Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil
Amid the dusk of books to find her.
But these our brothers fought for her,
At life’s dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her,
Tasting the raptured fleetness Of her divine completeness:
Their higher instinct knew
Those love her best who to themselves are true,
And what they dare to dream of dare to do.
They followed her and found her Where all may hope to find—
Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind,
But beautiful with danger’s sweetness round her,
Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath
Into the lifeless creed;
They saw her plumed and mailed,
With sweet, stem face unveiled,
And all-repaying eyes look proud on them in death.
—Lowell.
There had been a heavy fall of snow in Hereford during the night, but the south walk in Dr. Harford’s garden had been swept, and the still, frosty air and mid-day sunshine made the place as pleasant a playground as could be wished. The merry voices of a boy and girl had rung for the last half-hour in the pleasance, and the joys of snowballing were far too keen to allow the little couple to notice even for a moment the beauty of the wintry scene, with the rime-covered trees and bushes bordering the river, and in the background the cathedral, its massive tower surmounted in those seventeenth century days by a lofty spire covered with lead which glittered in the bright sunshine.
Presently the two playmates grew tired of snowballing and retired to a little arbour, commonly called the sun-trap, for here on the coldest days warmth could generally be found. There was a lull in the merry sounds, but it was only the calm which precedes a storm, for before long came a vehement expostulation, “Gabriel! Gabriel! let me have it. I will have it.”
“Not till you have promised,” was the teasing retort, and from the arbour there sprang out a small boy, with the most winsome and mischievous face, his hazel eyes sparkling with elfish mirth, while he held high above his head a wooden puppet, as dear to its small owner as the loveliest of modern dolls.
The bereft mother refused to enter into the game; it might be sport to him, but it was death to her.
“I won’t promise!” she said, angrily. “Give me my babe.”
“No,” said Gabriel, laughing. “I can’t have you chopping and changing. You said yesterday you would, and now you have changed your mind. Come, promise, Hilary, and I’ll give you the puppet.”
“Never!” said Hilary, furiously.
With a teasing laugh he tossed the puppet high in the air, intending to catch it as it fell; but, Hilary, frantic at this treatment of her Bartholomew babe, charged him with fury like a little goat, and the next minute both children were rolling in the snow..
By the time they had picked themselves up the whole situation had changed, for, much to their astonishment, a huge mastiff came bounding through the garden and, seizing the puppet on the path, began to worry it.
For a minute both paused, the girl aghast, the boy with knitted brows. It was well enough to tease his small playmate now and then, but he had not reckoned on this four-footed intruder. A sob from Hilary made him fly to the rescue.
“Leave go, you brute!” he shouted, trying in vain to drag back the mastiff by his collar.
This was clearly hopeless. He pulled and tugged with all his might, but the dog unconcernedly chewed the doll.
“Oh, my babe—my poor babe!” wailed Hilary.
Whereupon Gabriel, pricked at heart, made a valiant snatch at the puppet, got it firmly by the head and succeeded in wrenching it from the very jaws of death.
“There!” he said, flinging it towards the little girl in triumph; but the triumph was short-lived, for it was now the turn of the dog, who, defrauded thus unceremoniously of his toy, seized angrily on the arm of the knight-errant.
A scream of genuine terror from Hilary brought Dr. Harford rushing from the house, and in his wake followed a grave, stately gentleman whom the little girl at once recognised as Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan. Apparently the mastiff belonged to him, for at his stern summons it came to heel obediently, while Dr. Harford began to examine his son’s arm.
“How did you anger him, child?” he asked, deftly unfastening Gabriel’s dripping sleeve.
“It was my fault, sir,” replied the boy, trying bravely to stiffen his lip. “I threw up the puppet, and then the dog worried it.”
“I trust Nero has not hurt him much,” said Sir Robert, concerned to see the wound on the small, shapely arm.
“Oh, we’ll soon set it right,” said Dr. Harford, leading the child to the house; “but with dog-bites you should never take half-measures. I must put a hot iron to it, so screw up your courage, laddie, and think how brave Cranmer thrust his hand into the flames.”
Gabriel’s heart sickened at the prospect before him, but he held up his head and stepped out more briskly, while Hilary crept after him with tearful eyes.
“You will excuse me, Sir Robert, if I see to this matter at once,” said the doctor, “for delays are dangerous. I ran forth in such haste on hearing little Hilary Unett’s scream that I have not yet even asked whether you will not lie here this night.”
“Nay, I am to be the guest of Sir Richard Hopton at Canon Frome,” said Sir Robert, seating himself by the fire in the doctor’s study and watching his host’s rapid movements as he prepared to dress the child’s wound.
“I did but come to bear to you and to Doctor Wright the news of Sir John Eliot’s death.”
“What! Is he indeed gone?” said Dr. Harford, sorrow clouding his fine, thoughtful face.
“Here is a letter I received last night from London,” said Sir Robert. “An you will I will read it.”
“Sir John Eliot, one of the Members for Cornwall in the last Parliament, died this 27th day of November, after nigh upon four years’ imprisonment in the Tower, for refusing to answer for his conduct in Parliament anywhere but in Parliament itself, this being, he maintained, one of the inalienable rights of the English people, without which a just liberty would be impossible. Having incurred the displeasure of His Majesty on this account, and for his fearless unveiling of divers other Court abuses and irregularities, the King refused to release him, and, indeed, for the last year did keep him close prisoner in a dark, cold and wretchedly uncomfortable room, denying him, even at his physician’s request, air and exercise, and forbidding him to see any save his sons. His health was thus undermined, and a fortnight since, when he did petition for a temporary release to recover from his sickness, the request was refused by His Majesty, and now that he lies dead the King will not grant his sons’ petition to carry the body for burial to Port Eliot, but orders that Sir John shall be buried in the church within the walls of the Tower. This harshness hath greatly angered all who knew the late Member for Cornwall, and, knowing him, could but admire his integrity, his courage and his patriotic devotion.”
“A brave man—a truly great man,” said Dr. Harford. “Sir John Eliot is the martyr who by his blood will safeguard our Parliamentary rights.”
As he spoke he took the hot iron from the fire and drew Gabriel gently towards him.
“Now, my son,” he said, in the voice which by its tender but firm cheerfulness had nerved many a sufferer, “what a joy it will be to your father if you follow in that great man’s steps. Nothing could daunt Sir John; cost what it might he was ever true.”
The boy being of a highly-strung, nervous temperament turned deathly white, but never flinched as the hot iron seared his flesh; only a stifled moan escaped him, and Hilary through her tears saw the strangest look of triumph in his dilated eyes—a look that made her heart throb with love and admiration. In a few minutes more the arm was carefully bandaged, the two gentlemen continuing meantime their grave talk.
“I will send word to Frank Unett that you are here, sir,” said Dr. Harford, “for he, too, is one that deplores the present illegal rule without a Parliament; he will mourn Sir John’s death.”
“We call it a death,” said Sir Robert, “but he has been as surely murdered by the rigours of imprisonment as though he had been stabbed in the Tower. Well,” with a sigh, “the day of reckoning cannot long be delayed.”
“There, laddie,” said the doctor, drawing the sleeve gently over the bandage, “you have borne it like an Englishman; now run off into the fresh air and forget your troubles.”
With respectful salutes to their elders the children returned to the garden; Hilary, with her pretty eyes still tender and subdued, slipped her arm caressingly round her playmate’s neck. “I’m sorry, Gabriel,” she said, in a tremulous voice, “and all the time I didn’t really mean it. I will be your little wife.”
Gabriel turned and kissed her soft, rosy cheek with great frankness and warmth. “If you will,” he said, “I’ll promise not to worry your puppets any more. I don’t know how it is,” he continued reflectively, “but there’s something that makes a boy feel to a puppet like a dog does to a cat—he must worry it.”
“There was the one you roasted last Lammastide,” said Hilary, sadly.
“But you know it did make a glorious bonfire, and you enjoyed that part of it,” said Gabriel, with mirth in his eyes.
“But I wanted the puppet back again afterwards.”
“Well, well, I must try to remember you like the wretches. And you must really remember your promise, and not chop and change any more!”
“What does chop mean?”
“Go up and down like the sea; don’t you know how old Nat the sailor says the sea was a bit choppy?”
“I won’t be like the sea,” said Hilary, her lovely little face flushing and her eyes shining. “I give you my real true promise to be your wife.”
Gabriel did not repeat the kiss, for at that moment there flashed into his mind a fresh idea.
“Hilary,” he exclaimed, “let us build a snow monument to Sir John Eliot; he shall lie in effigy like Bishop Swinfield in the cathedral.”
“But your arm?”
“I can work with the right one,” he replied, cheerfully, and the two were soon as happy as could be fashioning their recumbent snow man.
Later on Dr. Harford, passing down the south walk arm-inarm with Hilary’s father, and still discussing the sad news brought by Sir Robert Harley, drew his friend’s attention to the busy little pair.
“They make excellent playmates,” said Frank Unett. “What would I not give for the hope of living to see my little maid grow up! But it will not be; Sir John Eliot’s malady will carry me off long ere that.”
Dr. Harford knew only too well that his companion spoke the truth, but he answered cheerfully, “You cannot look forward to long life, but with care you will be spared to us for some years, I trust.”
“I should not dread leaving my wife and child behind were not the times so dark,” said the invalid. “’Tis true my father-in-law is a learned and worthy man, but his views are not mine. Do what you can for them, Bridstock, they will need staunch friends.”
“Sir, sir,” said Gabriel, running towards them, “pray do come and see the monument we have made to Sir John Eliot.”
The two gentlemen praised the work.
“And what do you know of Sir John?” said Mr. Unett, with a smile.
“I know how brave he was,” said Gabriel, “and that he died to save us from being made slaves.”
“He heard Sir Robert reading the news-letter,” said Dr. Harford, putting his hand tenderly on Gabriel’s head. “Somehow a child always contrives to go straight to the mark and grasp the essential point of a tale.”
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” murmured Frank Unett, glancing from the eager-faced children to the snow effigy—the only monument brave John Eliot was like to have in the land for which he died. “But what’s amiss with your arm, lad?”
“Sir Robert’s dog bit it, but my father has cured it again,” said Gabriel, sturdily.
“It was my fault, father,” said Hilary; “we were quarrelling.”
“Eh? What was the disputed point? You two are for ever arguing.”
“Yet their greatest punishment is to be apart,” said Dr. Harford, with his genial laugh.
“I said I wouldn’t be Gabriel’s wife,” said Hilary, hanging her head. “But we’ve made it up again, and I have given him my promise.”
“Oh, you have, have you?” said her father, laughing; “and without so much as a ‘by your leave’ to me? Well, I could wish you no better lot. He will make a rare good husband, an I am not much mistaken.”
“Come, Frank, you ought not to stand still this cold day,” said the doctor; “’tis time you were in the house again.” They moved on, the invalid still smiling over his daughter’s words.
“The little minx!” he continued. “How innocently she said it. I should be heartily glad should their childish notion be carried out later on.”
“Stranger things have happened, Frank,” said the doctor, with a smile; “and I should be glad to have pretty Hilary for a daughter-in-law.”
“I wonder what she will grow up?” said the invalid. “Well,” with a sigh, “I shall not be here to see.”
“Look, here comes that bustling housekeeper of yours,” said the doctor, not sorry to turn the conversation. “Well, Mrs. Durdle, are you come to upbraid the physician for keeping your master out of doors?”
A stout, buxom, cheery-looking woman came hurrying towards them through the wicket-gate which led into the adjoining garden.
“Why, no, sir,” she said, breathlessly, “though if I may make bold to say so, I think master would be a deal better by the hearth than out in the sun this December day; but the Christmas puddings, sir, are ready for stirring, and I was coming to bid the children take their turn, or they will have no luck at all next year.”
“Heathen superstition, Mrs. Durdle,” said the doctor, with a smile. “But make not over-much of the bite Gabriel hath received, for in this case, truly, least said soonest mended. Tell him no tales about those that die of a dog-bite.” The housekeeper promised and went in search of the children.
“Not but what I know many a tale,” she reflected. “And, Lord! what a terrible thing it would be if the doctor should lose his son that way. They would bury the little lad in the cathedral, doubtless, for the Harfords, they come of a great family, as old as any in the county. I should go myself to help lay him out—that servant of theirs is a feckless wench. Oh, gracious me! Why, they’re already making his tomb!” and in amaze she looked at the two children, who were putting the last touches to their snow monument.
“Lor’ bless my heart, dearies!” exclaimed Mrs. Durdle, “what do you make that corpse-like thing for? Why couldn’t you keep to an honest Jack Frost with a pipe in his mouth?”
“Why, Durdle, ’tis Sir John Eliot, the Parliament man. We’re making his monument.”
“Well, what can put such an idea into the child’s head as to make a monument to a Parliament man? We’re not going to have no more Parliaments they tell me, and a good job, too. Done without them these many years well enough, says I. Come in now, my dearies. Come and stir the Christmas puddings—here’s nigh upon a week past since ‘Stir-up Sunday.’”
The children were always glad of an excuse to visit the kitchen, where Durdle, a cheerful, chatty soul, ever gave them a hearty welcome. They wanted no second bidding, and were soon perched on the table with the huge pudding-crock between them and two strong wooden spoons.
“Wish, Hilary; it’s no good stirring unless you wish,” said Gabriel, swinging his legs, while he meditated what gift to ask of fortune.
“I wish for a beautiful new puppet at Christmas,” said Hilary, without the smallest hesitation.
A flush rose to Gabriel’s forehead; he felt pricked at heart, and was on the point of assuring her that he himself would make that wish true. But the old loathing of puppets died hard. He remained prudently silent.
Next came Mrs. Durdle herself with a wish about her valentine in the coming year, which the children thought profoundly uninteresting. What could a widow of thirty have to do with valentines, indeed?
“And now, Master Gabriel, for your wish,” said Durdle, as the boy still hesitated.
“Yes, Gabriel, yours—be quick!” adjured Hilary.
He grasped the spoon and stirred the pudding vigorously, with an odd, far-away look on his intent face.
“Well,” asked his companions, “what did you wish?”
“Oh, that,” said Gabriel, colouring as he slipped down from the table—“that’s my secret.”
And neither Durdle’s cajoling nor Hilary’s earnest entreaties could make him say another word about the matter.
Before long, moreover, Hilary was summoned to her mother’s room, and Gabriel ran home through the garden, pausing for one last look at the snow monument by the south walk.
“I wish to be like you,” he whispered to the effigy of Sir John Eliot; “I wish to give my life for the country’s freedom.” Then, without a thought of what his wish might involve, he ran cheerfully home along the frosty paths singing a snatch of the old Bosbury carol:
“Oh! praise the Lord with one accord,
All you that present be;
For Christ, God’s Son, has brought pardon
All for to make us free.”
From all vain pomps and shows,
From the pride that overflows.
And the false conceits of men,
From all the narrow rules
And subtleties of schools,
And the craft of tongue and pen;
Bewildered in its search,
Bewildered with the cry
“Lo, here! lo, there, the Church!”
Poor, sad Humanity
Through all the dust and heat
Turns back with bleeding feet,
By the weary road it came,
Unto the simple thought,
By the great Master taught,
And that remaineth still:
Not he that repeateth the name,
But he that doeth the will!
—Longfellow.
Frank Unett had spoken truly—it was impossible that he should live to see his child grow up; yet he made a hard fight with death, and, thanks to the tender nursing of his wife and the rare skill of his friend, Dr. Bridstock Harford, lived for some time after that December day when Hilary’s future had been spoken of.
It always seemed to Gabriel that their childhood ended at his funeral, for then it was that they learnt of the separation in store for them. Hilary was to go with her mother for a long visit to some of her father’s kinsfolk, and by the time she returned his own schooldays would have begun, Dr. Harford having decided to send him to Gloucester with Sir Robert Harley’s son Ned, a boy some eighteen months his junior.
Very sorrowfully did the playmates take leave of each other, and Gabriel moped about sadly, understanding for the first time what it meant to be an only child.
It was on one of the days when he was missing his playfellow most that Hereford was thrown into a state of unwonted excitement by a visitation from Archbishop Laud. Gabriel found great relief and satisfaction in the crowded streets and the gala aspect of the city with its flags and decorations. But he was disappointed to find that the Archbishop himself was a little hard-featured, cold-eyed man in whom he could feel no interest at all.
“There was nothing to see but clothes,” he said afterwards to his father. “Except for them his Grace was just a common little man, much like Dickon, the tailor, in Eign street.”
Dr. Harford laughed. “I do not think his Grace is a large man either in body or mind,” he said. “But there is no doubt he is a good man, Gabriel.”
“You do not, then, hold with Sir Robert Harley,” said his wife, “that the Archbishop would fain hand England over to the Pope.”
“No, no, Elizabeth; Sir Robert is ever haunted by that terror. ’Tis a view held, indeed, by many, and doubtless the Archbishop’s innovations and unwise ceremonies give colour to the charge. Also he deals out harder measure to the sectaries than to the Papists. But though I loathe his ear-croppings and nose slittings, I don’t believe him to be a traitor to Protestantism,” said the doctor. “On the contrary, I know of a gentleman of this county whom he dissuaded from becoming a Papist.”
It chanced the next morning that Dr. Harford had to visit a patient in the direction of Brampton Bryan, and the day being very fine he told Gabriel that he would take him as his companion, and that afterwards he should see his future schoolfellow. There were few treats the boy enjoyed more than a ride with his father, for Dr. Harford was a great naturalist, and there were countless things to interest him in the Herefordshire lanes—details that Gabriel would never have observed at all if left to himself. They had not gone far along Bridge street that morning, however, when a messenger came running across the road with a paper, which he thrust into the doctor’s hand.
“I am loth to be the bearer of this, sir, but a man must do the work of his office,” he said, apologetically.
The doctor reined in his horse to read the paper, and Gabriel, glancing up at him from his sturdy little pony “Joyce,” saw a look of intense annoyance upon his face.
“When am I to come?” he asked.
“At once, sir, if you please,” said the messenger, respectfully. “’Tis very much against the will of every Hereford man, you may be sure, sir, but we have no choice in the matter.”
“Well, I will go without delay; ’tis at the Archdeacon’s court, I suppose?”
