Henry Esmond
The English Humourists
The Four Georges
By
William Makepeace Thackeray
Edited, with an Introduction, by
George Saintsbury
With 15 Illustrations
Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Copenhagen,
New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town,
Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Shanghai
CONTENTS
Introduction.
The History Of Henry Esmond, Esq.
Dedication.
Preface. The Esmonds Of Virginia
Book I. The Early Youth Of Henry Esmond, Up To The Time Of His Leaving
Trinity College, In Cambridge
Chapter I. An Account Of The Family Of Esmond Of Castlewood Hall
Chapter II. Relates How Francis, Fourth Viscount, Arrives At
Castlewood
Chapter III. Whither In The Time Of Thomas, Third Viscount, I Had
Preceded Him As Page To Isabella
Chapter IV. I Am Placed Under A Popish Priest And Bred To That
Religion.—Viscountess Castlewood
Chapter V. My Superiors Are Engaged In Plots For The Restoration Of
King James II
Chapter VI. The Issue Of The Plots.—The Death Of Thomas, Third
Viscount Of Castlewood; And The Imprisonment Of His Viscountess
Chapter VII. I Am Left At Castlewood An Orphan, And Find Most Kind
Protectors There
Chapter VIII. After Good Fortune Comes Evil
Chapter IX. I Have The Small-Pox, And Prepare To Leave Castlewood
Chapter X. I Go To Cambridge, And Do But Little Good There
Chapter XI. I Come Home For A Holiday To Castlewood, And Find A
Skeleton In The House
Chapter XII. My Lord Mohun Comes Among Us For No Good
Chapter XIII. My Lord Leaves Us And His Evil Behind Him
Chapter XIV. We Ride After Him To London
Book II. Contains Mr. Esmond’s Military Life, And Other Matters
Appertaining To The Esmond Family
Chapter I. I Am In Prison, And Visited, But Not Consoled There
Chapter II. I Come To The End Of My Captivity, But Not Of My Trouble
Chapter III. I Take The Queen’s Pay In Quin’s Regiment
Chapter IV. Recapitulations
Chapter V. I Go On The Vigo Bay Expedition, Taste Salt Water And
Smell Powder
Chapter VI. The 29th December
Chapter VII. I Am Made Welcome At Walcote
Chapter VIII. Family Talk
Chapter IX. I Make The Campaign Of 1704
Chapter X. An Old Story About A Fool And A Woman
Chapter XI. The Famous Mr. Joseph Addison
Chapter XII. I Get A Company In The Campaign Of 1706
Chapter XIII. I Meet An Old Acquaintance In Flanders, And Find My
Mother’s Grave And My Own Cradle There
Chapter XIV. The Campaign Of 1707, 1708
Chapter XV. General Webb Wins The Battle Of Wynendael
Book III. Containing The End Of Mr. Esmond’s Adventures In England
Chapter I. I Come To An End Of My Battles And Bruises
Chapter II. I Go Home, And Harp On The Old String
Chapter III. A Paper Out Of The “Spectator”
Chapter IV. Beatrix’s New Suitor
Chapter V. Mohun Appears For The Last Time In This History
Chapter VI. Poor Beatrix
Chapter VII. I Visit Castlewood Once More
Chapter VIII. I Travel To France And Bring Home A Portrait Of Rigaud
Chapter IX. The Original Of The Portrait Comes To England
Chapter X. We Entertain A Very Distinguished Guest At Kensington
Chapter XI. Our Guest Quits Us As Not Being Hospitable Enough
Chapter XII. A Great Scheme, And Who Balked It
Chapter XIII. August 1st, 1714
Appendix
The English Humourists Of The Eighteenth Century
Lecture The First. Swift
Lecture The Second. Congreve And Addison
Lecture The Third. Steele
Lecture The Fourth. Prior, Gay, And Pope
Lecture The Fifth. Hogarth, Smollett, And Fielding
Lecture The Sixth. Sterne And Goldsmith
The Georges
The Poems
Sketches Of Manners, Morals, Court And Town Life
George The First
George The Second
George The Third
George The Fourth
Footnotes
INTRODUCTION.
[Illustration]
Thackeray In His Study At Onslow Square. From a painting by E. M. Ward
We know exceedingly little of the genesis and progress of _Esmond_. “It
did not seem to be a part of our lives as _Pendennis_ was,” says Lady
Ritchie, though she wrote part of it to dictation. She “only heard
_Esmond_ spoken of very rarely”. Perhaps its state was not the less
gracious. The Milton girls found _Paradise Lost_ a very considerable part
of their lives—and were not the happier.
But its parallels are respectable. The greatest things have a way of
coming “all so still” into the world. We wrangle—that is, those of us who
are not content simply not to know—about the composition of Homer, the
purpose of the _Divina Commedia_, the probable plan of the _Canterbury
Tales_, the _Ur-Hamlet_. Nobody put preliminary advertisements in the
papers, you see, about these things: there was a discreditable neglect of
the first requirements of the public. So it is with _Esmond_. There is, I
thought, a reference to it in the Brookfield letters; but in several
searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as “grand
and melancholy”, and to Lady Stanley as of “cut-throat melancholy”. It is
said to have been sold for a thousand pounds—the same sum that Master
Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew
thought well of it—which is not wholly surprising.
It is still, perhaps, in possession of a success rather of esteem than of
affection. A company of young men and maidens to whom it was not long ago
submitted pronounced it (with one or two exceptions) inferior as a work of
humour. The hitting of little Harry in the eye with a potato was, they
admitted, humorous, but hardly anything else. As representing another
generation and another point of view, the faithful Dr. John Brown did not
wholly like it—Esmond’s marriage with Rachel, after his love for Beatrix,
being apparently “the fly in the ointment” to him. Even the author could
only plead “there’s a deal of pains in it that goes for nothing”, as he
says in one of his rare published references to the subject: but he was
wrong. Undoubtedly the mere taking of pains will not do; but that is when
they are taken in not the right manner, by not the right person, on not
the right subject. Here everything was right, and accordingly it “went
for” everything. A greater novel than _Esmond_ I do not know; and I do not
know many greater books. It may be “melancholy”, and none the worse for
that: it is “grand”.
For though there may not be much humour of the potato-throwing sort in
_Esmond_, it will, perhaps, be found that in no book of Thackeray’s, or of
any one else’s, is that deeper and higher humour which takes all life for
its province—which is the humour of humanity—more absolutely pervading.
And it may be found likewise, at least by some, that in no book is there
to be found such a constant intertwist of the passion which, in all
humanity’s higher representatives, goes with humour hand in hand—a loving
yet a mutually critical pair. Of the extraordinarily difficult form of
autobiography I do not know such another masterly presentment; nor is it
very difficult to recognize the means by which this mastery is attained,
though Heaven knows it is not easy to understand the skill with which they
are applied. The success is, in fact, the result of that curious
“doubleness”—amounting, in fact, here to something like _triplicity_—which
distinguishes Thackeray’s attitude and handling. Thus Henry Esmond, who is
on the whole, I should say, the most like him of all his characters
(though of course “romanced” a little), is himself and “the other fellow”,
and also, as it were, human criticism of both. At times we have a
tolerably unsophisticated account of his actions, or it may be even his
thoughts; at another his thoughts and actions as they present themselves,
or might present themselves, to another mind: and yet at other times a
reasoned view of them, as it were that of an impartial historian. The
mixed form of narrative and mono-drama lends itself to this as nothing
else could: and so does the author’s well-known, much discussed, and
sometimes heartily abused habit of _parabasis_ or soliloquy to the
audience. Of this nothing has yet been directly said, and anything that is
said would have to be repeated as to every novel: so that we may as well
keep it for the last or a late example, _The Virginians_ or _Philip_. But
its efficacy in this peculiar kind of double or treble handling is almost
indisputable, even by those who may dispute its legitimacy as a constantly
applied method.
One result, however, it has, as regards the hero-spokesman, which is
curious. I believe thoroughly in Henry Esmond—he is to me one of the most
real of illustrious Henrys as well of Thackeray’s characters—but his
reality is of a rather different kind from that of most of his fellows. It
is somewhat more abstract, more typical, more generalized than the reality
of English heroes usually is. He is not in the least shadowy or allegoric:
but still he is somehow “Esmondity” as well as Esmond—_the_ melancholy
rather than _a_ melancholy, clearsighted, aloofminded man. His heart and
his head act to each other as their governing powers, passion and humour,
have been sketched as acting above. He is a man never likely to be very
successful, famous, or fortunate in the world; not what is generally
called a happy man; yet enjoying constant glows and glimmers of a cloudy
happiness which he would hardly exchange for any other light. The late
Professor Masson—himself no posture-monger or man of megrims, but one of
genial temper and steady sense—described Thackeray as “a man apart”; and
so is the Marquis of Esmond. Yet Thackeray was a very real man; and so is
the Marquis too.
[Illustration]
No. 36 Onslow Square, Brompton, Where Thackeray Lived From 1853 to 1862.
The element of abstraction disappears, or rather retires into the
background, when we pass to Beatrix. She also has the _Ewigweibliche_ in
her—as much of it as any, or almost any, of Shakespeare’s women, and
therefore more than anybody else’s. But she is very much more than a
type—she is Beatrix Esmond in flesh and blood, and damask and diamond,
born “for the destruction of mankind” and fortunately for the delight of
them, or some of them, as well. Beatrix is beyond eulogy. “Cease! cease to
sing her praise!” is really the only motto, though perhaps something more
may be said when we come to the terrible pendant which only Thackeray has
had the courage and the skill to draw, with truth and without a disgusting
result. If she had died when _Esmond_ closes I doubt whether, in the Wood
of Fair Ladies, even Cleopatra would have dared to summon her to her side,
lest the comparison should not be favourable enough to herself, and the
throne have to be shared.
But, as usual with Thackeray, you must not look to the hero and heroine
too exclusively, even when there is such a heroine as this. For is there
not here another heroine—cause of the dubieties of the _Doctor Fidelis_ as
above cited? As to that it may perhaps be pointed out to the extreme
sentimentalists that, after all, Harry had been in love with the mother,
as well as with the daughter, all along. If they consider this an
aggravation, it cannot be helped: but, except from the extreme point of
view of Miss Marianne Dashwood in her earlier stage, it ought rather to be
considered a palliative. And if they say further that the thing is made
worse still by the fact that Harry was himself Rachel’s _second_ love, and
that she did not exactly wait to be a widow before she fell in love with
him—why, there is, again, nothing for it but to confess that it is very
shocking—and excessively human. Indeed, the fact is that Rachel is as
human as Beatrix, though in a different way. You may not only _love_ her
less, but—in a different sense of contrast from that of the Roman
poet—_like_ her a little less. But you cannot, if you have any knowledge
of human nature, call her unnatural. And really I do not know that the
third lady of the family, Isabel Marchioness of Esmond, though there is
less written about her, is not as real and almost as wonderful as the
other two. She is not so fairly treated, however, poor thing! for we have
her Bernstein period without her Beatrix one.
As for my Lords Castlewood—Thomas, and Francis _père et fils_—their
creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never “out”.
