Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor

by S. Baring-Gould

Anthony had seen Urith for the last time. They would meet again only in Eternity. Though the moor was wide before him and he was free to escape over it, yet he might not fly. Captain Fogg had taken his father prisoner, had conveyed him to Lydford Castle, which he made his headquarters, and had given out that, unless Anthony Cleverdon the younger, the rebel, who had commanded the insurgent company from the neighbourhood of Tavistock, surrendered himself within twenty-four hours, he would hang the old man from the topmost window of the castle keep.

This was the tidings that Mr. Solomon Gibbs had brought to Anthony. Mr. Gibbs made no comment on it, he left Anthony to act on what he heard unpersuaded by him, to sacrifice himself for his father, or else to let the old man suffer in his stead.

There could be little doubt that Squire Cleverdon had done his utmost to forfeit the love of his children.

All the unhappiness that had fallen on Anthony, Urith, and Bessie was due in chief measure to his pride and hardness of heart; nevertheless, the one great fact remained that he was the father of Anthony, and this fact constituted an ineradicable right over the son, obliging him to do his utmost to save the life of his father.

Moreover, the old man was guiltless of rebellion. Anthony's life was forfeit, because he had borne arms against his rightful sovereign, and his father had not compromised his loyalty in any way. Anthony had never, as a boy, endured that a comrade should be punished for his faults, and could he now suffer his father to be put to death for the rebellious conduct of the son?

Not for one moment did Anthony hesitate as to his duty. But a struggle he did undergo. He thought of Urith. He had sinned against her, led astray by his vanity and love of flattery; and, after having suffered, he had worked his way to a right mind. And at the very moment of reunion, when his love and exultation over his recovered wife shot up like a flame—at that very moment he must pronounce his own sentence of death; at the moment that he had felt that she forgave him, and that all was clear for beginning a new and joyous life together, he must be torn from her, and exchange the pure and beautiful happiness just dawning on him for a disgraceful death, and the grave.

He knew that Urith's grief over his death would be intense, and, maybe, bring her down almost into the dust; but he knew, also, that the day would come when she would acknowledge that he had acted rightly, and then she would be proud of his memory. On the other hand, were he to allow his father to die in his room, he would remain for ever dishonoured in his own sight, disgraced before the world, and would lose the respect of his wife, and with loss of respect her love for him would also go.

The worst was over: he had bidden her farewell without betraying to her that the farewell was for ever. He took his way to Lydford, there to hand himself over to the Royal officers.

He had not left the moor, but was on the highway that crosses an outlying spur of it, when he suddenly encountered Julian Crymes.