The House of Egremont
[Illustration: ROGER WALKED AROUND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BUSH ... HAT
IN HAND]
The
House of Egremont
_A Novel_
By
Molly Elliot Seawell
ILLUSTRATED BY C. M. RELYEA
New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1900
_Copyright, 1900_
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_Dramatic and all other rights
reserved_
UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN WHICH ROGER EGREMONT MAKES HIS BOW TO THE WORLD 1
II. ROGER EGREMONT MAKES INTIMATE ACQUAINTANCE WITH TWO
PERSONS, WHO EXERCISE GREAT BUT WIDELY DIFFERING
INFLUENCES UPON HIS LIFE,--TO WIT, THE DEVIL AND
MISS BESS LUKENS 25
III. ONCE MORE AT EGREMONT 49
IV. SHOWING HOW ROGER EGREMONT FALLS INTO GOOD COMPANY 62
V. THE EASTER TUESDAY MASQUERADE ON THE TERRACE, AND
WHAT CAME OF IT 87
VI. “YOUR LOVER IS EVER IN A BAD WAY WHEN THE OTHER
WOMAN APPEARS” 121
VII. IN WHICH ROGER EGREMONT MEETS WITH BOTH GOOD AND
ILL FORTUNE 148
VIII. WHEREIN THE PRINCESS MICHELLE IS PUT IN THE WAY OF
SECURING THE DESTINY OF WHICH SHE HAS LONG DREAMED 172
IX. “I WISH YOU TO COME WITH ME” 193
X. HO! FOR ORLAMUNDE 217
XI. THE JOURNEY, AND SOME CONFIDENCES MADE BY ROGER
EGREMONT TO THE PRINCESS MICHELLE 235
XII. “YOU HAVE BROUGHT ME TO THE GATE OF PARADISE, AND
HAVE SHOWN ME THE GLORY OF THE BEAUTY WITHIN--AND
THEN HAVE THRUST ME AWAY!” 256
XIII. THE PALACE OF MONPLAISIR--THE ABODE OF THE MOST
HIGH, MOST MIGHTY, AND MOST PUISSANT PRINCE OF
ORLAMUNDE 280
XIV. ROGER EGREMONT HAS A LITTLE ADVENTURE IN A GARDEN
AT NEERWINDEN AND BECOMES A MAJOR IN THE FINEST
BRIGADE IN THE WORLD 301
XV. IN WHICH AN EGREMONT HAS THE HAPPINESS OF RETURNING
TO HIS NATIVE LAND--AND WHAT BEFELL HIM THERE 328
XVI. ONCE MORE IN THE SALOON OF THE SWANS 352
XVII. IN WHICH CAPTAIN ROGER EGREMONT ACTS AS COACHMAN,
AND LIEUTENANT-GENERAL THE DUKE OF BERWICK AS
FOOTMAN 375
XVIII. ROGER EGREMONT HAS HIS LAST FIGHT WITH THE DEVIL 401
XIX. IF A MAN GIVETH HIS LIFE FOR HIS FRIENDS, HE CAN
DO NO MORE 424
XX. “HUGO STEIN IS MY ENEMY, AND I AM HIS, AS LONG AS
WE BOTH SHALL LIVE” 452
XXI. WHEREIN IS SET FORTH THE CONCLUSION OF A MAN WHO
ALWAYS FEARED GOD, AND ALWAYS TOOK HIS OWN PART 479
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ROGER WALKED AROUND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BUSH
... HAT IN HAND _Frontispiece_
“HERE ARE PENS, INK, AND PAPER” 40
THEN, WALKING DOWN THE STAIRWAY, CAME THE POOR KING 218
THEY WAIT TO BID THE PRINCESS GOOD-NIGHT 296
DICKY WHISTLED TO BOLD, WHO CAME AND LICKED HIS HAND 334
ROGER RAISED THE PISTOL AND FIRED 400
THE
HOUSE OF EGREMONT
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH ROGER EGREMONT MAKES HIS BOW TO THE WORLD
THE fortunes of the House of Egremont had their first great bloom
through the agency of a platter of beans; and through a platter of
beans more than a hundred years later the elder branch was ousted from
one of the greatest estates in England, became wanderers and gentlemen
adventurers throughout Europe, fought in quarrels not their own, served
sovereigns of foreign countries, knew the dazzling heights of glory,
and fell into the mire of penury and disrepute. An Egremont had the
ear of kings, and another Egremont mounted the gallows. They mated
sometimes with princes and dukes, and sometimes they were thought fit
to mate with the daughters of their gaolers. Some of them were great
at play, and met and vanquished the best players of Europe on the
field of the cloth of green; other Egremonts were ascetics and wore
hair shirts next their skins, and fasted and prayed extremely. They
seemed the favorite playthings of destiny, which had a showman’s way of
exhibiting them in all the ups and downs, the glories and shames, of
human vicissitudes.
