hard pressed and needed reinforcement, at Chalgrove Field. Colonel Hampden was gone there, having put himself at the head of Sheffield’s horse, and picked up some of Gunter’s dragoons, wherewith to harass Prince Rupert on the right of his position, and get round to the aid of the Parliament force, till Essex should bring up the main body of troops. Harry was to dispatch as many horse as he could spare, with due regard to the safety of Hampden House, where he was to stay in command of a sufficient guard.
Harry did not stay. Colonel Hampden never wore the scarf; but his standard went to the fight on Chalgrove Field.
Henrietta had not known nor conceived what it would be to send men forth to fight against their King. If she had imagined what passion it was that she had been smothering within her for so many months, and how the dread of battle and the horror of blood would work upon her, she would rather have hidden herself and the children in any chalk-pit of the hills than have been at Hampden House that day.
Her husband had but a moment. He asked her to pray for her father and her husband, first that they might do their duty, and next that they might come home to those who loved them best.
No,—she could not so pray. She could not mock Heaven by such a prayer when her husband was going forth on the most undutiful errand in the world. She could not pray for the success of crime against an anointed King.
“You will not pray against us, Henrietta?”
“Will I not? Day and night I pray for the King; and shall I not now?”
Harry was bursting away, when she called after him:
“I pray for you too, Harry. I pray that you may be spared the punishment of your crime,—of your—I will not say what.”
“Henrietta,” he said, approaching her again, “I believe you despise me.”
“I do, most heartily, in your hours of waywardness, which you are so proud of.”
“I believe you hate me, Henrietta.”
“I hate your treason. Lift your hand against your King, and I shall abhor you. Save him,—turn the battle if it goes against him, and I will forgive you everything.”
“Is this your dismissal of your husband to his duty as an Englishman?”
“I have heard enough talk of public duty. I should like to see something of the thing.”
“Is this the way you strengthen your husband’s heart now the hour has come?”
“Make what you can of it. Go!”
He was gone. She saw his face as he rushed past the window. Her heart was in her mouth at the sight, and she flung her child on the floor, and burst from the room and from the house, crying upon Harry to come back—to come back for one moment. Whether he heard the cry was never known. None others who heard it ever forgot it. Harry deputed another to his post of guard at Hampden, and galloped to Chalgrove Field.
The first news thence was that Colonel Hampden was coming. Next, that he was coming because he had received some slight hurt. No one in the house believed this. He would not come away from a battle-field, or from the merest skirmish, for a slight hurt. The nearest surgeons had been sent for before he alighted. His head drooped, he had clung to his horse with one hand, the other arm being disabled; and he was in great pain. He said he believed he should live, and the surgeons said the mischief was not of a fatal nature; but, as the household all acknowledged afterwards, they never had any hope. His frame had long been so worn, and his spirit so jarred, that his vital forces were low.
Henrietta was missed from his bedside. No one knew where she was, till little Dick Knightley said that uncle Carewe and she had been angry, and he had run away, and aunt too. She came back and took up the baby, and Dick believed she had carried baby away.
She came back. Some one who knew her had met her on the road hastening towards Chalgrove, and had turned her back, and taken her into his own house. She would not have been safe at Prestwood, and there was no persuading her to set foot within the Hampden gates again. She had accused herself of murdering her husband; and this might be in a manner true. Mr. Carewe had been even less like himself than Mr. Hampden in the fight. Both fought like desperate men, and Mr. Carewe especially seemed to thrust himself in the way of danger. His horse stumbled in the growing corn: he did not shelter himself by the hedgerows as he might have done: he pushed his horse wherever the enemy were thickest. The enemy helped him to his death only too willingly. Colonel Urrey showed himself openly on the King’s side to-day, and he seemed to glory in it. “That is Colonel Hampden,” he had shouted to the prince’s officers, “that is Mr. Carewe,” “that is Luke,” “that is Gunter,” and few of those whom he pointed out but fell or were wounded. Mr. Carewe was among the dead.
During the week that Colonel Hampden lived there was much for everybody to suffer, and but little consolation of any kind. There was no triumph in the case, nothing creditable or hopeful in the conflict of the day, and nothing that was encouraging in prospect. Four hundred troopers had engaged prince Rupert’s far larger numbers, in expectation of the Lord General coming up in force; but he never came. Colonel Hampden’s assumption of the command of Sheffield’s troop was needless, and his rush into the fight was precipitate. It was a mistake to come down from the heights to attack the King’s force in the corn-fields, where they had taken up their own ground. There was rank treason abroad that day, and Colonel Urrey had slain, as if by his own hands, the neighbours, and acquaintance, and comrades of many years, whose confidence he had no doubt sought in the King’s service. The whole business was humiliating, the affliction almost intolerable: and the noisy triumph of the royalists made itself heard even in the innermost chambers of Hampden House.
The dying man there was not one to be troubled by vexations so low. To him it was a small thing to be judged of man’s judgment, and his soul was