Did ever read in tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
It was toward the close of a lovely summer’s day, in the eventful year of 1643, that a young cavalier might have been seen riding at a slow pace, and in a somewhat sad and thoughtful mood, through a green and winding lane in the pleasant county of Warwick, not far distant from the pastoral banks of famous Avon.
But though the young man’s brow was now overcast and clouded, though his fine gray eye was fixed abstractedly on the mane of his charger, and though a heavy shadow, such as is believed by the superstitious to arise from the prescience of coming fate, gloomed over all his features, it was evident that such an expression was alien to the face, such a mood unusual to the character of the man.
He was as handsome a youth as you might see in a twelvemonth, even in that land, so justly famed for the manly beauty of its sons; tall and well-made, and giving promise of uncommon strength and vigor, when mature manhood should have swelled and hardened his slender form and yet unfurnished muscles. His face was frank and open, with a fair broad forehead, a well-opened, laughing, deep gray eye, and a mouth, the dimpled angles of which could not be divested of their natural tendency to smile, even by the heavy despondency which seemed now to weigh upon his spirit, and alter his whole countenance, even as a sunny landscape is altered by the intervention of a storm-cloud, blotting out all the laughing rays, which gave it mirth and radiance.
He was well-mounted on a horse that seemed adapted, by its mingled blood and bone, to bide the shock of armies, and caparisoned with demipique and holsters, as became the war-steed of an officer. Nor did the rider’s dress, though not what we should now call military, contradict the inferences that would be drawn from the charger’s make and accoutrements; for in his steeple-crowned slouched beaver he wore a single long black feather, and across the left breast of his velvet jerkin a baldrick of blue silk, sustaining a sword of heavier and more war-like fabric than the court rapiers of the day—the baldrick and the feather indicating a partisan of the king, as clearly as the sword and war-horse showed that he was bound on some longer and more perilous adventure than a ride through rich green meadows and among flowery hedge-rows.
He rode quite alone, however, which was at that day something unusual; for the custom of going forth accompanied by several armed servants or retainers, even in times of profound peace, was still prevalent among men of any pretension to gentle birth, and such, unless every indication of natural appearance, gentle bearing, and free demeanor failed, was evidently this young cavalier.
The sun was perhaps still an hour high, and the skies were filled with rich yellow lustre, while all the face of the green country was checkered with bright gleams and massive shadows, according as the level rays streamed gayly over the open fields, or were intercepted by the undulations of the ground, the frequent clumps of trees and patches of dark woodland, or the thick hawthorn hedges which diversified that pleasant landscape, when the lane which the young man followed began to rise rapidly over the eastern slope of a steep hill or down, the summit of which, a bare wild sheep-pasture, cut clear and solid against the rich gleam of the sunset heavens.
Here, for the first time, the youth raised his eyes, and after casting a rapid glance over the evening skies, as if to read the hour in the fading hues of day, checked his horse with the curb, and touching him at the same time lightly with the spur, cantered up the ascent with more animation in his air than he had hitherto displayed, and with a slight gesture of impatience, as if at the unexpected lateness of the hour.
A few minutes rapid riding brought him to the edge of the bare down, which was in fact a mere ridge, with but a few level yards at the summit, beyond these, sinking down almost precipitately into a singular lap or basin of land, nearly circular in form, and about two miles in diameter, walled in as it were from the external world, on every side, by tall, bare, grassy downs, treeless and bleak, without a sign of human habitation or of human culture, and limiting the range of the eye to that narrow and cheerless horizon.