Kate Aylesford: A Story of the Refugees

by Charles J. Peterson

What miracle
Can work me into hope! —Lee.

Then, as the headmost foes appeared,
With one brave bound the copse he cleared. —Scott.

Suddenly the distant cry of a hound seemed borne upon the air. Often before, during the morning, as we have said, Kate had fancied she heard such a noise; and as often had she been happily disappointed. But this time there was no mistaking it. No sighing of the wind among the pines, no murmur of distant water, could produce that peculiar cry, which was plainly the hoarse, deep bay of a bloodhound heated with the chase.

Kate gazed in terror around, vainly seeking a hiding-place. If the earth had opened, at that moment, and swallowed her up, she would have welcomed it as a relief. The worst that she had feared, that recapture which was more horrible than death, was now about to befall her. Help there was none. The nearest human creature, possessed of the sympathies of our common nature, was probably miles away; and as for pleading for mercy at the hands of the outlaws, she knew she might as well petition to the winds.

Meantime the bay of the hound sounded louder and louder, fiercer and fiercer, nearer and nearer. Occasionally he would appear to lose the scent for a moment or two, for the deep cry would die away through the wilderness; and Kate, at such times, would listen breathlessly, fluctuating between hope and despair. But the hoarse bay broke forth invariably again, at intervals greater or less; and always with a startling ferocity that sent the blood back in torrents to her heart. After thus recovering the scent, the cry of the hound would be heard almost incessantly, till the forest resounded with a hundred echoes, and the very heavens seemed to give back the sound. Though the pursuers now drew near, and then receded a space, as if following a somewhat circuitous path, the terrible bay of the hound plainly approached closer, with the lapse of every quarter of an hour.

There was but one hope now left for our heroine, which was that death would put an end to her miseries, before she could be dragged back to the outlaw’s hut. Her efforts to escape had so completely exhausted her, that her heroic spirit would have been unable to force the weary limbs onward much further, even though the refugees had failed to track her. She felt satisfied that she could not retrace her steps to the cabin, and that she would perish on the way if the attempt was made to compel her.

But, hopeless as was her condition, Kate still remained true to herself. The fate which she could not avert, she resolved should be met with dignity at least. She abandoned, therefore, all further thought of flight, determining to face her inevitable destiny where she then stood. Like a Roman virgin, stout-hearted to the last, as became the daughter of illustrious heroes, she drew her garments decorously and proudly about her, and stood up to face the foe.

It was not only on herself that she relied, however, in this most terrible of all extremities. The reader is already familiar with the fact that Kate was sincere and earnest in her piety; and now, when she considered death as imminent, she looked up to the Almighty for support in that dreadful hour. She had been educated in the liturgy of the Established Church, as her fathers had been since the days of the saintly Latimer, and though she worshiped with other sects as fervently as with her own, when the ministry of her church was impossible, her thoughts naturally turned, in this extremity, to the solemn words of that litany which she had learned first at her mother’s knee.

As she stood, therefore, facing the foe, and bravely supporting her weak frame by leaning against a tree, her eyes were raised to heaven, and her lips moved in earnest supplications. We have seen somewhere a picture of a Christian virgin, bound to an oak by Pagan enemies, and about to suffer martyrdom by being transfixed with arrows as a target. So Kate looked now. Her hands were clasped downwards before her; and her uplifted countenance glowed with a fervent enthusiasm that proved the mortal part above the fear of death. Thus she stood, while the bay of the ferocious hound drew nearer, and shouts, mingling with the hoarse cry, showed that her pitiless hunters were now close at hand; yet not an eyelid quivered, not a muscle about her mouth twitched, not a shade of color rose into her composed, though pallid face.

“Remember not, Lord, our offences,” she prayed, “nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins; spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood.”