The messenger replied in the affirmative, and the doctor touched up his horse and went off at such a brisk pace that Joyce’s short legs had some difficulty in keeping abreast of his roan mare. Arrived at his destination, he dismounted and threw the reins to his groom.
“I shall not be long, Gabriel,” he said, looking round at his son as he entered the building.
A vague uneasiness filled the lad’s mind. What was the matter, and why was Simon the groom speedily surrounded by a small crowd of eager questioners? Among them he could see old Nat the sailor, his wrinkled face bearing a look of indignation which he had never before seen there.
“Nat,” he called, “pray come and speak with me. What does it all mean?”
“Why, master,” said the old man, “it means that Archbishop Laud has summoned the best man in all Hereford because, forsooth, he does not bow his head to order in the church.”
“Oh! Nat, you don’t think they’ll cut off his ears, do you?” said the boy in an agony, remembering in a flash all the gruesome and, alas! true tales he had heard of such practices.
“I don’t know, master, but Simon here thinks it’s a matter of paying a fine. I’m going into the court to see for myself.”
In a trice Gabriel had dismounted. “Take me with you, Nat—please do,” he said. He was small for his years, and doubted whether the officials would let him pass alone, but his confidence in the old sailor was unbounded, and Nat made no objection, but led the boy into the Archdeacon’s court, where on the very last bench they found a spare place.
However small, however ill-furnished, there is generally something impressive about a court. To-day, moreover, all the diocesan officials were removed from their customary places, while raised above the ordinary mortals Archbishop Laud sat in a great chair of state. In the next tier were seated his vicar-general and various subordinate officials; while to the left side, at a lower level, stood Dr. Bridstock Harford. The doctor, who had married extremely early in his medical student days, was now not very much over thirty, a vigorous, intellectual-looking man, with one of those strong, quiet faces which inspire confidence. As Nat and Gabriel entered he had been asked what he had to say in defence, and Gabriel’s heart pounded in his breast as he listened to the calm, courteous reply.
“Your Grace,” said the doctor, “it is true that I have never practised any bowings or genuflexions, and for these reasons: First, nothing in Holy Writ seems to warrant it, the oft-quoted verse, ‘At the Name shall every knee bow,’ being, as all Greek students are well aware, truly the assertion that in the name of Christ all shall pray or worship. In another Scripture I read that God doth in no wise care that a man should bow his head like a bulrush; and in yet another that ‘God hath made men upright, but they have sought out many inventions.’ But, your Grace, what chiefly moves me to shun these formal bowings is the belief that in all matters of religion there should be a deep reserve betwixt the soul and God. Surely a reverence that is both sincere and profound seeks rather to express itself by inward and spiritual adoration than by any muscular movements, or ceremonies that are visible to others and which may become as like as not either Pharisaical or merely automaton-like. Christ spoke of a worship that should be in spirit and in truth, but gave us only two ceremonies, and those the simplest conceivable. For these reasons I object to complying with the order.”
The harsh voice of the Archbishop broke the silence which followed. It was utterly impossible for him to understand any side of a question but his own, and his fatal lack of sympathetic insight blinded him to the noble nature of the man he was dealing with.
“Your arguings, sir,” he remarked, “are what I should have expected from one of the teachers of science, falsely so called. Well was it written, ‘Knowledge puffeth up.’ How intractable, how lacking in humility is your nature I call on all here to witness.”
The doctor’s colour rose a little. He seemed about to reply, but thought better of it and held his peace. From the back of the court, however, came angry murmurs, for few men were more popular in Hereford. The people did not trouble at all about his views, but almost all of them knew what he was in times of sickness or distress. Nat, the sailor, swore beneath his breath in a soft monotone which seemed to relieve him, and Gabriel, with eyes like two live coals, slipped quietly through the crowd and made his way to his father’s side, craving to be as near him as possible.
“Will you solemnly undertake never again to offend in this matter?” was the next question.
“Your Grace,” replied the doctor, “I can undertake nothing of the sort, but do claim my right to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath set us free, and not to be entangled again in the yoke of bondage.”
“Then every time you do not bow at the sacred Name be well assured that you will be fined,” was the sharp retort, and sentence of the Court with the amount of fine was duly pronounced.
Gabriel breathed more freely. It was not a question of earcropping; but his heart burned with wrath at the way in which the Archbishop rebuked his father, and drawing nearer to him, he caught his hand in his and kissed it with a devotion and reverence that touched more than one spectator.
“Your own son teaches you that outward ceremonies are not valueless,” said the Archbishop.
“Your Grace,” said Dr. Harford, looking up with an unusual light in his quiet eyes, “should I value my little son’s demonstration if there were compulsion in it—if it were a ceremony performed at fixed moments? And would it be worth aught to me if he were fined so many shillings for omitting it? Pardon my outspokenness, but your Grace, though a learned man, knows naught of fatherhood.”
“Remove this prating Puritan and let the next case be called,” said the Archbishop, harshly.
And as Dr. Harford and Gabriel moved away, the court rang with the clerk’s stentorian voice shouting, “Mary Boswood, on a charge of refusing to wear a white veil when returning thanks after childbirth.”
As they passed down the gangway they met the unlucky matron with flushed face and tearful eyes making her way to the place they had quitted, and deeming it a very hard thing that she, who had been a virtuous wedded wife for years, should be dragged into court for refusing to wear, as she expressed it, “a thing as like as two peas to the white sheet in which bad women did penance.”
Gabriel gave a gasp of relief when once more they breathed the fresh outer air. He ran to Joyce and patted her neck and fondled her soft ears before mounting. Then in silence the father and son rode away together, not speaking at all until they had left the city and had had a good gallop over the broad strip of grass that bordered the road to Brampton Bryan.
“That has refreshed you, lad,” said the doctor, glancing at the grave face beside him, “and yet you look as though you had something on your mind.”
“Father,” said Gabriel, vehemently, “I hate Archbishop Laud with my whole heart! Yet you said he was a good man!”
“Indeed I believe him to be a very good man, but he hath more zeal than discretion, and forgets that ‘the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart.’ Dr. Laud will one day find that he is making a great mistake. He is trying with all his might to make folks better by outward observances, by making clean the cup and the platter; that is to put the cart before the horse. You must first make them pure within, or you will but breed up a generation of ceremonious hypocrites and Pharisees.”
“It is because of the discourteous way he spoke to you, sir, that I hate him,” said Gabriel, fiercely.
“Nay, hate him not; I fared much better than I should have done had I been a parson. They tell me that twenty clergy have been deprived of their livings, only for this refusal to bow. As for the Archbishop’s discourtesy, which makes him so much disliked by the gentry of the land, that is not altogether his fault, perhaps, for he had neither good birth nor good breeding. He said that ‘Knowledge puffeth up,’ and I was much minded to quote him the rest of the verse—‘but love buildeth up.’ Depend on it, my son, ’tis that love alone which can save our unhappy country in these difficult times.”
“Will they still be difficult when I am a man?” asked Gabriel.
“I fear they will,” said the doctor, gravely. “Therefore remember that you hate no man, howsoever his sayings and doings may offend you. Have your own faith, but see that you force it not on others, as is too much the custom; for Dr. Laud is wrong—compulsion never yet helped the good cause. What would you think of a physician who thought all men’s ailments were to be treated alike? Men’s souls are as different as their bodies, and their minds are cast in many moulds. The wise servant of Christ knows this, and seeks not to browbeat all men till they conform to one method. Never forget, lad, that your meat may be another man’s poison. There is only one infallible remedy, and as the proverb hath it, ‘Amor vincit omnia!”
By this time they had reached the house of the first patient, and Gabriel was sent on with the groom to the neighbouring inn to order their noontide meal. When this had been discussed, and he had listened to the cheerful talk between his father and the landlord on the prospects of the crops, he had altogether forgotten Dr. Laud and his harsh words, and thought the world once more a pleasant place.
There was much, too, to divert his mind when they reached Brampton Bryan Castle. He quickly fraternised with Ned, the eldest son, and quite lost his heart to sweet-faced Lady Brilliana, Sir Robert’s wife. She had travelled much, and had lived for many years in Holland, so that her talk was infinitely more easy as well as more interesting than that of any other lady he had met. Moreover, while Sir Robert was of the somewhat hard and narrow Puritan school, she was surely the gentlest Puritan dame that ever breathed, and seemed full of kindness to all, whatever their views. He began on that day, as they wandered about the castle, a friendship with Ned which was to last all through his life, and his pity for his father was great when, on returning from the most delightful scramble about the battlements, they found Sir Robert Harley still discoursing on the vestments—and what he indignantly called the ‘altar-ducking’—which Archbishop Laud had ordered in Hereford Cathedral.
He was destined to hear much more of the Archbishop when, his schooldays ended, he was sent, at the age of fifteen, to Oxford with Ned Harley. They were entered at Magdalene Hall, at that time an especially Puritan college, and here his distrust of Dr. Laud and his ways increased not a little. For he rebelled with all his might against the Archbishop’s notion of driving and coercing men into the ways he deemed best for them. Dr. Laud might, as his father always maintained, be a good man, but he was good after a fashion which stirred up all the combative elements in Gabriel’s nature.
Meanwhile Hilary Unett was being educated after a very different fashion. On her return from visiting her Unett kinsfolk she scarcely stirred from home, and her interests were entirely bound up in the quiet cathedral town. It chanced that after two or three rapid changes at the Palace her grandfather, Bishop Coke, had been translated from Bristol to the see of Hereford. He was a good and kind-hearted man, with a great reputation for learning; but now that Mr. Unett was dead, and Gabriel only in Hereford at rare intervals, it naturally followed that every influence round the girl was ecclesiastical. She therefore almost inevitably fell into the way of looking at all questions from the palace point of view.
Now and then, as he watched her, Dr. Harford would recall her father’s words on the day they had heard of Eliot’s death; but as he thought how the paths of the boy and girl were already beginning to diverge, that dream of a future union looked less and less probable.
He sighed as in imagination he looked down the vista of the coming years, plainly foreseeing that stormy times were in store for the nation, and that grave troubles and divisions awaited every household in the land. But he was not a man of many words, and he kept his musings to himself.
This is the time when bit by bit
The days begin to lengthen sweet,
And every minute gained is joy,
And love stirs in the heart of a boy.
This is the time the sun, of late
Content to lie abed till eight,
Lifts up betimes his sleepy head,
And love stirs in the heart of a maid.
—Katherine Tynan Hinkson.
It was in the spring of 1640, just when King Charles had dissolved the Short Parliament, after its three weeks’ existence, that Hilary made a discovery. She possessed a voice, a voice which, after a few lessons from the Cathedral organist, proved to be a source of real pleasure to herself and others. This event meant much more to her than the fact that England had again relapsed into the woeful plight of the last eleven years, and was once more without a Parliament. At every spare minute she was practising her guitar, or singing scales and songs, and thus it very naturally fell about that Gabriel, returning from Oxford that summer, was greeted, as he hastened along the south walk to the little gate which made the boundary between the two gardens, by a song “more tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear.” Stealing quietly forward, he could catch the words, which were set to the pathetic air of “Bara Fostus’ Dream”;
Come, sweet love, let sorrow cease,
Banish frowns, leave off dissension,
Love’s wars make the sweetest peace,
Hearts uniting by contention.
Sunshine follows after rain,
Sorrows ceasing, this is pleasing,
All proves fair again,
After sorrow soon comes joy;
Try me, prove me, trust me, love me,
This will cure annoy.
The voice was a mezzo-soprano, with that strange gift of individual charm, without which far finer voices fail to please. It seemed to witch the very heart of the listener, and Gabriel, determined as he was not to disturb the song, was all on fire to see the singer.
As she played the interlude on the guitar at the end of the first verse he stole over the grass, and, climbing up the old filbert tree, swung himself noiselessly on to the wall, and looked down eagerly through the leafy branches. Not far off, at the opposite end of a grassy glade, sat Hilary, her soft brown curls, held back by a snood of pink ribbon, but falling nevertheless about her comely face as she bent over the guitar. She wore a pale grey gown with dainty trimmings of pink, and the delicate colouring of her sweet womanly face made one think of apple-blossom.
Gabriel’s heart throbbed fast. Was this the child he had once teased? The companion he had sometimes wished a boy to share his rougher sports? The playmate he had quarrelled with so often, and kissed with careless kindliness when the dispute had ended? How had he ever dared to do it all? Then again the song thrilled him
Winter hides his frosty face,
Blushing now to be more viewed:
Spring return’d with pleasant grace,
Flora’s treasures are renewed;
Lambs rejoice to see the spring,
Skipping, leaping, sporting, playing,
Birds for joy do sing.
So let the spring of joy renew,
Laughing, colling, kissing, playing,
And give love his due.
Gabriel’s longing to see the singer’s downcast eyes almost overcame him but he waited while once more the bird-like voice rang through the quiet garden—
Then, sweet love, disperse this cloud,
That obscures this scornful coying;
When each creature sings aloud,
Filling hearts with over-joying.
As every bird doth choose her mate,
Gently billing, she is willing
Her true love to take.
With such words let us contend
(Laughing, colling, kissing, playing),
So our strife shall end.
Gabriel swung himself down by the filbert tree, brushed the dust from his dark green doublet, set his broad-brimmed hat at the correct angle with unusual care, and made his way through the gate as though he had never climbed a tree or lounged upon a wall in his life.
Who would have dreamed that to walk down that familiar glade to greet Hilary, would ever have caused his throat to grow dry and his breath to come in so strange a fashion, for all the world as though he were running a race! At last she looked up, and with a glad cry rose to welcome him; the guitar slipped unheeded on to the grass, and both her hands caught his, while her dark grey eyes smiled in a way that fairly dazzled the youth, who had but just realised that he was her lover.
“So you have come from Oxford at last,” she cried. “How long it is since we met!” He stooped to kiss her hand.
“Surely it was in some other life!” he said, with a strange feeling that suddenly all things had become new.
She laughed gaily as they sat down side by side. “Here, at any rate, is the same old stone bench where you and I used to learn our lessons,” she said. “And yonder is the stump to which you tied my puppet the day you played at Smithfield martyrs.”
“What a little brute I was.”
“You were a rare hand at teasing; but I’ll never forget it to you that you rescued my Bartholomew babe from the power of the dog. How the wretch bit your arm!”
“I am much indebted to him,” said Gabriel, smiling, “and would not for the world lose that honourable scar. Nothing would please me more than to suffer again in your service.”
His face was aglow, and Hilary, with a little stirring of the heart, turned from him and plucked a rose from the great hush of sweet-briar growing near the bench.
There was a minute’s silence, broken by the snapping of one of her guitar strings. She took a fresh string from the case, and was about to put it on, when she found the guitar quietly taken from her.
“Let me do that,” said Gabriel, pleadingly; and Hilary, with a novel sense of pleasure in being helped, allowed him to have his way, glancing now and again at his intent face, which was the same, yet not the the same, she had known all her life.
Truth to tell, Gabriel was no lover of books; he had not at all the look of the pallid student, and had burnt no midnight oil at Oxford. But the University life had changed him from boy to man, his chest was a good two inches broader from rowing; he had an air of health and vigour, and the clearly-cut features, which were of the Roman type, had kept their refinement, but had lost the stamp of physical delicacy they had once borne.
“How well I remember Nero’s onslaught that day,” said Hilary. “It was the day we heard of Sir John Eliot’s death in the Tower.”
“Did you hear that Mr. Valentine and Mr. Strode, who were imprisoned at the same time as Sir John Eliot, were released last January? They had been in gaol nigh upon eleven years,” said Gabriel; and as he looked up from the guitar, Hilary saw an indignant gleam in his hazel eyes which startled her.
“Now you look as you used to look when we quarrelled,” she said, smiling. “By the bye, what did we quarrel about the day the dog bit you? I have quite forgot.”
“We wrangled over something in the sun-trap,” said Gabriel, his eyes growing tender once more. “What was it?”
Laughingly they both turned their minds back to the days when they had been children together, and presently, in a flash, the whole scene came back to them. Once again Hilary saw her father’s look of amusement as she gave her childish explanation of the dispute, “I said I wouldn’t be Gabriel’s wife, but we have made it up again, and I have given him my promise.”
The colour surged up into her face as for an instant she met Gabriel’s eyes, for in their liquid depths she could read love and eager hope, and withal just a touch of the mirthful expression which she knew so well of old. She knew that he, too, had heard that voice from the past.
Dropping the briar rose and hastily taking the guitar, she began to tune the string he had just fixed. The sound awoke Gabriel to the consciousness that they were not alone in the world, that the garden was no Garden of Eden, and that lovemaking was not so simple as in the days of their childhood. He remembered Mrs. Unett and Bishop Coke, who would assuredly have much to say as soon as this Midsummer’s dream had formed itself into words. “Sing to me,” he said, when the string at length was in tune. “So far I have but heard Bara Fostus from the other side of the wall—a sweet air, but somewhat melancholy.”
Hilary racked her brain for a song which was not a love song, but failed to find anything better than “Phyllis on the New-Mown Hay,” which she sang with a spirit so gay and debonnair, and a voice so exquisitely fresh, that Gabriel’s passion was increased ten-fold. Like the lover in the song, he bid fair to be a most “faithful Damon,” and Hilary knew it, and wondered how it had come to pass that but an hour before they had been well content to think of each other merely as old friends and playfellows.
They were deep in conversation when, looking up, Hilary saw her grandfather slowly pacing down the garden. The Palace was not far from Mrs. Unett’s house, and the old man loved to escape from the state and ceremony that surrounded him, and to enjoy the quiet of his daughter’s home. Gabriel, who had been much away from Hereford, had only met the Bishop occasionally. But when at Oxford he had heard complaints of the tyranny, the mischief-making and the political intrigues of bishops in general, he had always looked on their own Bishop as a remarkable exception to the general rule. Glancing now at the stately old man, whose scholarly face bore a striking resemblance to that of his brother, Sir John Coke, the recently-dismissed Secretary of State, he knew that he was confronting the arbiter of his fate, and noted with relief the kindly look in the Bishop’s eyes as he caught sight of them.
“So, Mr. Harford, you are returned to us once more,” said the old man, giving him a courteous greeting. “I heard my granddaughter’s voice, but did not know of your arrival.”
