgood answered both in a breath.

"Badly wounded. They bring him here."

As he spoke, Garlinge and Clupp entered from the garden, bearing Halfman between them, wrapped in Evander's mantle.

The man of gallant carriage, of swaggering alacrity, seemed to lie horribly limp in the men's arms. Evander hurriedly made a couch of chairs and bade them lay their burden on it, that he might examine the wound. Brilliana bent over him.

"Oh, my dear friend," she sobbed.

The sound of her voice seemed to awaken Halfman. He opened his eyes.

"Lift me up," he said, feebly, to his supporters. He looked at Brilliana. "Lady, you have been deceived. Sir Randolph escaped from his enemies. A snare was set for Captain Cloud--" he paused.

"By whom?" cried Brilliana, the woman eager for her lover.

Something like a smile came to Halfman's face.

"That I may not say. I was privy to the plot. But I walked into the trap myself. I fear, sir, you will find a hole in your mantle."

"You wore my cloak?" Evander asked, in wonder. "You died for me?"

"Ah, why did you not warn?" Brilliana cried.

Halfman moved his head feebly.

"I did not want to live."

"But you shall live," Brilliana insisted, prayed.

Halfman laughed very faintly.

"I do not think so. I am an old soldier, and--ah!"

He gave a great gasp. Then suddenly lifted himself a little and saluted Brilliana as if on parade.

"Here, my sweet warrior," he said, clearly. He looked fixedly at Brilliana and declaimed, "I did hear you speak, far above singing."

Then his chin dropped; his head fell back on the supporting arms.

Evander touched him, turned to Brilliana.

"Alas! he's sped."

The only sound in the silent room was the weeping of Brilliana in Evander's arms.

EPILOGUE

Master Marfleet in his "Diurnal" hides in his prolixities some particulars interesting to us. Thus we learn incidentally from some reflections on the wickedness of the great, that while the King reigned in Oxford--to Master Marfleet he is always the "Man of Blood"

when he is not Nebuchadnezzar--Lady Brilliana Harby was in such favor at the court and with the Queen as to obtain patents of knighthood for two neighbors of hers, one Paul Hungerford and one Peter Rainham.

We further learn that Brilliana accompanied the Queen--in whom Mr.

Marfleet traces a remarkable likeness to Jezebel--to France in 1644, after which "flight of kites, crows, and other carrion fowl"--the words are Mr. Marfleet's--the estate of Harby came, through the good offices of General Cromwell, into the hands of Colonel Evander Cloud, much to Mr. Marfleet's satisfaction, a satisfaction which the school-master did not live long enough to lose.

Of Colonel Cloud's honorable military career we find a brief but eminently satisfactory account in Corporal Blow-the-Trumpet-against-Jericho Pring's pamphlet--now more than scarce--ent.i.tled "The Roll-Call of the Regiments of Zion."

From a letter of Colonel Cloud's, preserved in the Perrington Papers (_Historical Ma.n.u.scripts Commission_, vol. XCIX., B), we learn that after Naseby the writer found among the dying the person of Sir Rufus Quaryll.

"As G.o.d may forgive me," he writes, "I had sought for this man in encounter after encounter, with black thoughts of vengeance in my bosom. But as he lay there I felt constrained by divine impulse to forgive him, though he made me no answer but to curse horribly at me and at the fool who took my place; and so pa.s.sed away, as I fear, very impenitent."

After the surrender of the King by the Scots, and the end, as it seemed, of the civil war, Colonel Cloud, with the permission of his great chief, retired from active affairs and made his way to France, to Paris, where, in the early spring of 1647, he was married to Lady Brilliana Harby. Some of the French writers of the time make rather merry over this romantic union and the five years fidelity of squire and dame--Strephon and Chloe, as they are pleased to call them. But the laugh is rather on the wrong side of the face, for it is well known that there was bitter disappointment in the hearts and on the lips of many French gallants who had tried their best to win the beautiful English girl, and greatly resented her reservation for this solemn gentleman. One or two efforts, however, to make this resentment plain to the English soldier resulting uncomfortably, after a brisk morning's work, in the temporary disablement of one aggressor and the repeated disarming of another, in the end the "homme a Cromwell" was left to wed in peace. Oddly enough, his best man was his old acquaintance Sir Blaise Mickleton, who, having realized his property in good time, had settled in Paris since 1644 and had almost forgotten his native tongue, which he spoke, when he did speak, with a little broken French accent, very pretty to hear.

He had once tried to renew his pretensions to the hand of Brilliana, and had been so startlingly rebuffed that he never repeated the effort and was content to remain her very good friend. Evander was in England once or twice during the years 1647 and 1648, but after the death of the King, against which he vainly protested, with his famous friend he settled down in France, in the Loire country, for many happy years.

After the Restoration, Harby Hall pa.s.sed by mutual arrangement into the hands of Sir Randolph Harby, who had cheerfully ruined himself in the service of his King. Through him the name still persists in Maryland, in America. Harby itself was destroyed by fire early in the eighteenth century. It was not rebuilt; the moat was filled up, and no trace of Loyalty House remains to-day. In Harby church-yard there is an ancient stone, set there by Brilliana's order. It bears the name of Halfman, the date of his death, and after that date the words, "I did hear you speak, far above singing."

THE END