I cannot mount to Heaven beneath this ban,

Can Christian hope survive so far below

The level of the happiness of man?

Can angels’ wings in these dark waters grow?

A spirit voice replied, “From bearing right

Our sorest burthens comes fresh strength to bear!

And so we rise again towards the light,

And quit the sunless depths for upper air!

Meek patience is as diver’s breath to all

Who sink in sorrow’s sea, and many a ray

Comes gleaming downward from the Source of day,

To guide us reascending from our fall:

The rocks have bruised thee sore, but angels’ wings

Grow fast from bruises, hope from anguish springs.”

—A. Tennyson Turner.


With incredible slowness the summer months passed by in the stifling atmosphere of the Saxon tower of Oxford Castle. Many times Gabriel cheered himself by a resolute dwelling on the old motto written in Elizabethan handwriting in the great family Bible at Hereford which had belonged to his grandfather, “Hope helpeth heavie hartes, sayeth Henry Harford.”

He remembered that the same motto appeared in neat printing characters when the Bible had been handed down to his father, and had become “Bridstock Harford, his Book.” Apparently the Harfords had always had troubled times, but had known how to win their way through them, and he tried desperately not to disgrace the family traditions of fortitude and constancy.

It must, however, be owned that his surroundings were enough to discourage the bravest heart. The youngest of about fifty men of various ranks and different callings, but all of them prisoners of war, he found his natural reserve and fastidiousness tried in a hundred galling ways. While the miserably inadequate food and the total deprivation of the exercise to which all his life e had been accustomed, not only affected his health, but made it daily a greater effort to fight against the evil tendencies of his own nature. Solomon, in the days of his wisdom, set it on record that the man who could rule himself was greater than the victorious general who captured a city, but the world still gives the praise and glory to the military conqueror, and reserves sneers and hard words for the man who hates and boldly fights evil—a reflection only too apt to occur to people in moments of temptation.

Gabriel struggled on, however, through July and August and the greater part of September, saved by hope, and always persuading himself that his father would assuredly effect his exchange before another week of this dreary life was ended. He dwelt often, too, on the thought that perhaps his letter to Hilary after her mother’s death might reach her heart and awaken his Princess Briar-Rose to love once more. Happily he never dreamt that Norton had waylaid the messenger, and that the fragments of the letter had been trodden down into the mud of Marshfield-street. Like poor little Helena, he was for the time helped by an illusion.

On September the 23rd, while he was poring over the tiny volume of Plato which Falkland had given him, his attention was drawn to a general tolling of bells throughout the city, and when Aaron, the brutal gaoler employed to look after the war prisoners by Provost-Marshal Smith entered with the day’s rations, he was beset by eager questions.

“What hath chanced? Hath a battle been fought?” asked the prisoners, for once failing to snatch without delay at the penny loaves dealt out to them from a basket by Sandy, Aaron’s half-witted helper.

“A battle,” growled Aaron, setting down the buckets from which the cans were refilled with beer and water. “Ay, to be sure, and a victory for the king; but it has cost him my Lord Carnarvon, and my Lord Falkland, and a host of other noblemen beside, all for the trouble of slaying Puritan dogs like yourselves.”

Gabriel was well used to the taunt, but at the news of Falkland’s death he turned pale.

“Did you say my Lord Falkland was slain?” he asked, hoping against hope that his rescuer might only be wounded.

“Ay, to be sure, don’t you hear the bells tolling? He’s being borne through Oxford to Great Tew this very moment, though for the matter of that they ought to bury him at night with a stake through his heart at the crossing of the roads, for they say ’twas sheer suicide—he rode out alone betwixt the two armies! just the fool’s act one would look for from a bookish coward, always trying to make peace! A pox on all peace-loving cravens say I. Don’t stand staring at me like that, you mongrel cur! What was my Lord Falkland to you?” and he emphasized the question with a brutal kick.

All these weeks Gabriel had borne with patience and dignity the galling words and petty cruelties practised by the gaoler, but in the overwhelming shock of these grievous tidings his strength suddenly deserted him. Stung to the quick by the man’s coarse attack on the dead hero he turned upon him in fury.

“Don’t dare again to take on your foul lips a name you’re not worthy to breathe,” he cried, with such passionate wrath and a look so threatening that for a moment Aaron quailed.

But anger merely begot anger, and with a fierce laugh the gaoler eyed his victim derisively.

“You will come before the Provost-Marshal for that, you numskull,” he exclaimed, and amid a general silence he seized Gabriel by the arm, and grimly escorted him from the room.

