He would do him credit, and reward all the pains taken to educate him and bring him up as a good Catholic.
The motives which prompted him to this were mixed, and revenge against his wife was perhaps the dominant feeling. She loved that boy better than anything on earth; she would bring him up in the faith of the Reformed Church, and teach him, probably, to hate his father.
He would, at any rate, get possession of this her idol, and punish her for the words she had spoken to him by the porch of the farm, on that summer evening now more than two weeks ago.
Ambrose Gifford had deceived Mary from the first, professing to be a Protestant while it served his purpose to win favour in the household of the Earl of Leicester, but in reality he was a Catholic, and only waited the turn of the tide to declare himself. He led a bad, immoral life, and it was scarcely more than two years after her marriage that Mary Gifford's eyes were opened to the true character of the man who had won her in her inexperienced girlhood by his handsome person—in which the boy resembled him—his suave manner, and his passionate protestations of devotion to her.
Many women have had a like bitter lesson to learn, but perhaps few have felt as Mary did, humbled in the very dust, when she awoke to the reality of her position, that the love offered her had been unworthy the name, and that she had been betrayed and deceived by a man who, as soon as the first glamour of his passion was over, showed himself in his true colours, and expected her to take his conduct as a matter of course, leaving her free, as he basely insinuated, to console herself as she liked with other admirers.
To the absolutely pure woman this was the final death-blow of all hope for the future, and all peace in the present. Mary fled to her old home with her boy, and soon after heard the report that her husband had been killed in a fray, and that if he had lived he would have been arrested and condemned for the secret attack made on his victim, and also as a disguised Catholic supposed to be in league with those who were then plotting against the life of the Queen.
About a year before this time, a gentleman of the Earl of Leicester's household, when at Penshurst, had told Mary Gifford that Ambrose Gifford was alive—that he had escaped to join the Jesuits at Douay, and was employed by them as one of their most shrewd and able emissaries. From that moment her peace of mind was gone, and the change that had come over her had been apparent to everyone.
The sadness in her sweet face deepened, and a melancholy oppressed her, except, indeed, when with her boy, who was a source of unfailing delight, mingled with fear, lest she should lose him, by his father's machinations.
It was not till fully half-an-hour after Ambrose had been carried away, that the shepherd, with his staff in his hand and the lost lamb thrown over his shoulder, came to the place where Mary was lying.