But he heard it not. They who had been entrusted with the ringing of that fatal peal never rang it. Instead of bell ropes in their hands, they now had manacles around their wrists, and grim sentries standing guard over them. Rupert waited, watched, and listened, till the break of day showed him the great seaport of the Severn still calm; its gates close shut; its walls and towers bristling with armed men, in attitudes that told them determined on its defence. Thinking he had been made a fool of, and fearing further betrayal, he hastily beat retreat from Durdham Down to seek the pillage of some city more easy of being entered. The rising sun saw his back turned upon Bristol; he and his Cavaliers venting loud curses--reviling their partisans inside, whose misleading correspondence had lured them to an expedition ludicrous as bootless. CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN. A CITY OF REFUGE. Of the Foresters who figure in our tale, Rob Wilde, Jerky Jack, and Winny were not the only ones who had found their way into Bristol. Most of Sir Richard Walwyn's troopers were Foresters. But the master of Hollymead was himself there, with his daughters, their maid Gwenthian, and others of the family servants. Why he had exchanged his Forest home for a residence in town--that, too, in a city under military occupation, threatened with siege and all its inconveniences--has been already in part explained. With the commencement of hostilities country life became unsafe, more especially for people of quality and those who had anything to lose. Parties of armed men penetrated into the most remote districts, demanding contributions and levying them--at first in the name of the King. Naturally, this aroused the spirit of retaliation, and dictated reprisals; so that in time both sides became more or less blamable for _filibusterism_. The weight of evidence, however, shows that, as a rule, the Parliamentarian officers did all in their power to restrain, while those of the Royalist army not only encouraged but gloried in it-- themselves taking a hand. A Prince had set them the lesson, making robbery fashionable, and they were neither backward nor slow in profiting by it. As a sample of the spirit in which the Cavaliers made war, thus wrote Sir John, afterwards Lord Byron--the same truculent ruffian already alluded to, commanding a body of the King's horse--"_I put them all to the sword, which I find to be the best way to proceed with these kind of people, for mercy to them is cruelty_." The gallant defenders of Barthomley Church were "these kind of people," whom this monster, ungrammatical as inhuman, had massacred to a man!