From the spire of the Abbey church, throughout the night, the monks could see on the high lands close by, to the south, long lines of red camp-fires, and dancing torches here and there, as captains made their watchful rounds. The cries of the sentries came to their ears through the stilled air, as from the near side of Swilgate Brook itself, which washed the Abbey\'s walls. Little of sleep did the cells or dormitories know that frightened night, for servants were busy till the first cock-crow burying jewels and plate in the Abbot\'s garden, and half the brothers kept vigil in prayer before the High Altar, or in the chapels of St. Eustacius and St. James, while others slumbered fitfully on their pallets, or climbed the tower to watch the Lancastrians\' lights.
Thus, at last, anxious morning broke, and the cawing of the rooks in the branches close to Hugh\'s window roused the boy from his sleep. At a bound he was on his feet, forgetting even to rub his eyes, and glad that, having slept in his clothes, he might fare forth without loss of time. His dreams had been all of archery—how that the best bows were of Spanish yew, and he had tried to cut down the English yews in the churchyard to make new weapons, and had been haled before the King\'s justices because of the law to preserve the yews for the King\'s armies—and the thread of this dream ran through his mind even as he knelt and muttered his prayer.
It was full daylight when Hugh found himself outside the Abbey walls and on the footpath leading over the brook up to the Vineyards. Behind him the matin chimes were sounding from the belfry. Before him rose the dismantled walls of Holme Castle, once the abiding place of the great Earls of Gloster, but now long since grown over with ivy, and a harbor for owls and bats. When he had come to the top of the knoll, at the front of these ruins, the sight spread out before his eyes was one to well quicken breath and set veins tingling.
A vast host of armed men seemed to cover the earth as far as he could see. The boy had not known before that the whole world contained so many soldiers. One company was in the rough meadow close at hand. In the bright light he could discern them clearly—strong men of war, with battered steel breastplates, half blue, half red with rust, and iron caps upon their heads. Some of these were leading a score of horses back and down to the brook whence he had come. Others toiled at levelling some half-dozen camp-tents of white cloth, with crimson stripes, while still others crowded about the place where sparks crackled and black smoke curled about huge caldrons wherein food was cooking. At the peak of the largest tent, high upon the staff, floated gently in the early breeze an emblazoned standard, bearing the blood-red three roundels of the Courtenays.
For a moment Hugh\'s thoughts stopped at the memory of the strange Knight and his letter; somewhere among this band of brawny fighting men would be the four caitiffs who were here to slay that unknown Devon gentleman, Sir Hereward. He glanced at his little finger, whereon the signet ring of the three fishes glittered unwontedly,—and marvelled to find his base-born skin touched by such a trinket, for he had resisted Peter\'s desire to take it over to the Abbey treasury,—and then the glance lifted itself to still more marvellous things.
Away in the distance, on the topmost point to the left hand of the highroad, Hugh had already noted a brave pavilion, guarded by banks of earth raised since last he saw that familiar horizon, and overhung by what he saw now to be the royal standard of England\'s Kings. A blare of trumpets, rolling in sharp echoes from mound to mound across the field, proceeded now from this point, and as he looked Hugh saw upon the highway, setting forth in his direction, a little cavalcade of knights and ladies whose dress and trappings sparkled in the morning sun, even thus afar, like the lights on the High Altar beneath the painted windows.
Onward this group of riders came—and the boy, creeping under the cover of the hedge, stole forward with no other thought than to see them close at hand. And so it was that he crouched in listening silence, not more than twenty paces removed, when this thing happened.
The tall, grave-faced, golden-haired noble whom Hugh knew to be John, Earl of Devon, clad all in burnished steel, and bearing a great lion-crested tilting helmet upon his arm, strode forth from the company near the ruins to the highway, and stood thus, with bare head erect in the sunlight, until the riders, cantering lightly over the dew-laid road, drew rein before him. Then he advanced, and bending with one knee to earth, kissed the hand of a lady who, with a single knight, rode at the head of the little train.
