“I have ever foreboded this decision, yet it ruins my fondest hopes—but if God has not given the vocation man can do nought—and therefore I have sought the double opening for thee; thou choosest, then, the soldier’s life, under my old friend of Courcy, whom I know to be as valiant and devout a warrior as one could find, yet withal one who will not spare correction, and who can be stern at need.”
“I do choose it, since you leave it to me, yet I grieve to cross thy will.”
“Take till to-morrow to consider of it; a ship, under a captain whom I know, will leave Dartmouth shortly for France, and thou mayest go under his care. But first there is a duty to discharge; we must both go to Glastonbury, where the lapse of time will have obliterated thy remembrance from the towns folk, and destroy those papers; there is no longer any occasion for their existence.”
“When shall we travel?”
“I have engagements which detain me here for another week, then we shall set out; and now, my son, commend thyself to God, and seek His grace to guide thee at this solemn turning-point in thy life. Benedicat te Deus, et custodiat te semper, noctem quietam concedat Dominus.”
It was not till the midnight hour had passed that Cuthbert could sleep; he realised that he had come to a point in the road of life, where two ways branched off to right and left, either of which, fraught with diverse issues, he might follow, but which?
And the same figure continually haunted him in his dreams, even the two roads; sometimes the strife of battle and death in the forlorn hope, or in the deadly breach, seemed the goal of the one, and then the other appeared to lead to a desert of racks, stakes, and other appliances, too familiar to the proselytizing zeal of that era.
There were other visions, but visions of peace—of a home of rest beyond some fearful toil, some deadly peril which had preceded it in the dream.
Wakeful, but not refreshed, Cuthbert rose with the sun; the words of Sir Walter, “Take a day to consider,” rang in his mind; it should be a day of solitude.
He took a slight breakfast, and then ascended the hill above the house, crowned with the Druidical idol of a long vanished day; through furze and crag he scrambled to the summit; before him lay a land of desolation; moor after moor, swelling into hills, subsiding into valleys, tinged with light or shade as the shadows of the clouds drove over the wastes before the wind; like the restless ocean, it had a strange charm in its very boundlessness; its vastness seemed to calm one, as if an image of the illimitable eternity.