“Perhaps you’ll give your horse a rest here at the stable, sir?” the Roundhead corporal at his elbow suggested civilly. Hugh slouched down the road after him, and scarcely heeded Garrett beside him, chuckling, “Well, sir, I knew from the start you were Master Gwyeth.”
“Now you’re sure of it, you’d best carry the news to Oxford,” Hugh replied; “I cannot buy silence.”
After they were into the cool of the black stable and he had seen Bayard cared for, he sat down on a truss of straw and stared at the motes that swam in the sunlight by the open door. His eyes ached with the light and the dust, and his throat was all choked; he crushed the straws between his fingers as he sat, and in this destruction found his only ease.
He roused up as a petty officer entered the stable, who prayed him, from Lieutenant Millington, to come back to the house and dine with the officers of the company. Hugh hesitated a moment, then came, rather sullen and defiant, and after washing the dust from his face entered the dining room. Millington, a heavy, slow man of near forty, greeted him courteously, and presented him to his brother officers, who were distant and suspicious. “You are of Woodstead, are you not, sir?” one asked him, with an implication that made Hugh guess the other held him to have come from a den of all iniquities.
Then they conversed of matters that concerned them, while Hugh swallowed his dinner in silence, with an occasional pause to stare defiantly at Peregrine, who scowled at him from the opposite corner of the table. It was a relief when the meal was ended and he could rise, bent on setting out from the place at once; but Millington bade him step apart with him into an empty parlor. “’Tis an ill report we have had of you this winter, Hugh Gwyeth,” he began judicially, as he seated himself by the open window; “can you give me nothing better to bear to Everscombe?”
Hugh stood erect, with a feeling that he was a culprit brought to sentence, and replied that he had only slain a man in a fair fight, and he held that no wrong.
“Perhaps not;” Millington waived the question; “but I tell you, nephew, ’tis not the part of an honest gentleman to be herding with such drunken libertines and cowardly bullies as those that hold Woodstead.”
“Mayhap ’tis not the company I would keep of my own will,” Hugh admitted, “though they have been kind to me. But ’tis best I lie close just now.”
“If you have done no wrong why need you hide yourself?” Millington retorted, with a flicker of a triumphant smile.
“Have me a murderer and a thief, if you will,” Hugh flung back.