The first trick she played them was to their advantage. John Egremont,
a handsome, red-blooded country squire, of infinite assurance, happened
to catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth when she was befooling the world
with the notion that she, at the age of forty, would marry the boy
Duke of Anjou, twenty years younger than herself. Part of this play
was that the Queen should pine and lose her appetite, and swear wildly
one day that she would never marry a man who might “flout the old
woman,” and then proceed to write the Duke a love-letter which would
shame a dairymaid. The Duke, having tired of the whole business, took
ship for France, while the Queen took to her bed at her palace of
Westminster and moaned and wept incessantly. Nothing would she eat.
John Egremont, being in the Queen’s anteroom when one of her maids
came out lamenting that the Queen could eat nothing, ran down into the
kitchen, snatched up a platter of beans, the first thing on which he
could lay hands, and was about to run away with it. The cooks, however,
were valiant men though humble, and they fell upon him with basting
ladles and rolling-pins and turnspits, so that John Egremont had to
draw his sword. This he did, slashing out right and left, and pinking
more than one of them; but nevertheless, carrying his beans high above
his head, he escaped from the _mêlée_, and flew back to the Queen’s
apartments. Pushing his way into her presence,--a thing easily forgiven
by her when the man was young and comely,--he presented the beans on
his knees to her. The Queen, lying wrapped in a great mantle, with
her face in her hands, was persuaded to turn and look at the kneeling
Egremont. Something flashed from her cold bright eyes into his cold
bright eyes, and the daughter of Henry the Eighth suddenly burst
into that loud, ringing Tudor laugh, which was like the shout of a
clarion. Whether it was the homeliness of the dish, or the expression
of knowingness in Egremont’s handsome eyes, or that she was tired of
the play, is all one. She ate the beans,--Egremont meanwhile telling
her in moving language of his fight with the cooks, and showing her
his mantle, which bore the marks of the greasy encounter. At this,
Elizabeth Tudor laughed louder than ever; and when Egremont kissed her
beautiful white hands, after she had washed them in a silver basin,
she fingered fondly the short curls upon his neck, as she was wont to
do with handsome young fellows. From that day to the time, six months
before her death, when she fingered weakly the curls on the neck of
Egremont’s son--a handsome young man--as she had fingered his father’s,
and laughed feebly the old Tudor laugh, she was the sturdy friend of
the Egremonts. It mattered little that they were staunch believers
in the old religion, and that the Egremont dames had mass daily in a
secret chapel, and at their chief estate of Egremont was a “priest’s
hole,” where the priest was hidden when persecution raged. Elizabeth
Tudor was the only one of her race who was not consumed with a rage
for religion; but she, being a perfectly good-natured sceptic, merely
laughed in her sleeve at those who risked their persons and estates
for conscience’ sake. True, the queer Elizabethan religion afforded a
very good club wherewith to pound those subjects, otherwise distasteful
or insubordinate to her Majesty, but men as comely, well born, and
debonair as John Egremont were at liberty to believe what they liked,
as long as they came to court, flattered the Queen, and made her great
presents. So she continued to give profitable places to the Egremonts,
swearing flatly to her lords in council her great, mouth-filling oath,
“By God’s Son!” that Egremont, to her certain knowledge, had conformed
to the last new statutes, and to the very last days of her life
remained a good friend and protector to that family.
The Egremonts seemed to be gifted with the art of pleasing kings. They
were as much in favor with James the First as they had been with the
mighty princess whose mantle fitted Scotch James as well as royal robes
fit a sign-post. He played the fool with them as he did with all his
favorites, but put money in their purses for it, and their estates
grew. Poor stubborn Charles the First found the Egremonts loyal to him
in his endeavors to rule the English people as they did not wish to be
ruled; and, although they suffered somewhat at the hands of Cromwell,
the second Charles found them to his heart’s liking, and repaid them
twice over.
There were many Egremonts then, younger sons of younger sons, and they
held together strongly in certain things, and differed angrily and
loudly upon others. They were not a race of milksops, but sinewy men
and women, red-blooded like their Elizabethan ancestor. Their motto
was, “Fear God, and take your own part.” Some of them feared God,
but all of them took their own part with firmness and determination.
Although they held firmly to their religion, they frequently took
liberties with the Decalogue; but having received great benefits from
their sovereigns, repaid it with a handsome loyalty.
The head of the house in the merry days of Charles the Second was a
certain John Egremont, comely and debonair, like his forbears, but cold
of heart and a calculator. Like most men of that type, his loves were
few and strange. He footed it at court with the best of them, was good
at playing and at fighting, and thought with King Charles that God
would not forever damn a man for taking a little pleasure out of the
way. He was rather proud of his reputation as a sad dog, and it was in
no way impaired during a brief married life. The yoke was light, and
was soon lifted by death; so, within a year or two John Egremont was
back at court, leaving a little motherless boy at Egremont. Then he
took a notion to make the grand tour,--a quarrel with Lady Castlemaine
rendering it very necessary that he should absent himself from England
for a time. It was three years before he returned, but my Lady
Castlemaine had not cooled off, nor did she during the remainder of
John Egremont’s life.
