THE LADY ALICE LISLE. It was late on a dark summer's night, the day following the disastrous field of Sedgemoor, on which the forces of the king, under the incapable voluptuary Feversham, had annihilated the rebel army of Monmouth, owing scarcely less to the incapacity and want of judgment of the leader himself, than to the cowardice of his general of the horse, Lord Gray, of Werk. The scene lay amid the wooded hills of Hampshire, or that skirt of the country which is nearest to the confines of Wiltshire. The weather was wild and stormy, though in the height of summer; the wind blowing very freshly in heavy gusts from the southwest, with occasional squalls of sharp, driving rain. The skies were very dim and gloomy, although the moon was nearly at the full, so densely were they overlaid with masses of thick grey clouds, drifting onward, still onward, layer above layer, before the driving storm, so as to blot the stars entirely from the visible firmament, and only at times to suffer a faint lack-lustre gleam of the waning moon to struggle through the rifts of the changeful vapors. Dark, however, and inauspicious as the night would have been pronounced by ordinary wayfarers, it was yet hailed, for the causes which would have rendered it obnoxious to others, by two pedestrians, who, seemingly almost overdone with fatigue, travel-stained, and splashed from head to foot with fifty different shades of mud and clay, continued to plod sturdily though slowly onward, through the halfforest scene, amid which ran the narrow and unfrequented country road by which they were travelling. One of these men, though he carried ostensibly no arms, nor wore any of the regular trappings or insignia of the soldier, had yet something in his port, carriage, and demeanor, which at once indicated, to an experienced eye, that his proper profession was that of arms. His broad-leafed hat was ornamented with a band and feather, and though he was on foot he wore high horseman's boots, from which, either in his haste or forgetfulness, he had neglected to remove a pair of heavy spurs. The other person was older, less athletic in his build, and was evidently far more wearied than his stouter companion, and it was with pain and difficulty that he struggled feebly through the deep mire and broken ruts of the ill-made country road. He was dressed in black, with the band of a non-conformist clergyman about his neck, and the close fitting black skull-cap, which had procured for his sect the contemptuous name of crop-ear, under his steeple-crowned hat. "It is no use," he said at length, after stumbling two or three times so badly that he had all but fallen; "I can go no further. Though my life depended on it, I could not another mile." "Your life does depend on it," replied the other, shortly; "of a surety the avenger of blood is close at our heels, and the broad-swords of the Blues are just as thirsty for the blood of a preacher of the word, whom they call a trumpeter of sedition, as for that of a man-at-arms. Up! up! friend, and onward! give me your arm, and let me lead you; nay, if it must needs be, I will carry you. For the house of the woman of Israel, whom men call the Lady Alice, cannot but be within a short half mile, and there shall we have shelter, for the asking, until this tyranny be over-past." The preacher, who had sat down utterly exhausted on a bank by the wayside, replied only with a groan to this friendly exhortation, but he arose to make another effort for his life, and with the assistance of the stalwart arm of his younger and hardier companion, toiled onward by a steepish ascent which lay before them, stumbling at every step, and declaring his inability to proceed even for the sake of life. As they arrived, however, at the summit of the hill, a glimmering light met their eyes, seen faintly and at intervals through the foliage of the thick woodlands, which filled the slopes and bottom of a small lap of land into which they were descending, watered by a rapid and tumultuous brook, swollen by the recent rains, whose murmurs came up to their ears hoarse and menacing. "Heaven be praised!" exclaimed the soldier, as he saw the friendly gleam, "we are saved! That light burns in the lattice of the lady, the pious relict of the God-fearing patriot, John Lisle. The sounds of the brook make me sure of it. Courage, my friend, a few more steps, and our toils and perils shall be over." "God send it be so," said the preacher. "But think you she shall give us shelter when she knows who we are, and from what deed we come?" "Ay! do I," replied the other, confidently. "There is that in the heart of Alice Lisle that would not suffer her to yield up even her most deadly enemy to the sword of the pursuer. She is all woman charity, and saintly tenderness and mercy. Besides, for her there is little danger; she is known through the land for her loyalty, and for her deeds of love to the cavaliers in the days of their tribulation. No one, by her |