“The plague is increasing at Oxford, my lord,” said Gabriel; “and it was thought best that we should not remain there. I returned to Brampton Bryan with Ned Harley.”
The name of Harley brought a shadow over the Bishop’s face, for Sir Robert’s Puritanism met with little favour in the county. He reflected with some uneasiness that Gabriel Harford was of the same persuasion, in all probability, and not altogether a good companion for Hilary.
“Sing to us, child,” he said, glancing at his granddaughter and Hilary, who had noted his change of expression, began his favourite air
“Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings!”
The song soon lulled the old Bishop into tranquility; he had taken out his ivory tablets with the intention of making some such entry as this: “Mem: to warn my daughter not to countenance any matrimonial proposal in respect of G. H. and Hilary.” For was it not well known that Dr. Harford had spoken strongly against the war in Scotland—“the Bishops’ war,” now in progress—and who could tell what difficulties might arise in the future? But somehow, as the song proceeded, he slid into a state of dreamy content, and noted instead on the tablets a fresh idea for his treatise on the Epistle to the Colossians, which was suggested in part by the music and in part by the faces of Gabriel and Hilary. He looked benevolently across at the two young people, his mind hovering betwixt heaven and earth and the grievous divisions of his day all forgot.
Thus it chanced that through the halcyon days of that wonderful summer, Gabriel wooed Hilary in peace until, one morning, early in September, he found the present not sufficient for him, but must needs try to ensure the future, and hear from her own lips the promise that would set him at rest.
They had been out riding with the doctor, but had found the day hot, and, leaving the horses with the groom, had wandered across a bit of wild country bordering the road, to find rest and shelter in a little wood. Great beech trees made a solemn shade over the russet carpet of last year’s leaves, and here and there the sunbeams slanting through the branches turned the russet to gold and threw a silvery sheen over the brake fern growing around. The robins sang cheerfully overhead, and now and then a squirrel would dance from branch to branch scampering the faster as it caught sight of the two intruders resting in the shade beneath.
The very quiet of the place made Gabriel think involuntarily of the strange contrast to be found in “towered cities” amid “the busy hum of men.” Surely never again would he find so sweet a paradise in which to speak his love. The audacity of his childhood filled him now with amaze. What would he not have given for the easy flow of words which had then been at his command?
“This is perfection,” said Hilary, taking off her hat and fanning herself leisurely with a great fern.
“There is one thing wanting,” said Gabriel.
“You are exacting,” said Hilary, with a little rippling laugh. “What more can heart desire?”
“A bliss that would last,” said Gabriel, his voice trembling.
“Ah! but that is asking too much,” she answered, musingly. “Nothing lasts.”
“Nothing but love,” he said, in a tone that made her lift her eyes to his, and speedily drop them.
The colour rushed to her face, but her confusion seemed to cheer him.
“Hilary,” he exclaimed, “do you not know that I love you? You who first wakened love in me—who first made me truly live—surely you must know? I love you with all my being; only be mine—be mine.”
“I am your friend,” she faltered—“have ever been your friend.”
“Friendship is not enough,” he said, eagerly; “that was for childish days, but now—now—it is death to me to be without you. I am yours, body and soul. Give me hope, Hilary; give me hope!”
She raised her head and looked into his eager, hazel eyes, reading there the utter devotion of a first genuine passion, “I give you my heart,” she said in a voice so soft that the words seemed more breathed than spoken, and the robin which had been the sole spectator of this love scene ventured a little nearer, even as she spoke, only taking flight when Gabriel caught her in his arms for what seemed the first kiss he had ever given her, so strangely did it differ from the careless salute of their childhood.
The robin sang overhead now, and sang so blithely that even the happy lovers gave heed to the song.
“’Tis the sweetest I ever heard,” said Hilary. “Or is it that all things seem more beautiful because of love?”
“That must be it. Hitherto we have but dreamed; now we are awake, and this is the joy that lasts.”
So they lived through that exquisite dawn of love, and their bliss knew no alloy until the ruthless groom strode into the wood.
“I ha’ tethered the horses to the gibbet, sir,” he said to Gabriel, “and ha’ come to tell ye that the doctor is in sight.”
The lovers started to their feet. Suddenly to see Simon’s uncomprehending face; suddenly to hear the ill-omened word “gibbet,” roused them roughly enough from their paradise. They hurriedly left the little wood, not once even looking back, for was not Simon tramping heavily behind them, driving them forth into the thorns and thistles of the world just as effectually as if he had been the angel with the flaming sword!
He cannot lie a perfect man
Not being tried and tutored in the world.
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
In the seventeenth century marriages, as a rule, were arranged in a very formal fashion by parents or guardians; then, after letters relating to money matters had passed on both sides, the young people were encouraged to meet. But the lifelong intimacy between Gabriel and Hilary had set ordinary customs aside, and before Mrs. Unett had in the least awakened to the idea that the old friendship had changed and developed, the morning in the wood had altered the whole course of her daughter’s life.
In the Palace at Hereford it chanced strangely enough that on that very day another matrimonial project was being discussed, for late in the previous evening Dr. William Coke, of Bromyard, one of Hilary’s uncles, had unexpectedly arrived to see the Bishop, bringing with him a formal letter of proposal for the hand of his niece from one Mr. Geers, of Garnons, a rich squire who had long been his friend. At the precise moment when Gabriel was confessing his love in the uninterrupted quiet of the coppice, and Simon the groom shrewdly guessing as he waited at the gibbet that “young maister was lommaking in the ripple,” a grave discussion was going on in the Bishop’s study.
“You see, daughter,” said the old man, persuasively, “this proposal deserves consideration. Mr. Geers is a worthy man, and the settlement he would make is altogether satisfactory.”
“Yet he is over old for Hilary,” sighed the mother. “He would wish to wed without delay, and how can I spare my child?”
“She would still be in the county,” said her brother cheerily; “however, I don’t wish to plead for the gentleman, I am but his ambassador, not his advocate.”
Mrs. Unett looked with relief at the speaker. The parson had always been her favourite brother. He had appreciated her husband and had shared to a certain extent in his views, which had not been the case with any other member of the Coke family. Then, too, he was so kindly, so genial; he had such a keen enjoyment of life and contrived to make his antiquarian pursuits so extremely amusing to other people. Unlike some hobby-riders, he was never a bore, and to see his good-natured face beam with satisfaction when he discovered a treasure for his collection was a thing to remember. His rare visits to Hereford never failed to delight both Hilary and her mother.
“Tell me what you advise, brother,” said Mrs. Unett.
The parson laughed.
“You could not appeal to a worse man,” he said. “I am an indifferent good judge of old oak, and know something of fossils, but of love matters I am as ignorant as a child of seven. It seems that worthy Mr. Geers wants a wife, he is not blessed as I am with the love of antiquities, and he finds his country mansion wondrous dull. If Hilary pines for a husband, why, then, I should advise you to let the gentleman woo her.”
“I am very sure she is in no haste to wed,” said Mrs. Unett, “she is not yet eighteen, and would be loth to leave her home.”
“My dear, ’tis a good offer, and should not lightly be disregarded,” said the Bishop. “In many ways it would be well that Hilary should be established, and her future happiness secured.”
“Is that so easily done?” said Dr. Coke, with a quizzical smile. “Future happiness comes not with broad lands and a full purse. Perchance pretty Hilary would find the great mansion dull; or, again, she might, like a dame I once met, confess that the estate was all that could be wished, and that for the man—why, he was but a passing evil, and came of a short-lived family.”
Mrs. Unett smiled at his droll voice as he quoted the philosophical wife.
“Hilary is not made after that pattern,” she said. “Truth to tell, the maid has a will of her own, and is a trifle fastidious.”
“My dear,” said the Bishop, “she is a good, obedient maid, and if we show her that this arrangement is for her good, I make no doubt she will accept Mr. Geers’ suit.”
Dr. Coke smiled at his sister’s dubious expression.
“Are we so sure it is for her good?” he said. “Let the little maid see her suitor and judge for herself. But I must not stay talking any longer of marrying and giving in marriage, for I am to visit Sir Richard Hopton at Canon Frome on my way home. Do you entrust me with a message to the owner of Garnons? He comes to stay with me to-morrow.”
“Thank him for his courtesy, and say that we shall gladly receive him as a guest next week, if it suits his convenience,” said the Bishop. “The two had best meet as you suggest, and we shall see what time will bring forth.”
He returned to his treatise on the Colossians, and William Coke ordered his horse, kissed his sister, and, noticing her wistful expression, racked his kindly brain for some word that would cheer her.
“I am a doited old bachelor,” he said, smoothing back his grizzled hair and adjusting his wide felt hat. “But I somehow fancy Hilary will be in no haste to leave her mother for this worthy gentleman.”
Mrs. Unett sighed. Her voice had a mournful tone in it as she replied, “It is, after all, the way of the world, and what mothers must expect.”
He moved towards the door, but suddenly returned to her side with a broad smile on his ruddy face, and a world of fun in his twinkling eyes.
“Make yourself easy,” he said, “I don’t think she will accept him. I am the man’s ambassador, but there is one trifle I had forgot—I honestly admit that he squints.”
He rode off laughing to himself, and gave little more thought to the matter, for, as he had very truly remarked, love affairs were not at all in his line, and some interesting relics at Canon Frome drove both Hilary and her suitor from his mind.
The poor Bishop, however, was not long allowed to dwell on the spiritual characteristics of the men of Colosse; for in the late afternoon Dr. Harford craved an audience of him, and after due apologies for Gabriel’s impetuous love-making, told Hilary’s grandfather of Mr. Unett’s words in the past, and begged his consent to the union of the two old playmates.
The Bishop was dismayed at the proposal, and ruefully remembered that the dangers of constant intercourse had struck him when Gabriel returned from Oxford, but that a sudden idea as to the position of “Tychicus, a beloved brother and faithful minister,” had driven out the prudent reflection. His treatise had prospered wonderfully that summer, but meanwhile his granddaughter had been free to see as much as she pleased of the physician’s son.
“To be frank with you, sir,” he said, “I have other plans for Hilary, and am at this moment in treaty with Mr. Geers of Garnons. But even if she declines his suit, I am fain to confess that a marriage with your son is not what I should wish for her.”
“My lord, it was her father’s wish,” said Dr. Harford.
“Ay, but times have changed since the death of my son-inlaw. We do not think alike, either in religion or in politics, sir; and I should hesitate to give my grandchild in marriage to one likely to oppose me in matters both of Church and State.”
“The lad is scarce eighteen,” said Dr. Harford, “and is as yet a mere observer of current events. He hath, I am well assured, nought but respect and affection for you, my lord, and his whole heart is set on wedding Hilary. Other proposals may be in a worldly way more desirable, but the children have loved each other, if I mistake not, all their lives, and ’tis ill meddling with hearts.”
“The matter shall be referred to my daughter,” said the Bishop, rising. “Personally, I have nothing against your son; on the contrary, I think him full of promise. But he is over young to marry, and there are many objections to a long betrothal.”
Dr. Harford could only withdraw, and the Bishop, chafing a little at having to spend his time on these mundane matters, went to his daughter’s house to tell her what had passed.
Mrs. Unett had, however, already heard Hilary’s version of the story, and the thought of giving her daughter to Gabriel was so much more congenial to her than any notion of entertaining Mr. Geer’s proposal, that the Bishop found an opponent where he had looked for an ally. After a prolonged discussion, Mrs. Unett—never well able to resist the opinion of a man—sent for her daughter by way of support, and Hilary, who, after telling her mother of the events of the morning, had gone to her own chamber to dream it all over again, came down to the withdrawing room in no small trepidation.
“Child,” said the Bishop, “I have had a proposal for your hand.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said, curtseying as she approached him.
“Sit down, my dear, and let me tell you of the gentleman.”
Hilary’s eyes widened. Was Gabriel a gentleman she needed telling about? She could have laughed at the notion had not good manners obliged her to wait dutifully for the next remark.
“His estate is very large, and is in this county; although some years your senior, he is still only in middle life, and will, I am assured, make you an excellent husband.”
“Mother!” gasped Hilary, in dismay. “What does it mean?”
“Your grandfather refers to an offer from Mr. Geers, of Garnons, which he received before that of Mr. Harford. I think, my dear, you must at least see the gentleman next week when he stays at the Palace.”
“Certainly,” said the Bishop, with decision. “And I must tell you, Hilary, that his offer is not to be lightly refused. I cannot approve of any betrothal between you and Gabriel Harford, though very naturally some idle thoughts of love may have arisen from your being so much together.”
Hilary’s breath came fast. There was a choking feeling in her throat, nothing but pride kept her from tears—pride and a determination that, cost what it might, she would never yield.
“My lord,” she said, quietly; “I will certainly see Mr. Geers if it is your wish, but do not lead him to think that I shall accept his offer—that were impossible.”
“I very much wish you to accept the offer, but of course, I will not compel you, my child,” said the Bishop. “As to this other offer, however, I altogether disapprove of the notion, and I beg that you will discontinue all intercourse with Gabriel Harford.”
“My lord, he is the man my father wished me to marry,” said Hilary. “Does that count for nothing? He is the man to whom I have given my heart, does that weigh nought with you?”
There was a break in her voice, and a quivering of her lip as she spoke. The Bishop took her hand caressingly.
“Child, you are young—you are young,” he said, tenderly. “’Tis an easy matter to let the heart go to the first handsome face and the first flattering tongue that appeals to you. Believe me you have not yet seen enough of the world to judge. Gabriel Harford has a winsome way with him, but he is as yet wholly unformed, you cannot tell what he will grow into.”
“I love him—and can afford to trust the future,” said the girl, confidently.
The old Bishop shook his head sadly; nevertheless, the depth and reality of Hilary’s love had touched his heart.
“Let us leave it in this way,” he said. “See no more of the young man while he remains in Hereford. Give Mr. Geers a fair and unprejudiced hearing, and let us see what time will bring forth.” He rose to take leave of them, pausing at the door to counsel Mrs. Unett to send a letter without delay to Dr. Harford, acquainting him with their decision.
“It is better so, my child,” said the mother, when once more the two were by themselves. “Your grandfather is no doubt right. Gabriel is very young, and you cannot tell what manner of man he will be. I must write to his father. To do that does not rob you of all hope, it merely means that we must have good proof of Gabriel’s constancy before making promises as to the future.”
“We can wait,” said Hilary, firmly. But then she remembered the rapture of the morning, and the confident tone of Gabriel’s voice, as he said: “This is the joy that lasts.”
Alas! How soon had their day been over-clouded! She turned aside to the window and looked out at the cathedral through a mist of tears, hearing the scratching of her mother’s pen with a dull heartache. Presently down in the street below she saw a very carefully-dressed, spruce little lady, with grey curls and a benevolent face. It was kind-hearted Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, speaking to a little bare-footed lad and making him happy with a penny. In taking out her purse she dropped her handkerchief, and Hilary, running swiftly out of the room, threw open the front door and hastened to restore the handkerchief to its owner, The old maiden lady thanked her, but noticed the sad look in her eyes. “What is amiss, child?” she asked, stroking the girl’s cheek. “I met you riding this morning with a very different face.”
“Nothing lasts!” said Hilary, with tears in her voice.
“Yes, one thing,” said Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, a light dawning in her kind eyes. “There is an old poem in which you will find a truer saying, ‘All goeth but Godde’s will.’” The gentle little lady walked on, but although she said nothing, she was able to make a shrewd guess that her god-son, Gabriel Harford, was in some way the cause of Hilary’s trouble, and on reaching her house in Widemarsh street, she penned him a note inviting him to dine with her one day in the next week.
Hilary did not return to the withdrawing-room for fully half-an-hour, and then found that her mother was only just folding the formal letter, which had been hard to write. “May I enclose this to Gabriel, ma’am?” said the girl, putting a tiny sealed packet on the table.
“I do not think your grandfather would approve of a correspondence between you,” said Mrs. Unett, hesitating.
“’Tis not a letter—I will show it to you, if you wish, mother.”
The mother looked up into the dark eyes, saw the traces of tears, and forgot the Bishop’s prudent objections.
“I will send it, child,” she said, kissing her tenderly. “Do not think that I have forgot my own young days. And bear not so sad a face, Hilary, for I have great confidence in Gabriel, and would spare you to him in the future, more willingly than to any other man.”
Hilary’s face lighted up at these comfortable words. Surely time would prove to everyone’s satisfaction that they were indeed well suited to each other.
To fill up the hours of waiting Gabriel had gone out fishing, and when the light failed he lay on the bank of the river watching the dark trees as they stood out russet, grey and purple against the mellow evening sky, their heavy summer foliage hardly moving, so still was the air. All the world seemed beautiful, and he was far too happy to have any doubts. What could stand in his way when Hilary herself had owned her love? Not all the bishops in England could really interfere between them! And over and over in his mind there rang her softly spoken words, “I give you my heart.”
By this time surely his father’s visit to the palace would be well over, and the consent won? He sprang to his feet, shouldered his rod, and, with a glance at the fish he had caught, closed the basket, resolving to carry it to old Durdle, the housekeeper, for Mrs. Unett’s breakfast.
As he walked through the fields he whistled, “Phyllis on the New Mown Hay,” for sheer light-heartedness, and had some difficulty in pacing gravely through the streets when he reached the city. Old Nat, the sailor, meeting him in High Town, noticed his blithe face.
“Good e’en to you, sir,” he said, “you’re looking piert and heartful. Have ye had good luck?”
“Ay!” he replied, “it has been a lucky day with me. Look!” and he opened the basket. “You must have one of these fellows for your supper.”
With a cheery “Good night!” he passed on, leaving the old sailor divided between admiration of the trout and its donor.
“Takes after his father, he does,” muttered the old man, “an open hand and a good heart. But it’ll go hard with him in times like these, for he’s independent, and none too fond of knocking under to great folk.”
Twilight reigned in the house when Gabriel closed the front door behind him, but a streak of lamp-light came from the region of the study-door, and on entering the room he found his father and mother gravely discussing an open letter. Something in their faces struck a chill to his heart.
“Did you see the Bishop, sir?” he asked, eagerly.
“Sit down, lad,” said the doctor, pointing to a chair by the table which his patients were wont to occupy while he interviewed them. “Yes, I saw him; our talk was not satisfactory. Still, I would not have you lose heart altogether.”
