“Strafford had offered his brain and arm to establish a system which would have been the negation of political liberty. Laud had sought to train up a generation in habits of thought which would have extinguished all desire for political liberty.”
S. R. Gardiner.
History of the Great Civil War, Vol. II.
Norton found only one occupant of the snug tap-room of the inn, and this was a severe-looking man, who seemed absorbed in a news journal. His prominent ears, the closely-cropped dark hair, and the austerity of his whole manner tickled the Royalist’s sense of humour, and though certain that to draw information from those thin compressed lips would be like drawing water from a dry well, he greeted him pleasantly.
“Good day, Sexton,” he said.
Waghorn lifted his piercing eyes and regarded him with grave disapproval.
“I am no sexton, sir, you mistake my calling,” he said.
“Your pardon! but, in truth, you look like a sexton, there is an air of graves and mould about you, of skulls and crossbones,” replied Norton, laughing. “Perhaps, however, sexton or no, you can tell me the name of the Vicar, for I am a stranger here, and have just spoken with him and his daughter.”
“The Vicar is the son of that vile prelate, Bishop Coke, who lives in palaces while the poor starve, one of the hirelings that devour the flock, one of those twelve prelates who sought to break the law of the land, and were justly cast into the Tower. Would that they had remained there,” said the Puritan, bitterly.
“And this son of his, your Vicar, doth he share the Bishop’s views?”
“I know not,” said Waghorn, and an expression of genuine perplexity dawned in his eyes. “He did feed Massey’s men t’other day when they were cold and hungry.”
“The devil he did?” exclaimed Norton. “Doth he then side with the Parliament?”
“In truth, sir, he is one that hates the war, but whether he thinks one side better than the other I know not. As for the lady, she is no daughter of his, but his niece, Mistress Hilary Unett, and she, I understand, hates all godly Puritans, and favours such godless men as Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice. I speak over-freely, however, for I see you are a King’s officer.”
“Nay, man, I like the freedom of your speech,” said Norton, with a laugh. “Judging by your looks I took you for a man of few words, but, beshrew me! you are as good a talker as I have met in these parts.”
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh,” said Waghorn. “My thoughts are ever of how to thwart those who are half-hearted in the work of the Lord, those who would keep crosses standing because, forsooth, they are old. Many things are old yet have to be utterly destroyed. The brazen serpent was old, yet, when the people bowed down to it, then it had to be ground to powder. And so shall it be now, in spite of the Vicar. All he cares for is its great antiquity—if a heathen idol were brought across the seas, and if it were curiously wrought, I trow the Vicar would be right proud to place it among his hoards, and he and Mr. Silas Taylor would try to make out its age and its history, as they do with their vain stones, and their bones of those that be dead and gone.”
Norton’s eyes twinkled, with amusement.
“So the Vicar is an antiquary,” he said. “Well, I care not a doit for the churchyard cross, or the church itself for that matter.” And with a careless “good-day” he strolled out to the door, where his horse awaited him.
“He cares for little but success,” reflected Waghorn, shrewdly. “An ambitious pagan, a carnal man who would ride to his own evil desires through thick and thin. Yet methinks he might serve as a tool in the good cause. I will mark his movements closely, and use him when the time serves.”
With a deep sigh he returned to the perusal of the paper. It was an old number of the “Mercurius Aulicus,” a most bitter Royalist sheet published at Oxford, and notorious for the lies and the opprobrious language it employed. To read it always stirred the Puritan into a fiery indignation, which would have been excusable had he not afterwards found a secret pleasure in the excitement. He then sought refuge in the denunciatory psalms, and went back to his work breathing threatenings and slaughter against the opponents of all that he deemed right. Waghorn was one of the vast number of well-meaning people who call themselves followers of Christ, but jealously demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and conveniently skip the commandment, “Love your enemies.”
Meanwhile a momentary gleam of hope had come to Hilary. She had at first leapt to the conclusion that Norton had seen Gabriel during the campaign of the present year, but now she suddenly remembered that after the siege of Hereford Waller’s forces had retired to Gloucester. Was it not possible that he had met him there? If so, it was almost immediately after the cruel rebuff she had given him in the cathedral porch. Could she honestly blame him if after that he had taken her at her word? Was he not perfectly free to fall in love with this Gloucestershire lady?
