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,” remarked the Presbyterian. “Strange that one who hath hitherto been well reported among us and of modest bearing should suddenly change in this unseemly fashion. He erred in saying he was in hell while the day of grace is yet unspent, and he is permitted to remain in our godly company; but there can be no doubt that he will ultimately go there unless he speedily repents.”
There was a silence in the room. A good many of the prisoners felt that there was some truth beneath the fierce words of the lieutenant which was beyond their reach. Others had liked him, and were sorry to see such an extraordinary change in him. It was a relief when the key was turned in the lock and the door cautiously unbarred by Sandy. The half-witted lad, a great, awkward-looking fellow of fifteen, came shambling in guiltily, and locked the door after him.
“Aaron never saw me!” he whispered, grinning from ear to ear. Then, catching sight of Gabriel on the floor, “What, he hath swooned at last? Then belike he’ll be crying out a bit when he comes to himself. There was no sport at all for us at the whipping-post, for he never once shrieked for mercy, as some of ’em do. What’s the good of sport if you don’t hear the prey squeak?”
“Did they dare to flog him for what he said to Aaron?” asked the lawyer, his face darkening.
“Why, yes, gentlemen, to be sure; and as I’m telling you, ‘twas poor sport, cursed poor sport. I’d as lief not have seen it. When they unbound him he never spake a word, but just looked as though he could have murdered Aaron, and he never seemed to heed at all when I did what I could to staunch the blood.”
“’Tis this that hath changed him,” said Rawlyns, the Marlborough burgess; and while the others drew off a little, discussing the matter eagerly, he and Passey did the best they could for Gabriel, Sandy supplying them with certain rough remedies which he had contrived to smuggle up the tower steps during Aaron’s absence.
Strangely enough, the half-witted lad had more heart than his brutal chief, and though, as he honestly admitted, he liked “to hear the vermin squeak,” he was quick to respond to kindness, and retained a memory of a few pleasant words Gabriel had once spoken to him. So little but curses and blows had come to him throughout his wretched life that he was always hoping to win again some sort of recognition from the young lieutenant, and for the next few days it was pathetic to see the efforts he made to extort something more from Gabriel than the curt thanks which rewarded all his attempts at help. Gabriel did not, indeed, disguise the fact that the mere sight of the idiot’s face, the mere touch of his dirty and clumsy hands, repulsed him. Nor did he respond any more graciously to the sympathy of his fellow-prisoners; the brutal punishment had called out all the worst side of his nature, and for days he lay in his corner, ill in body and mind, bereft of all hope for himself and for the country, without faith in God or man, and, as he had very truly said, “in hell.”
Every time Aaron entered the room his hatred of the man seemed to increase, and the maddening sense of being wholly at the mercy of this brutal tyrant grew upon him until it seemed to dominate everything else. Even the nightly psalms and prayers of the prisoners became unendurable to him; he turned his face to the wall and tried not to listen, convinced in his mind that they were praying at him, and so wrapped round in himself and his wrongs that it seemed impossible his character should ever recover what it had lost.
At last one October evening, when the Presbyterian was saying a psalm, a few of the familiar words entered his mind with a force and freshness which compelled him, against his will, to turn his thoughts away from his misery.
Through the old tower room there rang the verse: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.”
From his earliest childhood his father had taught him to see God in nature, and the first light that came now to him in the outer darkness was the truth which had really become part of his very being when, as a little fellow, he rode with the doctor through the Herefordshire lanes, learning to observe, and learning to love birds and insects and flowers. God was in His creation and the world was not at the mercy of fate and chance.
Yet it was not until this autumn evening that the breadth of the assertion struck him, or that he in the least grasped the thought that the grand climax, welcoming the entrance of the King of Glory, was the prophecy of the entire ultimate triumph of the Lord strong and mighty—the Conqueror in the battle of love against hate, of righteousness against sin.
Sickened and utterly wearied with the stormy theological disputes of the age, he reached now beyond the clamouring voices, and sought refuge in the living realities wherein alone peace can be found.
Moreover, as he lay that evening in the dark prison room, for spite of the cold and the short days the prisoners were allowed neither fire nor light, there returned to him in helpful fashion the remembrance of the last talk he had had with his friend Joscelyn Heyworth.