The reaction from the morning was too great, however. Gabriel turned deathly white; he could not frame his lips to the question he longed, yet dreaded to put. The pain carried him back curiously to a former scene in that very room, when in an agony of nervous anticipation he had waited for the hot iron to be put on his mangled arm, and again he seemed to hear the words: “Nothing could daunt Sir John Eliot; cost what it might, he was ever true!” With an effort he pulled himself together.
“May I hear, sir, what actually passed?” he said.
And the doctor hastened to tell him all, then placed Mrs. Unett’s letter in his hands.
It was a kind, incoherent, weak letter, but Gabriel saw with relief that the writer did not at all favour the suit of Mr. Geers of Garnons. His mother, however, quickly dispelled what little consolation he had gained. There had never been much love lost between the two ladies.
“Never mind, my son,” she said. “In my opinion, you are very well out of the whole affair. Hilary is an only daughter, and has been spoilt and indulged by an over-fond parent, till she thinks everything must give way to her whims. Depend upon it, she would have been ill to live with.”
“I will wed none other,” said Gabriel, passionately, and, finding the discussion intolerable, he rose to go.
The doctor put a little packet into his hand. “It is for you,” he said. “Courage, lad! After all, the Bishop can but enforce a certain time of waiting on you if you are true to each other.”
The words carried some comfort with them, and hope rose again in his heart as he strode hurriedly through the garden to the south walk, where he eagerly opened the packet directed to him in Hilary’s somewhat laboured handwriting. The moon had just risen, and by its soft light he saw a curl of dark hair tied with a narrow ribbon, on which some letters were traced. With no little difficulty he made out the motto, “All goeth but Godde’s will.”
The message brought him fresh courage. It seemed to put everything in a true light. After all, what were differences of opinion on religious matters when words such as these could be their mutual comfort? He had never troubled to think whether they differed or not. The mere fact that the Bishop was one of the Laudian prelates, and that his father objected to the tendency to revert to Medi忙valism in the English Church, could not surely affect the question of his marriage with Hilary? It was sheer nonsense to think that such a thing could part them when they were united already by love, and by trust in the Divine will, which could not fail. So, although he was sore-hearted and downcast, he was far from hopeless, and after a while was ready to throw himself with ardour into his father’s plans for his future.
Let my voice swell out through the great abyss
To the azure dome above,
With a chord of faith in the harp of bliss:
Thank God for love!
Let my voice thrill out beneath and above
The whole world through,
O my love and life, O my life and love,
Thank God for you!
—James Thomson.
It seemed so doubtful whether Oxford was doing Gabriel much good, and the unhealthiness of the place was so great just then, that Dr. Harford decided to send his son to London and to enter him as a student at one of the Inns of Court. Sir Robert Harley had arranged to do the same with his eldest son, and as the two were friends, Gabriel was greatly pleased with the notion, and began to look forward to his new life. He discussed his prospects with Mrs. Joyce Jefferies a few days later when he dined with her at her pretty house in Widemarsh Street, but having known him all his life, she quickly detected the sadness that lurked beneath all his cheerful talk.
“Eliza,” she said, turning to her god-daughter, Miss Acton, who lived with her, “will you take this biscuit out to Tray, he has been barking and whining the last half-hour.”
“And what does Hilary Unett say to your leaving the University ere taking your degree?” she said to Gabriel when they were alone.
“She knows naught about it,” he replied, colouring. “We are no longer allowed to meet. The Bishop does not approve of our love.”
“Ah! that accounts for the change I noticed in her,” said the little lady. “I grieve for you both. But you are young; matters may right themselves in a year or two.”
They had reached the dessert stage, and Mrs. Joyce Jefferies had just put a bunch of grapes on her godson’s plate, when she was startled by a loud knock at the door. Miss Acton, returning from her mission to the low-spirited dog in the garden, met the visitor in the entrance-hall, and with heightened colour ushered him into the dining-room.
“Godmother, here is Mr. Geers,” she said, her pretty eyes bright with pleasure.
Now Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, having the kindest of hearts, loved nothing better than to set the course of true love running in safe and smooth channels. It had long been her desire to see Mr. Geers and Eliza Acton wedded. Unfortunately, Mr. Geers at present showed no signs of making any proposal for Miss Acton’s hand, and since the godmother was no matchmaker, she dared not even hint at what she so greatly wished.
“This is my godson, Mr. Gabriel Harford,” she said, having received the visitor with a warm welcome. “Gabriel, you have not, I think, met my cousin, Mr. Geers, of Carnons.”
Gabriel bowed, but his whole face seemed to stiffen, much to the astonishment of his godmother.
Mr. Geers would take nothing but a cup of sack, having already dined. He was a most quaint-looking person, but spite of the wandering eye which Dr. Coke had mentioned, there was something not unpleasing in his good-natured, shrewd expression and in his wide mouth, about which there lurked a kind of satirical smile.
“I have come to you, cousin,” he said, “to be cheered and heartened before going through a great ordeal. The fact is, I am going a-wooing.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, feeling perplexed.
“I have only once glimpsed the fair lady, and have not yet been introduced to her. The ceremony is to take place this afternoon at three o’ the clock, and I have a sinking feeling here already.” He placed his hand on his heart. Then taking out a watch from a shagreen case that hung at his fob, “There are yet two hours, and I pray you to hearten me up.”
The hostess laughed cheerfully, but all the time her kinsman had been speaking she had observed with discomfort the pallor of her goddaughter’s face, and the extraordinary way in which Gabriel was swallowing the grapes she had put on his plate—certainly a most terrible fit of indigestion must be the result.
“We will do our best to hearten you, but could do so better did we know the fair lady’s name,” she said.
“Her name,” said Mr. Geers, with a humorous gleam in the well-regulated eye and profound gravity in the squinting one, “her name is the worst part of the whole affair. They christened her ‘Hilary,’ which is a name that may be borne by man as well as woman. Now I desire a very womanly woman, no masculine she, and Hilary smacks somewhat of lawyers and their terms. But the surname is still worse, for that would lead one to believe that the lady means to die single and hath no intention of going in double harness. I confess that the name of Mistress Hilary Unett discourages me mightily.”
Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, feeling convinced that in another minute Gabriel would choke, bethought her of a plan which would relieve them all.
“You amuse me greatly,” she said, with a well-feigned laugh. “I must have a confidential talk with you. Let us send off these young people and enjoy a t锚te-脿-t锚te. Eliza, my dear, take Mr. Harford to see my throstle in the twiggen cage; I see he has finished his fruit.”
The two accepted the suggestion with alacrity, Mr. Geers watching them thoughtfully as they left the room.
“What’s amiss with that young man?” he said, “is he in love with pretty Eliza?”
“Oh! my dear Francis, do you really imagine Eliza would think twice of a lad younger than herself?” said Mrs. Joyce, marvelling at the dense stupidity of men. “But you are right in one way; the lad is in love, and, as ill-luck will have it, with the very same lady you are going to court.”
“What! with Mistress Hilary Unett? Great heavens! and I made merry over her name in his presence. Now tell me all about it, cousin, for hang it! the lady won’t look at a plainfaced man like me if that young spark has spoken to her.”
“Dear Cousin Francis, we all know that you would make the very kindest of husbands, but as you wish me to speak the bare truth I do not think Hilary Unett will accept your suit unless her grandfather forces her to do so.”
“She likes this handsome godson of yours?”
“Well, it is not for me to say yes or no to that question; but they have been playmates ever since they could walk, and next-door neighbours. You can judge for yourself whether it is likely or not.”
“I am greatly obliged to you for your sensible way of heartening me ere I go courting,” said Mr. Geers, smiling broadly. “I am bound to go through with the matter, but if the lady is true to herself nought will come of it, and young Mr. Harford need not again come so near to choking himself with burning rage and gulped grapes.”
The good-natured rival laughed till the tears ran down his sunburnt cheeks.
“But it was hard on the poor fellow,” he said, after a while. “Clearly he knew all about my proposals, for his face grew flint-like as you told him my name. Give him a comforting hint when I am gone, or he may seek a grave in the Wye and afterwards haunt me, which would make Garnons a yet more unpleasant home.”
“Garnons is over-lonely for you,” said Mrs. Joyce. “Yet I cannot think that Hilary Unett is well fitted to be its mistress.”
Perhaps Mr. Geers agreed with this shrewd remark when he had been introduced to the bishop’s granddaughter. Her reception was so grave, her manner so distant, that, as he confessed afterwards, it would have been easier to woo an iceberg. Fortunately, his cousin’s words had given him the clue to the girl’s manner and bearing, and on the third day of his visit to the Palace he called at Mrs. Unett’s house, and finding Hilary in the garden, resolved to speak out boldly, and make an end of this highly unsatisfactory courtship.
“Mistress Unett,” he said, “the Bishop has been very good in allowing me to propose an alliance with you, but I can scarcely flatter myself that the idea is pleasing in your eyes. I am a plain-spoken man and will not try your patience with further compliments or professions of my high esteem and sincere admiration, but will ask you truthfully to tell me whether you think you could honour me with your hand?”
“Sir, you have done me great honour by the proposal,” said Hilary, nervously. “But I should only wrong you did I consent to be your wife. You ask me to tell you the truth, and you have been so kindly a suitor that I will do exactly as you bid me. The truth, sir, is that my heart belongs to another.”
Mr. Geers bowed. “You honour me by your confidence, madam,” he said, gallantly. “I withdraw at once in favour of the lucky man who has won so great a treasure.”
“Alas! he is not lucky at all,” said Hilary, her eyes filling with tears. “They say he is over-young, and will not allow us to meet.”
“For that, dear madam, there is a sure remedy. Have patience; we grow old only too fast in these harassing days.”
And after that the good-natured suitor, with a pitying remembrance of Gabriel Harford’s unhappy face, tried to do him a good turn with the Bishop, by showing how utterly hopeless it was to woo a maid whose heart had been given to another man since nursery days, and how extremely probable it was that the lady’s health would suffer if she were too severely tried.
The words made no apparent impression on the Bishop, but they returned to him uncomfortably one Sunday morning in the cathedral, when his eye happened to rest for a minute on Hilary’s face. It suddenly struck him that she had grown curiously pale and thin during the last fortnight, and glancing across at the place usually occupied by Gabriel Harford, he noticed that in him, also, there was a change; the lad looked much older, his sunburnt face had lost its boyish carelessness, his eyes seemed larger and more sad. Yet there was a curious vigour about him in spite of his trouble, and as he joined in the metrical Psalm something in his expression appealed to the Bishop. The cathedral rang with the sweet voices of the choristers as they sang to the tune of the old 137th, Sternhold and Hopkins’ quaint version of King David’s words:
“In trouble and adversity,
The Lord God hear thee still;
The majesty of Jacob’s God
Defend thee from all ill.
And send thee from His holy place
His help in every need;
And so in Sion stablish thee
And make thee strong indeed.
“According to thy heart’s desire
The Lord grant unto thee,
And all thy counsel and device
Full well perform may He.
The Lord will His anointed save,
I know well by His grace;
And send him help by His right hand
Out of His holy place.”
It was Gabriel’s last Sunday in Hereford. On Tuesday night he was to lie at Brampton Bryan; on the following day to set off, in company with Sir Robert Harley and his son for London. His heart was heavy as he wondered when he should again see Hilary, yet, although they were not allowed to meet, there was no small comfort in this glimpse of her at morning service, from which no one had the right to debar him; there was comfort, too, in the words they were singing together, and hope and confidence began to possess his heart, and to bring a look of strength to his face.
The Bishop noted it, and bethought him of what Mr. Geers had said. After all, was he perhaps giving these two unnecessary pain? Was it, indeed, useless to try to put an end to love which had grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength?
By the end of the service Gabriel had decided that to leave home without a word of farewell to Hilary was intolerable, and being too honourable to steal an interview without leave, he waited in the Bishop’s cloisters hoping to see the prelate as he returned to the Palace, and to make his request. The sunshine blazed on the grass and daisies without, but the cloisters with their vaulted roof and exquisitely sculptured figures and foliage were cool and sheltered; Gabriel leant against one of the mullions of the great windows, glad to feel the fresh September air on his heated forehead. At length steps were heard, and looking up he saw the Bishop approaching, with his chaplain in attendance. Wishing the attendant anywhere else he stepped forward, and bowing low, said, “My lord, may I have a word with you?”
Gabriel’s manner was good, and the worthy Bishop, taking the deference in the tone for awe of his office, though it was in truth merely reverence for his age and his learning, felt that he had misjudged Hilary’s lover. Moreover, those who have just joined their prayers and praises see each other in a clearer atmosphere, raised somewhat above the fogs of prejudice and the murky smoke of differing opinions.
“You need not wait,” said the Bishop, glancing at his chaplain.
“I am glad to see you, Mr. Harford, for I have just learnt from Mrs. Joyce Jefferies that you are about to leave Hereford.”
“I am to be entered as a student at Lincoln’s-inn, my lord, and I crave your leave to say farewell to Hilary.”
The mere use of the Christian name at such a time reminded the Bishop of the closeness of the intimacy between the two. Although he himself had only lived four years in Hereford, Gabriel and Hilary had spent their lives in the place as near neighbours. It had been easy enough to discuss the betrothal as a mere matter of business with Dr. Harford, but it was hard to the kindly old man to resist the appeal of the lover himself.
“Merely to grant you a farewell would be a cruel kindness,” he said, thoughtfully. “You are just leaving for a much wider and more varied life; mayhap you will in London find others that will please your fancy more than my granddaughter.”
“My lord, if I cannot wed Hilary, I will wed no other,” said Gabriel. “We Harfords do not lightly change.”
Something in the confidence of his tone was so full of youth and inexperience that the Bishop felt a fatherly compassion taking possession of him.
“My lad,” he said, quietly, “you think thus in all honesty, but you are going to live in one of the most wicked cities in the world. You know not how great are the temptations you will have to face.”
“Yet if love be in truth akin to love Divine, it will ‘defend us from all ill,’” said Gabriel, musingly; and to both of them it seemed that the music of the old Psalm echoed Softly through the cloisters.
It was not very often that the Bishop turned from his theological studies to direct talk with one of Gabriel’s stamp; he began now to think that, after all, poor Frank Unett’s notion had been right, and that a Harford would make a good husband.
“Lad,” he said, “believe me, I desire only what is best for you and my grandchild. If I were to consent to a betrothal now on the understanding that it is not publicly announced, would you on your part undertake to avoid Hereford for the next two years? Time would then test and try you both.” Gabriel’s face fairly shone.
“My lord,” he said, breathlessly, “I will gladly bear any waiting if only we are permitted to be betrothed; and no one need be aware of it except my parents, and, if you will permit it, my godmother, Mrs. Joyce Jefferies.”
The Bishop smiled. “Yes, let Mrs. Jefferies know, for, in truth, it was a few words she spoke to me that inclined me to listen to your appeal. Go now, and talk over matters with your father, and I will prepare Mrs. Unett and Hilary for your call.” All this time Hilary had seen no member of the next-door household save little Bridstock, the brother born during Gabriel’s school days, who had, of course, no notion of keeping aloof from her and knew nothing of their trouble. Her face grew radiant when the Bishop told her of his interview with Gabriel. Nevertheless, the call—a state visit, paid in company with his father—was a rather formidable affair for the lovers, who left most of the talking to their elders, but their spirits rose when Dr. Harford proposed a ride for the following day.
“I have to go over to Bosbury to see a patient,” he said, “and if the day is fine I hope Mrs. Unett will entrust you to me.”
That Hilary should often accompany Gabriel and his father had long been a custom, and the enforced home-keeping of the past fortnight had been hard to bear. The girl’s face was radiant when once again she found herself riding with her lover through St. Owen’s Gate and out into the lovely country beyond. The unexpected relief after those weary days of sorrow made it wholly impossible to trouble as to the future. To-morrow there would indeed be parting, but for this one day they were as happy and light-hearted as children, and with an added rapture which no child can feel. On they rode past hedges bright with briony berries and brambles, or veiled with feathery traveller’s joy; past hopyards where the pickers were hard at work, their many-coloured raiment making patches of brightness in the long green avenues; past orchards where the trees were bending under their load of rosy or golden apples; while ever and anon would come glimpses of the Malvern hills with their exquisite colouring, not to be surpassed in richness by any other hills in existence. At length the pretty village of Bosbury was reached, and Dr. Harford pointed out to Hilary the old house of the Harfords in which some of the happiest days of his childhood had been spent—a fine gabled mansion with heavily mullioned windows. It had passed now into other hands, and the doctor never willingly entered it, being a man who disliked seeing his sacred places under new conditions.
“I have to see old Mr. Wall, the vicar,” he said to his son, “and as my visit is likely to be a long one we will bait the horses at the Bell, and you may show Hilary the monuments if she is disposed to look at them.”
Hilary did not much mind what she looked at so long as Gabriel was her cicerone, and the lovers, dismounting at the gate, walked through the churchyard.
“What a strange tower it is standing quite separate from the church,” said Hilary. “Why was it built in that fashion?”
Gabriel glanced up at the solid brown old tower with its mantling ivy.
“No one precisely knows, but some say it was that it might be used as a place of refuge,” he replied.
They entered the south porch and found the door open and the fresh air blowing through the beautiful church; from the lovely little chantry chapel at the end of the south aisle came a flood of golden sunshine mellowing the white pillars, while the wonderful dark oak chancel screen, which was the special feature of the place, lifted its rare fan tracery and rich carving in sombre contrast. There was something in the quiet of this country church and in its beauty which appealed strongly to Hilary, while to Gabriel, also, though he was much less responsive to mere loveliness, the place had a homelike feeling, so often had he been there with his father, and so vividly had Dr. Harford described to him his own childish days at Bosbury.
The Harford monuments in the style of the early Renascence were on either side of the sacrarium, and Gabriel, with a smile, pointed out to Hilary a mistake in one of the inscriptions, which stated that there lay Richard Harford, of the parish of Bosbury, Armiger, and Martha his wife.
“This lady in Elizabethan dress who rests beside my great uncle, is, in truth, his first wife, Katherine Purefoy; and Mrs. Martha does not rest here at all, but had two more husbands—to wit, Michael Hopton, of Canon Frome, and John Berrow, of Awre.”