"He advanced and kissed the Lady\'s Hand."
"He advanced and kissed the Lady\'s Hand."
This lady, then,—she with the bold, beautiful face, pale now as an ivory missal-cover, and drawn with stern lines, she with the burning brown-black eyes, and proudly upright carriage,—was the Frenchwoman, the Queen, the great Margaret of Anjou!
Hugh held his breath and stared out of fixed eyes at this terrible foreign woman, whose hates had fastened war upon his country, had killed even his own father, had drenched the land with blood—and listened with all his ears.
"We have given you, out of our grace, the lands and titles which your recreant brother Henry forfeited, and lost along with his head, when he played fast and loose with the usurper," this Queen said, in loud, cold tones, when the Courtenay stood upright again. "This day will test our wisdom in the thing."
"Madame," the Earl made answer, holding her eye with his, "our house has given three lives for you. If mine goes to-day I shall die sorrowing chiefly for this—that there are no more of us to die for our King."
The knight who rode beside the Queen—Hugh through the bushes saw only that he was tall and lean, with a delicately handsome young face and reddish-brown hair under his beaver, and wore a silver swan on his breast—spoke now:—
"My Lord of Devon, my mother rides now with the Lady Anne and her tiring women to a place of safety on t\'other side of Avon, there to wait upon the good tidings we shall presently bring her. The place is at Bushley, the Lady Anne being acquainted with it from childhood. From this, I return to lead our centre, with the Prior and the Lord Wenlock. My Lord Duke holds the front, beyond where our standard hangs. To you, my lord, the rear is given, to swing across this field, with your back against the ridge. The men from Somerset march to join you, even now. God stead you, honest Courtenay, and bring us victory!"
The Prince at this threw himself off his horse and into his mother\'s arms, his face buried upon her knees, his hands holding hers. The Queen, with marble face, swept her agonized glance high into the morning sky, and wept not, neither spoke, but bit her lips, and with her eyes invoked the saints.
Then, like some dissolving mist before Hugh\'s gaze, everything was altered. The Queen with her escort was ambling one way, toward the gray Abbey walls and the passage at the mill; her gallant young son was galloping with his group of knights back whence he came; the Courtenay company, close at hand, was gathering itself into ranks, with knights clambering heavily into saddles, and men-at-arms striking their pikes together. The whole broad field was, as by some magic hand, set in motion; everywhere troops were marching, standards fluttering forward, trumpets calling shrill-voiced to one another.
The boy, lifting his head now above the hedge, looked upon this vast shifting picture with but a dazed comprehension. The beauty of it all was so great that its grim meaning missed his mind. As far as eye could reach, armed bodies of men, with banners and harness glittering in the sunlight, met the vision. And now, of a sudden, all movement ceased. The birds in the ivy on the ruin behind him sang into the morning air, and no trumpet answered them. The landscape stood still.
Suddenly the boy clapped hands to ears, and stared affrightedly about him. A demon-like roaring sound had burst, as out of the very earth, which rocked and quivered under the shock. A thousand thunder-claps in one, out from the clear sky! Quailing with fright, as lesser belching noises succeeded, shaking the ground and confounding all senses and wits, Hugh backed out of the ditch, and felt, rather than made, his way rearward to the shadow of the ruins. Creeping up upon a ragged heap of tumbled stones, he ventured to look forth again.
A broadened veil of smoke—curious, thin, bluish smoke—all unlike that from burning thatches or stubble refuse—hung now upon the horizon where the royal standard had been. Was it still there? Hugh could not tell. Flashes of fire leaped swiftly for an instant here and there from this veil of smoky haze, and after each dart of flame there burst this deafening, thunderous roar which had so appalled him. Then it broke upon his brain that these were cannon, of which all men had long since heard, but few had ever seen on English soil. More than this it was not easy to grasp of what was going forward. Along the line of smoke, where sky ought to meet earth, could be seen confused masses of horse and footmen struggling together, but whither moving or how faring in their conflict could not be told. The men under Courtenay\'s banner had marched westward toward the windmill, and were not in sight.
