Hugh Gwyeth: A Roundhead Cavalier

by Beulah Marie Dix

“Then—you knew my mother?” Hugh asked, pushing aside his trencher.

“Ay, Mistress Ruth Oldesworth, and a gallant-spirited young gentlewoman she was. To leave her knave kinsfolk so, for love o’ the colonel! And she was that kind spoken to all of us that followed him. Faith, a man could nigh forgive her, even for deserting the colonel so.” Hugh broke out.

Hugh rumpled the hair back from his forehead, while he strove to grasp the significance of this new information. He realized that these last weeks there had been in his heart an unphrased feeling that his father was cruel, and his mother must have suffered much, just as he was suffering. Once he had held both parents something nobler than human creatures; and latterly his mother had seemed more than ever a saint, and his father an utter wretch; but now, what was he to think? Ridydale spoke presently. Hugh replied, and snuffed the candle with his fingers a moment, then broke out: Ridydale thoughtfully eyed the fire smouldering on the hearth, and tousled his beard with one hand.he began at length. “They were both very young and high-tempered, and he would have his pleasure. He was stubborn, though I grudge to say it of him, and she was not over-patient. There was words betwixt them, and that same day our troop was sent foraying southward and he did not even take leave of her. But he faced the troop about ere the sennight were over and brought us home at a gallop. And when he came to quarters she had taken you and gone for England. He never said word of it, even to me, save, ‘She might ha’ left me the lad; he was as much mine as hers.’”

“Then—he did have some care for me once?” Hugh asked; he was keeping his face turned toward the fire, away from his companion.

Hugh smiled at the fire, rather tremulously; it was dawning upon him that Ridydale, for all his formal respect and kindness, was disappointed that he did not bear out the promises of his babyhood, and he had a doleful feeling that in the same way Colonel Gwyeth, too, would always be disappointed in him. Ridydale began again, “and joined ourselves unto King Gustavus. For the colonel would not make a start to follow his lady; perhaps ’twas stubbornness, but he had no word of her since she quitted Germany, and he was too proud to go a-begging to her, so we just stayed on in the Swedish army. Once—’twas the year we fought at Wolfenbüttel—there came a gentleman volunteer from England with tidings out of Warwickshire, and so we learned that she was dead.”

Hugh blinked at the fire and made no answer. Ridydale mused aloud. Then, as Hugh still kept silent, Ridydale suggested they get to bed, and led the way up the steep ladder to the loft. There were two pallets in Ridydale’s rough chamber, and Hugh wondered impersonally, as he lay down on one, what trooper the corporal had violently dispossessed of his quarters to make room for him. At the foot of the pallet, in the sloping roof, was a small window, through which Hugh found, after the candle was out, he could see five bright stars and a patch of purple-black sky. He lay staring at the stars and saw no meaning in them, for thinking busily to himself and trying to comprehend that his parents had been neither all good nor utterly depraved, but just frail everyday human creatures, whom he must love and bear with for their humanness.

Next morning he awoke of his own accord, without being kicked, and, finding the room empty and a sunbeam coming through the little window, rose up and went briskly below stairs. Late though he was, the woman gave him all the breakfast he wanted, and then force of habit took him over to the stable.Saxon greeted him, and the other men merely pestered him with questions but gave him no blows.

With a feeling that it was not yet time to proclaim his identity to all, Hugh answered evasively, and then, because it was irksome to be idle, he watered one of the horses, and, as Unger had bidden him the day before, began patching up a headstall. He was sitting on a keg, fumbling with a refractory buckle, when Ridydale bore down upon him with a fierce, Arguing that if he were still a stable-boy Ridydale had the right to command him, and if he were a gentleman Ridydale’s friendliness had given him the right to make requests, Hugh laid aside the headstall and went meekly back to the cottage, where till dinner time he lounged ingloriously on the doorstone. After the noon meal Ridydale, very sullen and wrathful, beckoned him outside and rated him, respectfully but severely. “’Tis not becoming a gentleman like you to fetch and carry for those dogs of troopers,” he explained. It was so ludicrously like the view of what befitted a gentleman which up to a fortnight ago he himself had held that Hugh could not help smiling. “Methinks ’tis not what a gentleman does but how he does it makes the disgrace,” he said.

Ridydale shook his head and looked dubious, then, coming apparently to a better temper, changed the subject by offering to lend Hugh money with which to buy fresh clothes. “The colonel will be here to-night,” he concluded, “and I’ve a plan to wait a good-natured moment and tell him of you. I’m thinking he’ll ask to see you, and you should not come before him in such rags as these.”

But Hugh had had enough of borrowing on the chance of Colonel Gwyeth’s making repayment, and he refused the loan; if the colonel chose to provide for him, he reasoned to himself, he need wear his rags but few hours longer; and if the colonel rebuffed him again he would liefer have rags than whole clothes and a debt to so short-pursed a man as a corporal of carabineers. Ridydale fairly let slip his self-control at the boy’s obstinate refusal. “If ’twere not for your red hair and your trick of setting your lips together, I’d doubt if you were a Gwyeth,” he broke out at last, and marched away to the stables in some temper.