Hugh Gwyeth: A Roundhead Cavalier

by Beulah Marie Dix

The burst of angry words was choked in Hugh’s throat; with a little shudder of the shoulders he dropped his head upon his folded arms. “Will you tell me wherefore, sir?” he asked in a dull tone.

“Because of the never-dying folly of woman,” Master Oldesworth replied, with a sudden fierce harshness of tone that made Hugh lift his head. He felt that, if the revelation of the letter had not made every other happening of that day commonplace, he would have been surprised at the sudden lack of control that made his grandfather’s sallow cheeks flush and his thin lips move. But in a moment Master Oldesworth was as calm of demeanor as before and his voice was quite colorless when he resumed: “Hear the truth at last, Hugh, and you, too, will have reason to curse the folly of womankind. She, your mother, my best-beloved daughter, was most wilful, even from a child. Though you have none of her look I have noted in you something of her rash temper. Her own impulse and desire must always be her guides, and well they guided her. For there came a swashbuckling captain of horse out of Germany, with a brisk tongue and an insolent bearing, for which that mad girl put all her love on him, worthless hackster though he was.”

“’Tis my father whom you speak of so?” Hugh cried, with an involuntary clinching of the hands.

“Your mother’s work again!” said Master Oldesworth with a flicker of a smile, that was half sad and half contemptuous. “She fled away from her father’s house to marry this swaggering rascal; she followed him into Germany; and there she found true all her kinsmen had told her of his worthlessness and wickedness. So she took her child and gladly came back to us again.”

“She never uttered word of this to me,” Hugh maintained doggedly.

“I urged her to,” Master Oldesworth continued, “but, with the weakness of her sex, before six months were out she had forgot his unworthiness and baseness. She remembered only that she loved him and she blamed herself that she had left him; indeed, she would have returned if she had been assured he would receive her back. But I forbade her hold communication with him while she dwelt beneath my roof, and he himself did not care to seek her out, though she long looked for him. When he did not come she was the more convinced the fault was hers, and, since she had robbed her son of his father, as she phrased it, she would at least give him a true and noble conception of that father to cherish. Perhaps she held it compensation for the wrong she thought she had worked Alan Gwyeth that she sketched him unto you a paragon of all virtues. And partly for that he was dead to her, and partly for that she would not have the shame of her flight, as she called her most happy deliverance, be known to you, she gave him out to you as dead. ’Twas ill done, but I suffered her to rule you as she would; I had ever a weak fondness for her.”

With a sudden jarring noise Hugh thrust back his chair and stumbling to the window stood so Master Oldesworth could not see his face. His poor mother, his poor mother! Because he knew in his heart she had done ill to him with her weak deceptions he loved her and pitied her all the more, and his eyes smarted with repressed tears that he could not see her nor tell her that it all mattered little, the agony this disillusionment was costing him; he knew she had meant it kindly and he thanked her for it.

He was still staring out between the elms at the sloping lawn, where, he remembered as if it had happened years back, he had played that very morning like a boy, when his grandfather’s dry tones reached him: “This man would seem to have roistered through life without thought of her. Of late I did not know myself whether he were dead or living, but it seems he is sailing on the high waves of royal favor and has found himself fitting comradeship among the profligates and traitors of King Charles’s camp.”

Hugh swept his hand across his eyes and faced about squarely. His father a profligate who had abandoned his mother! Who dared say it or believe it? His mother’s face as she had looked before she died came back to him. A true-hearted gentleman and a gallant soldier, like his father,—like his father.

“And you never suspected anything of the truth ere this?” Master Oldesworth pursued.