DOROTHY'S REFUGE.
With the decay of summer, lady Vaughan began again to sink, and became
at length so weak that Dorothy rarely left her room. The departure of
Richard Heywood to join the rebels affected her deeply. The report of
the utter rout of the parliamentary forces at Edgehill, lighted up her
face for the last time with a glimmer of earthly gladness, which the
very different news that followed speedily extinguished; and after that
she declined more rapidly. Mrs. Rees told Dorothy that she would yield
to the first frost. But she lingered many weeks. One morning she signed
to her daughter to come nearer that she might speak to her.
'Dorothy,' she whispered, 'I wish much to see good Mr. Herbert. Prithee
send for him. I know it is an evil time for him to travel, being an old
man and feeble, but he will do his endeavour to come to me, I know, if
but for my husband's sake, whom he loved like a brother. I cannot die in
peace without first taking counsel with him how best to provide for the
safety of my little ewe-lamb until these storms are overblown. Alas!
alas! I did look to Richard Heywood--'
She could say no more.
'Do not take thought about the morrow for me any more than you would for
yourself, madam,' said Dorothy. 'You know master Herbert says the one is
as the other.'
She kissed her mother's hand as she spoke, then hastened from the room,
and despatched a messenger to Llangattock.
Before the worthy man arrived, lady Vaughan was speechless. By signs and
looks, definite enough, and more eloquent than words, she committed
Dorothy to his protection, and died.
Dorothy behaved with much calmness. She would not, in her mother's
absence, act so as would have grieved her presence. Little passed
between her and Mr. Herbert until the funeral was over. Then they talked
of the future. Her guardian wished much to leave everything in charge of
the old bailiff, and take her with him to Llangattock; but he hesitated
a little because of the bad state of the roads in winter, much because
of their danger in the troubled condition of affairs, and most of all
because of the uncertain, indeed perilous position of the Episcopalian
clergy, who might soon find themselves without a roof to shelter them.
Fearing nothing for himself, he must yet, in arranging for Dorothy,
contemplate the worst of threatening possibilities; and one thing was
pretty certain, that matters must grow far worse before they could even
begin to mend.
But they had more time for deliberation given them than they would
willingly have taken. Mr. Herbert had caught cold while reading the
funeral service, and was compelled to delay his return. The cold settled
into a sort of low fever, and for many weeks he lay helpless. During
this time the sudden affair at Brentford took place, after which the
king, having lost by it far more than he had gained, withdrew to Oxford,
anxious to re-open the treaty which the battle had closed.
The country was now in a sad state. Whichever party was uppermost in any
district, sought to ruin all of the opposite faction. Robbery and
plunder became common, and that not only on the track of armies or the
route of smaller bodies of soldiers, for bands of mere marauders, taking
up the cry of the faction that happened in any neighbourhood to have the
ascendancy, plundered houses, robbed travellers, and were guilty of all
sorts of violence. Hence it had become as perilous to stay at home in an
unfortified house as to travel; and many were the terrors which during
the winter tried the courage of the girl, and checked the recovery of
the old man. At length one morning, after a midnight alarm, Mr. Herbert
thus addressed Dorothy, as she waited upon him with his breakfast:
'It fears me much, my dear Dorothy, that the time will be long ere any
but fortified places will be safe abodes. It is a question in my mind
whether it would not be better to seek refuge for you--. But stay; let
me suggest my proposal, rather than startle you with it in sudden form
complete. You are related to the Somersets, are you not?'
'Yes--distantly.'
'Is the relationship recognized by them?'
'I cannot tell, sir. I do not even distinctly know what the relationship
is. And assuredly, sir, you mean not to propose that I should seek
safety from bodily peril with a household which is, to say the least, so
unfriendly to the doctrines you and my blessed mother have always taught
me! You cannot, or indeed, must you not have forgotten that they are
papists?'