All at once Hugh\'s gaze was diverted from this distant prospect to a strange apparition nearer at hand—a brownish-gray sort of globe, like a full moon, which, low to earth, stood between him and the smoke, and seemed to wax in bigness visibly as he looked. There was not time for thought before this ball, singing to itself as it came, swelled to giant size in the lad\'s vision—then smashed into the vine-clad wall beside him with a huge scattering of stones and mortar. The wall quivered for a moment, then fell outward, prone to the sward.
Without hesitation, Hugh slid down from his perch, and half-choked with dust and lime ran toward Swilgate Brook as fast as ever his legs would carry him. He made no pause, nor cast any glance backward, until he stumbled, panting and aflame with fright, into the cool shadow of the Abbey\'s big west gate. Not till its ponderous doors had clanged shut behind him, did he venture to draw breath.
Only the slowest and stoutest of the lay servitors in the kitchen lingered yet over their morning meal when the boy, his hunger led forward by keenest smelling sense, found his way thither. Within this low-vaulted chamber it was as if the confusion of tongues had fallen again. There were some hardier spirits who had, from sundry distant points of vantage, seen a tithe of what Hugh had witnessed. These told their tales to gaping, awe-stricken groups with much bold embroidery and emblazoning of fancy, peopling the field with mailed giants, and imputing to magic the mystery of the cannons, whose dire bellowings gave even these stony kitchen walls a throbbing pulse. Worse still was what the village vagabonds—permitted for the once to enter freely and mix with their betters before the fires—related with rolling eyes and quaking voices, to wile further victuals from the frightened cooks.
Into such riot ran this babel of loose tongues that not even the Precentor\'s entrance stilled it. This gentle, soft-eyed old monk had, indeed, no thought to govern aught or any, and gazed about over the motley throng as one abashed, until his glance fell upon Hugh. To him he beckoned, and, when the two were without upon the stairs, made hurried explanation:—
"His Lordship will himself sing the early Mass, with pontifical procession, and full chapter ceremonial. Get thee with all speed into thy surplice, comb out thy locks—shalt bear the cross!"
A brief while later, paced slowly from the cloisters the long devotional line, Hugh, all aglow with pride in his new office, advancing at its head, with the jewelled cross upheld aloft. After him were singing boys in surplices and singing men with added copes; then two score monks in ebon black with lighted tapers, the secular canons, the priests of the Abbey, the priors, the deacons attired for the altar, and last the venerable Abbot, John Strensham, bent with age and infirmities, and wearing over his vestments an almuce with hood of ermine, because his blood was cold. Into the choir the procession filed with measured step and solemn chant—and then, as by some sudden stroke of universal palsy, foot halted and song died on lips.
Such a scene as never monk or abbot had dreamt of in Tewkesbury lay before them.
The doors of the rood screen hung wide, so that vision swept from the choir down through the nave and its outer parts, where the simple and base-born heard the Mass, straight to the great north porch. Here, too, the doors were open, for daylight streamed therefrom transversely across the nave. And in this light the amazed monks saw a mired, blood-stained, bedraggled swarm of armed men struggling fiercely for entrance before their fellows, and among these some who smote and felled the others with their swords or battle-axes—amid clamor of shrieks and violent curses, rising above the ground-note of a deep wild shouting as from a multitude without, and the furious clash of steel on steel. The wrath of hell raged here and tore itself before them on the consecrated floor of heaven.
While yet this spell of bewilderment lay upon the astounded spectators in the choir, Hugh felt himself clutched by the shoulder and pushed forward down the steps and into the aisle by a strong though trembling hand. It was the old Abbot, who in the moment of horror at this sacrilege forgot his years. Raising himself to his full height, and snatching the great beryl monstrance from the altar, he hurrie............