“I did not know you were connected with the Hoptons.”
“Yes, in this fashion, besides by a close friendship betwixt my father and Sir Richard Hopton, and that again is cemented by their political views being of the same order.”
“Have politics aught to do with friendship?”
“With friendship, yes, but with love nothing at all.”
“That is well, for you and I, perchance, might not agree,” said Hilary.
“We could always agree to differ, but in truth we neither of us as yet know enough of matters of State to have any opinions,” he replied.
“I don’t quite understand your ancestry yet,” said Hilary, laughing. “There is great-grandfather John, and here is great-uncle Richard, but where is the grandfather?”
“He was Henry Harford, of Warminster,” said Gabriel. “But my father, being the son of his second wife, Madame Alice Harford, inherits none of the Harford property. Madame Harford still lives near London, and I am to visit her. They say she is a most formidable personage, and has never forgiven my father and mother for marrying when they were mere boy and girl. For my part I am glad they did, for it makes my father understand our case.”
“Yes, he understands well, and has been most kind to us. Had it not been for him and for Mrs. Joyce Jefferies, we should have had sad hearts to-day.”
They wandered back into the churchyard and sat down to rest on the steps of the old stone cross which for many generations had stood there. So quiet and peaceful was all around that it was hard to believe that the village street was within a stone’s-throw, and the lovers, absorbed in their own happiness, did not hear the quiet footsteps of a man approaching them, did not dream that just as surely as time advanced with cares and sorrows in his train, so did this austere-looking figure come into their lives, bringing with him the shadow of a coming agony.
They both started when upon their love-making was cast the sudden shade of the new-comer’s presence. Gabriel rose hurriedly, responding to the man’s grave salute in some confusion.
“I understand that Dr. Harford is at the vicarage; can I leave with you, sir, a message for him?”
“Certainly; what name?” said Gabriel, looking at the questioner’s sombre, deep-set eyes, in which there smouldered a strange fire. A look of resentment, indeed, darkened the whole face, which, though full of strength and purpose, was far from pleasing.
“My name is Peter Waghorn, and yonder to the east of the church, in the house with the tiled roof, my father, some years ago Vicar of Miltoncleve, lies at the point of death.”
“I will tell Dr. Harford directly he leaves Mr. Wall,” said Gabriel. Then with a thought of Hilary, “It is nought of an infectious kind, I suppose?”
Peter Waghorn smiled grimly.
“My father is dying of a disease that has been over-rife in the country since Dr. Laud got the upper hand. He was driven from his living in Devon and imprisoned by the Bishop of Exeter for speaking against Dr. Laud’s preaching. They then sent him to the Court of High Commission, and he was deprived, degraded and fined.”
“But for what offence?” asked Gabriel. “Merely for disapproving of the Archbishop’s doings? The prisons would be full of the gentry and the most learned men of the day were all sent to gaol who disliked Dr. Laud.”
“’Twas for preaching against decorations and images in the churches,” said Peter Waghorn, a gleam of fierce wrath flashing across his face. “So little do the punishments of the Archbishop match the offence, that for this my father suffered the loss of all things, and for daring now and again to preach afterwards, he was sent to Bridewell, mercilessly flogged, and for a whole winter chained to a post with irons on his hands and feet in a dark dungeon. ’Twas the cruel cold and damp that ruined his health, for he had nought but a pad of straw to lie on, and was kept on bread and water.”
“Truly they may well say that the oppressions and cruelties of the prelates are enough to drive a wise man mad,” said Gabriel. “But surely he may yet be saved? My father has brought many back to health that other physicians despaired of.”
“’Tis over-late,” said Waghorn, bitterly; “he lies sick of a wasting fever, and his limbs are stiff and useless with rheumatism. Yet his end may perchance be eased by a skilled physician.”
At that moment Dr. Harford came out from the vicarage, and Peter Waghorn, anxious to lose no more time, hastened forward to meet him. In close conversation they walked down the village street, and Gabriel returned to his place on the steps of the cross.
“How you do hate Archbishop Laud,” said Hilary, with a gleam of amusement in her eyes as she looked at him. “For my part, if the older Waghorn is like the younger I think he can have been no great loss to the Church. Come, why vex yourself thus over the misfortunes of this poor vicar? I thought you had no great liking for parsons.”
Her tone jarred on him. “I don’t understand,” he said, “how you can be so little moved by a tale like that. It makes one’s blood boil; and ’tis not only parsons who suffer. Remember how Mr. Shirfield, a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, was treated by the Star Chamber.”
“What was his crime?” asked Hilary.
“Merely that as Recorder of Salisbury he permitted the taking down of a blasphemous window in St. Edmund’s Church—its removal had been agreed to by a vestry when six justices of the peace were present.”
“But a window cannot be blasphemous,” said Hilary, looking perplexed.
“Indeed it can,” replied Gabriel. “Why, this one had seven pictures of God the Father in the form of a little old man in a blue and red coat, with a pouch by his side and an elbow chair. The people used to bow to this as they went in and out. Merely to speak of it sickens one.”
Hilary still looked puzzled. She could not feel that it mattered much. “And what did Dr. Laud do to Mr. Shir-field?” she asked, anxious to understand why Gabriel’s indignation was so hot.
“He stood up and moved the Court that the Recorder should be fined 拢1,000, removed from the Recordership and thrown into the Fleet Prison till the fine was paid. And still worse was the fate of my father’s friend Gellibrand, Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College, Oxford, who, for encouraging the printing of an almanack in which the names of the martyrs from Foxe’s book were mentioned and the black letter saints omitted, was literally hounded to death by Dr. Laud. My father was present at the trial in the Court of High Commission, and the Professor was acquitted by Archbishop Abbott and the whole Court except Dr. Laud, who was full of wrath at the acquittal, and urged that the Queen desired him to prosecute the author and to suppress the book. Then when the Court still persisted in acquitting the accused, Dr. Laud turned upon him in fury, saying that he ought to be punished for making a faction in the Court, and vowing that he would sit in his skirts, for he heard that he kept conventicles at Gresham College after his lectures. Afterwards a second prosecution in the High Commission was ordered, and this so affected the Professor’s health and spirits that it brought a complaint on him, of which he afterwards died.”
“Oh,” said Hilary, with a little impatient sigh, “let us have no more doleful tales; these things have nought to do with us. Let us enjoy this happy day while we can.”
Gabriel’s whole face changed at her appeal. The indignation gave place to love and tenderness, and a mirthful look came into his eyes; when, as if in response to her words, they heard the voices of some little village children singing,
“Then to the maypole let us away,
For it is now a holiday.”
The ardent, generous spirit which made him quick to resent any sort of cruelty or oppression also gave him the power to be such a lover as might well content the most exacting of maidens, and there were probably no happier people in England that day than these two lovers as they sat under the shadow of Bosbury Cross.
Meanwhile in the tiled cottage to the east of the churchyard an old clergyman, in the last throes of a lingering and painful death, faintly gasped the words, “Lord, how long?”
The physician sorrowfully watched the havoc wrought by man-inflicted ill, from time to time speaking a word or two of comfort and good cheer, or gently raising the dying man into an easier posture. And at the foot of the bed, his face buried in his hands, knelt Peter Waghorn, his frame shaken with sobs, his heart consumed with hatred of Dr. Laud, and in his mind the psalmist’s passionate cry, “Let there be none to extend mercy unto him! . .. Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.” A last faint gasping sigh made him raise his head. The physician was gently laying down the worn-out body and closing the sightless eyes.
From the open casement the wind wafted into the quiet room the glad sound of children’s voices, and as the little people ran down the road the words and the clear high notes floated back to the lovers by the cross, and to the bereaved, sore-hearted man:
“. . . let us away!
For it is now a holiday.”
Dr. Harford noted the strange contrast within the room and without. He laid his hand kindly on Peter Waghorn’s shoulder.
“Your father, too, keeps holiday,” he said; “be comforted, he has entered into rest.”
“England, it has been said, has been saved by its adventurers—that is to say, by the men who, careless whether their ways were like the ways of others,... have set their hearts on realising first in themselves and then in others, their ideal of that which is best and holiest. Such adventurers the noblest of the Puritans were. Many things existed not dreamed of in their theology, many things which they misconceived, or did not conceive at all; but they were brave and resolute, feeding their minds upon the Bread of Heaven, and determined within themselves to be servants of no man and of no human system.”—S. R. Gardiner.
Gabriel quitted Hereford the next day, carrying with him the lock of dark hair and the ribbon with the motto as the outward and visible symbols of his betrothal, and deep in his heart the spiritual presence of the mingled love of two souls. These, together with the vigorous and sincere Christianity which had been the result chiefly of his father’s, example and training, were the best equipments he could have had for his London life.
Yet, perhaps, had the Bishop of Hereford known how strangely trying the next two years were to be, he would not have imposed on his granddaughter’s lover a test so excessively severe. Never had the country passed through such a grave crisis.
It was towards the end of September that Gabriel arrived with his companions at Sir Robert Harley’s lodgings in Little Britain. Only a short time before, London had been given over to demonstrations of joy on hearing that the King’s army had been utterly routed by the Scots, for the English, who had always detested the Bishops’ War, felt that the cause of the invaders was the cause of the invaded, and were rejoiced to hear that Newcastle and the two northern provinces were in the hands of the Covenanters. Scotch and English alike were sternly resolved no longer to endure the intolerable misgovernment of Charles, and the people crowded to sign the petition to the King which complained of the grievances of the military charges, of ship-money, of the rapine caused by lawless troops, of the Archbishop’s innovations, the unbearable growth of monopolies, and, above all, of the unlawful government without a Parliament.
The city seethed with exasperated discontent, and the very day after the travellers arrived they found themselves in the heart of the struggle. It was Sunday, and they had gone to morning service at one of the City churches, where all had seemed tranquil enough. But at the time of giving out notices the Bishop’s Chancellor roused the congregation to fury by calling upon the churchwardens to take the oath to present offenders against the ecclesiastical law.
All the wrath which had been gathering through the long years of tyranny, all the hatred of Laud’s unwise revival of obsolete lawrs and punishments seemed to concentrate itself in the shouts of “No oath! no oath!” which burst from the congregation. Gabriel was startled, but the next moment all his sympathies were with the people, for an apparitor stood up angrily haranguing the objectors and most foolishly dubbing them “A company of Puritan dogs.” This was too much to be tamely endured; the people rose in wrath and hustled the apparitor, while the Sheriff, who had been called to restore order, had the good sense to do so by taking the obnoxious apparitor to gaol, the Chancellor making his escape in such haste that he left his hat behind him.
Gabriel, remembering how galling the prosecution of his own father had been, remembering, too, how Peter Waghorn’s old father lay dead at Bosbury, a victim of the same overbearing r?gime, could not but rejoice in the people’s triumph. The only marvel was that they had so long endured the intolerable tyranny—a tyranny which, during the last eleven years, had driven twenty thousand English Puritans to seek a new home in America.
Meanwhile the King had found himself between the devil and the deep sea; Strafford’s infamous scheme of debasing the coinage had been checkmated by the firmness of the London merchants in the summer. It was impossible to raise money anymore after the illegal fashion of the past eleven years, and, hemmed in by his angry Scotch subjects in the north and his indignant English subjects in the south, Charles at length, in his speech to the great Council assembled in the hall of the Deanery at York, announced the issue of writs for a Parliament to meet on November the third.
Sir Robert Harley lost no time in establishing his son and Gabriel Harford in chambers at Lincoln’s Inn, then returned once more to Brampton to be again elected one of the Members for Herefordshire.
It was the turn of the tide, and during October, before the Parliament met, the impatience of the people was no longer to be restrained. The High Commission Court, where so many cruel sentences had been passed, was invaded on the 22nd by an angry mob; sentence was about to be pronounced on a separatist, but the proceedings were not allowed to be carried on, the angry populace seized the books, broke down the benches and flung the furniture out of doors. It was all in vain that Laud called on the Court of Star Chamber to punish these disturbers; his influence over the Court had been utterly swept away by the passion of an outraged people.
It was not until November that Gabriel rode down to the house at Notting-hill, where old Madam Harford lived, for on his arrival in London she had been taking the waters at Tunbridge. In some trepidation he drew rein before the doorway of a square red-brick mansion standing on the crest of the hill, and was ushered into a very pleasant room where the lady of the house sat, not at her spinning-wheel or her embroidery-frame, but at a well-contrived reading-desk, poring over a great folio.
There was no doubt that report had spoken rightly in terming old Madam Harford “a very formidable personage.” Her greeting was kind, but curiously silent, and there followed a pause while she scrutinised her visitor very closely, as though to take his measure before committing herself.
“You have your father’s features,” she said at length, making room for her grandson on a carved oak settle beside her. “What news do you bring from Hereford?”
Gabriel was glad enough to talk on this subject, and they naturally spoke, too, of Bosbury, and of his ride there in September. Then the case of Peter Waghorn’s father was mentioned.
“I remember the name in old times,” said Madam Harford, her face lighting up. “There was a skilled carver in wood who lived nigh to the church, and he had a very clever son who went to college and took holy orders.”
“That must be the very man,” said Gabriel. “One of Dr. Laud’s victims.”
“The Archbishop will soon be called to his account,” said Madam Harford, her shrewd, wrinkled face expressing no vindictiveness, but a quiet, strong conviction. “My Lord Strafford’s high-handed and tyrannical doings have brought him very justly to a prison and, if I mistake not, Dr. Laud also will be impeached.”
“Sir Robert Harley says that Mr. Pym has damning evidence against Lord Strafford which will startle all men at the trial,” said Gabriel.
“Truly it must have been a strange scene in the House of Lords, when one so haughty and powerful as the Earl was called on to kneel while the order was read which sequestered him from his place in the House, and gave him into custody,” said the old lady, musingly. “They tell me that the Lords hated his system of government even more than the Commons.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor, the servant announcing Sir John Coke. Gabriel looked with great interest at the old white-haired man who entered, for was he not great uncle to Hilary?
“I bring you a startling piece of news, ma’am,” said Sir John, sinking down into the elbow chair which Gabriel had placed for him. “We have fresh evidence of the great Popish plot, for to-day, when Mr. Heywood, a justice of the peace, was crossing Westminster Hall, a man rushed at him and tried, with a knife, to stab him to the heart. He was known to have a list of Papists marked out for removal from the neighbourhood of the Court and of the Houses.”
Now, in the existence of this great Popish plot the whole country firmly believed, and the attempted assassination of Mr. Heywood was quite enough to rouse the people to anger and to something very like panic. Pym and Hampden, who two years later were fighting against the King, and Falkland and Capel, who afterwards fought for him, were at one on this point. The truth probably was that the great bulk of the English Papists were only anxious to live in peace, but for some time a small number of them had made the Queen’s rooms at Whitehall a nest of intrigue. Sir John Coke had known this well enough when he had been Secretary of State, and Gabriel listened now with interest to what he was telling his old friend. It was, indeed, what he told all the world, and possibly his annoyance at having been dismissed from office on the score of his age, made him a little more ready to reveal what he knew to the Queen’s discredit.
“Count Rossetti, the new Papal agent at Court,” explained Sir John, “was full of fears last winter that the Short Parliament would demand his dismissal. The Queen therefore obtained a promise from the King that if objections were made he would say that her marriage-treaty secured her the right to hold correspondence with Rome. Now this, ma’am, was a lie; the marriage-treaty, as the King and Queen knew well enough, contained nothing of the sort. Never was there a sadder day for England than that which brought to her shores a French princess of the Popish religion to be the wife of a Protestant prince. All our worst troubles have come out of this luckless marriage. ’Tis very well known that the Queen hath begged the Pope to send men and to advance money to aid the King in governing the people against their wishes.”
The old man’s words lingered long in Gabriel’s mind; he began to understand something of the gravity of the situation, and scarcely a week passed without bringing fresh evidence that the country was in the gravest peril.
It was inevitable that with all the ardour of youth he should side with the Parliament which was reforming bit by bit the evils of the past.
To stand in a crowded London street and to hear the shouts of joy as Burton was brought back from prison, to look on the haggard face so cruelly mutilated, and to know that this awful punishment had been incurred because the man had spoken and written against turning communion-tables into altars, against bowing to them, against crucifixes, and against putting down afternoon services on Sunday—this was indeed an object-lesson which would last a lifetime. While the wrath kindled by the piteous condition of Dr. Leighton, another of Laud’s victims, who had been so barbarously treated in prison that when brought forth he could neither walk, see, nor hear, filled his heart with that intolerable resentment of cruelty and oppression which made many in those days feel no sacrifice to be too great if it did but stop such doings.
There has always been in Englishmen a vigorous and healthy hatred.= of clerical domination, and it was this which united men of widely differing views in their attack on Laud’s system and on the new canons which Convocation had issued when it had continued sitting after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. These were now declared to be illegal, and on December 18 Archbishop Laud was impeached of high treason, and committed to custody by the House of Lords. Not a voice was raised on his behalf; so cordially was he detested that, in spite of his many virtues and his sincere love of the Church, men rightly felt that he was “the root and ground of all their miseries,” and that his rigid, unsympathetic rule, his preferment of such men as Strafford and Windebank, and of many tyrannical Bishops—the hated Bishop Wren among them; above all, his merciless determination to crush Puritanism and to make Parliamentary government impossible, constituted grave dangers to the country. Was the entire teaching power of England to be left in such hands? Was Laud to have the training of all those to whom each Sunday the people were compelled to listen? The idea was not to be borne.
At Sir Robert Harley’s rooms in Little Britain Gabriel naturally heard much of what was passing during those two eventful years. In May London was stirred into the wildest excitement by the discovery of the Army plot, and although the full details were not generally published, it was known to all that the scheme concocted by the Queen and her evil counsellors, and certainly in the knowledge of the King, had been to bring in French troops from the south, to which end the Queen was about to go to Portsmouth. Meanwhile the English army was to join with the Papists against London and Parliament, and the Irish army was to attack the Scots. Gabriel learnt from Sir Robert that the plot had been revealed by Goring, Governor of Portsmouth, and also by a merchant who had received news of the intended attack on the city and the Tower of London from an acquaintance at Paris.
