'Where are you going, sir? Set me down, set me down.'
'We go for help for your mother. Let that suffice.'
Ambrose now made a renewed struggle for freedom. It was the last; he felt something put over his face, so that he could neither see where he was going nor utter another cry; he only knew he was being carried off by this strange man he knew not where, and that he had left his mother lying pale and still, with that terrible red stream trickling from her forehead, on the hillock of heather on the moor.
It is said, and perhaps with truth, that the bitterest hate is felt by the sinner against the sufferer for his sin. This hatred was in Ambrose Gifford's heart, and was the primary cause of his thus forcibly taking from the wife whom he had so cruelly betrayed, the child who was so infinitely precious to her.
Ambrose Gifford had, no doubt, by subtle casuistry persuaded himself that he was doing good to the boy. He would be educated by the Jesuits, with whom he had cast in his lot; he would be trained as a son of the Catholic Church, and by this he hoped to gain favour, and strike off a few years of purgatorial fire for his past sins!
He had confessed and done penance for the disgraceful acts of which he had been guilty, and he had been received into the refuge the Roman Church was ready to offer to him.
At this time she was making every effort to strengthen her outposts, and to prepare for the struggle which at any moment she might be called upon to make to regain her coveted ascendency in England.
The seminary founded at Douay by a certain Dr Allen, a fine scholar, who was educated at Oxford, was much resorted to by persecuted Catholics who sought a refuge there. Or by men like Ambrose Gifford, who, obliged to leave the country under the shadow of a crime committed, were glad to throw themselves into the arms ready to receive them, and, as they would have expressed it, find pardon and peace by fasting and penance in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Doubtless, the great majority of those who gathered at Douay at this time were devout and persecuted members of the Church, from the bondage of which Elizabeth had delivered her country, with the hearty approbation of her loyal subjects.
But, black sheep like Ambrose Gifford went thither to be washed and outwardly reformed; and he, being a man of considerable ability and shrewdness, had after a time of probation been despatched to England to beat up recruits and to bring back word how the Catholic cause was prospering there.
He had, therefore, every reason to wish to take with him his own boy, whose fine physique and noble air he had noted with pride as he had, unseen, watched him for the last few weeks when haunting the neighbourhood like an evil spirit.