The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel’s too fortunate or too
unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen’s great triumph in the
_Doll’s House_ as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to the
incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray’s management of the
temporary loss of Rachel’s beauty. They are certainly both touches of the
baser side of human nature ingeniously worked in. But the question is,
What, in this wonderful book, is _not_ ingeniously worked in—character or
incident, description or speech?
If the champions of “Unity” were wise, they would take _Esmond_ as a
battle-horse, for it is certain that, great as are its parts, the whole is
greater than almost any one of them—which is certainly not the case with
_Pendennis_. And it is further certain that, of these parts, the
personages of the hero and the heroine stand out commandingly, which is
certainly not the case with _Pendennis_, again. The unity, however, is of
a peculiar kind: and differs from the ordinary non-classical “Unity of
Interest” which Thackeray almost invariably exhibits. It is rather a Unity
of _Temper_, which is also present (as the all-pervading motto _Vanitas
Vanitatum_ almost necessitates) in all the books, but here reaches a
transcendence not elsewhere attained. The brooding spirit of
_Ecclesiastes_ here covers, as it were, with the shadow of one of its
wings the joys and sorrows, the failures and successes of a private family
and their friends, with the other the fates of England and Europe; the
fortunes of Marlborough and of Swift on their way from dictatorship, in
each case, to dotage and death; the big wars and the notable literary
triumphs as well as the hopeless passions or acquiescent losses. It is
thus an instance—and the greatest—of that revival of the historical novel
which was taking place, and in which the novel of Scott(1)—simpler, though
not so very simple as is sometimes thought—is being dashed with a far
heavier dose of the novel-element as opposed to the romance, yet without
abandonment of the romance-quality proper. Of these novel-romance scenes,
as they may be called, the famous mock-duel at the end is of course the
greatest. But that where the Duke of Hamilton has to acknowledge the
Marquis of Esmond, and where Beatrix gives the kiss of Beatrix, is almost
as great: and there are many others. It is possible that this very
transcendence accounts to some extent for the somewhat lukewarm admiration
which it has received. The usual devotee of the novel of analysis dislikes
the historic, and has taught himself to consider it childish; the common
lover of romance (not the better kind) feels himself hampered by the
character-study, as Émile de Girardin’s subscribers felt themselves
hampered by Gautier’s style. All the happier those who can make the best
of both dispensations!
Nothing, however, has yet been said of one of the most salient
characteristics of _Esmond_—one, perhaps, which has had as much to do with
the love of its lovers and the qualified esteem of those who do not quite
love it, as anything else. This is, of course, the attempt, certainly a
very audacious one, at once to give the very form and pressure of the time
of the story—sometimes in actual diction—and yet to suffuse it with a
modern thought and colour which most certainly were _not_ of the time. The
boldness and the peril of this attempt are both quite indisputable; and
the peril itself is, in a way, double. There is the malcontent who will
say “This may be all very fine: but I don’t like it. It bothers and teases
me. I do not want to be talked to in the language of Addison and Steele”.
And there will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive
malcontent who will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it
is not, as it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists “in
squadrons and gross bands”, argument is, of course, impossible. He may be
taught better if he is caught young, but that is all: and certainly the
last thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make
him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to those
who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps, is there
very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is not
successful—except to disable their judgement. But as for the doctrine that
this attempt _deserves_ to fail, and must fail—that it is wrong in
itself—there one may take up the cudgels with some confidence.
So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring one
period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and speaking
as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as they move and
see as they see—it is merely the triumph and the justification of the
whole method of prose fiction in general, and of the historical novel in
particular. For that historical novel is itself the result of the growth
of the historic sense acting upon the demand for fiction. So long as
people made no attempt to understand things and thoughts different from
those around and within them; so long as, like the men of the Middle Ages,
they blandly threw everything into their own image, or, like those of the
Renaissance to some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded
other ages at worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as
childish—the historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It
only became possible when history began to be seriously studied as
something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus been
made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry the
process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to represent
the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of regarding it
from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The process of
Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further into
application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date, partly his
genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged Shakespeare to combine
his treatment—to make his godlike Romans at once Roman and Elizabethan,
and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the
conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, _dichotomizes_
the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person,
now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If
anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there
are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations that we yet
possess of human genius—one of the most extraordinary achievements of that
higher imagination which Coleridge liked to call _esenoplastic_.(2) That a
man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general life is
wonderful; that he should have the faculty of reproducing past life is
wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past and preserve
the present—command and provide at once theatre and company, audience and
performance—this is the highest wizardry of all. And this, as it seems to
me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and more, what he has done, in the
_History of Henry Esmond_.(3)
He could not have done it without the “pains” to which he refers in the
saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more than once.
It has been thought desirable to include in the present volume the two
main after-crops,(4) _The English Humourists_ and _The Four Georges_.
Exactly _how_ early Thackeray’s attention was drawn to the eighteenth
century it would, in the necessarily incomplete state of our biographical
information about him, be very difficult to say. We have pointed out that
the connexion was pretty well established as early as _Catherine_. But it
was evidently founded upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and
enlivened with a proper dose of difference, which is the most certain
source and the purest maintainer of love in life and literature.
At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the
novel not so much by their form—for Thackeray as a lecturer had very
little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great deal
that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene—as by their purport.
_Esmond_, though partly critical, is mainly and in far the greater part
creative. The Lectures, though partly creative—_resurrective_, at any
rate—are professedly and substantially critical. Now, a good deal has been
said already of Thackeray’s qualities and defects as a critic: and it has
been pointed out that, in consequence of his peculiar impulsiveness, his
strong likes and dislikes, his satiric-romantic temperament, and perhaps
certain deficiencies in all-round literary and historical learning, his
critical light was apt to be rather uncertain, and his critical deductions
by no means things from which there should be no appeal. But _The English
Humourists_ is by far the most important “place” for this criticism in the
literary department; and _The Four Georges_ (with _The Book of Snobs_ to
some extent supplementing it) is the chief place for his criticism of
society, personality, and the like. Moreover, both have been, and are,
violently attacked by those who do not like him. So that, for more reasons
than one or two, both works deserve faithful critical handling themselves.
It is always best to disperse Maleger and his myrmidons before exploring
the beauties of the House of Alma: so we may take the objections to the
_Humourists_ first. They are chiefly concerned with the handling of Swift
and (in a less degree) of Sterne. Now, it is quite certain that we have
here, in the first case at any rate, to confess, though by no means to
avoid. It is an instance of that excessive “taking sides” with or against
his characters which has been noticed, and will be noticed, again and
again. Nor is the reason of this in the least difficult to perceive. It is
very doubtful whether Thackeray’s own estimate of average humanity was
much higher than Swift’s: nor is it quite certain that the affection which
Swift professed and (from more than one instance) seems to have really
felt for Dick, Tom, and Harry, in particular, as opposed to mankind at
large, was very much less sincere than Thackeray’s own for individuals.
But the temperament of the one deepened and aggravated his general
understanding of mankind into a furious misanthropy; while the temperament
of the other softened _his_ into a general pardon. In the same way,
Swift’s very love and friendship were dangerous and harsh-faced, while
Thackeray’s were sunny and caressing. But there can be very little doubt
that Thackeray himself, when the “Shadow of Vanity” was heaviest on him,
felt the danger of actual misanthropy, and thus revolted from its victim
with a kind of terror; while his nature could not help feeling a similar
revulsion from Swift’s harsh ways. That to all this revulsion he gives
undue force of expression need not be denied: but then, it must be
remembered that he does not allow it to affect his _literary_ judgement. I
do not believe that any one now living has a greater admiration for Swift
than I have: and all that I can say is that I know no estimate of his
genius anywhere more adequate than Thackeray’s. As for Sterne, I do not
intend to say much. If you will thrust your personality into your
literature, as Sterne constantly does, you must take the chances of your
personality as well as of your literature. You practically expose both to
the judgement of the public. And if anybody chooses to take up the cudgels
for Sterne’s personality I shall hand them over to him and take no part on
one side or another in that bout. To his _genius_, once more, I do not
think Thackeray at all unjust.
The fact is, however, that as is usual with persons of genius, but even
more than as usual, the defects and the qualities are so intimately
connected that you cannot have one without the other—you must pay the
price of the other for the one. All I can say is that such another _live_
piece of English criticism of English literature as this I do not know
anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect: to get perfection you must
go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I could pick plenty of small holes
in the details of the actual critical dicta, I know no picture of the
division of literature here concerned from which a fairly intelligent
person will derive a better impression of the facts than from this.
Addison may be a little depressed, and Steele a little exalted: but it is
necessary to remember that by Macaulay, whose estimate then practically
held the field, Steele had been most unduly depressed and Addison rather
unduly exalted. You may go about among our critics on the brightest day
with the largest lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the
“Congreve” article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive
nobody but a fool. The vividness of the “Addison and Steele” presentation
is miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay
on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would be,
to Pope. “Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding” is another miracle of
appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to “sentimentality”
by what other means than an intense _sympathy_ (from which it is
impossible to exclude something that may be called sentimental) such a
study as that of Goldsmith could have been produced? Now Goldsmith is one
of the most difficult persons in the whole range of literature to treat,
from the motley of his merits and his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has
achieved the adventure here. In short, throughout the book, he is
invaluable as a critic, if not impeccable in criticism. His faults, and
the causes of them, are obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the
chief of them, as usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative
phrase) as rare in quality as they are abundant in quantity.
The lectures on _The English Humourists_ must have been composed very much
_pari passu_ with _Esmond_; they were being delivered while it was being
finished, and it was published just as the author was setting off to
re-deliver them in America. _The Four Georges_ were not regularly taken in
hand till some years later, when _The Newcomes_ was finished or finishing,
and when fresh material was wanted for the second American trip. But there
exists a very remarkable _scenario_ of them—as it may be almost called—a
full decade older, in the shape of a _satura_ of verse and prose
contributed to _Punch_ on October 11, 1845; which has accordingly been
kept back from its original associates to be inserted here. All things
considered, it gives the lines which are followed in the later lectures
with remarkable precision: and it is not at all improbable that Thackeray
actually, though not of necessity consciously, took it for head-notes.
