But the doctor, less calm inwardly than he had appeared to her, had set spurs to his steed and was already out of sight, though she could hear the sound of horse hoofs in the distance. They seemed to her fancy to beat out the words she had sent back to Gabriel, those words which were after all not wholly true. Choking back a sob, she tried to turn her thoughts to Dr. Roger’s harangue on the Divine right of kings. It was but cold comfort.
CHAPTER IX.
“There is no time so miserable but a man may be true.”
—Timon of Athens.
How Gabriel lived through the next few days he never clearly remembered. Afterwards it seemed to him as if he had been struggling up some huge mountain, crawling inch by inch with no very definite aim, but simply because he thought it would be the part of a coward to lie down and die. He rode with his father, he went fishing, he read Burton’s “Protestation Protested,” and tried to grasp the tolerant notion of a National Church surrounded by voluntary Churches which had occurred to Dr. Laud’s victim during his long imprisonment. He read, too, Lord Brooke’s “Discourse on Episcopacy,” and got a further glimpse of that toleration which was as yet so little understood by either side in the great struggle. But, through all, the grievous wound in his heart made itself constantly felt, and the dreary emptiness of the world seemed to offer him no grain of comfort.
One night he remembered that the life, which seemed so unbearable as well as so useless, might at least be laid down for the country. Hilary had rejected him, but was not the Lord General at Worcester, and only too glad to accept any able-bodied man who would volunteer? It was well known that the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, Hampden, Cromwell—all the leading Parliamentarians, in fact—were profiting by the first repulse at Powick Bridge, and were straining every nerve to get soldiers of a spirit that would control such panic as had disorganised the men when they had unexpectedly encountered Prince Rupert.
Gabriel was alone in his father’s study when this thought first came to him. The evening had closed in; his mother, weary with a long day’s work, had retired early, and the doctor had been summoned to see a dying man in St. Owen’s street.
It was characteristic of him that the very thought of temporising had never crossed his mind. He had not dreamed in London that public matters could possibly separate him from Hilary, but now that he had found how dearly he was to pay for his views, he was never even for a moment tempted to shrink back. The Harfords, as he had said, to the Bishop, did not change. Having once fairly studied the questions of the day, he would be true to the cause he adopted, cost what it might; and having once given his heart to a woman nothing could make him untrue to her.