Chippinge Borough

"Then I'd make it mine!" Vaughan retorted. "Where is he?"

Flixton flicked his thumb in the direction of an inner door. "He's there," he said. "He's there safe enough! For the rest, it is easy to find fault! Very easy for you, my lad! You're no longer in the service."

"There are a good many will leave the service for this!" Vaughan replied; and he saw on the instant that the shot told. Flixton's face fell, he opened his mouth to reply. But disdaining to listen to excuses, of which the speaker's manner betrayed the shallowness, Vaughan opened the bedroom door and passed in.

To his boundless astonishment Brereton was really in bed, with a light beside him. Asleep he probably was not, for he rose at once to a sitting posture and, with wild and dishevelled hair, confronted the intruder with a mingling of wrath and discomfiture in his looks. His sword and an undress cap, blue with a silver band, lay beside the candle on the table, and Vaughan saw that though in his shirt-sleeves he was not otherwise undressed.

"Mr. Vaughan!" he cried. "What, if you please, does this mean?"

"That is what I am here to ask you!" Vaughan answered, his face flushed with indignation. He was too angry to pick his words. "Are you, can you be aware, sir, what is done while you sleep?"

"Sleep?" Brereton rejoined, with a sombre gleam in his eyes. "Sleep, man? God knows it is the last thing I do!" He clapped his hand to his brow and for a moment remained silent, holding it there. Then, "Sleep has been a stranger to me these three nights!" he said.

"Then what do you do here?" Vaughan answered, in astonishment. And looked round the room as if he might find his answer there.

"Ah!" Brereton rejoined, with a look half suspicious, half cunning. "That is another matter. But never mind! Never mind! I know what I am doing."

"Know-"

"Yes, well!" the soldier replied, bringing his feet to the floor, but continuing to keep his seat on the bed. "Very well, sir, I assure you."

Vaughan looked aghast at him. "But, Colonel Brereton," he rejoined, "do you consider that you are the only person in this city able to act? That without you nothing can be done and nothing can be ventured?"

"That," Brereton returned, with the same shrewd look, "is just what I do consider! Without me they cannot act! They cannot venture. And I-go to bed!"

He chuckled at it, as at a jest; and Vaughan, checked by the oddity of his manner, and with a growing suspicion in his mind, knew not what to think. For answer, at last, "I fear that you will not be able to go to bed, Colonel Brereton," he said gravely, "when the moment comes to face the consequences."

"The consequences?"

"You cannot think that a city such as this can be destroyed, and no one be called to account?"

"But the civil power-"

"Is impotent!" Vaughan answered, with returning indignation, "in the face of the disorder now prevailing! I warn you! A little more delay, a little more license, let the people's passions be fanned by farther impunity, and nothing, nothing, I warn you, Colonel Brereton," he continued with emphasis, "can save the major part of the city from destruction!"

Brereton rose to his feet, a certain wildness in his aspect. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "You don't mean it! Do you really mean it, Vaughan? But-but what can I do?" He sank down on the bed again, and stared at his companion. "Eh? What can I do? Nothing!"

"Everything!"

He sprang to his feet. "Everything! You say everything?" he cried, and his tone rose shrill and excited. "But you don't know!" he continued, lowering his voice as quickly as he had raised it and laying his hand on Vaughan's sleeve-"you don't know! You don't know! But I know! Man, I was set in command here on purpose. If I acted they counted on putting the blame on me. And if I didn't act-they would still put the blame on me."

His cunning look shocked Vaughan.

"But even so, sir," he answered, "you can do your duty."

"My duty?" Brereton repeated, raising his voice again. "And do you think it is my duty to precipitate a useless struggle? To begin a civil war? To throw away the lives of my own men and cut down innocent folk? To fill the streets with blood and slaughter? And the end the same?"

"Ay, sir, I do," Vaughan answered sternly. "If by so doing a worse calamity may be averted! And, for your men's lives, are they not soldiers? For your own life, are you not a soldier? And will you shun a soldier's duty?"

Brereton clapped his hand to his brow, and, holding it there, paced the room in his shirt and breeches.

"My God! My God!" he cried, as he went. "I do not know what to do! But if-if it be as bad as you say-"

"It is as bad, and worse!"

"I might try once more," looking at Vaughan with a troubled, undecided eye, "what showing my men might do? What do you think?"

Vaughan thought that if he were once on the spot, if he saw with his own eyes the lawlessness of the mob, he might act. And he assented. "Shall I pass on the order, sir," he added, "while you dress?"

"Yes, I think you may. Yes, certainly. Tell the officer commanding to march his men to the Square and I'll meet him there."

Vaughan waited for no more. He suspected that the burden of responsibility had proved too heavy for Brereton's mind. He suspected that the Colonel had brooded upon his position between a Whig Government and a Whig mob until the notion that he was sent there to be a scapegoat had become a fixed idea; and with it the determination that he would not be forced into strong measures, had become also a fixed idea.

Such a man, if he was to be blamed, was to be pitied also. And Vaughan, even in the heat of his indignation, did pity him. But he entertained no such feeling for the Honourable Bob, and in delivering the order to him he wasted no words. After Flixton had left the room, however, he remembered that he had noted a shade of indecision in the aide's manner. And warned by it, he followed him. "I will come with you to Leigh's," he said.

"Better come all the way," Flixton replied, with covert insolence. "We've half a dozen spare horses."