No book of his has been so violently attacked both at the time of its
appearance and since. Nor—for, as the reader must have seen long ago, the
present writer, though proud to be called a Thackerayan stalwart, is not a
Thackerayan “know-nothing”, a “Thackeray-right-or-wrong” man—is there any
that exposes itself more to attack. From the strictly literary side,
indeed, it has the advantage of _The Book of Snobs_: for it is nowhere
unequal, and exhibits its author’s unmatched power of historical-artistic
imagination or reconstruction in almost the highest degree possible. But
in other respects it certainly does show the omission “to erect a sconce
on Drumsnab”. There was (it has already been hinted at in connexion with
the Eastern Journey) a curious innocence about Thackeray. It may be that,
like the Hind,
He feared no danger for he knew no sin;
but the absence of fear with him implied an apparent ignoring of danger,
which is a danger in itself. Nobody who has even passed Responsions in the
study of his literary and moral character will suspect him for one moment
of having pandered to American prejudice by prating to it, as a tit-bit
and _primeur_, scandal about this or that King George. But it was quite
evident from the first, and ought to have been evident to the author long
beforehand, that the enemy _might_ think, and _would_ say so. In fact,
putting considerations of mere expediency aside, I think myself that he
had much better not have done it. As for the justice of the general
verdict, it is no doubt affected throughout by Thackeray’s political
incapacity, whatever side he might have taken, and by that quaint
theoretical republicanism, with a good deal of pure Toryism mixed, which
he attributes to some of his characters, and no doubt, in a kind of rather
confused speculative way, held himself. He certainly puts George III’s
ability too low, and as certainly he indulges in the case of George IV in
one of these curious outbursts—a _Hetze_ of unreasoning, frantic,
“stop-thief!” and “mad-dog!” persecution—to which he was liable. “Gorgius”
may not have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly “a most
expensive _Herr_”, and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and by no
means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost infinitely
_not_ better than she should be; the allegations of treachery to private
friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he deserted the Whigs, it was no
more than some of these very Whigs very shortly afterwards did to their
country: he played the difficult part of Regent and the not very easy one
of King by no means ill; he was, by common and even reluctant consent, an
extremely pleasant host and companion; and he liked Jane Austen’s novels.
There have been a good many princes—and a good many demagogues too—of whom
as much good could not be said.
Admitting excess in these details, and “inconvenience” in the
circumstances of the original representation, there remains, as it seems
to me, a more than sufficient balance to credit. That social-historic
sense, accompanied with literary power of bodying forth its results, which
we noticed as early as the opening of _Catherine_ has, in the seventeen
years’ interval, fully and marvellously matured itself. The picture is not
a mere mob of details: it is an orderly pageant of artistically composed
material. It is possible; it is life-like; the only question (and that is
rather a minor one) is, “Is it true?”
Minor, I say, because the artistic value would remain if the historical
were impaired. But I do not think it is. I shall bow to the authority of
persons better acquainted with the eighteenth century than I am: but if
some decades of familiarity with essayists and novelists and diarists and
letter-writers may give one a scanty _locus standi_, I shall certainly
give my testimony in favour of “Thackeray’s Extract”. The true essence of
the life that exhibits itself in fiction from _Pamela_ and _Joseph
Andrews_ down to _Pompey the Little_ and the _Spiritual Quixote_; in essay
from the _Tatler_ to the _Mirror_; in Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and
Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in
Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs. Delany and Madame d’Arblay, seems to me to
deserve warrant of excise and guarantee of analysis as it lies in these
four little flaskets.
And, as has been done before, let me finish with an almost silent
indication of the wonderful variety of this volume also. In one sense the
subject of its constituents is the same. Yet in another it is treated with
the widest and most infinite difference. Any one of the three treatments
would be a masterpiece of single achievement; while the first of the three
is, as it seems to me, _the_ masterpiece of its entire class.(5)
THE MS. OF “ESMOND”
The MS. is contained in two volumes and was presented to Trinity College,
Cambridge, by the author’s daughter; it is now deposited in the College
Library. Sir Leslie Stephen, in writing to the Librarian about it on June
11, 1889, says:—
“There are three separate handwritings. Thackeray’s own small upright
handwriting; that of his daughter, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, a rather
large round handwriting; and that of an amanuensis whose name I do not
know. The interest is mainly this, that it shows that Thackeray dictated a
considerable part of the book; and, as Mrs. Ritchie tells me, he dictated
it without having previously written anything. The copy was sent straight
to press as it stands, with, as you will see, remarkably little
alteration. As _Esmond_ is generally considered to be his most perfect
work in point of style, I think that this is a remarkable fact and adds
considerably to the interest of the MS.”
The four facsimiles which follow, and which appear here by the very kind
permission of Lady Ritchie and of the authorities of the College, have
been slightly reduced to fit the pages.
[Illustration: Facsimile 1]
[Illustration: Facsimile 2]
[Illustration: Facsimile 3]
[Illustration: Facsimile 4]
THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, ESQ.
THE HISTORY OF
HENRY ESMOND, ESQ.
A COLONEL IN THE SERVICE OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN ANNE
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet
[First edition in three volumes, 1852. Revised edition, 1858]
Dedication.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
WILLIAM BINGHAM, LORD ASHBURTON
MY DEAR LORD,
The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne’s
time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to
inscribe this volume to your lordship, for the sake of the great kindness
and friendship which I owe to you and yours.
My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country
where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall
gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America
because I am
Your obliged friend and servant,
W. M. THACKERAY.
LONDON, October 18, 1852.
Preface. The Esmonds Of Virginia
The estate of Castlewood, in Virginia, which was given to our ancestors by
King Charles the First, as some return for the sacrifices made in his
Majesty’s cause by the Esmond family, lies in Westmoreland county, between
the rivers Potomac and Rappahannoc, and was once as great as an English
Principality, though in the early times its revenues were but small.
Indeed, for near eighty years after our forefathers possessed them, our
plantations were in the hands of factors, who enriched themselves one
after another, though a few scores of hogsheads of tobacco were all the
produce that, for long after the Restoration, our family received from
their Virginian estates.
My dear and honoured father, Colonel Henry Esmond, whose history, written
by himself, is contained in the accompanying volume, came to Virginia in
the year 1718, built his house of Castlewood, and here permanently
settled. After a long stormy life in England, he passed the remainder of
his many years in peace and honour in this country; how beloved and
respected by all his fellow citizens, how inexpressibly dear to his
family, I need not say. His whole life was a benefit to all who were
connected with him. He gave the best example, the best advice, the most
bounteous hospitality to his friends; the tenderest care to his
dependants; and bestowed on those of his immediate family such a blessing
of fatherly love and protection, as can never be thought of, by us at
least, without veneration and thankfulness; and my son’s children, whether
established here in our Republick, or at home in the always beloved mother
country, from which our late quarrel hath separated us, may surely be
proud to be descended from one who in all ways was so truly noble.
My dear mother died in 1736, soon after our return from England, whither
my parents took me for my education; and where I made the acquaintance of
Mr. Warrington, whom my children never saw. When it pleased Heaven, in the
bloom of his youth, and after but a few months of a most happy union, to
remove him from me, I owed my recovery from the grief which that calamity
caused me, mainly to my dearest father’s tenderness, and then to the
blessing vouchsafed to me in the birth of my two beloved boys. I know the
fatal differences which separated them in politics never disunited their
hearts; and as I can love them both, whether wearing the king’s colours or
the Republick’s, I am sure that they love me, and one another, and him
above all, my father and theirs, the dearest friend of their childhood,
the noble gentleman who bred them from their infancy in the practice and
knowledge of Truth, and Love, and Honour.
My children will never forget the appearance and figure of their revered
grandfather; and I wish I possessed the art of drawing (which my papa had
in perfection), so that I could leave to our descendants a portrait of one
who was so good and so respected. My father was of a dark complexion, with
a very great forehead and dark hazel eyes, overhung by eyebrows which
remained black long after his hair was white. His nose was aquiline, his
smile extraordinary sweet. How well I remember it, and how little any
description I can write can recall his image! He was of rather low
stature, not being above five feet seven inches in height; he used to
laugh at my sons, whom he called his crutches, and say they were grown too
tall for him to lean upon. But small as he was he had a perfect grace and
majesty of deportment, such as I have never seen in this country, except
perhaps in our friend Mr. Washington, and commanded respect wherever he
appeared.
In all bodily exercises he excelled, and showed an extraordinary quickness
and agility. Of fencing he was especially fond, and made my two boys
proficient in that art; so much so, that when the French came to this
country with Monsieur Rochambeau, not one of his officers was superior to
my Henry, and he was not the equal of my poor George, who had taken the
king’s side in our lamentable but glorious War of Independence.
Neither my father nor my mother ever wore powder in their hair; both their
heads were as white as silver, as I can remember them. My dear mother
possessed to the last an extraordinary brightness and freshness of
complexion; nor would people believe that she did not wear rouge. At sixty
years of age she still looked young, and was quite agile. It was not until
after that dreadful siege of our house by the Indians, which left me a
widow ere I was a mother, that my dear mother’s health broke. She never
recovered her terror and anxiety of those days, which ended so fatally for
me, then a bride scarce six months married, and died in my father’s arms
ere my own year of widowhood was over.
From that day, until the last of his dear and honoured life, it was my
delight and consolation to remain with him as his comforter and companion;
and from those little notes which my mother hath made here and there in
the volume in which my father describes his adventures in Europe, I can
well understand the extreme devotion with which she regarded him—a
devotion so passionate and exclusive as to prevent her, I think, from
loving any other person except with an inferior regard; her whole thoughts
being centred on this one object of affection and worship. I know that,
before her, my dear father did not show the love which he had for his
daughter; and in her last and most sacred moments, this dear and tender
parent owned to me her repentance that she had not loved me enough: her
jealousy even that my father should give his affection to any but herself;
and in the most fond and beautiful words of affection and admonition, she
bade me never to leave him, and to supply the place which she was
quitting. With a clear conscience, and a heart inexpressibly thankful, I
think I can say that I fulfilled those dying commands, and that until his
last hour my dearest father never had to complain that his daughter’s love
and fidelity failed him.
And it is since I knew him entirely, for during my mother’s life he never
quite opened himself to me—since I knew the value and splendour of that
affection which he bestowed upon me, that I have come to understand and
pardon what, I own, used to anger me in my mother’s lifetime, her jealousy
respecting her husband’s love. ’Twas a gift so precious, that no wonder
she who had it was for keeping it all, and could part with none of it,
even to her daughter.
Though I never heard my father use a rough word, ’twas extraordinary with
how much awe his people regarded him; and the servants on our plantation,
both those assigned from England and the purchased negroes, obeyed him
with an eagerness such as the most severe taskmasters round about us could
never get from their people. He was never familiar, though perfectly
simple and natural; he was the same with the meanest man as with the
greatest, and as courteous to a black slave-girl as to the governor’s
wife. No one ever thought of taking a liberty with him (except once a
tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never
forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him,
and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made
persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy was not put on like a
Sunday suit, and laid by when the company went away; it was always the
same; as he was always dressed the same whether for a dinner by ourselves
or for a great entertainment. They say he liked to be the first in his
company; but what company was there in which he would not be first? When I
went to Europe for my education, and we passed a winter at London with my
half-brother, my Lord Castlewood and his second lady, I saw at her
Majesty’s Court some of the most famous gentlemen of those days; and I
thought to myself, “None of these are better than my papa”; and the famous
Lord Bolingbroke, who came to us from Dawley, said as much, and that the
men of that time were not like those of his youth:—“Were your father,
madam,” he said, “to go into the woods, the Indians would elect him
Sachem;” and his lordship was pleased to call me Pocahontas.