Dorothy had been educated in such a fear of the catholics, and such a
profound disapproval of those of their doctrines rejected by the
reformers of the church of England, as was only surpassed in intensity
by her absolute abhorrence of the assumptions and negations of the
puritans. These indeed roused in her a certain sense of disgust which
she had never felt in respect of what were considered by her teachers
the most erroneous doctrines of the catholics. But Mr. Herbert, although
his prejudices were nearly as strong, and his opinions, if not more
indigenous at least far better acclimatised than hers, had yet reaped
this advantage of a longer life, that he was better able to atone his
dislike of certain opinions with personal regard for those who held
them, and therefore did not, like Dorothy, recoil from the idea of
obligation to one of a different creed--provided always that creed was
catholicism and not puritanism. For to the church of England, the
catholics, in the presence of her more rampant foes, appeared harmless
enough now.
He believed that the honourable feelings of lord Worcester and his
family would be hostile to any attempt to proselytize his ward. But as
far as she was herself concerned, he trusted more to the strength of her
prejudices than the rectitude of her convictions, honest as the girl
was, to prevent her from being over-influenced by the change of
spiritual atmosphere; for in proportion to the simplicity of her
goodness must be her capacity for recognizing the goodness of others,
catholics or not, and for being wrought upon by the virtue that went out
from them. His hope was, that England would have again become the abode
of peace, long ere any risk to her spiritual well-being should have been
incurred by this mode of securing her bodily safety and comfort.
But there was another fact, in the absence of which he would have had
far more hesitation in seeking for his ewe-lamb the protection of sheep,
the guardians of whose spiritual fold had but too often proved wolves in
sheep-dogs' clothing: within the last few days the news had reached him
that an old friend named Bayly, a true man, a priest of the English
church and a doctor of divinity, had taken up his abode in Raglan castle
as one of the household--chaplain indeed, as report would have it,
though that was hard of belief, save indeed it were for the sake of the
protestants within its walls. However that might be, there was a true
shepherd to whose care to entrust his lamb; and it was mainly on the
strength of this consideration that he had concluded to make his
proposal to Dorothy--namely, that she should seek shelter within the
walls of Raglan castle until the storm should be so far over-blown, as
to admit either of her going to Llangattock or returning to her own
home. He now discussed the matter with her in full, and, notwithstanding
her very natural repugnance to the scheme, such was Dorothy's confidence
in her friend that she was easily persuaded of its wisdom. What the more
inclined her to yield was, that Mr. Heywood had written her a letter,
hardly the less unwelcome for the kindness of its tone, in which he
offered her the shelter and hospitality of Redware 'until better days.'
'Better days!' exclaimed Dorothy with contempt. 'If such days as he
would count better should ever arrive, his house is the last place where
I would have them find me!'
She wrote a polite but cold refusal, and rejoiced in the hope that he
would soon hear of her having sought and found refuge in Raglan with the
friends of the king.
Meanwhile Mr. Herbert had opened communication with Dr. Bayly, had
satisfied himself that he was still a true son of the church, and had
solicited his friendly mediation towards the receiving of mistress
Dorothy Vaughan into the family of the marquis of Worcester, to the
dignity of which title the earl had now been raised--the parliament, to
be sure, declining to acknowledge the patent conferred by his majesty,
but that was of no consequence in the estimation of those chiefly
concerned.
On a certain spring morning, then, the snow still lying in the hollows
of the hills, Thomas Bayly came to Wyfern to see his old friend Matthew
Herbert. He was a courteous little man, with a courtesy librating on a
knife-edge of deflection towards obsequiousness on the one hand and
condescension on the other, for neither of which, however, was his
friend Herbert an object. His eye was keen, and his forehead good, but
his carriage inclined to the pompous, and his speech to the formal,
ornate, and prolix. The shape of his mouth was honest, but the closure
of the lips indicated self-importance. The greeting between them was
simple and genuine, and ere they parted, Bayly had promised to do his
best in representing the matter to the marquis, his daughter-in-law,
lady Margaret, the wife of lord Herbert, and his daughter, lady Anne,
who, although the most rigid catholic in the house, was already the
doctor's special friend.