They had sat late together in their quarters at the “Nagg’s Head” in Bath, and Joscelyn had told him of his visit to his old tutor Whichcote, at North Cadbury, during which the recent death of Hampden had been the chief topic, and in his bitterness of soul the young Captain had found relief in telling an older and wiser man the despair he felt for the country under its grievous loss. A memory returned to Gabriel of some words of Whichcote’s as to heaven, which his friend had quoted, and he fell to musing over them. “Heaven is first a temper and then a place; and both heaven and hell have their foundations within us.” He knew only too well that the last statement was true, knew it by the brutal thirst for vengeance which was consuming him; by the hatred of his enemies which had changed his whole character, by the harsh judgments he silently passed on the failings and petty weaknesses of his fellow-prisoners. But the tutor had said that heaven also had its foundation within us, and the thought linked itself now to that startling assertion that the world and they that dwell therein are God’s, which had first lightened his gloom. Musing over it all, he presently fell into a sounder and more refreshing sleep than any he had of late known.
He was roused at last, not as had been usually the case, by the discomfort of the heavy irons he wore, but by the soft, light brushing of something across his forehead. In the light of the early morning he saw a robin fluttering over him, and only one long shut up in a single room, away from all the interests of outer life, could understand the intense pleasure of the sight. In the sheer happiness of watching the bird he forgot his aching limbs, and the blank despair which for so long had clouded his mind was gone.
What was that quaint legend which he had once heard little Bridstock’s Welsh nurse tell in the old nursery at Hereford? The robin had won his red breast because, being the kindest of the birds, it flew every night to hell with a drop of water wherewith to slake the thirst of those tormented in the flame. The bird had been true to its nature when it flew through the narrow unglazed window and came to the desolate prisoner of war in Oxford Castle. And as, perched on one of the old beams, it flooded the place with its blithe song, Gabriel escaped altogether from the dreary prison. Once more he was in the wood in Herefordshire, with the sunshine turning the brake fern into silver and the carpet of russet leaves into gold, once more the sweetest eyes in the world were lifted to his, once more the musical voice told him that all things seemed more beautiful because of love, while the bird of hope sang in the tree overhead.
Spite of all that had intervened, there was gladness in the remembrance, for his love for Hilary was the most divine part of his nature, no fleeting passion to be changed to bitterness by change in her. It was that rare love which war, death or sickness may lay siege to, but which is by its quality eternal.
And thus, through love, he gradually came back to life, and once more the old family motto, “Hope helpeth heavie hartes,” strengthened him to endure the sorrows of division and the countless horrors which the war had brought in its train.
The robin did much to cheer all the prisoners. It became the pet and plaything of everyone in the place; to listen to its blithe song, to tame it, and to conceal it safely before the brutal Aaron entered, was a daily occupation, and not a man in the place failed to provide it with crumbs, so that the bird was ere long the one plump and prosperous creature in the tower-room.
With November came a return of the gaol fever, the new fever as it was called, one of the visitations which resulted from the privation and unhealthy overcrowding among the unhappy prisoners. It spread throughout England, sparing neither rich nor poor, and presented such unusual symptoms that no doctor understood how to deal with it.
This, however, made little difference to the Oxford prisoners, for no one troubled to think about doctoring them. It went to Gabriel’s heart to see how they suffered, and his whole time was now given to a desperate attempt to relieve the sick. Cure was out of the question, for no medicine was to be had, and all through the month and on into December men were stricken. Those with good constitutions pulled through, the others raved in delirium for a few days, then died. It became quite a usual occurrence to see Aaron and Sandy removing the dead, and at length their numbers were reduced to thirty-nine.
“There’s a lot of waste space here,” remarked Aaron brutally, as he dragged out the corpse of the Presbyterian who in September had reprimanded Gabriel, but of late had been his best friend. “I shall have to bring you some more prisoners to fill the gaps.”
“When once this hateful war is over,” thought Gabriel, “I will follow in my father’s steps and be a physician. I will fight disease and pain, and bring hope to heavy hearts. For of all terrible things the worst is to watch men dying for want of proper aid.”
And then he fell to musing, as he had often done of late, on the strange problem of war. It was easy to account for the extraordinary influence which Falkland had had over him by the largeness of mind and the passionate generosity of the dead hero. And now more and more as he thought of his death, it seemed to him that Falkland was the forerunner of a vast multitude who, in future generations, would band themselves together and resolutely stand for peace, permitting only such force as was needful for the protection of hearth and home, and the maintenance of the just laws of their own country. As he recalled Prince Rupert’s favourite saying, “We will have no law in England, save that of the sword,” he could not but remember the words of One whom both Royalists and Parliamentarians professed to obey, “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”