I did not see our other relative, Bishop Tusher’s lady, of whom so much is
said in my papa’s memoirs—although my mamma went to visit her in the
country. I have no pride (as I showed by complying with my mother’s
request, and marrying a gentleman who was but the younger son of a Suffolk
baronet), yet I own to a _decent respect_ for my name, and wonder how one,
who ever bore it, should change it for that of Mrs. _Thomas Tusher_. I
pass over as odious and unworthy of credit those reports (which I heard in
Europe, and was then too young to understand), how this person, having
_left her family_ and fled to Paris, out of jealousy of the Pretender,
betrayed his secrets to my Lord Stair, King George’s ambassador, and
nearly caused the prince’s death there; how she came to England and
married this Mr. Tusher, and became a great favourite of King George the
Second, by whom Mr. Tusher was made a dean, and then a bishop. I did not
see the lady, who chose to remain _at her palace_ all the time we were in
London; but after visiting her, my poor mamma said she had lost all her
good looks, and warned me not to set too much store by any such gifts
which nature had bestowed upon me. She grew exceedingly stout; and I
remember my brother’s wife, Lady Castlewood, saying—“No wonder she became
a favourite, for the king likes them old and ugly, as his father did
before him.” On which papa said—“All women were alike; that there was
never one so beautiful as that one; and that we could forgive her
everything but her beauty.” And hereupon my mamma looked vexed, and my
Lord Castlewood began to laugh; and I, of course, being a young creature,
could not understand what was the subject of their conversation.
After the circumstances narrated in the third book of these memoirs, my
father and mother both went abroad, being advised by their friends to
leave the country in consequence of the transactions which are recounted
at the close of the volume of the memoirs. But my brother, hearing how the
_future bishop’s lady_ had quitted Castlewood and joined the Pretender at
Paris, pursued him, and would have killed him, prince as he was, had not
the prince managed to make his escape. On his expedition to Scotland
directly after, Castlewood was so enraged against him that he asked leave
to serve as a volunteer, and join the Duke of Argyle’s army in Scotland,
which the Pretender never had the courage to face; and thenceforth my lord
was quite reconciled to the present reigning family, from whom he hath
even received promotion.
Mrs. Tusher was by this time as angry against the Pretender as any of her
relations could be, and used to boast, as I have heard, that she not only
brought back my lord to the Church of England, but procured the English
peerage for him, which the _junior branch_ of our family at present
enjoys. She was a great friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and would not rest
until her husband slept at Lambeth, my papa used laughing to say. However,
the bishop died of apoplexy suddenly, and his wife erected a great
monument over him; and the pair sleep under that stone, with a canopy of
marble clouds and angels above them—the first Mrs. Tusher lying sixty
miles off at Castlewood.
But my papa’s genius and education are both greater than any a woman can
be expected to have, and his adventures in Europe far more exciting than
his life in this country, which was past in the tranquil offices of love
and duty; and I shall say no more by way of introduction to his memoirs,
nor keep my children from the perusal of a story which is much more
interesting than that of their affectionate old mother,
Rachel Esmond Warrington.
CASTLEWOOD, VIRGINIA,
November 3, 1778.
Book I. The Early Youth Of Henry Esmond, Up To The Time Of His Leaving
Trinity College, In Cambridge
The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a
tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great
head-dress. ’Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these
appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and
cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King
Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden’s words): the Chorus
standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing
the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History hath
encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre. She
too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She too, in
our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them
obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of Court
ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of
the common people. I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old
French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and model of kinghood—who never
moved but to measure, who lived and died according to the laws of his
Court-marshal, persisting in enacting through life the part of Hero; and,
divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked,
and with a great periwig and red heels to make him look tall—a hero for a
book if you like, or for a brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a
Roman shape, but what more than a man for Madame Maintenon, or the barber
who shaved him, or Monsieur Fagon, his surgeon? I wonder shall History
ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see
something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw
Queen Anne at the latter place tearing down the Park slopes after her
staghounds, and driving her one-horse chaise—a hot, red-faced woman, not
in the least resembling that statue of her which turns its stone back upon
St. Paul’s, and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill. She was
neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand her
a letter or a washhand-basin. Why shall History go on kneeling to the end
of time? I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take a natural
posture: not to be for ever performing cringes and congees like a
Court-chamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in the presence of
the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than
heroic: and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding will give our children
a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the
_Court Gazette_ and the newspapers which we get thence.
There was a German officer of Webb’s, with whom we used to joke, and of
whom a story (whereof I myself was the author) was got to be believed in
the army, that he was eldest son of the Hereditary Grand Bootjack of the
Empire, and heir to that honour of which his ancestors had been very
proud, having been kicked for twenty generations by one imperial foot, as
they drew the boot from the other. I have heard that the old Lord
Castlewood, of part of whose family these present volumes are a chronicle,
though he came of quite as good blood as the Stuarts whom he served (and
who as regards mere lineage are no better than a dozen English and
Scottish houses I could name), was prouder of his post about the Court
than of his ancestral honours and valued his dignity (as Lord of the
Butteries and Groom of the King’s Posset) so highly, that he cheerfully
ruined himself for the thankless and thriftless race who bestowed it. He
pawned his plate for King Charles the First, mortgaged his property for
the same cause, and lost the greater part of it by fines and
sequestration: stood a siege of his castle by Ireton, where his brother
Thomas capitulated (afterwards making terms with the Commonwealth, for
which the elder brother never forgave him), and where his second brother
Edward, who had embraced the ecclesiastical profession, was slain on
Castlewood tower, being engaged there both as preacher and artilleryman.
This resolute old loyalist, who was with the king whilst his house was
thus being battered down, escaped abroad with his only son, then a boy, to
return and take a part in Worcester fight. On that fatal field Eustace
Esmond was killed, and Castlewood fled from it once more into exile, and
henceforward, and after the Restoration, never was away from the Court of
the monarch (for whose return we offer thanks in the Prayer-book) who sold
his country and who took bribes of the French king.
What spectacle is more august than that of a great king in exile? Who is
more worthy of respect than a brave man in misfortune? Mr. Addison has
painted such a figure in his noble piece of _Cato_. But suppose fugitive
Cato fuddling himself at a tavern with a wench on each knee, a dozen
faithful and tipsy companions of defeat, and a landlord calling out for
his bill; and the dignity of misfortune is straightway lost. The
Historical Muse turns away shamefaced from the vulgar scene, and closes
the door—on which the exile’s unpaid drink is scored up—upon him and his
pots and his pipes, and the tavern-chorus which he and his friends are
singing. Such a man as Charles should have had an Ostade or Mieris to
paint him. Your Knellers and Le Bruns only deal in clumsy and impossible
allegories: and it hath always seemed to me blasphemy to claim Olympus for
such a wine-drabbled divinity as that.
About the king’s follower the Viscount Castlewood—orphan of his son,
ruined by his fidelity, bearing many wounds and marks of bravery, old and
in exile, his kinsmen I suppose should be silent; nor if this patriarch
fell down in his cups, call fie upon him, and fetch passers-by to laugh at
his red face and white hairs. What! does a stream rush out of a mountain
free and pure, to roll through fair pastures, to feed and throw out bright
tributaries, and to end in a village gutter? Lives that have noble
commencements have often no better endings; it is not without a kind of
awe and reverence that an observer should speculate upon such careers as
he traces the course of them. I have seen too much of success in life to
take off my hat and huzza to it as it passes in its gilt coach: and would
do my little part with my neighbours on foot, that they should not gape
with too much wonder, nor applaud too loudly. Is it the Lord Mayor going
in state to mince-pies and the Mansion House? Is it poor Jack of Newgate’s
procession, with the sheriff and javelin-men, conducting him on his last
journey to Tyburn? I look into my heart and think that I am as good as my
Lord Mayor, and know I am as bad as Tyburn Jack. Give me a chain and red
gown and a pudding before me, and I could play the part of alderman very
well, and sentence Jack after dinner. Starve me, keep me from books and
honest people, educate me to love dice, gin, and pleasure, and put me on
Hounslow Heath, with a purse before me and I will take it. “And I shall be
deservedly hanged,” say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing. I
don’t say no. I can’t but accept the world as I find it, including a
rope’s end, as long as it is in fashion.
Chapter I. An Account Of The Family Of Esmond Of Castlewood Hall
When Francis, fourth Viscount Castlewood, came to his title, and presently
after to take possession of his house of Castlewood, county Hants, in the
year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a
lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until
my lady viscountess lighted upon him, going over the house, with the
housekeeper on the day of her arrival. The boy was in the room known as
the book-room, or yellow gallery, where the portraits of the family used
to hang, that fine piece among others of Sir Antonio Van Dyck of George,
second viscount, and that by Mr. Dobson of my lord the third viscount,
just deceased, which it seems his lady and widow did not think fit to
carry away, when she sent for and carried off to her house at Chelsey,
near to London, the picture of herself by Sir Peter Lely, in which her
ladyship was represented as a huntress of Diana’s court.
The new and fair lady of Castlewood found the sad lonely little occupant
of this gallery busy over his great book, which he laid down when he was
aware that a stranger was at hand. And, knowing who that person must be,
the lad stood up and bowed before her, performing a shy obeisance to the
mistress of his house.
She stretched out her hand—indeed when was it that that hand would not
stretch out to do an act of kindness, or to protect grief and ill-fortune?
“And this is our kinsman,’” she said; “and what is your name, kinsman?”
“My name is Henry Esmond,” said the lad, looking up at her in a sort of
delight and wonder, for she had come upon him as a _Dea certè_, and
appeared the most charming object he had ever looked on. Her golden hair
was shining in the gold of the sun; her complexion was of a dazzling
bloom; her lips smiling, and her eyes beaming with a kindness which made
Harry Esmond’s heart to beat with surprise.
“His name is Henry Esmond, sure enough, my lady,” says Mrs. Worksop the
housekeeper (an old tyrant whom Henry Esmond plagued more than he hated),
and the old gentlewoman looked significantly towards the late lord’s
picture, as it now is in the family, noble and severe-looking, with his
hand on his sword, and his order on his cloak, which he had from the
emperor during the war on the Danube against the Turk.
Seeing the great and undeniable likeness between this portrait and the
lad, the new viscountess, who had still hold of the boy’s hand as she
looked at the picture, blushed and dropped the hand quickly, and walked
down the gallery, followed by Mrs. Worksop.
When the lady came back, Harry Esmond stood exactly in the same spot, and
with his hand as it had fallen when he dropped it on his black coat.
Her heart melted I suppose (indeed she hath since owned as much) at the
notion that she should do anything unkind to any mortal, great or small;
for, when she returned, she had sent away the housekeeper upon an errand
by the door at the farther end of the gallery; and, coming back to the
lad, with a look of infinite pity and tenderness in her eyes, she took his
hand again, placing her other fair hand on his head, and saying some words
to him, which were so kind and said in a voice so sweet, that the boy, who
had never looked upon so much beauty before, felt as if the touch of a
superior being or angel smote him down to the ground, and kissed the fair
protecting hand as he knelt on one knee. To the very last hour of his
life, Esmond remembered the lady as she then spoke and looked, the rings
on her fair hands, the very scent of her robe, the beam of her eyes
lighting up with surprise and kindness, her lips blooming in a smile, the
sun making a golden halo round her hair.
As the boy was yet in this attitude of humility, enters behind him a
portly gentleman, with a little girl of four years old in his hand. The
gentleman burst into a great laugh at the lady and her adorer, with his
little queer figure, his sallow face, and long black hair. The lady
blushed, and seemed to deprecate his ridicule by a look of appeal to her
husband, for it was my lord viscount who now arrived, and whom the lad
knew, having once before seen him in the late lord’s lifetime.