The discovery of the King’s intrigues and the absolute hatred of the Queen which now prevailed, robbed Strafford of his last hope of escape: Charles knew that to refuse to sign the Earl’s death-warrant would be to expose his wife to the gravest peril; the choice was a most cruel strain upon him, and at length, worn out with agony of mind, he stifled his conscience, and to screen his wife, sacrificed his friend.
The next triumph of the Parliament was the abolition in July of the hated Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission. But, on the question of religion, signs of disunion in the Parliamentary ranks began to be evident. Bishops were then the nominees of the King, and those who wished to retain them were tending to become supporters of the independent authority of the monarch, while the opposite party, who feared to retain the bishops in the Church lest they should prove hostile to Parliamentary government, were gradually becoming, not without good reason, more and more distrustful of Charles.
All through this eventful time Gabriel had heard but little of Hilary. In each letter which he received from home she was allowed to send him some message; but it was an understood thing that the lovers should not correspond, and, somehow, ere long, the messages grew formal and unsatisfactory. More cheering than these occasional words from afar was the great kindness of the Bishop of Hereford, who often invited Gabriel to visit him at his London residence.
Truth to tell, politics were not in the Bishop’s line; his thoughts were far more with his work on the Epistle to the Colossians than with his work in the House of Lords; and when one day late in December he invited Gabriel to dine with him, their talk never once turned on the topics which absorbed the rest of the nation.
Gabriel had now spent his second Christmas in London, and was eagerly looking forward to his return home in the following September. It was a keen delight to him to listen to Bishop Coke’s description of his recent visit to Hereford, and the kindly old prelate spoke at some length about his granddaughter.
“She cheered us all with her sweet voice on Christmas night,” he remarked as he rose from the table and led his guest into the library; “and better than all her other songs was a carol which she told me you had taught her as a child.”
“That must have been the Bosbury carol which I learnt from my father,” said Gabriel. And back into his mind there flashed a vision of the past—a snow-effigy of Sir John Eliot lying in the old garden, and a perception that had come to him that the words, “All for to make us free,” were perhaps the best words that could be said of any man.
The Bishop at that moment caught sight of his manuscript, and, to Gabriel’s disappointment, said no more about Hilary. “My commentary on the Colossians is complete,” he remarked, turning over the leaves with a loving touch. “This afternoon I place it in the printer’s hands.”
Gabriel was saved a reply, for the door was opened, and the servant announced Lord Digby. Withdrawing a little into the oriel window, he watched the entrance of a fine-looking man, with eager eyes and impetuous manner. In his hand he carried a parchment roll, and Gabriel, knowing that he was generally considered to be the King’s evil genius and most rash counsellor, wondered on what errand he could have come. A greater contrast than this young, hot-headed nobleman and the gentle, dreamy-eyed Bishop could not be conceived—they might have stood for ideal representatives of the worldly and the heavenly mind.
“I will not detain you a minute, my lord,” said Digby, declining a chair. “I am in the greatest haste and only came to beg you to set your signature to this Protestation. They tell me you are but to-day returned from Hereford, and doubtless you have not heard what has passed. The mob at Westminster saw fit to shout ‘No Bishops!’ and the Archbishop of York, clutching at a ’prentice to silence him, was set upon by the crowd and hustled on his way to the House. Luckily Colonel Lunsford and some of his men drove back the dogs when they passed into Westminster Hall, and a free fight followed, when many of the rogues were wounded. ’Tis no longer safe for the Bishops to venture to the House—this parchment is a protest against such conduct, and I am sure you will gladly aid us by lending your name.”
Gabriel wondered what intrigue lay beneath this apparently simple request. That the matter was of considerable importance in Digby’s eyes he felt convinced, for his expression as he looked at the saintly old Bishop was at once anxious and wily.
“Do not trouble, my lord, to read the document through,” urged Digby; “’tis a mere recital of the wrong under which the Bishops are suffering through this ill-conduct of the mob. I am sure you will agree that such an insult is not to be tamely endured.”
“I see that Bishop Hall has signed,” said the old prelate; “I have a deep respect for Bishop Hall.”
And after a little more talk on Digby’s part the Protestation was signed and the noble lord bowed himself out.
He had only just gone when the servant came to say that the Bishop’s coach was waiting, and Gabriel hastened to make his farewell.
“Nay,” said the Bishop, “I have yet much to tell you as to Hereford matters. If you will come with me we can speak of them as I drive down to the City.”
The precious manuscript was to be conveyed to the printers, and Gabriel was much afraid that the Bishop would be too much occupied with it to talk of his granddaughter. However, in the course of the drive he heard many little details which the home letters had failed to give him, and as he parted with the kindly old man he felt more than ever drawn to him. His dismay was, therefore, all the greater when, happening to be with Ned Harley in Sir Robert’s room late the next day, he heard that the Protestation which Bishop Coke had signed inadvertently was very far from being the simple matter that Digby had represented it to be.
“It seems,” explained Sir Robert, “that Archbishop Williams took it to the King at Whitehall last night, that his Majesty without reading it handed it to Nicholas, who gave it to the Lord Keeper to place before the House of Lords. Doubtless his Majesty knew beforehand what it contained.”
“What did it contain, sir?” asked Gabriel, curiously.
“It protested that all laws, orders, votes and so forth made in the absence of the Bishops were null and void. Clearly it was got up by my Lord Digby, who was in high ill-humour because a day or two since he had been worsted in his effort to obtain the assent of the Lords to a declaration that Parliament was no longer free. It would have suited him very well that this vote should be treated as null and void. The unfortunate Bishops will pay dearly for their protest.”
“Why, sir, what has been done to them?” asked Gabriel, with some anxiety in his tone.
“The Lords at once acquainted the Lower House that the Protestation entrenched on the fundamental privileges and being of Parliament, and Mr. Pym told them that a scheme for seizing the Parliamentary leaders was on foot; he then moved that the Bishops who had signed the Protestation should be impeached of treason for having tried to subvert the very being of Parliament. I believe that they are all by now in the Tower.”
Gabriel, having mixed of late with men of every shade of opinion, had learnt to hold his tongue. He said not a word as to having been present when Digby visited Bishop Coke. But the next day he hurried off to the Tower, where he found the Bishop of Hereford in sore distress.
“You well know that I had no treasonable intention in signing,” said the old man. “I merely wished for order in Palace Yard, and that we might be able to go to and from our duties in Parliament unmolested. Well,’tis after all my own fault. I ought to have read the document through instead of yielding to my Lord Digby’s haste. Truth to tell, my thoughts were more with my manuscript—and now what will become of it?”
“My lord, if you will trust me as a messenger, I would bear your wishes to the printers, who saw me of late with your lordship,” said Gabriel.
And thus it came to pass that the proofs of the Commentary on the Colossians went to and from the Tower in the charge of Dr. Harford’s son, and that the Bishop’s tedious weeks of imprisonment were cheered by the work he loved.
It happened one day early in January that Gabriel, crossing Tower-green with the second batch of proofs, caught sight of no less a person than Archbishop Laud himself. He was standing in converse with a friend, and laughing very heartily over a caricature which the other held. Gabriel saw at a glance that it was a picture which represented Archbishop Williams as a decoy duck leading his eleven brethren into prison. On his return from Bishop Coke’s room he saw that Dr. Laud had parted with his friend, and was pacing the green alone with bent head and an air of great dejection. Remembering the pomp of his entry into Hereford years ago, Gabriel could not help feeling great pity for the captive; what a contrast did he now present! Feeble, bent and sad, he seemed another being from the haughty overbearing prelate who had roused his wrath as a child by that harsh rebuke to his father. Even the bitter enmity between the two Archbishops which had scandalised people, was now a thing of the past, though, perhaps, there had been a little malice in Dr. Laud’s laughter over the caricature representing Dr. Williams’s mischance. The Archbishop had turned and was pacing slowly back again, when his leg suddenly gave way beneath him, and he fell to the ground. Gabriel ran forward and helped the old man to rise.
“I thank you, sir,” said Laud, feebly, giving him a long look out of his inscrutable eyes. “They have taken all my attendants from me save one, and my strength is failing.”
A warder approached them, and, again thanking Gabriel, the Archbishop bade the man take him back to his room in the Bloody Tower.
But, nevertheless, though it was impossible not to feel compassion for the forlorn plight of one who a short time before had enforced his will on the whole country, there rang in Gabriel’s ears the words that had been spoken to him in Bos-bury churchyard, and he could not but think of the far worse plight of Waghorn’s father in Bridewell, heavily ironed, and chained for months to a post in a foul, damp dungeon.
His thoughts were grave enough as he was rowed up the river that cold afternoon, and the recollection of the startling news he had heard on the previous day as to the King’s impeachment of the Parliamentary leaders, and his illegal demand for their arrest, filled him with uneasiness; it seemed to him that they were all living on the brink of a volcano.
Bidding the boatman set him down at the Parliament stairs, he sprang ashore, and was just paying his fare, when he chanced to notice two gentlemen getting into the next boat. He recognised them at once as Hazlerigg and Holies; as he mounted the steps he had to stand aside to make room for two more gentlemen who seemed in haste to join them; the first was Mr. Pym, with his usual air of strength tempered with bonhomie, and close behind him came Mr. John Hampden, his fine genial face no longer cheerful as it was wont to be, but sad and stern, with the expression of one who is steadily confronting some grievous national danger.
Gabriel took off his hat and bowed low; he had met the Member for Buckinghamshire more than once at Sir Robert Harley’s.
“This is a dark day for England, Mr. Harford,” said Hampden, returning the young man’s salute. “But God reigns—with His help we will take no step backward.”
The boat was pushed off, and Gabriel saw that the four Members were being rowed in the direction of the city.
Hurrying up the steps, he walked towards the Houses of Parliament, and as he approached Westminster Hall, it was very clear that most unusual work was on hand. Fighting his way through the crowd he gained the doorway, gathering as he did so that the King was close by, coming, men said, to arrest the Parliamentary leaders. The notion seemed too wild to be believed; yet it was, alas! true.
Just as the clocks struck three the King’s coach, surrounded by some three or four hundred armed men, drove up to Westminster Hall; the guard filed into the great building, while the King, alighting, wrapped his fur-lined cloak about him, for the bitter January wind blew gustily, as though it would have protested against his entrance. Gabriel was swept by the throng inside the Hall, but he could see well enough, and watched intently as the King strode rapidly through the armed ranks, towards the entrance which led to the House of Commons; here he turned and bade his retinue wait outside, then once more moved forward to enter that door which no English King had ever passed.
Apparently his command to the retinue to wait without only applied to a certain number, for Gabriel observed that some eighty of them flung off their cloaks and left them in the hall, then, with their sword arms free and provided also with pistols, they passed on into the lobby. Gabriel noticed that the first to pass in after the King was Captain David Hide, the husband of one of the Coningsbys of Herefordshire, a notorious scoundrel, with a savage and uncontrollable temper; he was one of the officers who had drawn their swords on the people a few days before, and was said to be the inventor of the opprobrious term of “Roundhead,” which during the last week had come into vogue as applied to supporters of the Parliament.
Then followed a long time of waiting, which chafed the King’s followers sorely.
“I warrant you,” said one standing within earshot of Gabriel, and cocking his pistol as he spoke, “I am a good marksman, I will hit sure.”
The lad’s blood grew hot. What would happen when the King found the Members he sought absent? That he had contemplated using force if the House refused to give them up was evident. What would happen now?
As he mused a thrill of expectation passed through the waiting people; the King appeared in the doorway—his brow was dark, it was plain to all that he had been baffled, and the disgust of his retinue would have amused Gabriel had not his heart burnt within him at the thought of the grievous wrong that had been intended. He learnt afterwards that Mr. Strode, the fifth Member, had refused to quit the House, and had only been forcibly dragged out by a friend a moment before the entrance of the King.
For days after the whole of London rang with the angry cry, “Privileges of Parliament!” It was in vain that the King ordered Gurney, the Lord Mayor, to proclaim Lord Mandeville and the five Members of the House of Commons as traitors. Gurney, loyal man as he was, sturdily replied that the proclamation was against the law, and the King, thus hopelessly beaten, could only save the Queen from the consequences of her rash intrigues by hastily quitting Whitehall, and making preparations for her departure from England.
It was not until May that the imprisoned prelates were released, but when the King had consented to the Bishops’ Exclusion Bill, and there was no longer anything to dread from their political interference, they were allowed to quit the Tower. Bishop Coke had indeed received a special permit to go to his wife during her illness, and early in June he returned to Hereford, never again to visit London.
Hilary, who not unnaturally laid the blame of her grandfather’s imprisonment on the Parliamentary leaders, and hated them accordingly, was entranced to hear the Bishop’s warm words of appreciation as to Gabriel Harford, nor did it once occur to her that her lover had learnt to look on almost every disputed subject from a point of view exactly opposite to her own.
“We sin against our dearest not because we do not love, but because we do not imagine.” —Ian Maclaren.
“And so Master Gabriel be at home again,” said Mrs. Hurdle, glancing across the kitchen at Hilary one September morning as she made the pastry with deft hands. “Home again, and quite the man. I reckon his mother be thankful to you for bringing him to Hereford just now.”
“What do you mean, Durdle?” said Hilary, colouring. “Of course he comes home to see his father and mother.”
Durdle, with an expressive shake of the head, sprinkled flour on her board and took up her rolling pin.
“My dear, you don’t throw dust in my eyes,” she said, “being that I’ve known you both from cradle days. Depend upon it, if it wasn’t for your pretty face, Master Gabriel would be off like my Lord Scudamore’s sons and all the other gentry to fight for the King.”
“Maybe he will yet go,” said Hilary, with a vision of girding him for the fight like the maidens of olden time—a vision that was at once painful and inspiring. How bravely he would face the foe, how chivalrous he would be to the weak and defenceless!
She took a basket on her arm and strolled slowly down the garden to gather apricots for preserving; the housekeeper’s words had turned her thoughts to the war, the topic that now engrossed all England. She had not greatly heeded the rumours which for many months had been current, but when it was known that the Queen had sold the Crown jewels to raise troops in Holland, and that the Parliament was putting the kingdom into a state of defence, then, indeed, the prospect of war began to kindle in her heart that fire of eager interest which the duller details of the long struggle between opposing principles had never been able to quicken. By the time the King had raised his standard at Nottingham, Hilary, like almost every other dweller in Herefordshire, had become a most devoted Royalist, and it never occurred to her that in other parts of England, people just as well bred, just as honest, were equally devoted to the Parliamentary cause.
Her basket was about half full when a merry voice greeted her.
“‘Go tie me up yon dangling apricocks,’ as said the gardener in Shakspere’s play.”
“Nay, I want them pulled down,” said Hilary, laughing, as she glanced round into her lover’s mirthful eyes. Gabriel, having made his conditions and received payment in kisses, worked with a will, and before long the tree was stripped. Then he called a truce, and induced her to rest for a while on the old stone bench under the briar bush.
It was now three days since his return, and they had been days of almost unmixed happiness. Their long waiting had been bravely borne, and each had matured during the time of absence; in Hilary, Gabriel saw more clearly than ever his ideal of all that was beautiful and good, while she was quick to note in him a manliness and a strength of character, the result of the life he had lived during the two years in London. How they laughed as they spoke of the troubles of the past, and recalled the wooing of Mr. Geers, and the kindly offices of Mrs. Joyce Jefferies.
“You would never believe how hard it has been for dear Mrs. Joyce to tell no one of our betrothal,” said Hilary, gaily. “She had the greatest longing to tell Eliza Acton, and laugh with her over that memorable dinner when you were all so discomfited.”
“The time for telling outsiders is close at hand,” said Gabriel, blithely. “If only the Bishop were at the Palace the waiting would be over.”
“Whitbourne suits him better in the summer, and in truth he needs more air after his imprisonment, and all his anxiety about my grandmother,” replied Hilary. “You’ll never know how grateful we were to you for what you did for him while he was in the Tower; he told me that no grandson could have been more attentive and thoughtful.”
“It was little enough I could do,” said Gabriel, “and everybody must love one like the Bishop.”
“Do you know what Durdle said just now?—she has, you know, a very shrewd notion of the truth about us, though she has never been told in so many words—she protested that had you not wanted to come back here and see me you would have been riding off to offer your services to His Majesty.”
Gabriel started, a strange look dawned in his eyes; the suggestion had evidently awakened a train of thought that was far from pleasant. Hilary fancied that he shrank from the idea of leaving her, and only loved him the better for it, even though that thought of fastening on his armour still allured her.
“Had you no longing to take part in this war?” she asked, watching his thoughtful face.
“Such a notion never occurred to me,” he said. “My hope is that one great battle may be fought within the next few days, which will decide the vexed question once for all.”
In this he only expressed the anticipation of most people.
“Yet somehow I should have expected you to want to have your share in fighting for the right,” said Hilary.
He seemed about to speak but checked himself, and Hilary, with a puzzled consciousness that something she did not understand was troubling him, watched him anxiously.
“You are shivering!” she exclaimed the next minute. “What is amiss?”
But Gabriel did not easily put his deepest feelings into words; he could not explain to her at that moment what fighting for the right might mean for him, any more than years ago he could have told her of his childish wish to follow in Eliot’s steps. The torture of the sudden perception that the cause he had learned to hold sacred would assuredly lose for him Hilary’s sympathy and approval made him silently turn to her and clasp her in his arms with a passion far too deep for speech. Then, releasing her, he hastily rose, and picking up the basket of apricots, resumed with an effort his usual manner.
“Do you not want these carried to the still-room?” he asked. “Stoning is the next process, if I remember right.”
“Why, to be sure,” said Hilary, laughing. “Stoning with a good deal of eating intermixed. I think one in twenty used to be Durdle’s allowance.”
“Here she comes to set the limit,” said Gabriel, with a smile. “She bustles about more briskly than ever; and look how her face beams!—something extraordinary must have happened.”
“Miss Hilary, such news!” cried the housekeeper, her fat face wreathed in smiles. “Haste, my dear, and hear it all from the Bishop’s secretary who is talking to the mistress at the front door. He is going to ride straight over to Whitbourne and tell his lordship.”
“But what is it, Durdle? What has happened?”
“Why, thank God! the Roundheads have been beaten near Worcester—go and hear what Mr. Jenkinson is telling of the rout.”