The next seven years were spent by him in back-stairs negotiations
to get back to court, and in long absences on the Continent; and
meanwhile his son and heir, the little Roger, led at Egremont the
most neglected life possible, so far as his father was concerned. He
had, it is true, a tutor, a guzzling, tipsy creature, whom the boy
despised and hated, and from whom he would learn nothing. The tutor,
however, secure in the indifference of the lad’s father, troubled
himself not at all about Roger’s learning, or want of learning; and
so the boy grew up as ignorant as a clod concerning books, but not so
ignorant about some other important things. John Egremont’s absences
from England, and his stony nature, left him but few friends, even
among his own kindred, thus breaking the traditions of his family.
The little Roger, therefore, was reared in loneliness, except for the
companionship of one other lad, a far-off cousin, Dicky Egremont. Dicky
was almost as ill off for friends as Roger, his nearest relative being
a paralytic old grandfather, who had served under Prince Rupert, and
eked out an existence in what was little more than a cottage on the
Egremont estate. The two boys were perpetually together, and had no
other company but servants. Roger could not be called a handsome lad,
although he had ever a straight, slender figure, fine white teeth in
his wide mouth, and a profusion of beautifully curling light-brown
hair. But Dicky was rather a homely little boy, in spite of his apple
cheeks and his dimples and a very roguish smile; and although only two
years younger than Roger, he always seemed very much more so, and Roger
early acquired the habit of speaking to him and of him as if Dicky were
an infant, and he, Roger, were an hundred years old. This was so marked
that Roger, at eleven years of age, thought the nine-year-old Dicky too
young to share many of his thoughts and dreams,--for he thought and
dreamed, although he did not read and could scarcely write his name.
But, though a very ignorant boy, he was so far from uncouth and witless
that his ignorance was anything but obvious. He had by nature a strong
and acute understanding, and showed even as a little lad great art in
concealing the defects of his education. He had, moreover, a natural
grace, a careless sweetness in his air that made him the pet of the
ladies in the drawing-room on the rare occasions when he saw them, as
well as the favorite of Hoggins the cook, and Molly the housemaid. And
though most of his days were passed with game-keepers and stablemen,
and his evenings generally in the housekeeper’s room, Roger never
forgot, or allowed these people to forget, that he knew the difference
between the condition of gentle and simple. Indeed, the servants, out
of pity for his forlorn childhood, had tried to console him by telling
him that all the broad lands of Egremont and the stately Elizabethan
house would one day be his. It sank deep in the boy’s mind, and he
early acquired an idea of the beauty and value of his home and a
passionate affection for it, that strongly colored all his later life.
And Egremont was worthy to be loved. The manor-house lay upon a breezy
upland, with the faint blue line of the hill country between it and
the salt sea on the one side; and on the other, afar off, was the salt
sea again, each but little more than a day’s ride away. The land was
rich and well wooded and watered. A little brawling river ran through
the estate, and fed the artificial lake and fish pond near the house,
on which swans and ducks floated and made their reedy habitations. The
woods of Egremont were celebrated, and particularly a great avenue of
oaks, three miles long, standing in ranks like soldiers at parade, was
the envy of all the timber merchants in the south of England. John
Egremont, in the year of the Restoration, planted two thousand young
oaks; the timber, already immensely valuable, was likely to become more
so.
The park held a thousand acres, through which the dun deer ran, and
where other wild creatures and many birds found undisturbed cover.
It was in this park that Roger Egremont spent his boyhood and early
manhood. The house, a vast parallelogram, had been built by that
John Egremont of the bean-platter. It was full of tall windows; the
Elizabethan architects, being new to glass, used it so lavishly that
many Elizabethan mansions were little more than glass houses. There was
a fine hall in the Egremont house, and a library with a respectable
number of books in it, and much quaint carved woodwork, but the lad,
Roger Egremont, was almost a stranger in the house, so little did he
live in it, except to sleep in a little bedroom he had on the first
floor, and to take his meals in a grimy den habited by the tutor.
For at the break of day, every morning, fair or foul, Roger was
out-of-doors, looking after his rabbit hutches and all his various
contrivances for trapping wild creatures, and running about the stables
backing the colts, cultivating the acquaintance of the great, mild-eyed
cows, as they stood in line to be milked, listening to the call of
birds and domestic fowls, and learning to imitate them, watching the
budding or the falling of the leaf, feeding the ducks in the river, and
gravely studying by the hour the antics of the fish in the fish pond.