“So this is the little priest!” says my lord, looking down at the lad;
“welcome, kinsman.”
“He is saying his prayers to mamma,” says the little girl, who came up to
her papa’s knee; and my lord burst out into another great laugh at this,
and kinsman Henry looked very silly. He invented a half-dozen of speeches
in reply, but ’twas months afterwards when he thought of this adventure:
as it was, he had never a word in answer.
“_Le pauvre enfant, il n’a que nous_,” says the lady, looking to her lord;
and the boy, who understood her, though doubtless she thought otherwise,
thanked her with all his heart for her kind speech.
“And he shan’t want for friends here,” says my lord, in a kind voice,
“shall he, little Trix?”
The little girl, whose name was Beatrix, and whom her papa called by this
diminutive, looked at Henry Esmond solemnly, with a pair of large eyes,
and then a smile shone over her face, which was as beautiful as that of a
cherub, and she came up and put out a little hand to him. A keen and
delightful pang of gratitude, happiness, affection, filled the orphan
child’s heart, as he received from the protectors, whom Heaven had sent to
him, these touching words, and tokens of friendliness and kindness. But an
hour since he had felt quite alone in the world: when he heard the great
peal of bells from Castlewood church ringing that morning to welcome the
arrival of the new lord and lady, it had rung only terror and anxiety to
him, for he knew not how the new owner would deal with him; and those to
whom he formerly looked for protection were forgotten or dead. Pride and
doubt too had kept him within doors: when the vicar and the people of the
village, and the servants of the house, had gone out to welcome my Lord
Castlewood—for Henry Esmond was no servant, though a dependant; no
relative, though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house;
and in the midst of the noise and acclamations attending the arrival of
the new lord (for whom you may be sure a feast was got ready, and guns
were fired, and tenants and domestics huzzaed when his carriage approached
and rolled into the courtyard of the hall), no one ever took any notice of
young Henry Esmond, who sat unobserved and alone in the book-room, until
the afternoon of that day, when his new friends found him.
When my lord and lady were going away thence, the little girl, still
holding her kinsman by the hand, bade him to come too. “Thou wilt always
forsake an old friend for a new one, Trix,” says her father to her
good-naturedly; and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They
passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen
Elizabeth’s rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was
a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of
rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond,
and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a
child of two years old, was already here on the terrace in his nurse’s
arms, from whom he ran across the grass instantly he perceived his mother,
and came to her.
“If thou canst not be happy here,” says my lord, looking round at the
scene, “thou art hard to please, Rachel.”
“I am happy where you are,” she said, “but we were happiest of all at
Walcote Forest.” Then my lord began to describe what was before them to
his wife, and what indeed little Harry knew better than he—viz., the
history of the house: how by yonder gate the page ran away with the
heiress of Castlewood, by which the estate came into the present family,
how the Roundheads attacked the clock-tower, which my lord’s father was
slain in defending. “I was but two years old then,” says he, “but take
forty-six from ninety, and how old shall I be, kinsman Harry?”
“Thirty,” says his wife, with a laugh.
“A great deal too old for you, Rachel,” answers my lord, looking fondly
down at her. Indeed she seemed to be a girl; and was at that time scarce
twenty years old.
“You know, Frank, I will do anything to please you,” says she, “and I
promise you I will grow older every day.”
“You mustn’t call papa Frank; you must call papa my lord, now,” says Miss
Beatrix, with a toss of her little head; at which the mother smiled, and
the good-natured father laughed, and the little, trotting boy laughed, not
knowing why—but because he was happy no doubt—as every one seemed to be
there. How those trivial incidents and words, the landscape and sunshine,
and the group of people smiling and talking, remain fixed on the memory!
As the sun was setting, the little heir was sent in the arms of his nurse
to bed, whither he went howling; but little Trix was promised to sit to
supper that night—“and you will come too, kinsman, won’t you?” she said.
Harry Esmond blushed: “I—I have supper with Mrs. Worksop,” says he.
“D—n it,” says my lord, “thou shalt sup with us, Harry, to-night! Shan’t
refuse a lady, shall he, Trix?”—and they all wondered at Harry’s
performance as a trencherman, in which character the poor boy acquitted
himself very remarkably; for the truth is he had no dinner, nobody
thinking of him in the bustle which the house was in, during the
preparations antecedent to the new lord’s arrival.
“No dinner! poor dear child!” says my lady, heaping up his plate with
meat, and my lord filling a bumper for him, bade him call a health; on
which Master Harry, crying “The King”, tossed off the wine. My lord was
ready to drink that, and most other toasts: indeed, only too ready. He
would not hear of Doctor Tusher (the Vicar of Castlewood, who came to
supper) going away when the sweetmeats were brought: he had not had a
chaplain long enough, he said, to be tired of him: so his reverence kept
my lord company for some hours over a pipe and a punchbowl; and went away
home with rather a reeling gait, and declaring a dozen of times, that his
lordship’s affability surpassed every kindness he had ever had from his
lordship’s gracious family.
As for young Esmond, when he got to his little chamber, it was with a
heart full of surprise and gratitude towards the new friends whom this
happy day had brought him. He was up and watching long before the house
was astir, longing to see that fair lady and her children—that kind
protector and patron; and only fearful lest their welcome of the past
night should in any way be withdrawn or altered. But presently little
Beatrix came out into the garden, and her mother followed, who greeted
Harry as kindly as before. He told her at greater length the histories of
the house (which he had been taught in the old lord’s time), and to which
she listened with great interest; and then he told her, with respect to
the night before, that he understood French, and thanked her for her
protection.
“Do you?” says she, with a blush; “then, sir, you shall teach me and
Beatrix.” And she asked him many more questions regarding himself, which
had best be told more fully and explicitly, than in those brief replies
which the lad made to his mistress’s questions.
Chapter II. Relates How Francis, Fourth Viscount, Arrives At Castlewood
’Tis known that the name of Esmond and the estate of Castlewood, com.
Hants, came into possession of the present family through Dorothea,
daughter and heiress of Edward, Earl and Marquis of Esmond, and Lord of
Castlewood, which lady married, 23 Eliz., Henry Poyns, gent.; the said
Henry being then a page in the household of her father. Francis, son and
heir of the above Henry and Dorothea, who took the maternal name which the
family hath borne subsequently, was made knight and baronet by King James
the First; and, being of a military disposition, remained long in Germany
with the Elector-Palatine, in whose service Sir Francis incurred both
expense and danger, lending large sums of money to that unfortunate
prince; and receiving many wounds in the battles against the Imperialists,
in which Sir Francis engaged.
On his return home Sir Francis was rewarded for his services and many
sacrifices, by his late Majesty James the First, who graciously conferred
upon this tried servant the post of Warden of the Butteries and Groom of
the King’s Posset, which high and confidential office he filled in that
king’s, and his unhappy successor’s, reign.
His age, and many wounds and infirmities, obliged Sir Francis to perform
much of his duty by deputy; and his son, Sir George Esmond, knight and
banneret, first as his father’s lieutenant, and afterwards as inheritor of
his father’s title and dignity, performed this office during almost the
whole of the reign of King Charles the First, and his two sons who
succeeded him.
Sir George Esmond married rather beneath the rank that a person of his
name and honour might aspire to, the daughter of Thos. Topham, of the city
of London, alderman and goldsmith, who, taking the Parliamentary side in
the troubles then commencing, disappointed Sir George of the property
which he expected at the demise of his father-in-law, who devised his
money to his second daughter, Barbara, a spinster.
Sir George Esmond, on his part, was conspicuous for his attachment and
loyalty to the royal cause and person, and the king being at Oxford in
1642, Sir George, with the consent of his father, then very aged and
infirm, and residing at his house of Castlewood, melted the whole of the
family plate for his Majesty’s service.
For this, and other sacrifices and merits, his Majesty, by patent under
the Privy Seal, dated Oxford, Jan., 1643, was pleased to advance Sir
Francis Esmond to the dignity of Viscount Castlewood, of Shandon, in
Ireland: and the viscount’s estate being much impoverished by loans to the
king, which in those troublesome times his Majesty could not repay, a
grant of land in the plantations of Virginia was given to the lord
viscount; part of which land is in possession of descendants of his family
to the present day.
The first Viscount Castlewood died full of years, and within a few months
after he had been advanced to his honours. He was succeeded by his eldest
son, the before-named George; and left issue besides, Thomas, a colonel in
the king’s army, that afterwards joined the Usurper’s government; and
Francis, in holy orders, who was slain whilst defending the house of
Castlewood against the Parliament, anno 1647.
George, Lord Castlewood (the second viscount) of King Charles the First’s
time, had no male issue save his one son Eustace Esmond, who was killed,
with half of the Castlewood men beside him, at Worcester fight. The lands
about Castlewood were sold and apportioned to the Commonwealth men;
Castlewood being concerned in almost all of the plots against the
Protector, after the death of the king, and up to King Charles the
Second’s restoration. My lord followed that king’s Court about in its
exile, having ruined himself in its service. He had but one daughter, who
was of no great comfort to her father; for misfortune had not taught those
exiles sobriety of life; and it is said that the Duke of York and his
brother the king both quarrelled about Isabel Esmond. She was maid of
honour to the Queen Henrietta Maria; she early joined the Roman Church;
her father, a weak man, following her not long after at Breda.
On the death of Eustace Esmond at Worcester, Thomas Esmond, nephew to my
Lord Castlewood, and then a stripling, became heir to the title. His
father had taken the Parliament side in the quarrels, and so had been
estranged from the chief of his house; and my Lord Castlewood was at first
so much enraged to think that his title (albeit little more than an empty
one now) should pass to a rascally Roundhead, that he would have married
again, and indeed proposed to do so to a vintner’s daughter at Bruges, to
whom his lordship owed a score for lodging when the king was there, but
for fear of the laughter of the Court, and the anger of his daughter, of
whom he stood in awe; for she was in temper as imperious and violent as my
lord, who was much enfeebled by wounds and drinking, was weak.
Lord Castlewood would have had a match between his daughter Isabel and her
cousin, the son of that Francis Esmond who was killed at Castlewood siege.
And the lady, it was said, took a fancy to the young man, who was her
junior by several years (which circumstance she did not consider to be a
fault in him); but having paid his court, and being admitted to the
intimacy of the house, he suddenly flung up his suit, when it seemed to be
pretty prosperous, without giving a pretext for his behaviour. His friends
rallied him at what they laughingly chose to call his infidelity. Jack
Churchill, Frank Esmond’s lieutenant in the royal regiment of foot guards,
getting the company which Esmond vacated, when he left the Court and went
to Tangier in a rage at discovering that his promotion depended on the
complaisance of his elderly affianced bride. He and Churchill, who had
been _condiscipuli_ at St. Paul’s School, had words about this matter; and
Frank Esmond said to him with an oath, “Jack, your sister may be
so-and-so, but by Jove, my wife shan’t!” and swords were drawn, and blood
drawn, too, until friends separated them on this quarrel. Few men were so
jealous about the point of honour in those days; and gentlemen of good
birth and lineage thought a royal blot was an ornament to their family
coat. Frank Esmond retired in the sulks, first to Tangier, whence he
returned after two years’ service, settling on a small property he had of
his mother, near to Winchester, and became a country gentleman, and kept a
pack of beagles, and never came to Court again in King Charles’s time. But
his uncle Castlewood was never reconciled to him; nor, for some time
afterwards, his cousin whom he had refused.
