Hugh Gwyeth: A Roundhead Cavalier

by Beulah Marie Dix

“I shall never ask you to take me back.” Hugh tried to speak stoutly, but his voice faltered in an ignoble manner.

“Now consider well,” his grandfather continued. “When you pass the gate it will be to me as if you had never lived. Be not rash, Hugh,” he went on more gently. “Come back with me to the house; this folly of yours shall never be known, and I shall look to your welfare as I always have. But if you choose to go to that place of perdition, the king’s camp, and to that evil man, Alan Gwyeth, I forget you are my daughter’s son. Now make your choice between that man and me.”

CHAPTER III
THE ROAD TO NOTTINGHAM

Over in the marsh beyond the dim highway the frogs were piping their lonesome note; the shrilling call of autumnal insects sounded from the wayside; of a sudden the waste darkness reëchoed with solitary noises. All came clearly to Hugh’s ear in the hush that followed his grandfather’s words, and with them something that was akin to fright laid hold on him. Outside the park gate the world looked vast and black; he felt himself weak in his youthfulness, so even the butt of his pistol for which he groped did not strengthen his courage. He looked to his grandfather and involuntarily made a step toward him, but Master Oldesworth still stood with his hands upon the top of his staff and watched him but made no sign. With a stinging sense of rebuff Hugh drew back and held himself quiet, while he strove to think clearly and so make his resolution without prejudice. But all the time he felt that invisible hands were surely haling him back to Everscombe and with his whole will he struggled against them. “Will it be ended past question when I go out at the gateway?” he cried, almost before his thought had framed the words.

He did not even wait for an assent, but as he spoke stepped out beyond the pillars of the gate into the rough highway. There he faced about suddenly. “Grandfather,” he cried, “I—I am grateful for all you have done for me. Prithee, forgive me.” The words died away then, for he saw Master Oldesworth had turned and was walking slowly toward Everscombe, nor did he once look back.

For an instant it was borne in on Hugh to run after his grandfather, to implore pardon, to beg to be taken back and suffered to live the old dull life at the manor house; then the impulse left him and he was more ashamed of it than of his previous wavering. Still he lingered by the gate, straining his eyes into the dusk of the park till long after he had lost sight of Master Oldesworth. Once more he became aware of the sad piping of frogs in the marsh, and he listened stupidly, while heavier and heavier he felt the weight of loneliness press upon him. For he now realized that his decision had indeed been irrevocable; for all time he was cut off from his kinsfolk and his only home.

When at last he turned slowly from the gateway there was no hopefulness in his step nor did he lift his eyes from the ground, unless to glance up at the familiar trees of the park that he should not see again. But at length, through the branches before him, he beheld Charles’s Wain shining clear and the bright Pole Star that seemed to point him northward to the king and to his father. At that Hugh straightened his drooping shoulders resolutely and in good earnest set forth upon his journey.

The new moon had long been set, but the stars were bright and the way amid the trees was plain to follow. A pleasant freshness of the early fall was in the faint night breeze and yet a lurking chill, that made Hugh glad to draw his cloak closer and trudge on more briskly. It was not long after midnight when he reached the first cottage on the outskirts of the village of Kingsford; he had passed the cheery little timbered dwelling many a time, but now, muffled in the night, it seemed unfamiliar. As his feet crunched the gravel of the road before the cottage he heard the house dog bark within, and a sudden feeling of being shut out came over him. The dark houses, as he hurried by them, had the awesome blankness of sleeping faces; even in the woods he had not been so lonely as here in Kingsford, where human beings were within call.

But as he drew to the end of the straggling village he slackened his pace. The road, ascending slightly here, skirted the churchyard, where he could see the light streak that marked the pathway, and the huddled stones, blacker against the turf. For a moment he rested his arms upon the lich wall and stood gazing across the graves at the dense bulk of the little Norman church, with its side porch overshadowed by a dark yew tree and its square tower cleanly outlined against the starry sky. In the chancel of the church his mother lay buried. She would have approved what he was doing, he told himself; she would gladly have returned to Alan Gwyeth. With every fibre of his resolution newly braced he once more took up his march, down the gentle slope and across the one-arched bridge that spanned the river Arrow. There, with the sound of the hurrying water in his ears, he paused and took a final glance at the tower of Kingsford church, and as he passed on wondered vaguely if he should ever set eyes on it again, and when, and how.

Beyond Kingsford the road ran once more through woods with now and again a space of open land or a retired farmhouse. Hugh gave little heed to the country round him, however; he noted only that he had firm road beneath his feet, the cool morning wind in his face, and the stars overhead to light him. But the wind grew chilly and faint with approaching dawn; the stars paled; from far away across the cleared fields a cock crowed and another answered him. When Hugh entered the village next beyond Kingsford, the sky was fading to a dull leaden color and he shivered with the cold of breaking day. Already people were beginning to stir; he met laborers going afield and from roadside barns heard men shouting to cattle, and the bark of dogs. About the little inn there were some signs of life, so he entered and bought bread of a tousled-headed woman. Coming out of the house he saw the eastern sky was breaking into billows of pink, and a little later the cold yellow sun burst forth.