In short, the great book of nature lay open before him, and he read it
diligently, and learned to understand it well, but of other books and
of men he knew pitifully little.
In these hours of incessant bodily and actually mental activity, little
Dicky was generally his companion, and it pleased the older boy’s
vanity to tell him the magnificent things to be done for him when Roger
should reign at Egremont. Yet, when the servants talked before him, as
they often did, of “when master be dead,”--an event which they rather
anticipated,--Roger would fly into a rage and cry,--
“Say no more to me of that. Do you think I want my father to die?”
To this, Molly the housemaid pertly replied,--
“La, Master Roger, he be dead enough a’ready to all of us.”
Roger’s feelings toward his father were strangely contradictory. The
boy had a tender and loving heart, and it warmed at the name of father.
He admired his father’s portrait, taken in a splendid court dress, with
long, dark locks flowing on his shoulders. And on the few and short
visits of John Egremont at his home, the lad always ran to meet him
with delight. But he was always received coldly and carelessly, and
he always had, in consequence, a revulsion of feeling, very much like
hatred. For his mother’s memory the boy had a fond affection, and loved
to hear the story of her short life under the roof of Egremont.
So life went on until Roger was twelve years old, when one day he got
a letter from his father,--the first in his life. He could not read it
alone, and he would not take it to his tutor, so he went after little
Dicky, who was an expert at reading and writing. And the news which
Dicky read to him, sitting on the bench by the fish pond, was that John
Egremont was coming home to live, and would bring with him a younger
son, Hugo, the child of a second marriage made in Germany; and the
father hoped the two brothers would be good friends.
The two lads gazed into each other’s eyes with consternation,--staggered
and alarmed at the notion of the new boy. Roger, however, had a good
courage, and spoke up sturdily.
“At least, I am the oldest and the biggest; and if he will not behave,
I can trounce him, that I will.”
Some time after, one morning as Roger was returning to the house for
breakfast after a gallop on his pony since daybreak, he was seized at
the buttery door by Molly the housemaid, who burst out,--
“Your dad’s come, Master Roger, and another boy with him, as master
told the housekeeper was two year younger nor you. It’s your new
brother--ha! ha!”
Molly’s laughter was anything but merry, and her news made Roger an
unresisting victim in her hands, while she scrubbed his face and hands
violently, curled his long light hair, and whisked him into his best
suit, she clacking angrily meanwhile about “lads as was said to be ten,
and any fool could see warn’t a day under fourteen.”
And then Roger, very white and very straight, walked to the hall where
his father and his newly arrived brother awaited him.
Some premonition of evil flashed into the boy’s young soul as he stood
for five minutes outside the door, before he could screw his courage
up to opening it, and he was not a boy of faint heart either. At the
end of the hall, by the fireplace, sat his father and a strange boy.
Roger advanced, still pale, but graceful and outwardly at ease. As he
approached, his father rose, and said in the kindest tone that Roger
had ever heard from his lips,--
“Roger, this is your younger brother, Hugo; I hope you will be good
friends.”
To have an unknown brother sprung on one would have disconcerted an
older and wiser person than poor little Roger Egremont. He became still
whiter as his dark eyes grew larger and darker, and he glanced uneasily
from his father to the new brother, without making any advance at all.
Hugo, a tall, well-grown boy, was the image of his father, and Roger
made the alarming discovery that Hugo was much bigger than he, and
instead of his licking Hugo, Hugo would be quite able to lick him. The
two lads looked at each other for a moment, and then Hugo, slipping
off his chair, ran forward and kissed his half-brother on both cheeks,
French fashion.
To be kissed at all was disconcerting to Roger, and to be kissed
by another boy was an insult and a humiliation. Roger’s reception,
therefore, of these endearments was a vigorous push.
“I’ll shake hands if you like,” he said sulkily, “but I’ll have no
kissing.”
John Egremont, secretly enraged, could not but remember that any
English boy would resent such an advance. He said, therefore, without
any exhibition of wrath: “Your brother has been brought up abroad, and
does not know English manners, although he speaks English. But you two
should have fine times together. Hugo will live here after this.”
The two boys eyed each other distrustfully. It vexed their father to
see how much taller and bigger was Hugo, the alleged younger, than
Roger. Hugo was a handsomer boy, but Roger had more the air of a
gentleman.
They shook hands, nevertheless, and Hugo, making a pirouette, said
something in French and something in German to his father, quite as if
they were equals: and John Egremont laughed, while Hugo burst into the
fragment of a song about _Ce monstre là_ which seemed to tickle his
father mightily.
All this time a thousand maddening questions were chasing each other
through Roger’s disturbed mind. Had he a step-mother, and any more
brothers and sisters? He had an immediate opportunity of finding this
out, for their father at once dismissed them, thinking they would the
more speedily become friends alone.
Once outside, upon the terrace that led down to the fish pond, Roger
turned to Hugo, and asked,--
“Where is your mother?”