By places, pensions, bounties from France, and gifts from the king, whilst
his daughter was in favour, Lord Castlewood, who had spent in the royal
service his youth and fortune, did not retrieve the latter quite, and
never cared to visit Castlewood, or repair it, since the death of his son,
but managed to keep a good house, and figure at Court, and to save a
considerable sum of ready money.
And now, his heir and nephew, Thomas Esmond, began to bid for his uncle’s
favour. Thomas had served with the emperor, and with the Dutch, when King
Charles was compelled to lend troops to the States, and against them, when
his Majesty made an alliance with the French king. In these campaigns
Thomas Esmond was more remarked for duelling, brawling, vice, and play,
than for any conspicuous gallantry in the field, and came back to England,
like many another English gentleman who has travelled, with a character by
no means improved by his foreign experience. He had dissipated his small
paternal inheritance of a younger brother’s portion, and, as truth must be
told, was no better than a hanger-on of ordinaries, and a brawler about
Alsatia and the Friars, when he bethought him of a means of mending his
fortune.
His cousin was now of more than middle age, and had nobody’s word but her
own for the beauty which she said she once possessed. She was lean, and
yellow, and long in the tooth; all the red and white in all the toy-shops
in London could not make a beauty of her—Mr. Killigrew called her the
Sibyl, the death’s-head put up at the king’s feast as a _memento mori_,
&c.—in fine, a woman who might be easy of conquest, but whom only a very
bold man would think of conquering. This bold man was Thomas Esmond. He
had a fancy to my Lord Castlewood’s savings, the amount of which rumour
had very much exaggerated. Madam Isabel was said to have royal jewels of
great value; whereas poor Tom Esmond’s last coat but one was in pawn.
My lord had at this time a fine house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, nigh to the
Duke’s Theatre and the Portugal ambassador’s chapel. Tom Esmond, who had
frequented the one as long as he had money to spend among the actresses,
now came to the church as assiduously. He looked so lean and shabby, that
he passed without difficulty for a repentant sinner; and so, becoming
converted, you may be sure took his uncle’s priest for a director.
This charitable father reconciled him with the old lord his uncle, who a
short time before would not speak to him, as Tom passed under my lord’s
coach window, his lordship going in state to his place at Court, while his
nephew slunk by with his battered hat and feather, and the point of his
rapier sticking out of the scabbard—to his twopenny ordinary in Bell Yard.
Thomas Esmond, after this reconciliation with his uncle, very soon began
to grow sleek, and to show signs of the benefits of good living and clean
linen. He fasted rigorously twice a week to be sure; but he made amends on
the other days: and, to show how great his appetite was, Mr. Wycherley
said, he ended by swallowing that fly-blown rank old morsel his cousin.
There were endless jokes and lampoons about this marriage at Court: but
Tom rode thither in his uncle’s coach now, called him father, and having
won could afford to laugh. This marriage took place very shortly before
King Charles died: whom the Viscount of Castlewood speedily followed.
The issue of this marriage was one son, whom the parents watched with an
intense eagerness and care; but who, in spite of nurses and physicians,
had only a brief existence. His tainted blood did not run very long in his
poor feeble little body. Symptoms of evil broke out early on him; and,
part from flattery, part superstition, nothing would satisfy my lord and
lady, especially the latter, but having the poor little cripple touched by
his Majesty at his church. They were ready to cry out miracle at first
(the doctors and quack-salvers being constantly in attendance on the
child, and experimenting on his poor little body with every conceivable
nostrum)—but though there seemed from some reason a notable amelioration
in the infant’s health after his Majesty touched him, in a few weeks
afterward the poor thing died—causing the lampooners of the Court to say,
that the king in expelling evil out of the infant of Tom Esmond and
Isabella his wife, expelled the life out of it, which was nothing but
corruption.
The mother’s natural pang at losing this poor little child must have been
increased when she thought of her rival Frank Esmond’s wife, who was a
favourite of the whole Court, where my poor Lady Castlewood was neglected,
and who had one child, a daughter, flourishing and beautiful, and was
about to become a mother once more.
The Court, as I have heard, only laughed the more because the poor lady,
who had pretty well passed the age when ladies are accustomed to have
children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she
came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the
doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir. This
absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play
upon. Indeed, to the last days of her life, my lady viscountess had the
comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the
very midst of winter, painting roses on her cheeks long after their
natural season, and attiring herself like summer though her head was
covered with snow.
Gentlemen who were about the Court of King Charles and King James, have
told the present writer a number of stories about this queer old lady,
with which it’s not necessary that posterity should be entertained. She is
said to have had great powers of invective; and, if she fought with all
her rivals in King James’s favour, ’tis certain she must have had a vast
number of quarrels on her hands. She was a woman of an intrepid spirit,
and it appears pursued and rather fatigued his Majesty with her rights and
her wrongs. Some say that the cause of her leaving Court was jealousy of
Frank Esmond’s wife: others, that she was forced to retreat after a great
battle which took place at Whitehall, between her ladyship and Lady
Dorchester, Tom Killigrew’s daughter, whom the king delighted to honour,
and in which that ill-favoured Esther got the better of our elderly
Vashti. But her ladyship for her part always averred that it was her
husband’s quarrel, and not her own, which occasioned the banishment of the
two into the country; and the cruel ingratitude of the sovereign in giving
away, out of the family, that place of Warden of the Butteries and Groom
of the King’s Posset, which the two last Lords Castlewood had held so
honourably, and which was now conferred upon a fellow of yesterday, and a
hanger-on of that odious Dorchester creature, my Lord Bergamot(6); “I
never,” said my lady, “could have come to see his Majesty’s posset carried
by any other hand than an Esmond. I should have dashed the salver out of
Lord Bergamot’s hand, had I met him.” And those who knew her ladyship are
aware that she was a person quite capable of performing this feat, had she
not wisely kept out of the way.
Holding the purse-strings in her own control, to which, indeed, she liked
to bring most persons who came near her, Lady Castlewood could command her
husband’s obedience, and so broke up her establishment at London; she had
removed from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Chelsey, to a pretty new house she
bought there; and brought her establishment, her maids, lap-dogs, and
gentlewomen, her priest, and his lordship, her husband, to Castlewood
Hall, that she had never seen since she quitted it as a child with her
father during the troubles of King Charles the First’s reign. The walls
were still open in the old house as they had been left by the shot of the
Commonwealth men. A part of the mansion was restored and furnished up with
the plate, hangings, and furniture, brought from the house in London. My
lady meant to have a triumphal entry into Castlewood village, and expected
the people to cheer as she drove over the Green in her great coach, my
lord beside her, her gentlewomen, lap-dogs, and cockatoos on the opposite
seat, six horses to her carriage, and servants armed and mounted,
following it and preceding it. But ’twas in the height of the No-Popery
cry; the folks in the village and the neighbouring town were scared by the
sight of her ladyship’s painted face and eyelids, as she bobbed her head
out of the coach window, meaning no doubt to be very gracious; and one old
woman said, “Lady Isabel! lord-a-mercy, it’s Lady Jezebel!” a name by
which the enemies of the right honourable viscountess were afterwards in
the habit of designating her. The country was then in a great No-Popery
fervour, her ladyship’s known conversion, and her husband’s, the priest in
her train, and the service performed at the chapel of Castlewood (though
the chapel had been built for that worship before any other was heard of
in the country, and though the service was performed in the most quiet
manner), got her no favour at first in the county or village. By far the
greater part of the estate of Castlewood had been confiscated, and been
parcelled out to Commonwealth men. One or two of these old Cromwellian
soldiers were still alive in the village, and looked grimly at first upon
my lady viscountess, when she came to dwell there.
She appeared at the Hexton Assembly, bringing her lord after her, scaring
the country folks with the splendour of her diamonds, which she always
wore in public. They said she wore them in private, too, and slept with
them round her neck; though the writer can pledge his word that this was a
calumny. “If she were to take them off,” my Lady Sark said, “Tom Esmond,
her husband, would run away with them and pawn them.” ’Twas another
calumny. My Lady Sark was also an exile from Court, and there had been war
between the two ladies before.
The village people began to be reconciled presently to their lady, who was
generous and kind, though fantastic and haughty, in her ways; and whose
praises Dr. Tusher, the vicar, sounded loudly amongst his flock. As for my
lord, he gave no great trouble, being considered scarce more than an
appendage to my lady, who as daughter of the old lords of Castlewood, and
possessor of vast wealth, as the country folks said (though indeed
nine-tenths of it existed but in rumour), was looked upon as the real
queen of the Castle, and mistress of all it contained.
Chapter III. Whither In The Time Of Thomas, Third Viscount, I Had Preceded
Him As Page To Isabella
Coming up to London again some short time after this retreat, the Lord
Castlewood dispatched a retainer of his to a little cottage in the village
of Ealing, near to London, where for some time had dwelt an old French
refugee, by name Mr. Pastoureau, one of those whom the persecution of the
Huguenots by the French king had brought over to this country. With this
old man lived a little lad, who went by the name of Henry Thomas. He
remembered to have lived in another place a short time before, near to
London, too, amongst looms and spinning-wheels, and a great deal of
psalm-singing and church-going, and a whole colony of Frenchmen.
There he had a dear, dear friend, who died and whom he called aunt. She
used to visit him in his dreams sometimes; and her face, though it was
homely, was a thousand times dearer to him than that of Mrs. Pastoureau,
Bon Papa Pastoureau’s new wife, who came to live with him after aunt went
away. And there, at Spittlefields, as it used to be called, lived Uncle
George, who was a weaver too, but used to tell Harry that he was a little
gentleman, and that his father was a captain, and his mother an angel.
When he said so, Bon Papa used to look up from the loom, where he was
embroidering beautiful silk flowers, and say, “Angel! she belongs to the
Babylonish Scarlet Woman.” Bon Papa was always talking of the Scarlet
Woman. He had a little room where he always used to preach and sing hymns
out of his great old nose. Little Harry did not like the preaching; he
liked better the fine stories which aunt used to tell him. Bon Papa’s wife
never told him pretty stories; she quarrelled with Uncle George, and he
went away.
After this Harry’s Bon Papa, and his wife and two children of her own that
she brought with her, came to live at Ealing. The new wife gave her
children the best of everything, and Harry many a whipping, he knew not
why. Besides blows, he got ill names from her, which need not be set down
here, for the sake of old Mr. Pastoureau, who was still kind sometimes.
The unhappiness of those days is long forgiven, though they cast a shade
of melancholy over the child’s youth, which will accompany him, no doubt,
to the end of his days: as those tender twigs are bent the trees grow
afterward; and he, at least, who has suffered as a child, and is not quite
perverted in that early school of unhappiness, learns to be gentle and
long-suffering with little children.