Then with a sense of relief she recalled Dr. Harford’s talk when he had visited them on his return from London. Had he not quoted to her Gabriel’s own words—his conviction that her message had brought him back to life? He might perhaps have had a passing admiration for the Puritan maid, but had it amounted to anything more she was certain that he would never have sent her such a message.
With that, however, the cold wave of doubt returned. What if Waller had been this year in Gloucestershire? He was frequently in the West, and what more likely than that long absence, the tedium of the campaign, and possibly the malign influence of the arch-rebel, Cromwell, had gradually wrought a change in Gabriel’s character? She remembered how greatly the two years’ absence in London had altered him. Was it not only too probable that this apparently endless war had changed him yet more?
“If only I had asked Colonel Norton when he had encountered him,” she reflected, miserably, “but in the agony of the moment all I thought of was how to hide everything. He can never have guessed, that is one comfort; and I’ll never, never speak of the matter again should he come here. Yet if only I could know for certain when it was! I will, at any rate, see if Uncle Coke knows.”
So, after dinner, when the Vicar was filling his pipe, she asked, with well-assumed indifference, “did Captain Bayly give you much news of Gloucester, sir, the other night? Had he been there in the siege?”
“Nay; I gathered that he had only quitted his home at Poole, in Dorsetshire, a short time ago. Governor Massey had persuaded him to come into Herefordshire because he had seen something in Dorset of the movement of the Clubmen, which they say is now spreading to our county.”
“What are the Clubmen?” asked Hilary.
“They are those country-folk who are determined to have nothing to do either with Royalists or Parliamentarians, but league themselves together to defend their homes and families.”
“In truth, then, sir, I think you yourself are one,” said Hilary, smiling. “For you certainly hold aloof from both parties in one sense, and feed the hungry without respect of persons or opinions.”
“Child, my first duty is to obey the Prince of Peace,” said the Vicar. “I do not understand the violent warlike spirit of most of our clergy, or the bitter words of the Puritan preachers. But it hath never been my fortune to agree well with parsons; the bulk of them seem to me absorbed in the little interests of their parishes, wrapped up in their own narrow opinions and unmindful of greater things.”
Hilary was silent; she wondered what it was that made her uncle so unlike such a parson as Prebendary Rogers, of Stoke Edith, and she tried to understand why he was always at his best when with men of other callings. Much as she loved him, and greatly as she had been influenced by his gentle, kindly spirit, and by the quiet humour which had done so much to cheer her sadness, he was still something of an enigma to her. But she had a suspicion that the true key to his life lay in the old saying, “The liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand.”
But a long digression had been made, and she was deter mined to bring back the conversation to the question she had at heart before the Vicar lighted his pipe.
“When was Sir William Waller’s army last in Gloucestershire?” she asked.
“Well, it must have been just six months ago, I should say,” said the Vicar. “Yes, for I remember we were haymaking in the glebe when Mr. Taylor told me how Waller’s army had twice well-nigh succeeded in capturing His Majesty, who was chased from one county to another. You must remember hearing of Sudeley Castle being taken, and of how scores of bridges in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire were broken down by the two armies, so that they said it would cost 拢10,000 to make them good again. That was last June, my dear.”
“Colonel Norton said something about it,” said Hilary, steadily, and the Vicar was too much engrossed in the difficult operation of lighting his pipe to notice that she had grown white to the lips.
“Ah, a pleasant-spoken man,” he remarked, “but I don’t like what I hear about the doings of his garrison. Maybe he only carries out his orders, but it is a grievous strain on the people.”
Hilary stole quietly away and would gladly have been alone, but Mrs. Durdle besought her so earnestly to come into the kitchen that she could not refuse.
“Come, dearie, and stir the Christmas pudding,” said the housekeeper, “just for old times’ sake. I’m sadly behindhand this year, but there was no getting the currants from Ledbury with all them soldiers infesting the place. Stir and wish, my dear, stir and wish.”
“There’s nothing l............