“In Germany,” replied Hugo, with much readiness; and then, stopping
still with a frightened look, he caught Roger by the arm and cried,--
“Oh, no, no!--they told me to say she was dead, and I forgot. Don’t
tell my father, please.”
“I am no tell-tale,” replied Roger, with ready contempt; “somebody told
you to tell a lie and you told the truth.”
Hugo was not pleased at the frankness of this speech, but he had been
warned by his father concerning the code of morals and manners he was
likely to meet with among English boys, and privately concluded they
were all a pack of brutes.
Nevertheless, the boys made some efforts at a good understanding, in
which they were mutually helped by little Dicky, who presently turned
up. Dicky loved Roger better than anything in the world, and was
secretly cut to the heart by Roger’s inferiority in certain things to
Hugo, which soon became apparent. For Hugo was a miracle of boyish
accomplishments. He could chatter both French and German, could sing
in three languages and dance in four, could play the viol da gamba,
and draw, and knew the sword exercise perfectly on foot. He could not,
however, do it on horseback, and was quite unlearned about horses,
dogs, and fowling-pieces. Here, Roger excelled; and Dicky suggested
timidly to him that he should learn some things of Hugo, and in return
teach Hugo to ride. This sensible advice both boys took, and got on
the better for it. Yet never were two creatures more dissimilar.
Roger fought when he was angry, Hugo quarrelled; in that lay enormous
differences.
Soon, however, they were thrown so completely upon each other for
companionship that perforce they were compelled to become playmates,
or have no playmates at all. For to John Egremont’s infinite rage and
disgust, Hugo was coldly looked upon by all the Egremont kindred, and
by the gentry round about Egremont. A tale was industriously circulated
that this lad’s mother, a certain Madame Stein, had neither married
John Egremont nor died, but was still flourishing in Germany. As for
Hugo’s being younger than Roger, his appearance flatly contradicted his
father’s assertions, and the story which John Egremont had concocted
with infinite pains found no believers. The Egremonts were angered by
the giving of their name to the boy. The gentry would not let their
sons associate with Hugo; and, as Hugo was the one object dear to John
Egremont’s hard heart, he bitterly resented the attitude of his world
toward his favorite child. And as it refused to accept this favorite
child, John Egremont decided that it should not accept his other son;
so Roger was forbidden to go where Hugo was not invited. As Hugo was
never invited anywhere, the two boys stayed very closely at home. John
Egremont was kinder to Roger than he had ever been before, because,
looking into the future, he saw that Hugo might profit some day by his
brother’s good-will. But there was no disguising the blind partiality
of the father for the boy who was like him. Hugo was upon terms of
familiarity with his father that were simply amazing in that age of
extreme filial respect and obedience. Roger never dared the smallest
liberty. It made his boyish heart swell with anguish when he heard his
father gravely discussing with Hugo, as if Hugo were the heir and a man
grown, certain alterations he wished to make in the house and various
improvements on the estate. By way of revenge, when the two boys were
alone, Roger would not fail to remind Hugo which one was the heir, and,
instead of begging him not to tell their father, menaced him; and as
Roger was a fighter, Hugo very prudently held his tongue.
The ill-will of my Lady Castlemaine was not over in a day, and year
after year, as John Egremont showed his face at Whitehall Palace, he
was civilly invited to take himself off. This lasted until Roger was
sixteen years old and Hugo was alleged to be fourteen, when a very
unexpected summons into the other world came to John Egremont, and he
was forced to mount and go behind the gentleman on a pale horse. He
had not even time to sign a will he had made, in which he gave all he
could of the estate, and much that was not his to give, to Hugo. This
darling of his father’s heart was left penniless. Sir Thomas Buckstone,
a money-getting, puritanical person, was named as guardian of the two
lads in this unsigned will, and nobody objecting, he qualified, and
immediately took charge of them.
Now, as none of John Egremont’s friends and neighbors had believed his
story concerning Hugo, when the boy was by this mischance left a beggar
a great outcry was raised against him. This was intensified by letters
received from the lad’s mother, who came to life most unopportunely,
and followed her letters to England. She was a painted, shrill-voiced,
handsome harpy of a woman, whose wild protestations and vehement
assertions and multitude and variety of asseverations that she was John
Egremont’s widow, did away with the small chance Hugo had of getting
a younger brother’s portion; and she retired defeated and discredited
from the beginning.
Sir Thomas Buckstone, a dull-witted man, saw only in Roger Egremont a
graceful, shy, uneducated stripling, who knew nothing but horses and
dogs, and conceived it would be for their mutual advantage that there
should be but one mind between them, and that mind Sir Thomas’s. And
there were, besides, eight Buckstone maidens, any one of whom was
eligible to become Madam Egremont. Therefore Sir Thomas solemnly
assured Roger of the intention to protect him from being robbed in
favor of Hugo.