It would have been greatly unlike the marquis or any of his family to
refuse such a prayer. Had not their house been for centuries the abode
of hospitality, the embodiment of shelter? On the mere representation of
Dr. Bayly, and the fact of the relationship, which, although distant,
was well enough known, within two days mistress Dorothy Vaughan received
an invitation to enter the family of the marquis, as one of the
gentlewomen of lady Margaret's suite. It was of course gratefully
accepted, and as soon as Mr. Herbert thought himself sufficiently
recovered to encounter the fatigues of travelling, he urged on the
somewhat laggard preparations of Dorothy, that he might himself see her
safely housed on his way to Llangattock, whither he was most anxious to
return.
It was a lovely spring morning when they set out together on horseback
for Raglan. The sun looked down like a young father upon his
earth-mothered children, peeping out of their beds to greet him after
the long winter night. The rooks were too busy to caw, dibbling deep in
the soft red earth with their great beaks. The red cattle, flaked with
white, spotted the clear fresh green of the meadows. The bare trees had
a kind of glory about them, like old men waiting for their youth, which
might come suddenly. A few slow clouds were drifting across the pale
sky. A gentle wind was blowing over the wet fields, but when a cloud
swept before the sun, it blew cold. The roads were bad, but their horses
were used to such, and picked their way with the easy carefulness of
experience. The winter might yet return for a season, but this day was
of the spring and its promises. Earth and air, field and sky were full
of peace. But the heart of England was troubled--troubled with passions
both good and evil--with righteous indignation and unholy scorn, with
the love of liberty and the joy of license, with ambition and
aspiration.
No honest heart could yield long to the comforting of the fair world,
knowing that some of her fairest fields would soon be crimsoned afresh
with the blood of her children. But Dorothy's sadness was not all for
her country in general. Had she put the question honestly to her heart,
she must have confessed that even the loss of her mother had less to do
with a certain weight upon it, which the loveliness of the spring day
seemed to render heavier, than the rarely absent feeling rather than
thought, that the playmate of her childhood, and the offered lover of
her youth, had thrown himself with all the energy of dawning manhood
into the quarrel of the lawless and self-glorifying. Nor was she
altogether free from a sense of blame in the matter. Had she been less
imperative in her mood and bearing, more ready to give than to require
sympathy,--but ah! she could not change the past, and the present was
calling upon her.
At length the towers of Raglan appeared, and a pang of apprehension shot
through her bosom. She was approaching the unknown. Like one on the
verge of a second-sight, her history seemed for a moment about to reveal
itself--where it lay, like a bird in its egg, within those massive
walls, warded by those huge ascending towers. Brought up in a retirement
that some would have counted loneliness, and although used to all gentle
and refined ways, yet familiar with homeliness and simplicity of mode
and ministration, she could not help feeling awed at the prospect of
entering such a zone of rank and stateliness and observance as the
household of the marquis, who lived like a prince in expenditure,
attendance, and ceremony. She knew little of the fashions of the day,
and, like many modest young people, was afraid she might be guilty of
some solecism which would make her appear ill-bred, or at least awkward.
Since her mother left her, she had become aware of a timidity to which
she had hitherto been a stranger. 'Ah!' she said to herself, 'if only my
mother were with me!'
At length they reached the brick gate, were admitted within the outer
wall, and following the course taken by Scudamore and Heywood, skirted
the moat which enringed the huge blind citadel or keep, and arrived at
the western gate. The portcullis rose to admit them, and they rode into
the echoes of the vaulted gateway. Turning to congratulate Dorothy on
their safe arrival, Mr. Herbert saw that she was pale and agitated.
'What ails my child?' he said in a low voice, for the warder was near.
'I feel as if entering a prison,' she replied, with a shiver.
'Is thy God the God of the grange and not of the castle?' returned the
old man.
'But, sir,' said Dorothy, 'I have been accustomed to a liberty such as
few have enjoyed, and these walls and towers--'
'Heed not the look of things,' interrupted her guardian. 'Believe in the
Will that with a thought can turn the shadow of death into the morning,
give gladness for weeping, and the garment of praise for the spirit of
heaviness.'