Norton’s eyes twinkled, with amusement.
“So the Vicar is an antiquary,” he said. “Well, I care not a doit for the churchyard cross, or the church itself for that matter.” And with a careless “good-day” he strolled out to the door, where his horse awaited him.
“He cares for little but success,” reflected Waghorn, shrewdly. “An ambitious pagan, a carnal man who would ride to his own evil desires through thick and thin. Yet methinks he might serve as a tool in the good cause. I will mark his movements closely, and use him when the time serves.”
With a deep sigh he returned to the perusal of the paper. It was an old number of the “Mercurius Aulicus,” a most bitter Royalist sheet published at Oxford, and notorious for the lies and the opprobrious language it employed. To read it always stirred the Puritan into a fiery indignation, which would have been excusable had he not afterwards found a secret pleasure in the excitement. He then sought refuge in the denunciatory psalms, and went back to his work breathing threatenings and slaughter against the opponents of all that he deemed right. Waghorn was one of the vast number of well-meaning people who call themselves followers of Christ, but jealously demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and conveniently skip the commandment, “Love your enemies.”
Meanwhile a momentary gleam of hope had come to Hilary. She had at first leapt to the conclusion that Norton had seen Gabriel during the campaign of the present year, but now she suddenly remembered that after the siege of Hereford Waller’s forces had retired to Gloucester. Was it not possible that he had met him there? If so, it was almost immediately after the cruel rebuff she had given him in the cathedral porch. Could she honestly blame him if after that he had taken her at her word? Was he not perfectly free to fall in love with this Gloucestershire lady?
Then with a sense of relief she recalled Dr. Harford’s talk when he had visited them on his return from London. Had he not quoted to her Gabriel’s own words—his conviction that her message had brought him back to life? He might perhaps have had a passing admiration for the Puritan maid, but had it amounted to anything more she was certain that he would never have sent her such a message.
With that, however, the cold wave of doubt returned. What if Waller had been this year in Gloucestershire? He was frequently in the West, and what more likely than that long absence, the tedium of the campaign, and possibly the malign influence of the arch-rebel, Cromwell, had gradually wrought a change in Gabriel’s character? She remembered how greatly the two years’ absence in London had altered him. Was it not only too probable that this apparently endless war had changed him yet more?
“If only I had asked Colonel Norton when he had encountered him,” she reflected, miserably, “but in the agony of the moment all I thought of was how to hide everything. He can never have guessed, that is one comfort; and I’ll never, never speak of the matter again should he come here. Yet if only I could know for certain when it was! I will, at any rate, see if Uncle Coke knows.”
So, after dinner, when the Vicar was filling his pipe, she asked, with well-assumed indifference, “did Captain Bayly give you much news of Gloucester, sir, the other night? Had he been there in the siege?”
“Nay; I gathered that he had only quitted his home at Poole, in Dorsetshire, a short time ago. Governor Massey had persuaded him to come into Herefordshire because he had seen something in Dorset of the movement of the Clubmen, which they say is now spreading to our county.”