“A very small allowance, my dear lad--enough to keep him from beggary;
that is all which I can in conscience allow him out of your estate.”
Roger heard this in silence for a moment and then said,--
“But he is my father’s son. He should have enough to live upon as
becomes a gentleman.”
“One hundred pounds a year,” replied Sir Thomas, virtuously.
“Make it what you like, sir; but although I am not great friends with
my half-brother, I would not stint him in his living. If I cannot give
him enough out of my own allowance, I can promise him to give him a sum
down when I am of age, and I shall do it.”
Which he did, and of which Hugo was perfectly sure as soon as Roger
told him, and straightway borrowed money on the strength of it. But
he borrowed prudently,--Hugo being ever prudent. The two brothers
continued to live at Egremont, and were more nearly friends than they
had ever been before. Hugo read and studied diligently, and Roger never
looked into a book. Sir Thomas Buckstone, thinking money on education
wasted, made no move toward supplying his ward with book-learning,
and Roger’s religion debarred him from the universities; so he lived
on, the same lazy, happy, idle, and apparently unprofitable life he
had always led. He was not the soberest young man in the parish, and
did not follow Hugo’s example of always watering his wine; by which
as others grew drunk, Hugo remained sober and smiling. Nor was Roger
immaculate in other respects, but where Hugo had one friend, Roger had
a dozen.
It is not to be supposed that Roger gave no thought to the future
mistress of Egremont, but beyond plainly indicating it was _not_ to
be one of the eight Buckstone maidens, he made no sign. He was a
favorite in the hunting-field, where he was a bold and dashing rider,
and at balls, where he danced well, and he could sing a good song,
accompanying himself upon the viol,--an accomplishment he had picked up
from Hugo. Nor was he at all shy with the ladies, and knew quite well
how to turn a compliment with perfect grace. But he was so sensible of
his deficiencies in education, and knew so little to talk about, that
he did not very much cultivate the society of women. Nevertheless,
Roger Egremont was fully able to reach the standard of a man as defined
by Henry the Great of France, in his song descriptive of himself,--
“This devil of a Henry the Fourth,
Has the three gifts that make a man.
He can drink, he can fight,
And he can be gallant to the ladies.”
Hugo, on the contrary, cultivated assiduously all who would notice him.
What mattered it that the sheriff of the county invited Roger, before
Hugo’s face, to dine at his house, and pointedly omitted Hugo? Hugo
smiling met him next day, and asked cordially after her ladyship and
her ladyship’s daughters, and rode by his lordship’s side for the space
of a mile or more. What if there were talk about whether he should be
permitted to attend the county ball? Hugo worked for an invitation
hard, and went upon a very slim one, and bore amiably the cold looks
of the people generally who were assembled. He was far more regularly
handsome than Roger, infinitely accomplished, and made considerable
headway with the other sex. Roger despised his half-brother for this
way of getting on in the world, but he was at a loss how to explain his
feelings in the matter.
By that time, Dicky Egremont was growing manward. He was as eager
about learning as Roger was indifferent, and was likewise a great
toast among the ladies, a tireless dancer, an expert fiddler, and had
a voice in singing like the sweetest thrush that ever sang. His old
grandfather being dead, and having no estate, Dicky, like his cousins,
had liberty to follow his natural bent, and it led him wherever there
was youth, gayety, and music. Roger, who could well afford it, made him
a handsome allowance, of which Dicky made ducks and drakes. Much of
it went on horses and dogs, but stray fiddlers, professional beggars,
and occasionally the deserving poor got the best part of it. Unlike
Roger, Dicky sorrowfully lamented that he was shut out, by the religion
of his family, from a liberal education, and sometimes talked wildly
of running away to St. Omer’s or Douai, or Clermont, where he could
learn what was out of his reach at Oxford and Cambridge. But as these
aspirations were usually followed by a screeching run after the hounds,
or a roaring night at cards and dice, nobody took little Dicky very
seriously. One March morning, however, after a convivial night of it,
beginning with the county ball and ending in countless jorums of punch,
Roger, on rising and going out, found Dicky with a solemn face, round
and rosy though it might be, walking up and down the terrace.
“Halloa!” cried Roger, gayly, “I did not think to find thee sober this
morning. The last I remember was the chorus we were having--”
“Roger,” said Dicky, going up to his cousin, and holding him by the
lappel as he had done as a little lad. “This life is idle and sinful.
I am going to France to be educated--to St. Omer’s; I am going, I tell
you.”
Roger’s ringing laugh startled the lazy fish in the fish pond.
“_You_ going to St Omer’s--such a promising little rake as you are?”
Dicky blushed scarlet, and then fell to smiling so that the dimples
came out all over his round, rosy face. “I know,” he said presently,
becoming preposterously grave, and blinking his eyes solemnly, “I have
been a very wild, bad fellow, but I mean to reform--that I do, Cousin
Roger.”