Harry was very glad when a gentleman dressed in black, on horseback, with
a mounted servant behind him, came to fetch him away from Ealing. The
_noverca_, or unjust stepmother, who had neglected him for her own two
children, gave him supper enough the night before he went away, and plenty
in the morning. She did not beat him once, and told the children to keep
their hands off him. One was a girl, and Harry never could bear to strike
a girl; and the other was a boy, whom he could easily have beat, but he
always cried out, when Mrs. Pastoureau came sailing to the rescue with
arms like a flail. She only washed Harry’s face the day he went away; nor
ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather when the
gentleman in black came for the boy; and old Mr. Pastoureau, as he gave
the child his blessing, scowled over his shoulder at the strange
gentleman, and grumbled out something about Babylon and the scarlet lady.
He was grown quite old, like a child almost. Mrs. Pastoureau used to wipe
his nose as she did to the children. She was a great, big, handsome young
woman; but, though she pretended to cry, Harry thought ’twas only a sham,
and sprung quite delighted upon the horse upon which the lackey helped
him.
He was a Frenchman; his name was Blaise. The child could talk to him in
his own language perfectly well: he knew it better than English indeed:
having lived hitherto chiefly among French people: and being called the
little Frenchman by other boys on Ealing Green. He soon learnt to speak
English perfectly, and to forget some of his French: children forget
easily. Some earlier and fainter recollections the child had, of a
different country; and a town with tall white houses; and a ship. But
these were quite indistinct in the boy’s mind, as indeed the memory of
Ealing soon became, at least of much that he suffered there.
The lackey before whom he rode was very lively and voluble, and informed
the boy that the gentleman riding before him was my lord’s chaplain,
Father Holt—that he was now to be called Master Harry Esmond—that my Lord
Viscount Castlewood was his _parrain_—that he was to live at the great
house of Castlewood, in the province of ——shire, where he would see madame
the viscountess, who was a grand lady. And so, seated on a cloth before
Blaise’s saddle, Harry Esmond was brought to London, and to a fine square
called Covent Garden, near to which his patron lodged.
Mr. Holt the priest took the child by the hand, and brought him to this
nobleman, a grand languid nobleman in a great cap and flowered
morning-gown, sucking oranges. He patted Harry on the head and gave him an
orange.
“_C’est bien ça_,” he said to the priest after eyeing the child, and the
gentleman in black shrugged his shoulders.
“Let Blaise take him out for a holiday,” and out for a holiday the boy and
the valet went. Harry went jumping along; he was glad enough to go.
He will remember to his life’s end the delights of those days. He was
taken to see a play by Monsieur Blaise, in a house a thousand times
greater and finer than the booth at Ealing Fair—and on the next happy day
they took water on the river, and Harry saw London Bridge, with the houses
and booksellers’ shops thereon, looking like a street, and the Tower of
London, with the armour, and the great lions and bears in the moats—all
under company of Monsieur Blaise.
Presently, of an early morning, all the party set forth for the country,
namely, my lord viscount and the other gentleman; Monsieur Blaise, and
Harry on a pillion behind them, and two or three men with pistols leading
the baggage-horses. And all along the road the Frenchman told little Harry
stories of brigands, which made the child’s hair stand on end, and
terrified him; so that at the great gloomy inn on the road where they lay,
he besought to be allowed to sleep in a room with one of the servants, and
was compassionated by Mr. Holt, the gentleman who travelled with my lord,
and who gave the child a little bed in his chamber.
His artless talk and answers very likely inclined this gentleman in the
boy’s favour, for next day Mr. Holt said Harry should ride behind him, and
not with the French lacky; and all along the journey put a thousand
questions to the child—as to his foster-brother and relations at Ealing;
what his old grandfather had taught him; what languages he knew; whether
he could read and write, and sing, and so forth. And Mr. Holt found that
Harry could read and write, and possessed the two languages of French and
English very well; and when he asked Harry about singing, the lad broke
out with a hymn to the tune of Dr. Martin Luther, which set Mr. Holt
a-laughing; and even caused his _grand parrain_ in the laced hat and
periwig to laugh too when Holt told him what the child was singing. For it
appeared that Dr. Martin Luther’s hymns were not sung in the churches Mr.
Holt preached at.
“You must never sing that song any more, do you hear, little manikin?”
says my lord viscount, holding up a finger.
“But we will try and teach you a better, Harry.” Mr. Holt said; and the
child answered, for he was a docile child, and of an affectionate nature,
“That he loved pretty songs, and would try and learn anything the
gentleman would tell him.” That day he so pleased the gentlemen by his
talk, that they had him to dine with them at the inn, and encouraged him
in his prattle; and Monsieur Blaise, with whom he rode and dined the day
before, waited upon him now.
“’Tis well, ’tis well!” said Blaise, that night (in his own language) when
they lay again at an inn. “We are a little lord here; we are a little lord
now: we shall see what we are when we come to Castlewood where my lady
is.”
“When shall we come to Castlewood, Monsieur Blaise?” says Harry.
“_Parbleu!_ my lord does not press himself.” Blaise says, with a grin;
and, indeed, it seemed as if his lordship was not in a great hurry, for he
spent three days on that journey, which Harry Esmond hath often since
ridden in a dozen hours. For the last two of the days, Harry rode with the
priest, who was so kind to him, that the child had grown to be quite fond
and familiar with him by the journey’s end, and had scarce a thought in
his little heart which by that time he had not confided to his new friend.
At length on the third day, at evening, they came to a village standing on
a green with elms round it, very pretty to look at; and the people there
all took off their hats, and made curtsies to my lord viscount, who bowed
to them all languidly; and there was one portly person that wore a cassock
and a broad-leafed hat, who bowed lower than any one—and with this one
both my lord and Mr. Holt had a few words. “This, Harry, is Castlewood
church,” says Mr. Holt, “and this is the pillar thereof, learned Doctor
Tusher. Take off your hat, sirrah, and salute Doctor Tusher.”
“Come up to supper, doctor,” says my lord; at which the doctor made
another low bow, and the party moved on towards a grand house that was
before them, with many grey towers, and vanes on them, and windows flaming
in the sunshine; and a great army of rooks, wheeling over their heads,
made for the woods behind the house, as Harry saw; and Mr. Holt told him
that they lived at Castlewood too.
They came to the house, and passed under an arch into a courtyard, with a
fountain in the centre, where many men came and held my lord’s stirrup as
he descended, and paid great respect to Mr. Holt likewise. And the child
thought that the servants looked at him curiously, and smiled to one
another—and he recalled what Blaise had said to him when they were in
London, and Harry had spoken about his godpapa, when the Frenchman said,
“_Parbleu!_ one sees well that my lord is your godfather”; words whereof
the poor lad did not know the meaning then, though he apprehended the
truth in a very short time afterwards, and learned it and thought of it
with no small feeling of shame.
Taking Harry by the hand as soon as they were both descended from their
horses, Mr. Holt led him across the court, and under a low door to rooms
on a level with the ground; one of which Father Holt said was to be the
boy’s chamber, the other on the other side of the passage being the
father’s own; and as soon as the little man’s face was washed, and the
father’s own dress arranged, Harry’s guide took him once more to the door
by which my lord had entered the hall, and up a stair, and through an
ante-room to my lady’s drawing-room—an apartment than which Harry thought
he had never seen anything more grand—no, not in the Tower of London which
he had just visited. Indeed the chamber was richly ornamented in the
manner of Queen Elizabeth’s time, with great stained windows at either
end, and hangings of tapestry, which the sun shining through the coloured
glass painted of a thousand hues; and here in state, by the fire, sat a
lady to whom the priest took up Harry, who was indeed amazed by her
appearance.
My lady viscountess’s face was daubed with white and red up to the eyes,
to which the paint gave an unearthly glare: she had a tower of lace on her
head, under which was a bush of black curls—borrowed curls—so that no
wonder little Harry Esmond was scared when he was first presented to
her—the kind priest acting as master of the ceremonies at that solemn
introduction—and he stared at her with eyes almost as great as her own, as
he had stared at the player-woman who acted the wicked tragedy-queen, when
the players came down to Ealing Fair. She sat in a great chair by the
fire-corner; in her lap was a spaniel-dog that barked furiously; on a
little table by her was her ladyship’s snuff-box and her sugar-plum box.
She wore a dress of black velvet, and a petticoat of flame-coloured
brocade. She had as many rings on her fingers as the old woman of Banbury
Cross; and pretty small feet which she was fond of showing, with great
gold clocks to her stockings, and white pantofles with red heels; and an
odour of musk was shook out of her garments whenever she moved or quitted
the room, leaning on her tortoiseshell stick, little Fury barking at her
heels.
Mrs. Tusher, the parson’s wife, was with my lady. She had been
waiting-woman to her ladyship in the late lord’s time, and, having her
soul in that business, took naturally to it when the Viscountess of
Castlewood returned to inhabit her father’s house.
“I present to your ladyship your kinsman and little page of honour, Master
Henry Esmond,” Mr. Holt said, bowing lowly, with a sort of comical
humility. “Make a pretty bow to my lady, monsieur; and then another little
bow, not so low, to Madam Tusher—the fair priestess of Castlewood.”
“Where I have lived and hope to die, sir,” says Madam Tusher, giving a
hard glance at the brat, and then at my lady.
Upon her the boy’s whole attention was for a time directed. He could not
keep his great eyes off from her. Since the Empress of Ealing he had seen
nothing so awful.
“Does my appearance please you, little page?” asked the lady.
“He would be very hard to please if it didn’t,” cried Madam Tusher.
“Have done, you silly Maria,” said Lady Castlewood.
“Where I’m attached, I’m attached, madam—and I’d die rather than not say
so.”
“_Je meurs où je m’attache_,” Mr. Holt said, with a polite grin. “The ivy
says so in the picture, and clings to the oak like a fond parasite as it
is.”
“Parricide, sir!” cries Mrs. Tusher.
“Hush, Tusher—you are always bickering with Father Holt,” cried my lady.
“Come and kiss my hand, child,” and the oak held out a _branch_ to little
Harry Esmond, who took and dutifully kissed the lean old hand, upon the
gnarled knuckles of which there glittered a hundred rings.
“To kiss that hand would make many a pretty fellow happy!” cried Mrs.
Tusher: on which my lady crying out, “Go, you foolish Tusher,” and tapping
her with her great fan, Tusher ran forward to seize her hand and kiss it.
Fury arose and barked furiously at Tusher; and Father Holt looked on at
this queer scene, with arch grave glances.
The awe exhibited by the little boy perhaps pleased the lady to whom this
artless flattery was bestowed; for having gone down on his knee (as Father
Holt had directed him, and the mode then was) and performed his obeisance,
she said, “Page Esmond, my groom of the chamber will inform you what your
duties are, when you wait upon my lord and me; and good Father Holt will
instruct you as becomes a gentleman of our name. You will pay him
obedience in everything, and I pray you may grow to be as learned and as
good as your tutor.”
The lady seemed to have the greatest reverence for Mr. Holt, and to be
more afraid of him than of anything else in the world. If she was ever so
angry, a word or look from Father Holt made her calm: indeed he had a vast
power of subjecting those who came near him; and, among the rest, his new
pupil gave himself up with an entire confidence and attachment to the good
father, and became his willing slave almost from the first moment he saw
him.