Hilary clapped her hands with delight.
“Good new’s, indeed! come, Gabriel, let us hear all about it,” and she ran into the house eagerly.
“Let me take the basket, sir,” said Durdle, expecting Gabriel to follow her.
But he shook his head, and himself carried the fruit to the still-room, leaving the housekeeper to bustle after Hilary, all agog to hear the details of the fight.
The still-room was cool and shady; great bunches of lavender were hanging from the ceiling, and a tray full of dead rose petals spread to dry was on the window seat. He set the basket of apricots on the spotless deal table and began to pace to and fro in miserable agitation. All desire to know the details of this battle was held in check by the perception that the parting of the ways had come, and that from henceforth the sympathy between him and the woman he loved was gravely broken. Who could have thought that Hilary of all people would be so deeply stirred by any public news? She had never been roused to take interest in the wrongs and grievances under which England had so long groaned. How was it that the news of fighting should awake, not only her interest, but her keen partisanship?
It was with a pang that he saw her radiant face as she rejoined him. He had known her too long and too well to imagine that she was faultless, but her rapture now gave the first shock to his belief in her perfect womanliness.
“Why did you not come and hear for yourself?” she cried, gaily. “Prince Rupert has beaten the Roundheads at Powick Bridge, near Worcester. None of our men are killed, but fifty of theirs, and the rest have fled helter-skelter, like the cowardly traitors they are.”
“Nay, an you gloat in that fashion over the slaughter of your own countrymen, I will not stay to listen,” said Gabriel, his eyes flashing with anger.
Hilary had thrown aside her sun-bonnet, and was drawing a chair to the table that she might sit down and begin the stoning of the apricots. She paused, however, aghast at his look and tone. “I disown them for my countrymen,” she said quickly; “they are traitors.”
“If you knew more about them you would see that they desire only to save the country from ruin and to save the King from his evil counsellors,” said Gabriel. “Do you think men like Mr. John Hampden and my Lord Brooke and Sir Robert Harley and the other leading Parliamentarians are to be dubbed traitors and overcrowed by a young German prince, who doth not in any way understand the liberties of England?”
Hilary faltered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “To hear you speak, one would fancy you were a Roundhead yourself.”
“It is scarce worthy of you to use the new term of reproach,” he said. “You would think it unfair were I to term all in the King’s army ‘Malignants’ or ‘Cavaliers’; let us leave such spiteful party names to these who hate as well as differ. But you and I, though we may disagree, shall ever love, and therein lies a mighty difference.”
Hilary sank down on to the chair. She had turned very pale, and the suffering in her face made Gabriel’s heart ache. He drew nearer.
“My beloved, do not take it thus hardly. Here in Herefordshire you inevitably look on matters from a different point of view; but had you seen what I saw in London, did you but know of the abominable plots and intrigues hatched at Whitehall, you would, at any rate, understand why many Englishmen feel that, to defend our liberties, the King’s evil counsellors must be defeated, cost what it may. Don’t let these matters of State grieve you so sorely; our love, is surely proof against all such passing matters.”
She had listened to him intently, nor could she altogether hide the love which shone in her dark-grey eyes as they met his. He bent over her, his arm stole round her protectingly; but the sense of his strength and protectiveness was exactly what she could not at that moment endure to realise. With an impetuous gesture and a look which wounded him to the quick, she freed herself from him, and, springing to her feet, confronted him with such pale anger in her face as he had never before seen.
“Don’t touch me! You have deceived us!” she said. “Why did you not tell me before?”
“How was it possible when we were not allowed to write to each other?” said Gabriel. “And, indeed, had I been able to write I should scarce have thought you would take any interest in public affairs. The contest between King and people has been going on in reality for many years; why is it that you only care now that the bloodshed has begun?”
“You did deceive us,” said Hilary, ignoring his question because she could not answer it. “You won my grandfather’s favour and waited on him, while you in your heart sided with his enemies.”
“You do but show your injustice by urging that against me,” replied Gabriel, hotly. “I had no thought but to help one who had shown me kindness, and who had been most unfairly cosened into signing the Protestation when he knew not what it involved.”
“And now I can understand your frequent visits to the Tower,” she said, in the most bitter tone. “It was all part of your plan to deceive us—you even, I believe, tried to get into Archbishop’s Laud’s good graces, for he spoke of you to my grandfather.”
At this, spite of himself, Gabriel burst out laughing.
“Do you really think that any gentleman could have seen the poor old Primate fall to the ground and not have offered to help him up?” he said. “Long before I went to London you knew that I hated his system; and if the Royal Army indeed prevails now, the Archbishop, with all his tyrannies, will be brought back, the Puritans will be driven from the land or left to languish in gaol, and Mr. John Hampden—the patriot who tried to save us from the curse of ship-money—will probably die on the scaffold with the other Parliamentary leaders. Now, perhaps, you understand why some of us feel that we must defend our country.”
“Then you must choose betwixt what you call your country and me,” said Hilary, drawing herself up proudly. “For I will never be betrothed to a man who is a rebel.”
Gabriel breathed hard, his hands clenched and unclenched themselves like those of a man in mortal agony.
“And I,” he said at length, throwing back his head, as though choking for want of air—“I, with God’s help, will be true to the Great Charter which bids Englishmen resist any prince who seeks to rob them of their just privileges.”
She dropped him a curtsey—not mockingly, but in grave farewell. Then, taking up her sun-bonnet, she turned to leave the room. But Gabriel strode forward and intercepted her, “Hilary!” he cried, passionately, “you cannot end all betwixt us like this.”
“I both can and will,” she said, with quiet coldness very little in accordance with her throbbing heart.
“It is impossible that matters of State can part those who love,” he urged vehemently. “They are affairs of another sphere—what has our love to do with this hateful war?”
“It has this to do with it, that I will not love a man who is a rebel,” said Hilary, proudly.
“’Tis the thrice-accursed fighting that hath so changed you,” he said, despairingly. “You, who cannot bear to see a dog hurt, or a boy whipped for thieving, can glory over the fifty Englishmen killed at Powick Bridge!”
“Yes, for their rebellion is justly punished,” she said, “and I punish yours in the only way open to me. Go, sir! I will look upon your face no more.”
She drew back from the door and motioned to him imperiously to leave her.
Gabriel paused for a minute as though to gather his strength together. It was no time now to argue, to plead; words availed naught. The time for deeds had come, the call to be true to country and conscience. With a look of reproachful love that was to haunt her all her life long, he bowed low, and quitted the room in silence.
For a few minutes Hilary sat down calmly to her fruit-stoning: then all at once the pride that had upheld her gave way, and, burying her face in her hands, she sobbed as if her heart were broken.
“Who like an April morn appears,
Sunshine and rain, hopes clouded o’er with fears,
Pleased and displeased by starts, in passion warm,
In reason weak.”
—Churchill.
Now, whether it was due to the kitchen fire or to the war fever, it would be hard to say, but Mrs. Durdle on that cool September morning gasped with heat, and as she digested the news of the Powick fight and put her pastry into the oven, she hailed with relief any excuse for leaving her domain.
“I’ll see how they young folk be getting on with the apricots,” she said to herself, wiping her hot face and setting her cap straight. “There’ll be more lommaking than stoning, an I’m not mistaken. And, Lord love ’em! they do make a fine, handsome couple, nobody can’t deny it.”
She had just bustled out into the passage when, to her astonishment, she saw Gabriel Harford closing the door of the still-room behind him, with a face which had suddenly lost all its boyishness. Haggard and pale, with wide eyes that seemed to see nothing of his surroundings, he strode by the housekeeper and passed rapidly down the garden path.
Mrs. Durdle stood quite still, staring after him.
“Lack-a-day!” she cried. “Now what should that bode? He passed me by and never so much as saw me—me that am of a pertly presence, and was never overlooked before in all my born days. Save us! But’tis clear as day they have had their first quarrel—that is, their first lovers’ quarrel, for they was always at it like hammer and tongs as children, bless ’em, though their greatest punishment was to be apart.”
The next question was—who should make the peace? They were now past the days of cuffing and scolding; indeed, Durdle fairly quaked at the thought of addressing either of them, and feeling that discretion was the better part of valour, she stole on tip-toe to the still-room door, and made careful and noiseless preparation to look through the keyhole. First, she hitched up her gown, then, supporting herself by the doorpost, she slowly lowered her massive form on to one knee and, crouching forward, applied a sharp, twinkling, little grey eye to the keyhole.
Alas! the apricots were pushed aside, and Hilary, with her face hidden, was sobbing in that silent, restrained fashion which always alarmed the housekeeper.
To get up from her crouching posture without making a sound was even harder than the descent had proved. However, Durdle valiantly gripped both doorposts, and with a tremendous effort heaved herself on to her feet, and tiptoed across the hall to the dining-room.
“Oh, ma’am! do pray come to Mistress Hilary,” she exclaimed, addressing poor Mrs. Unett in the most startling fashion. “She is crying her heart out alone, and Mr. Gabriel he’s gone off with a face the colour of a monument and eyes as big as egg-cups, and I am certain sure that they have had a desperate quarrel.”
“Say nothing to anybody else, Durdle,” said Mrs. Unett, hurriedly rising, and making her way with an anxious face to the still-room.
Hilary sprang to her feet as the door opened, and became engrossed in the withered rose petals on the window-sill.
“When shall we make the pot pourri, ma’am?” she said with averted face.
But Mrs. Unett was not to be deceived or repulsed. She put her arm about the girl, and gently turned the tear-stained face to her own, kissing her daughter without a word.
That was more than Hilary’s pride could withstand, she sank down on her knees and clung to her mother, sobbing anew.
“It’s all over,” she said, piteously; “I have been quite—quite deceived. Oh, mother! he has sided with the Parliament.”
“We might have expected it, after all,” said Mrs. Unett; “for his father hath ever inclined to that side, yet I never thought—never dreamt that if it actually came to war he could be disloyal.”
“Oh, he has some fine arguing about being faithful to the Great Charter,” said Hilary, bitterly. “But I told him I would never love a rebel—and I bid him choose between me and the country.”
“And he?” said Mrs. Unett.
“He chose the country, and I said I would see him no more,” said Hilary, with a rush of tears.
Little by little Mrs. Unett gathered most of what had passed, and her kindly heart was rent with conflicting feelings. After all, Gabriel had spoken truly when he said their love could not really be touched by any matters of State; Hilary was too young to understand the full truth of that thought. And yet, in spite of all, how could the Bishop give her in marriage to one agreeing with those who had just turned the Bishops out of the House of Lords?
“If only I had some man to counsel me,” thought poor Mrs. Unett. “But I can’t consult Dr. Harford, and the Dean must not know of the betrothal. I must go to Whitbourne and get my father’s advice—how is a lonely woman to judge in so difficult a matter?”
“Hilary,” she said, in a tone of relief. “We will drive over this very day to Whitbourne and consult your grandfather. Dry your eyes, child; he will be sure to tell us what it is right to do.”
Now Hilary was quite without her mother’s tendency to consult a man in every difficulty, nevertheless she hailed with no small satisfaction this notion of going to Whitbourne, for Whitbourne was twenty-three miles from Hereford, and with every inch she felt that she would be stronger to harden her heart against Gabriel. Nothing would have induced her to confess this thought to anybody, but deep down in her own consciousness she was aware of a great dread. If she met Gabriel, and if again he were to give her that look of reproachful love she feared he might break down her power of resistance.
There was a certain comfort, moreover, in the hurried preparations for departure; they would inevitably stay for a few days, for a journey over the proverbially bad roads of Herefordshire was not by any to be taken in hand lightly or unadvisedly, but required a little breathing time in which fragile ladies of Mrs. Unett’s constitution might recover from the severe shaking undergone.
By the time the coach was at the door Hilary had contrived to wash away all traces of her tears, and only a very careful observer would have noticed that her smile was forced, and that her laugh did not ring true.
Great rejoicings were going on in the city, and the cheers of the crowd excited her, until suddenly the shouting began to form itself into actual words, and a man who had been loyally drinking himself drunk in honour of the victory of Powick Bridge, hung on to the coach door, wildly waving his hat and bawling at the top of his voice, “God save King Charles, and hang up the Roundheads!”
Hilary, in deep disgust, promptly drew the leathern curtain across the window, but though she could thus shut out the hideous leering face of the pseudo-patriot, she could not banish his words, which persistently rang in her ears as the coach lumbered out through Byster’s Gate and along the rough road to Whitbourne; nor could she shut out the mental picture which the words conjured up, the picture of Gabriel Harford with a rope about his neck.
“I wish I had not used the term ‘Roundhead’ this morning; ’tis only fit for such people as that drunken wretch in Bye-street,” she thought. And, having once begun to see something amiss in her words, she continued the salutary, but depressing, occupation all through the drive, ending with the humiliating perception that she had defended the cause she believed to be right in the wrong way, and that although nothing would induce her to be betrothed to a rebel, she had certainly by her harshness done much to confirm him in his convictions.
It was quite dusk when they arrived at the Bishop’s country residence, the evening air had grown cold, and the two ladies, stiff and weary with their drive, were glad to see the lights within the pretty gabled house, and the door flung wide to welcome them. The Bishop’s surprise and pleasure at their unexpected arrival touched Hilary, who was always at her best when with her grandfather, and Mrs. Unett’s explanation that she had come to talk over a family matter, having been made, the Bishop, possibly guessing from his grandchild’s face what the “family matter” was, deferred the talk till the morning.
They supped quietly with Bishop Coke and his chaplain, and the name of Harford was never once mentioned, but the talk turned inevitably to the news of Powick Fight, until the Bishop, with a sigh, used the very same words which Gabriel had used in the morning as to hoping that all would be swiftly decided by one great battle. Then, rising from table, he led the way to the hall, where the household assembled for evening prayers, read by the chaplain, after which Hilary, in a much softened mood, was glad to go to bed.
She woke the next morning with an aching head and a sore heart, wondering whether every future awakening would be so full of misery and desolation.
“It shall not be!” she determined, vigorously; “I will not allow my life to be spoilt in that fashion.” And springing out of bed she dressed rapidly, hurried through her prayers—because she found that on her knees tears were somehow apt to come into her eyes—and without waiting for food hastened out of the house.
The fresh morning air was a relief, and she hailed with joy the sight of a visitor riding up the approach. On nearer view she recognised him as Dr. Rogers, one of the Cathedral canons and rector of Stoke Edith.
“Why, Mistress Hilary!” he exclaimed, “I had not thought to find you here; you are a sight to cheer a downhearted man on a sad morn.”
“But we had good news, sir, yesterday, of the victory,” said Hilary. “They brought us the news at Hereford.”
“Ay, my dear, but I come from Worcester with yet later news of defeat. My Lord Essex, who is in command of the rebel army, entered Worcester and has taken possession of the city. With my own eyes I saw his vile troops quartered in the cathedral; the knaves had no sort of reverence, and have stabled their horses in the cloisters. But there! I could not offend your ear by describing the scene. Would that I had the hanging of them! They should have but short shrift!”
The worthy canon was an ardent—even a bitter—Royalist, and his burning words added fuel to the fire already kindled in Hilary’s heart. She listened eagerly to all he had to tell of the occupation of Worcester, and received passively and contentedly the exaggerated doctrine of the unquestioning obedience which was the sole duty of the subject, and the supreme, divinely-given authority which was the prerogative of the King—the King who, according to Dr. Rogers could do no wrong.
Few people are at their best in the early morning before breakfast, after any special fatigue on the previous day, and Hilary, who at another time might have been capable of seeing the weak points in Dr. Rogers’s harangue, drank it in now without any misgivings, reflecting all the time what a bulwark it would make against that secret dread lest she should be conquered by Gabriel’s love.
And so it came to pass, that whereas on the previous night she had been gentle-minded and sorrowing over her own shortcomings, when morning service time came and they all went by the little wicket-gate in the drive to the church close by, she was in a very different mood, and never prayed a single prayer, because the whole time she was picturing the scene in the cathedral described by Dr. Rogers.
“It is to vile men like this that Gabriel has allied himself,” she thought, indignantly; “men without any reverence, men who have turned the Bishops out of the House of Lords, and who would fain abolish the Prayer-book! Nothing is sacred to them—not even a church!”
It never occurred to her that perhaps by her thoughts she was more grossly desecrating the building she deemed sacred than the troops of Lord Essex had desecrated the cathedral, which, of course, in Puritan eyes, was only a large building that could at once be used as a shelter from the cold, and which they considered no more sacred than the rest of the world to Him Whose throne is the heaven and Whose footstool is the earth.
Dr. Rogers remained to the noontide meal, and then rode on to other houses to impart his news. When he had gone the Bishop was closeted alone for some time with Mrs. Unett, and at length Hilary was summoned to the family conclave. She had no misgivings now, all the tenderness of the previous evening had vanished, and the kindly old Bishop was astonished at the change that had come over her.
“Child,” he said, “I am much grieved to learn from your mother that Gabriel Harford hath ranged himself on the side of the Parliament. It is doubtless the effect of overmuch intercourse with Sir Robert Harley. Still matters of State, matters soon I trust to be satisfactorily settled, need not greatly affect your future happiness. God forbid that I should part you from one I know to be as clean-souled a man as you will ever meet. An you still love him I will not refuse to wed you in due time.”
“But I do not still love him,” said Hilary with decision, nettled, she scarce knew why, by her grandfather’s tribute to Gabriel. A day or two ago her heart would have throbbed with delight to hear his praises; now the demon of pride had turned all to bitterness, and she was defiantly determined to stand to all that she had said to her lover during their dispute.
They discussed the affair for some little time, but Hilary was not to be moved, and the Bishop could not but admit that there might be difficulties in the future should the war prove longer than was expected.
He was scarcely quit of his granddaughter when to his discomfort Dr. Harford was announced; it appeared that, having learnt from Gabriel what had passed, the Doctor had called on Mrs. Unett, but hearing that she had gone to Whitbourne had deemed it best to approach the Bishop himself.
“My lord,” he said, “Gabriel is in despair over the unlucky dispute of yesterday. I promised him to see if there was any hope that your granddaughter would reconsider the matter. The boy is hot-tempered and admits that he might have put his views before her more considerately. But the fact was they were both excited by the news of the defeat at Powick Bridge, and were betrayed into a dispute and quarrel which he bitterly regrets.”
