Hugh Gwyeth: A Roundhead Cavalier

by Beulah Marie Dix

“Curse his stubbornness!” Hardwyn panted out, and then there were other blows of which Hugh kept no count. He only knew that at the last he found himself free to reel over against the boards of a stall, and, without glancing at the other men around them, he looked up into Hardwyn’s flushed face a long minute. Then, still keeping hold on the stall, he made a step toward the door, but Hardwyn picked up the saddle and flung it down before him. “Mend that aright now,” he ordered, “and, harkee, if ever you bungle another piece of work like that, I’ll flay you alive.”

Without a word Hugh took up the saddle and tightened the buckle. His fingers shook, he noted, and once, when he put his hand to his mouth, he felt his lip was bleeding where he had bitten it. But he had not cried or spoken, nor would he; when the saddle was put to rights he flung it over its peg, and, still keeping silence, walked out of the stable toward the highway.

So long as he was in sight of the men he walked with tolerable erectness, but he knew it could not last long and he must get away from every one, so he struck across the road into the fields. There he turned eastward on a course that would finally bring him round Shrewsbury to the main highway. For eastward lay the village where he had left Strangwayes; Dick would protect him, he knew, and yet he knew he was not going to him.

As well walk eastward as another way, though, but he ached from head to foot and his back throbbed painfully; so at last, on a bleak hilltop, he sat down to rest, and watched the twilight close in. A little below him he could see the dim roofs of Shrewsbury and the purpling sky above. The western star came out first, and, as the night darkened, many more showed till he lost count of them and turned his eyes to the lights of the town. As he gazed thither he caught, clear and vibrant on the still air, the note of a bell. On the instant the foolish old tale of Dick Whittington came back to him: “Turn again, turn again.” Then he remembered how Lois and he had spoke together the day before he set out from Everscombe; and, when he had hoped for Whittington’s fortune, she had answered that his father would be glad to see him.

Of a sudden Hugh found himself lying face down in the wet grass of the hillside with his fingers digging into the turf. If he were only dead, now while he still possessed some shred of self-respect! He could not go on living, a mere horse-boy, everybody’s drudge, with his highest hope to be some day a swaggering private trooper, and then to be knocked on the head in a petty skirmish. It was so piteously different from the soldierly life he had planned, but he did not ask for that now, only not to be bullied and flogged any more.

Then that mood passed, and he knew only that he was cold in his torn shirt and his back was sore so he was loath to move. But the cold at last forced him to his feet and set him pacing up and down the wet grass; he still loved life enough to exert himself to keep it. Then he began to realize that, after all, he had acted like a child. Was this life so much less endurable than that at Everscombe? Was it worse to earn his living of a gang of brutal troopers than be dependent on grudging relatives? If he did get more blows, a man must not whimper for that, and he was now a man. Neither must a man go crying to his friends; rather the thing that best befitted a gentleman was to accept the life he had taken up and go on bravely.

So, in the early hours of the morning, Hugh Gwyeth faced westward and tramped back to the stables. Reaching there about dawn, he walked in as usual, and taking up a bucket, went to draw water. He had a curious sense of not feeling ashamed nor abashed, as he thought to feel when facing the men once more, but rather proud of himself and of more dignity than ever. He had no hope, however, of being a hero in the sight of the troopers. Some of them chaffed him over his beating and his slinking back again. “You wanted more of the same, did you?” Hardwyn asked dryly, whereat the others laughed. Saxon chaffed him too; but later, when Hugh came to the cottage for breakfast, he asked him roughly if the whip had drawn blood, and then he helped the boy to wash off his hurt back.

By next day every one had forgotten that Hardwyn had flogged him, and life went on in its old course. Only Hugh took it now as an accepted thing; there was no escape, so he would make the best of it, do as he was bidden, dodge what blows he could, and, what he could not dodge, bear without flinching. He even contrived, so long as he could busy himself about the horses, to find a sort of negative pleasure in the life. To groom and feed and water the great, friendly animals did not seem menial, but this made only a part of the day’s routine, and Hugh’s pride could not yet stoop willingly to cleaning boots and fetching beer. The last was the most humiliating employment of all; though he might reconcile himself to slipping into an obscure corner and cleaning the boots of a man who was older than he and a better soldier, he felt that to tramp a quarter-mile on the highway with a brace of jugs and fetch bad beer from an alehouse for a crew of peasant troopers could never befit a gentleman.

Late of an October afternoon he was trudging back to the stable from such an errand, when he met a gay company of horsemen and, to save being trampled on, halted at one side of the road till they should pass. By chance he glanced up and among the riders saw one very young gentleman with yellow curls, who wore a fine blue velvet suit and a big hat, and bestrode a dainty roan mare. Hugh caught his breath and looked again, then dodged headlong back from the road, in behind a cottage out of sight. Halting there a moment he instinctively looked himself over,—ragged shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, ragged breeches stained with mud, half-worn boothose, and shoes that were falling to pieces. He wondered if Frank Pleydall, in his fine clothes, on his good horse, had recognized him, and he thought it unlikely. With a foolish dread of a second encounter he made his way back to the stable through the fields; the going was rough, and he now perceived much of the beer had slopped out of the jugs. “I shall be flogged for that,” he told himself, and, with something that was not jealousy but hurt him keenly, he wondered if Frank Pleydall knew what a happy lad he was.

But, much as he expected it, Hugh did not get a flogging; for when he came into the stable yard he found strange horses standing there, and two or three troopers he did not know, and his own acquaintances looked energetic and on good behavior, so much perturbed they did not even rate him about the beer. “The colonel is back from the eastward,” Unger explained, “and Corporal Ridydale is on our shoulders again.”