“Do, little Dicky,” cried Roger, beginning to laugh again, and throwing
his arm around Dicky’s neck. “You’ll have to give over punch--”
“I had too much last night, God forgive me,” piously said Dicky, and
then, Hugo suddenly appearing, Dicky stopped short, and the three young
men went in to breakfast. Roger did not take Dicky any too seriously.
He remembered that Dicky, as a boy, frequently announced his intention
to be a priest, chiefly for the pleasure of hiding himself in the
“priest’s hole” that mysterious place behind the mantel in the little
yellow parlor, out of which Roger, as executioner, would haul him and
proceed to decapitate him on the stone horse-block outside. And Dicky
was very young, and extravagantly fond of fiddling and dancing; so
Roger thought no more about the scheme until one day, about a week
after that, when a letter was put in his hand. It was in Dicky’s
handwriting, and ran thus:--
DEAR ROGER,--Do not be angry; I am on my way as fast as a good horse
will carry me, to Torbay, where I shall take ship for France. Pray,
Cousin Roger, do not be very angry. I have some money, and I have
no one in the world to love or think of except you; and I want
to have some college learning, and that is why I have gone. Dear
Roger, you have been the best and truest friend I ever had, except
my grandfather. You need not look for my fiddle. I could not take it
with me, so I hid it in a place where some day I shall come after it.
God bless you, Roger.
Your aff. cousin,
RICHD. EGREMONT.
Roger was, indeed, very angry with Dicky. He went to the yellow parlor,
and drawing back a panel of the wainscoting, revealed the well-known
place in the wall,--pierced with auger-holes for air and light,--and
there lay Dicky’s beloved fiddle; and in the midst of Roger’s wrath the
sight made him smile.
Egremont was lonely to Roger for a long while after Dicky’s departure,
for although he and Hugo were upon perfectly friendly terms, there was
little sympathy between them. And troublous times were ahead for all
Englishmen, for it was then the summer of 1688. England seethed like a
pot over the repeal of the Test Act, and the substitution of the Act of
Toleration. Naturally, Roger Egremont was strongly predisposed toward
the abolition of the Test Act, which, as long as it lasted, excluded
him not only from the universities and the learned professions, for
which he cared nothing, but from the profession of arms, for which he
cared a great deal. Few, even of the strongest advocates of King James,
went as far as Roger Egremont in his views. Reasoning naturally, his
ideas were lofty, but often impractical. He dared assert that it was
inherently wrong to molest any man, in his person or estate, for his
religious belief. This was but a step removed from treason, according
to the lights of his time, when, everywhere, a difference in religion
was considered a crime against the State. This and many other ideas,
which Robert Egremont was accused of getting from game-keepers and
poachers, he really drew from the thoughts that flooded his mind when
he saw the pale glory of the stars gleaming in the serene sky of
evening, or felt the vagrant wind blowing, or watched the awakening of
the spring, or the solemn farewell that nature takes in the dying time
of year.
These notions mattered little as long as Roger was a minor, living
idly and pleasantly at Egremont. But when he came of age, and openly
advocated the cause of dissenters and papists, it was altogether
different. The Egremont estates gave him great political interest,
and he made no secret of the way he meant to use it,--in treasonable
practices, so his world thought, but really in the advancement of human
liberty.
Meanwhile things were going badly for another advocate of the Act of
Toleration--to wit, his Majesty, James the Second. It grew toward
the autumn of the year 1688, and England was filled with rumors of
revolution, while the gaols were filled with dissenters, and the
Catholics shivered at the prospect of soon joining them. At Exeter,
not far from Egremont, a number of dissenting ministers had been
imprisoned, and typhus fever broke out among them. One of them had
preached in the parish of Egremont, and great complaint had been
made of Roger Egremont’s indifference to the maintenance of the law
concerning dissenters. Some of the followers of these poor men had
visited these unfortunates in gaol and brought away the infection of
fever, which raged thereafter in the country round about. When the
trial came off, a few weeks later, one of the judges and several of the
jury and of the spectators caught the fever from the prisoners, and
many deaths resulted.
Roger Egremont and his half-brother were speaking of this one November
afternoon in 1688, as they sat at dinner in the great dining-hall at
Egremont. The main entrance opened directly into this vast hall, hung
with portraits, with ancient armor, and with hunting trophies. A fine
musicians’ gallery faced a huge fireplace in which a coach and four
could have turned around. Innumerable tall slits of windows let in the
light, and faintly illuminated the carved ceiling almost lost in the
gloom of the dull autumn afternoon.
The pretence, so carefully cultivated by their father, that Roger was
the elder had become more obvious as the young men grew older. Hugo,
tall, dark, and well made, was at least twenty-three years old, and
everybody but himself laughed when he gravely spoke of himself as
barely twenty. Hugo always uttered it with the utmost seriousness.
