His heart fairly jumped within him when at last, in the mid-afternoon, he saw from a hill a great congregation of houses and steeples, which he knew must be Nottingham. He started down the hill on the run, though his knees were smiting together with his long fast. He thought he could keep up the pace clear to the gates of the town, but a troublesome stone got into his shoe, so presently he had to pause and sit down under a hedge to look to it. As he was pulling on the shoe again a man passing by bade him good day, and Hugh, seeing there were houses within call, so he need not fear a second assault, entered into talk with him: “Yonder’s Nottingham, is it not?”
“O’ course,” answered the other, proportioning his courtesy to the state of Hugh’s jacket.
“How do you like having a king lie so near?” Hugh laughed for the sheer happiness that was in him.
“Ill enough,” growled the other, “wi’ his swaggering ruffians breaking our fields and kissing our wenches. Praise Heaven they be gone now.”
“Gone?” Hugh echoed blankly.
“Ay, his Majesty and the whole crew of his rakehelly followers went packing westward three days back.”
CHAPTER IV
TO HORSE AND AWAY
If Hugh Gwyeth had been a few years older he might perhaps have cursed his ill fortune; if he had been a few years younger he would assuredly have put his head down on his knees and wept; as it was, being neither man nor child, he blinked his eyelids rapidly and forced a weak grin, then asked: “There’s a road that runs west from Nottingham, is there not, friend? Perhaps then there is some cross-way from here by which I may reach it?”
The man delayed long enough to give full information about a path, a stile, a meadow, and an ancient right of way, which Hugh checked off mechanically. But after the man had passed on he still sat a time staring at the distant roofs of Nottingham and blinking fast.
At length he got to his feet and started down the hillside by the path the man had shown him, slowly, for all the spring had gone out of his gait now, and his knees felt weak and shook so that more than once he had to pause to rest. During such a halt a sickening fear seized him: suppose after all he should never reach his father? There was no danger of his dying of starvation yet, for he had had food as late as the previous morning; but what if strength failed him and he fell down in the fields or lonely woods and slowly perished there? That fear still staying with him, he made his night’s resting-place under a hedge, almost within hail of a farmhouse. He lay down early in the twilight, too exhausted to make the day’s march longer, but he could not sleep for very hunger. In the first hours of his waking the dim light in the distant farmhouse gave him company, but after that he had only the stars. He lay huddled in a heap for warmth and stared up into the sky at Charles’s Wain and the North Star, that were shining clear as on the night when he quitted Everscombe.