“It is true then that he has allied himself to the side of the Parliament?” asked the Bishop.
“Yes, quite true, my lord, but he will not admit that political matters have aught to do with a love already given, and I agree with him.”
“I said as much to Hilary but now,” said the Bishop. “The maid vows she will not love a rebel. You had better see her yourself, doctor. So much do I value your son’s high character that I told her, spite of his views, I would gladly wed her to him. But Hilary is not easily led, nor will I attempt to coerce her. There she goes, walking towards the moat; do you, if you will, sir, follow her and plead your son’s cause.”
The doctor willingly obeyed, and the Bishop, with a sigh, took up an old fourteenth-century manuscript entitled “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,” and tried to forget the sorrows and distracting cares of his times by reading words written hundreds of years before by Juliana, an anchorite of Norwich:—“And He will that our hearts be mightily raised above the deepness of the earth, and all vain sorrows, and enjoy in Him. This was a delectable sight, and a restful showing that is without end; and the beholding of this whiles we are here it is full pleasant to God and full great speed to us. And the soul that thus beholdeth, it maketh him like to Him that is beholden, and oned it in rest and in peace by His grace.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Harford followed the graceful figure in the soft grey gown crossing the trim lawns which stretched down to the moat. In those days of hand-loom weaving, dresses were costly and lasted long. Hilary still wore the one she had been wearing on the day of Gabriel’s return from Oxford when he had been “Shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft.” But the morning was very cold, and she had put on a little short cape and hood of grey, lined with rose pink, in which she looked so ravishingly beautiful that the doctor felt a fresh pang of compassion for Gabriel’s loss.
Her face clouded when on turning round she saw him approaching. He had always had a great influence over her, and, being in a perverse mood, she set herself to resist any appeal he might make, and tried naughtily to criticise his grave, strong face. The sudden brightness of his smile, however, which was so like Gabriel’s, somewhat disconcerted her, and her greeting was less cold than she had intended.
“The Bishop told me to seek you here, Hilary,” he said, gently. “I am come in a two-fold capacity—as Gabriel’s father and as your father’s friend. Have you forgotten how greatly he wished a union betwixt you two?”
“The war has changed all that,” said Hilary. “He would not approve now, sir.”
“I assure you that he foresaw troubled times,” said Dr. Harford. “And knowing that in many points your grandfather did not hold with him, he begged me to do what I could to help you. ’Tis the memory of his words that brings me here today.”
“Many desired reforms then who would not side now with the Parliament,” said Hilary. “Doubtless he would have followed my Lord Falkland’s example.”
“I do not think he would; their natures were wholly different. But, child, it is of hearts, not of politics, I would speak. Do you quite realise what you are doing when you vow you will never again see the man who for so long has devotedly loved you?”
“It is he who has changed,” said Hilary, fighting hard to keep the tears out of her eyes.
“It is true,” said the Doctor, “that no young and unformed nature could possibly have lived in London through these perplexing years without growth and development. But as a lover, he is unchanged, absolutely constant, and broken-hearted at this untoward dispute. Is there no hope that you will reconsider what you said? He quite admits that he might have explained things more considerately yesterday, but you were both of you stirred by the news of the fighting.”
Hilary stifled her inclination to yield; the very sound of the word “fighting” had called back her powers of resistance.
“And to-day when we have just heard how the rebel troops have defiled Worcester Cathedral you think to find me more amenable?” she exclaimed, indignantly. “Tell Gabriel, sir, that I am more than ever resolved to have nothing to do with those who side with the Parliament. He has given me up for what he calls the ‘country’ and, pray, tell him that I care only for the King.”
In her sparkling eyes, in the hard look which dawned in the naturally sweet face, the doctor saw that his mission was hopeless. Very sadly he bade her farewell, convinced that further words would only strengthen her in her resolve; his keen, all-observant eyes seemed for a moment to look her through and through, then, with profound gravity, he turned and walked back to the house.
Hilary, with a heavy heart, sauntered aimlessly along beside the moat. She was not well pleased with herself, for as she grew cooler she perceived that her last words had not rung true, and if there was one thing she prided herself on, it was on a high standard of truth and honour. Was it absolutely the case that she cared only for the King? Was her loyal devotion to an unseen head of the State to eclipse every other claim? She pictured Gabriel’s face as he received her curt, cold message, and her pride began to waver; slowly she re-crossed the lawns towards the house—should she not add some more kindly word? Was it not possible to be true to her notion of loyalty yet less harsh to the man who loved her?
Glancing up at the study window she saw the old whitehaired Bishop, and remembered how infinitely more thoughtful for Gabriel he had been. Yet no one could dare to call his loyalty in question. What was it that made him view the matter so differently?
Drawing nearer she saw that he was standing with clasped hands and closed eyes, his serene face showing plainly that he was in a region far above the petty divisions and difficulties of English life.
“He sees beyond the struggle and lives in another atmosphere,” thought the girl, all her hardness melting as she looked at the saintly old face. Then, quickening her steps, she hastened on to overtake the doctor before he mounted, not pausing to think what words she should say, but with an eager desire to undo the effect of her needlessly cold message.
“Where is Dr. Harford?” she asked, encountering one of the servants.
“He would not stay for food, mistress,” replied the man. “I saw him mount his horse but now.”
With an impatient exclamation, Hilary ran through the hall and out into the drive; surely she should be in time to stop him, it could not be too late.
But the doctor, less calm inwardly than he had appeared to her, had set spurs to his steed and was already out of sight, though she could hear the sound of horse hoofs in the distance. They seemed to her fancy to beat out the words she had sent back to Gabriel, those words which were after all not wholly true. Choking back a sob, she tried to turn her thoughts to Dr. Roger’s harangue on the Divine right of kings. It was but cold comfort.
“There is no time so miserable but a man may be true.”
—Timon of Athens.
How Gabriel lived through the next few days he never clearly remembered. Afterwards it seemed to him as if he had been struggling up some huge mountain, crawling inch by inch with no very definite aim, but simply because he thought it would be the part of a coward to lie down and die. He rode with his father, he went fishing, he read Burton’s “Protestation Protested,” and tried to grasp the tolerant notion of a National Church surrounded by voluntary Churches which had occurred to Dr. Laud’s victim during his long imprisonment. He read, too, Lord Brooke’s “Discourse on Episcopacy,” and got a further glimpse of that toleration which was as yet so little understood by either side in the great struggle. But, through all, the grievous wound in his heart made itself constantly felt, and the dreary emptiness of the world seemed to offer him no grain of comfort.
One night he remembered that the life, which seemed so unbearable as well as so useless, might at least be laid down for the country. Hilary had rejected him, but was not the Lord General at Worcester, and only too glad to accept any able-bodied man who would volunteer? It was well known that the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, Hampden, Cromwell—all the leading Parliamentarians, in fact—were profiting by the first repulse at Powick Bridge, and were straining every nerve to get soldiers of a spirit that would control such panic as had disorganised the men when they had unexpectedly encountered Prince Rupert.
Gabriel was alone in his father’s study when this thought first came to him. The evening had closed in; his mother, weary with a long day’s work, had retired early, and the doctor had been summoned to see a dying man in St. Owen’s street.
It was characteristic of him that the very thought of temporising had never crossed his mind. He had not dreamed in London that public matters could possibly separate him from Hilary, but now that he had found how dearly he was to pay for his views, he was never even for a moment tempted to shrink back. The Harfords, as he had said, to the Bishop, did not change. Having once fairly studied the questions of the day, he would be true to the cause he adopted, cost what it might; and having once given his heart to a woman nothing could make him untrue to her.
On this Saturday evening, just a week after their unhappy dispute and parting, there came to him for the first time the sense of returning life. Of life, and even of a certain sweetness in life—for was it not his to lay down in a good cause? Soon, too, perhaps within a few days or weeks, it might all be over, and the pain which was making each hour a misery would be ended; his body would lie on some distant battlefield, and he would be free and at rest.
Stormy and wet as the night was he could not stay in the house, but wrapping his cloak about him strode down the garden and paced rapidly up and down the south walk. The place was haunted by memories of Hilary. How they had played and quarrelled and kissed and made it up again in the old times! How little they had dreamed in those happy, careless days what the joys and pangs of love really meant! And how very vague had been his childish notion of patriotism in the dusk of that December day when he had whispered to Sir John Eliot’s snow effigy, the words, “I wish to be like you; I wish to give my life for the country’s freedom!” Well, his chance had come. Here was the very opportunity he had ardently desired, but it had brought with it an agony that no child would have had the power to imagine.
At last a deluge of rain drove him into the little arbour and, impelled by some association of place, he drew forth the small leathern case which for the last two years he had always carried and looked at the dark glossy curl which Hilary had sent him. It was a rash thing to do, for the very touch of the soft hair broke down the stern self-control he had kept up through the week, while nature herself seemed to feel with him as the wild wind swayed the branches to and fro and the rain came down in torrents.
Lying there on the floor of the arbour he sobbed his heart out, tortured by the words of Hilary’s last message—tortured more cruelly still by the memory of her relentless face as he had last seen it. At length a lull in the tempest began to influence him; he struggled to his feet again and looked out into the night. The rain had ceased for a few minutes; the cold, wet air revived him, and he stood watching the stormy sky and the bleak-looking moon which shone out now and again through rifts in the hurrying black clouds.
Cold and careless as the moon is of all the sorrow’s she looks down on, no lover could ever resist the fascinations of her mysterious light. He thought he would look to-night for the last time at that grassy glade and at the old stone bench by the sweetbriar, where Hilary had been singing to her guitar on the day he first realised his love. Quietly opening the wicket-gate, he walked with sad steps over the soaking turf, wondering—as the young always must wonder—how it was possible that a joy such as theirs had been could have turned to such bitter anguish.
And then all at once the invincible hopefulness of youth came to his aid. It could not all be over! This love that he knew to be pure and true, was it possible that it should be wasted—cast away as a thing of little worth? To think that it could end would be to doubt God the Giver. In this world or the next they would yet be united.
He went to the bush of sweetbriar and gathered a spray, recalling as he did so the old folk-tale of the prince who at the right time had fought his way through the thorn hedge, and how the thorns had turned to roses, and the sleeping princess had been wakened at length by his kiss of love.
Perhaps Hilary’s love was, after all, not dead, but only sleeping; perhaps his Princess Briar-rose would be wakened one day by a love which would fight its way to her, be the obstacles never so great.
At that moment screams coming distinctly from the direction of Mrs. Unett’s house fell upon his ear. He knew well that Hilary and her mother were still at Whitbourne, and fearing that something must have gone amiss during their absence, he walked up to the door which led to the back premises, and knocked. At this, however, the screams only grew more piercing.
He called to Mrs. Durdle, asking what was the matter, and at last she was persuaded to open the door a few inches, and to peer cautiously out, her fat face almost the colour of the guttering tallow candle which she grasped in her capacious hand.
“Oh, Master Gabriel! I be glad to see you, we be that frightful!”
She used the Herefordshire phrase for being frightened, but Gabriel could hardly restrain a smile, for her terror had certainly not improved her looks.
“What has frightened you?” he asked, following her into the house. “And who in the world is making that noise?”
“Aw, sir, ’tis naught but Maria, she’s always timbersome, and to-night there’s good cause with the soldiers clamouring at Byster’s Gate.”
“What soldiers?” exclaimed Gabriel in astonishment. “I had heard naught.”
“Parliament soldiers, sir,” said Durdle, trembling. “Mick Thompson, my Valentine, he told me they’ve been standing outside these two hours, and he do think Price, the mayor, be going to let ’em in. Peace, you hussy!” she added, turning to shake the hysterical maid who had come out into the passage at the sound of a man’s voice.
“Oh, sir! Oh, sir!” cried Maria, “don’t let ’em kill us!”
“No, Master Gabriel, say a good word for me,” said Durdle, imploringly. “For if I have called ’em Roundheads and traitors, ’tis the tongue which, as the Scripture says, is a deadly evil. You’ll be witness, sir, that I always had a tongue that would be wagging; some are born that way, and others they be as mum as mice, but the quiet ones is often the most dangerous, being you don’t know what to expect of ’em.”
“Why, Durdle, do you take them for savages? They won’t molest you,” said Gabriel, with a smile.
“I’ll never say another word agin the Parliament if only the soldiers will let me be and not come nigh the house,” said Durdle. “But if they was to come here, and me left with naught but that screeching hussy for company, I should go stark mad with fright.”
“I am joining the Parliamentary army myself,” said Gabriel, “and my first piece of work shall be to guard this house, Durdle. And now let me out by the front door and bolt it after me; I must go across to Byster’s Gate and see what has come to pass.”
“Blessings on you, sir, for promising help to the defenceless,” said Durdle, fervently. “I always did say there was a wonderful comfort in havin’ a man to protect you.”
Gabriel, not a little amused by the old housekeeper’s confidence, hurried across the city to see what truth there was in her tale. The streets boasted no lamps, but there were lights in most of the windows, and a stir and bustle in the place which was certainly unusual at such an hour. Bye Street was thronged with people when at length he reached it, nor did anyone heed the heavy rain which once more came pouring down.
“Shame on the Mayor, say I,” exclaimed a burly citizen.
“Nay, ’tis Alderman Lane that’s the traitor,” retorted another. “They do say he has persuaded the Mayor.”
“What has chanced?” asked Gabriel.
“Why, sir, the Earl of Stamford is marching to besiege Hereford, and his advance guard has been parleying these two hours at the gate, standing knee-deep in the mud and mire.”
“Here they come!” shouted a bystander. “Plague take the Mayor, he’s letting in the cursed rebels.”
And amid groans and jeers the men of the advance guard filed through Byster’s Gate, so wet and weary that they were almost ready to drop.
Scanning them closely as they formed up within the gateway, preparing to stand on guard through the night, Gabriel caught sight of a well-known face, and hastened forward to greet Ned Harley.
“Welcome to Hereford!” he said, greeting him warmly.
“There are not many that will join with you there,” said Ned laughing. “My father is with the main body; they will enter, no doubt, to-morrow morning, and will at least be spared standing to the mid-leg in dirty water, as we have been for the last two hours.”
“You are half frozen,” said Gabriel.
“Ay, and half-starved to boot,” said Ned Harley. “Such foul weather never was! We have had naught but snow and rain since we started, and one of our soldiers died on the march so bitter was the cold.”
Gabriel tried to picture Lady Brillianas dismay could she have seen her favourite son in his forlorn plight, for Ned, at the best of times, was far from strong. Meantime, the citizens, having had a good look at the soldiers, withdrew, bolting and barring their doors; and it was with much difficulty that fuel was procured for the great fires which the officers ordered to be kindled in the street. Gabriel was doing his best to help with these when he was joined by his father, and they worked with a will to get food for the weary men, retiring after midnight, and taking Ned Harley with them for the rest he sorely needed.
When his friend had been fed and warmed, and left to the blissful quiet of a great four-post bed in the guest chamber, Gabriel followed his father to the study. The doctor was smoking his short clay pipe beside the fire, and he looked with a certain expectancy at his son, whose change of expression was noteworthy.
“Sir,” said Gabriel, “I crave your leave to join the Parliamentary Army. I had determined to ask it before the arrival of Lord Stamford’s force, but this will make matters still easier and to-morrow Sir Robert Harley himself will be here.”
The doctor’s face was sad, and he sighed heavily.
“I am not surprised that you wish to serve,” he said. “I will try not to grudge you to the good cause, my son. But God grant that this fratricidal war may be a brief one.”
“Were it not a war in defence of our rightful liberties, I would never draw sword, sir,” said Gabriel. “But since the discovery of the Army Plots I know you also hold that there was naught for the Parliament to do but in defence of the country’s rights to seize on the Militia and prepare us to face foes from without and from within. The King makes specious promises ‘on the word of a King,’ but his word has been proved to be wholly untrustworthy. They say he is swayed by evil counsellors, and if so, let us fight to deliver both King and country from that curse. I for one would gladly enough die.”
“Lad,” said Dr. Harford, reading his thoughts, “you are sore-hearted and in great heaviness, but forget not that your life is a sacred trust; fight like a brave soldier, but give me your promise that you will not rashly plunge into peril for the sake of ending a pain which you should live to conquer.”
Gabriel was silent, he leant his head on the carved wooden chimney-piece and looked down into the glowing embers.
“Remember,” said Dr. Harford, “that thousands have to bear just what you are bearing, and that some weakly succumb or sink to lower levels, while others, like your hero, Sir John Eliot, make pain and harsh treatment and contumely so many stepping stones in their career.”
“I see not how pain of this sort is to be conquered,” said Gabriel, still watching the embers in which his fancy could picture Hilary’s face.
“Live on bravely, and you will find that it will be conquered by life,” said the doctor. “Remember the poet’s saying:
‘He life’s war knows,
Whom all his passions follow as he goes.’
And may God Almighty spare you to me, my son.”
With those words to hearten him Gabriel volunteered his services to Sir Robert Harley, who entered the city with the Earl of Stamford and Sir Richard Hopton on the Sunday morning, taking up his quarters in the Bishop’s Palace. It was hard to enter the place associated so much with Hilary under these strange new conditions.
“I will write you a recommendation to Sir Philip Stapleton,” said Sir Robert. “Hundreds of gentlemen have volunteered, and though you begin as many of them do in the ranks, you are certain to get promotion.”
Gabriel thanked him, but as he stood waiting for the letter a sharp stab of pain went to his heart, for he caught sight of a painting of Hilary as a child, her eyes looking straight into his with that curious dignity, that “touch me if you dare!” expression which she had always been wont to assume when confronted by strangers.
On the following Tuesday he bade farewell to his father and mother, and in company with Edward Harley and the forlorn hope, left Hereford for Worcester, where the Earl of Essex with a military committee of twelve noblemen of the county was endeavouring to bring the neighbourhood into thorough subjection to the Parliament. Before long, as all realised, the two armies were bound to find that opportunity for a pitched battle which they both eagerly desired. And in the meanwhile Gabriel, amid the duties of drilling, and the work which fell to his share, fought out his own private battle in manly fashion, not forgetting his father’s words as to the sacredness of life, yet not wholly without a lingering hope that the coming fight might end a life that had grown distasteful.