To be out of the close, crowded prison was for a minute the most intense relief, and as he went down the steps Gabriel’s wrath cooled. Longingly he looked about him with the keen eyes of one whose spare time was chiefly employed in futile plans of escape.

Aaron took him across the courtyard to the Governor’s apartments, where they found the redoubtable Smith busy with pen and ink and a huge ledger. He glanced at them as they entered with an expression of annoyance.

“What do you mean by bringing a prisoner into my presence without leave?” he said; “I’ll not have them brought straight to my room from that fever-den.”

“Beg pardon, sir,” said Aaron, saluting, “but it was a bad case of insubordination.”

“Sir,” said Gabriel, “the only insubordination lay in this, that, forgetting he was my gaoler, I forbade him to speak evil of my Lord Falkland.”

“Forbade!” repeated the Provost-Marshal, raising his eyebrows. “You are quite right, Aaron, these rebels must learn their place. You are condemned, Mr. Harford, to thirty days in irons and to be flogged—the number of the strokes not to exceed thirty.”

Gabriel bowed in silence; his lips closed in a hard line; a curious look came into his eyes—the same look which had dawned there years ago in the Archdeacon’s Court at Hereford, when he had heard his father condemned. As Aaron in brutal triumph escorted him to the whipping-post, he could hear the church-bells tolling drearily, and a sense of blank despair filled his heart as he realised fully what a friend and helper he had lost in Lord Falkland; but beneath that lay the deep, burning sense of wrong—the fierce and bitter resentment of a personal wrong which seemed to change his whole nature.

Many speculations were made by the prisoners as to the punishment that would be meted out to him. He was absent for some time, and when Aaron at length readmitted him the first thing that attracted everyone’s attention was the ominous clanking of the irons. He seemed to cross the room with some difficulty, but that was well understood by all who had experienced the weight of the fetters. What no one did understand was the extraordinary change which had come over his face and bearing.

“How long are you condemned to wear irons?” said the lawyer, making room for him on the bench at his side.

“Thirty days,” said Gabriel, and his voice had deepened in a strange way. The lawyer looked searchingly into the white, set face, and fierce eyes of the speaker.

“Come, eat,” he said, kindly. “You have not yet dined. That brute Aaron haled you away just as he had brought the food.”

But Gabriel waved aside the bread, for in truth the thought of eating sickened him.

“You put yourself in the wrong, sir, by seeking to extenuate Lord Falkland’s rash act,” said one of the officer who was a strait-laced Presbyterian. “Ill fare those who are neither cold nor hot; had his lordship not deserted his old friends and sought Court favour he might now have been a useful and an honoured man. Aaron, though brutal, hath the wit to see how worthless is the man who is true to neither party.”

Throughout this pompous speech the lawyer had furtively watched his neighbour, and he was the only man in the room who was not startled when Gabriel suddenly stood up, the colour all at once flushing his pale face, his eyes blazing.

“Sir,” he said, angrily, “Lord Falkland never sought Court favour, he loathed the Court, but from a sense of duty tried to save the country by urging moderation on the King. All men know what sort of treatment he received from the vile courtiers. Are we sunk so low that we cannot see the virtues of a great man because in matters of State he opposes us?”

“I repeat,” said the Presbyterian, “that you were wrong to espouse the cause of one who had thrown away his life. You should not have sought to gloss over the sinfulness of his suicidal end. Aaron was right—he ought not to have had funeral honours. Lord Falkland was a weak man and sorely misguided, as was natural enough, for his religion was merely an intellectual pursuit, and wholly unorthodox. Hell is now his portion.”

“Then I will have no more to do with what you call religion,” said Gabriel, passionately. “It is these; accursed systems that are at the root of all our misery—there’s not a pin to choose betwixt your bigotry and the bigotry of the Archbishop. England is going to the dogs because Churchmen wrangle over ceremonies and trappings, and Puritans squabble over Holy Writ. You say my Lord Falkland is doomed to hell? Then if so there was never One who called peacemakers blessed, or ordered us to love our enemies and serve them. But he is not doomed. It is a lie! It is this country that is in hell, with its blind bigots and its beasts calling themselves men, and its blood and its boastful tyranny. ’Tis I myself that am in hell, mad with the thirst for vengeance, longing to kill with my own hands the brutes down yonder.”

Quite suddenly his voice faltered, he reeled backwards, and would have fallen to the ground had not the room been crowded. As it was, he fell against Passey, who, aghast at the wild words he had uttered, was nevertheless mindful of Gabriel’s kindly help in the past, and allowed the head of the unconscious prisoner to rest on his knee.

“A most blasphemous young man,&............