The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. For, "Done with you!" Vaughan cried. "There's nothing I'd like better!"

Flixton grunted. He had overreached himself, but he could not withdraw the offer.

Vaughan was by his side, and plainly meant to accompany him.

Let no man think that the past is done with, though he sever it as he will. The life from which he has cut himself off in disgust has none the less cast the tendrils of custom about his heart, which shoot and bud when he least expects it. Vaughan stood in the doorway of the stable while the men bridled. He viewed the long line of tossing heads, and the smoky lanthorns fixed to the stall-posts; he sniffed the old familiar smell of "Stables." And he felt his heart leap to the past. Ay, even as it leapt a few minutes later, when he rode down College Green, now in darkness, now in glare, and heard beside him the familiar clank of spur and scabbard, the rattle of the bridle-chains, and the tramp of the shod hoofs. On the men's left, as they descended the slope at a walk, the tall houses stood up in bright light; below them on the right the Float gleamed darkly; above them, the mist glowed red. Wild hurrahing and an indescribable babel of shouts, mingled with the rushing roar of the flames, rose from the Square. When the troop rode into it with the first dawn, they saw that two whole sides-with the exception of a pair of houses-were burnt or burning. In addition a monster warehouse was on fire in the rear, a menace to every building to windward of it.

The Colonel, with Flixton attending him, fell in on the flank, as the troop entered the Square. But apparently-since he gave no orders-he did not share the tingling indignation which Vaughan experienced as he viewed the scene. A few persons were still engaged in removing their goods from houses on the south side; but save for these, the decent and respectable had long since fled the place, and left it a prey to all that was most vile and dangerous in the population of a rough seaport. The rabble, left to themselves, and constantly recruited as the news flew abroad, had cast off the fear of reprisals, and believed that at last the city was their own. Vaughan saw that if the dragoons were to act with effect they must act at once. Nor was he alone in this opinion. The troop had not ridden far into the open before he was shocked, as well as astonished, by the appearance of Sir Robert Vermuyden, who stumbled across the Square towards them. He was bareheaded-for in an encounter with a prowler who had approached too near he had lost his hat; he was without his cloak, though the morning was cold. His face, too, unshorn and haggard, added to the tragedy of his appearance; yet in a sense he was himself, and he tried to steady his voice, as, unaware of Vaughan's presence, he accosted the nearest trooper.

"Who is in command, my man?" he said.

Flixton, who had also recognised him, thrust his horse forward. "Good Heavens, Sir Robert!" he cried. "What are you doing here? And in this state?"

"Never mind me," the Baronet replied. "Are you in command?"

Colonel Brereton had halted his men. He came forward. "No, Sir Robert," he said. "I am. And very sorry to see you in this plight."

"Take no heed of me, sir," Sir Robert replied sternly. Through how many hours, hours long as days, had he not watched for the soldiers' coming! "Take no heed of me, sir," he repeated. "Unless you have orders to abandon the loyal people of Bristol to their fate-act! Act, sir! If you have eyes, you can see that the mob are beginning to fire the south side on which the shipping abuts. Let that take fire and you cannot save Bristol!"

Brereton looked in the direction indicated, but he did not answer. Flixton did. "We understand all that," he said, somewhat cavalierly. "We see all that, Sir Robert, believe me. But the Colonel has to think of many things; of more than the immediate moment. We are the only force in Bristol, and-"

"Apparently Bristol is no better for you!" Sir Robert replied with tremulous passion.

So far Vaughan, a horse's length behind Brereton and his aide, heard what passed; but with half his mind. For his eyes, roving in the direction whence Sir Robert had come, had discerned, amid a medley of goods and persons huddled about the statue, in the middle of the Square, a single figure, slender, erect, in black and white, which appeared to be gazing towards him. At first he resisted as incredible the notion which besieged him-at sight of that figure. But the longer he looked the more sure he became that it was, it was Mary! Mary, gazing towards him out of that welter of miserable and shivering figures, as if she looked to him for help!

Perhaps he should have asked Sir Robert's leave, to go to her. Perhaps Colonel Brereton's to quit the troop, which he had volunteered to accompany. But he gave no thought to either. He slipped from his saddle, flung the reins to the nearest man, and, crossing the roadway in three strides, he made towards her through the skulking groups who warily watched the dragoons, or hailed them tipsily, and in the name of Reform invited them to drink.

And Mary, who had risen in alarm to her feet, and was gazing after her father, her only hope, her one protection through the night, saw Vaughan coming, tall and stern, through the prowling night-birds about her, as if she had seen an angel! She said not a word, when he came near and she was sure. Nor did he say more than "Mary!" But he threw into that word so much of love, of joy, of relief, of forgiveness-and of the appeal for forgiveness-that it brought her to his arms, it left her clinging to his breast. All his coldness in Parliament Street, his cruelty on the coach, her father's opposition, all were forgotten by her, as if they had not been!

And for him, she might have been the weakest of the weak, and fickle and changeable as the weather, she might have been all that she was not-though he had yet to learn that and how she had carried herself that night-but he knew that in spite of all he loved her. She had the old charm for him! She was still the one woman in the world for him! And she was in peril. But for that there is no knowing how long he might have held her. That thought, however, presently overcame all others, made him insensible even to the sweetness of that embrace, ay, even put words in his mouth.