CHAPTER VIII "MY VOW"

How we reached home that night I could never exactly tell. I know that I half carried, half supported him down the narrow path, and at last managed to reach the door of our house. But it was no easy task, and for some minutes I stood there panting and exhausted before I could bring myself to summon any one. Then my mother, who had been sitting up anxiously, heard us, and came hurrying out full of eager inquiries. But I had no strength left to answer her, and when she saw my father's state she ceased her questioning, for she knew at once what had happened.

For three whole days and nights he was only partially conscious. Then he fell into a heavy sleep, which the doctor whom we had summoned from Minehead assured us was his salvation; and so it turned out, for on the fourth day he recovered consciousness, and within a week he was up, and looked much as usual, save for the worn, troubled look in his eyes, and the deeper lines on his forehead.

On the first afternoon when he was allowed to talk, my mother was alone with him for several hours. Then she came out, and fetched me in from the garden and took me to him.

"Hugh, my boy," he said slowly, looking up from his desk, "we are making our plans for the future. We are going to leave here at once."

I was not surprised, and I was certainly not displeased. For although I loved our country home and the quaint homely people by whom we were surrounded, I could never look upon Bossington Headland again without a shudder, when I remembered how nearly it had witnessed a terrible tragedy.

"Your mother and I thought of travelling abroad for a while," he went on. "I shall never be able to settle down anywhere again. But with you it is different. You ought to go to college and choose a profession. Whether you do so or not must depend upon one thing. I myself shall never resume the name which I am supposed to have disgraced, but if you choose to do so there is nothing to prevent you. You will have to bear a certain amount of odium, but it is not every one who will visit my disgrace upon you. You will be poor, but although my father will never leave either of us a penny he cannot prevent the title coming to me, and eventually to you. The entailed estates which go with the title are very small, and I hear that he has purposely mortgaged them up to the hilt, so that nothing should ever come to me from them. But if you choose to bear your rightful name you will claim a place amongst one of the oldest and most honourable families in the country, you can go to college, and somehow or other we will find the money to start you in one of the professions, but not in the army."

"And if I choose to bear still the name I have always done?"

"Then you will not be able to go to college, or to enter any of the professions," my father answered. "You can do neither under an assumed name."

I walked up and down the room for a minute or two thinking. My mind was soon made up.

"I will not bear any name that you do not," I declared, firmly. "If my grandfather thinks that you are not worthy to bear the name of Devereux, neither will I, unless the time shall come when he and the whole world shall know the truth, and you shall take your name again: I will never call myself anything else but Hugh Arbuthnot."

My father stretched out his hand, and looked up at me with glistening eyes.

"Spoken like a man, Hugh," he said. "God grant that that day may come!"

"Amen!" I added, fervently. "And come it shall!"

But I did not tell him then the resolve which I had grafted into my heart, I did not tell him then that I had sworn to myself that I would roll this cloud away from his name, even if I wrung the confession from my uncle's dying lips, and if success should be denied to me, I would, at least, find some means of bringing down retribution on the head of the man who had wrecked and embittered my father's life. By fair means or foul I would gain my end. At eighteen years old I devoted and consecrated my life to this purpose.