Roger had never been so regularly handsome as Hugo, but he retained the
charming, arch expression of his boyish days in his dark eyes, and his
was one of those faces on which both women and men look with favor.
The two brothers were seated at a small square table, close by the
fireplace. They talked together of the parliamentary struggles, and of
the chances of the King’s party. The conflict between James the Second
and William of Orange was on, and every day news was expected of the
landing of the Dutch Prince.
“For my part,” said Roger, very earnestly, “I look in amazement
at this England of ours. The people prate of liberty, and yet are
panic-stricken at the mere notion that a man should have liberty of
conscience to worship God as he likes. I am for the repeal of the
Test Act, and the penal laws, and in favor of the Act of Toleration,
not simply because it will make me a free man, but because it will
mean the breaking of the dawn to many who have stumbled along in the
darkness, thinking the figures of their fellow-men huge, misshapen
devils menacing them. And if all Englishmen were equally free, we would
see each other as we are and have no fear.”
“What book did you get that fine speech out of, brother?” asked Hugo,
smiling indulgently, as he always did, at the views of the unlettered
Roger. A dull flush came into Roger’s face.
“Surely, I did not get it out of any book; it is a thought out of
my own head. Books are well enough, but I can learn nothing from
them--true, I have not much tried,” he added hastily. “But I know that
to keep me, a freeborn Briton, subject to imprisonment and infamy, and
to take my lands away from me, if I openly practise the religion of our
fathers, is wrong. And to forbid me, an English gentleman, to walk in
St. James’s Park, whither every Dutch spy can have access, is a gross
affront to me,--nay more, an invasion of my liberty. And I also know
that to keep those unfortunate poor creatures languishing in gaol at
Exeter, because they go to hear a weaver preach in a barn of Sundays,
is inhuman. And I would like to see my country be the first, and not
the last, to see this great truth of toleration.”
Hugo, who was not fond of these discussions, remarked: “In my ride
to-day, I heard that two of the nonconformist ministers in gaol at
Exeter are dead of the gaol fever, and that fourteen persons, including
the judge that sentenced them, are ill, and several likely to die.
There should be precautions taken in bringing prisoners with the
infection on them into court.”
“If the judge that sentenced them and the jury that convicted them
all died of the fever, it would be the just reward of iniquity,” cried
Roger, excitedly. “I need no book-learning for that!”
As he raised his eyes he saw, through the window opposite, a number of
armed men who seemed to have sprung from the ground, and who fairly
surrounded the house as far as he could see. And at the same moment
the great door of the hall was opened, and a long-nosed gentleman, in
military dress and a black peruke, entered, followed by three other
persons, evidently of the suite of the long-nosed gentleman. They
advanced without bowing; one of the party ran ahead, pulled out a
chair, and the long-nosed gentleman seated himself at the table without
removing his hat.
Roger Egremont watched this silently and without rising. Nor did he
move when the long-nosed gentleman, coolly helping himself to a piece
of a fowl on the table, said in English with a Dutch accent: “Sir, I am
under no disguise. I am the Prince of Orange. My horse lost a shoe at
your park gates, and knowing it to be near dinner-time, I claim your
hospitality until the blacksmith is through with the horse.”
As soon as he uttered the words “I am the Prince of Orange,” Hugo rose
and made obeisance. Roger, quietly picking up his hat, which lay on a
chair nearby, put it on his head; he and the Prince of Orange were the
only persons covered.
The Prince, without noticing the action, continued to gnaw and tug
at his chicken, while Roger continued to observe in silence his four
uninvited guests. Two of the Dutchmen helped themselves to mutton from
the dish, while the third gulped down wine, and making a wry face after
it, spat upon the floor.
Roger Egremont’s black eyes began to blaze. The Prince of Orange, with
the drumstick of the chicken sticking out of his mouth, spoke in a tone
of explanation rather than apology.
“The wine drunk in England does not suit Dutch palates. Have you no
other liquor?”
“I have a variety of liquor,” responded Roger, with the greatest
politeness, “but none of it will suit Dutch palates. It was bought by
English gentlemen for English gentlemen, of whom I am one, by God!”
The Prince of Orange glanced up at Roger, who wore a cool, insulting
smile. The Prince’s saturnine features contorted into a smile too,
as, drawing his sword, he leaned over the table, and catching Roger’s
hat on the sword’s point, flicked it off. A platter of the same kind
of white beans with which Roger Egremont’s ancestor won the favor
of Elizabeth Tudor was at hand. Roger took it up gently, poised it
carefully, and then threw it full in the face of the Prince of Orange.
That day, six months, Roger Egremont appeared in the prisoner’s dock at
Westminster Hall, before the Court of the King’s Bench, to be tried for
his life upon the charge of sedition and treason. He sat, because the
fetters upon his legs prevented him from standing.