He put his small hand into the father’s as he walked away from his first
presentation to his mistress, and asked many questions in his artless
childish way. “Who is that other woman?” he asked. “She is fat and round;
she is more pretty than my Lady Castlewood.”
“She is Madam Tusher, the parson’s wife of Castlewood. She has a son of
your age, but bigger than you.”
“Why does she like so to kiss my lady’s hand? It is not good to kiss.”
“Tastes are different, little man. Madam Tusher is attached to my lady,
having been her waiting-woman, before she was married, in the old lord’s
time. She married Doctor Tusher the chaplain. The English household
divines often marry the waiting-women.”
“You will not marry the French woman, will you? I saw her laughing with
Blaise in the buttery.”
“I belong to a church that is older and better than the English Church,”
Mr. Holt said (making a sign whereof Esmond did not then understand the
meaning, across his breast and forehead); “in our Church the clergy do not
marry. You will understand these things better soon.”
“Was not St. Peter the head of your Church?—Dr. Rabbits of Ealing told us
so.”
The father said, “Yes, he was.”
“But St. Peter was married, for we heard only last Sunday that his wife’s
mother lay sick of a fever.” On which the father again laughed, and said
he would understand this too better soon, and talked of other things, and
took away Harry Esmond, and showed him the great old house which he had
come to inhabit.
It stood on a rising green hill, with woods behind it, in which were
rooks’ nests, where the birds at morning and returning home at evening
made a great cawing. At the foot of the hill was a river with a steep
ancient bridge crossing it; and beyond that a large pleasant green flat,
where the village of Castlewood stood and stands, with the church in the
midst, the parsonage hard by it, the inn with the blacksmith’s forge
beside it, and the sign of the “Three Castles” on the elm. The London road
stretched away towards the rising sun, and to the west were swelling hills
and peaks, behind which many a time Harry Esmond saw the same sun setting,
that he now looks on thousands of miles away across the great ocean—in a
new Castlewood by another stream, that bears, like the new country of
wandering Aeneas, the fond names of the land of his youth.
The Hall of Castlewood was built with two courts, whereof one only, the
fountain court, was now inhabited, the other having been battered down in
the Cromwellian wars. In the fountain court, still in good repair, was the
great hall, near to the kitchen and butteries. A dozen of living-rooms
looking to the north, and communicating with the little chapel that faced
eastwards and the buildings stretching from that to the main gate, and
with the hall (which looked to the west) into the court now dismantled.
This court had been the most magnificent of the two, until the protector’s
cannon tore down one side of it before the place was taken and stormed.
The besiegers entered at the terrace under the clock-tower, slaying every
man of the garrison, and at their head my lord’s brother, Francis Esmond.
The Restoration did not bring enough money to the Lord Castlewood to
restore this ruined part of his house; where were the morning parlours,
above them the long music-gallery, and before which stretched the
garden-terrace, where, however, the flowers grew again, which the boots of
the Roundheads had trodden in their assault, and which was restored
without much cost, and only a little care, by both ladies who succeeded
the second viscount in the government of this mansion. Round the
terrace-garden was a low wall with a wicket leading to the wooded height
beyond, that is called Cromwell’s battery to this day.
Young Harry Esmond learned the domestic part of his duty, which was easy
enough, from the groom of her ladyship’s chamber: serving the countess, as
the custom commonly was in his boyhood, as page, waiting at her chair,
bringing her scented water and the silver basin after dinner—sitting on
her carriage step on state occasions, or on public days introducing her
company to her. This was chiefly of the Catholic gentry, of whom there
were a pretty many in the country and neighbouring city; and who rode not
seldom to Castlewood to partake of the hospitalities there. In the second
year of their residence the company seemed especially to increase. My lord
and my lady were seldom without visitors, in whose society it was curious
to contrast the difference of behaviour between Father Holt, the director
of the family, and Doctor Tusher, the rector of the parish—Mr. Holt moving
amongst the very highest as quite their equal, and as commanding them all;
while poor Doctor Tusher, whose position was indeed a difficult one,
having been chaplain once to the Hall, and still to the Protestant
servants there, seemed more like an usher than an equal, and always rose
to go away after the first course.
Also there came in these times to Father Holt many private visitors, whom
after a little, Henry Esmond had little difficulty in recognizing as
ecclesiastics of the father’s persuasion; whatever their dresses (and they
adopted all) might be. These were closeted with the father constantly, and
often came and rode away without paying their devoirs to my lord and
lady—to the lady and lord rather—his lordship being little more than a
cipher in the house, and entirely under his domineering partner. A little
fowling, a little hunting, a great deal of sleep, and a long time at cards
and table, carried through one day after another with his lordship. When
meetings took place in this second year, which often would happen with
closed doors, the page found my lord’s sheet of paper scribbled over with
dogs and horses, and ’twas said he had much ado to keep himself awake at
these councils: the countess ruling over them, and he acting as little
more than her secretary.
Father Holt began speedily to be so much occupied with these meetings as
rather to neglect the education of the little lad who so gladly put
himself under the kind priest’s orders. At first they read much and
regularly, both in Latin and French; the father not neglecting in anything
to impress his faith upon his pupil, but not forcing him violently, and
treating him with a delicacy and kindness which surprised and attached the
child; always more easily won by these methods than by any severe exercise
of authority. And his delight in our walks was to tell Harry of the
glories of his order, of its martyrs and heroes, of its brethren
converting the heathen by myriads, traversing the desert, facing the
stake, ruling the courts and councils, or braving the tortures of kings;
so that Harry Esmond thought that to belong to the Jesuits was the
greatest prize of life and bravest end of ambition; the greatest career
here, and in heaven the surest reward; and began to long for the day, not
only when he should enter into the one Church and receive his first
communion, but when he might join that wonderful brotherhood, which was
present throughout all the world, and which numbered the wisest, the
bravest, the highest born, the most eloquent of men among its members.
Father Holt bade him keep his views secret, and to hide them as a great
treasure which would escape him if it was revealed; and proud of this
confidence and secret vested in him, the lad became fondly attached to the
master who initiated him into a mystery so wonderful and awful. And when
little Tom Tusher, his neighbour, came from school for his holiday, and
said how he, too, was to be bred up for an English priest, and would get
what he called an exhibition from his school, and then a college
scholarship and fellowship, and then a good living—it tasked young Harry
Esmond’s powers of reticence not to say to his young companion, “Church!
priesthood! fat living! My dear Tommy, do you call yours a Church and a
priesthood? What is a fat living compared to converting a hundred thousand
heathens by a single sermon? What is a scholarship at Trinity by the side
of a crown of martyrdom, with angels awaiting you as your head is taken
off? Could your master at school sail over the Thames on his gown? Have
you statues in your church that can bleed, speak, walk, and cry? My good
Tommy, in dear Father Holt’s Church these things take place every day. You
know St. Philip of the Willows appeared to Lord Castlewood and caused him
to turn to the one true Church. No saints ever come to you.” And Harry
Esmond, because of his promise to Father Holt, hiding away these treasures
of faith from T. Tusher, delivered himself of them nevertheless simply to
Father Holt, who stroked his head, smiled at him with his inscrutable
look, and told him that he did well to meditate on these great things, and
not to talk of them except under direction.
Chapter IV. I Am Placed Under A Popish Priest And Bred To That
Religion.—Viscountess Castlewood
Had time enough been given, and his childish inclinations been properly
nurtured, Harry Esmond had been a Jesuit priest ere he was a dozen years
older, and might have finished his days a martyr in China or a victim on
Tower Hill: for, in the few months they spent together at Castlewood, Mr.
Holt obtained an entire mastery over the boy’s intellect and affections;
and had brought him to think, as indeed Father Holt thought with all his
heart too, that no life was so noble, no death so desirable, as that which
many brethren of his famous order were ready to undergo. By love, by a
brightness of wit and good humour that charmed all, by an authority which
he knew how to assume, by a mystery and silence about him which increased
the child’s reverence for him, he won Harry’s absolute fealty, and would
have kept it, doubtless, if schemes greater and more important than a poor
little boy’s admission into orders had not called him away.
After being at home for a few months in tranquillity (if theirs might be
called tranquillity, which was, in truth, a constant bickering), my lord
and lady left the country for London, taking their director with them: and
his little pupil scarce ever shed more bitter tears in his life than he
did for nights after the first parting with his dear friend, as he lay in
the lonely chamber next to that which the father used to occupy. He and a
few domestics were left as the only tenants of the great house: and,
though Harry sedulously did all the tasks which the father set him, he had
many hours unoccupied, and read in the library, and bewildered his little
brains with the great books he found there.
After a while the little lad grew accustomed to the loneliness of the
place; and in after days remembered this part of his life as a period not
unhappy. When the family was at London the whole of the establishment
travelled thither with the exception of the porter, who was, moreover,
brewer, gardener, and woodman, and his wife and children. These had their
lodging in the gate-house hard by, with a door into the court; and a
window looking out on the green was the chaplain’s room; and next to this
a small chamber where Father Holt had his books, and Harry Esmond his
sleeping-closet. The side of the house facing the east had escaped the
guns of the Cromwellians, whose battery was on the height facing the
western court; so that this eastern end bore few marks of demolition, save
in the chapel, where the painted windows surviving Edward the Sixth had
been broke by the Commonwealth men. In Father Holt’s time little Harry
Esmond acted as his familiar, and faithful little servitor; beating his
clothes, folding his vestments, fetching his water from the well long
before daylight, ready to run anywhere for the service of his beloved
priest. When the father was away he locked his private chamber; but the
room where the books were was left to little Harry, who, but for the
society of this gentleman, was little less solitary when Lord Castlewood
was at home.
The French wit saith that a hero is none to his valet de chambre, and it
required less quick eyes than my lady’s little page was naturally endowed
with, to see that she had many qualities by no means heroic, however much
Mrs. Tusher might flatter and coax her. When Father Holt was not by, who
exercised an entire authority over the pair, my lord and my lady
quarrelled and abused each other so as to make the servants laugh, and to
frighten the little page on duty. The poor boy trembled before his
mistress, who called him by a hundred ugly names, who made nothing of
boxing his ears—and tilting the silver basin in his face which it was his
business to present to her after dinner. She hath repaired, by subsequent
kindness to him, these severities, which it must be owned made his
childhood very unhappy. She was but unhappy herself at this time, poor
soul, and I suppose made her dependants lead her own sad life. I think my
lord was as much afraid of her as her page was, and the only person of the
household who mastered her was Mr. Holt. Harry was only too glad when the
father dined at table, and to slink away and prattle with him afterwards,
or read with him, or walk with him. Luckily my lady viscountess did not
rise till noon. Heaven help the poor waiting-woman who had charge of her
toilet! I have often seen the poor wretch come out with red eyes from the
closet, where those long and mysterious rites of her ladyship’s dress were
performed, and the backgammon-box locked up with a rap on Mrs. Tusher’s
fingers when she played ill or the game was going the wrong way.
Blessed be the king who introduced cards, and the kind inventors of piquet
and cribbage, for they employed six hours at least of her ladyship’s day,
during which her family was pretty easy. Without this occupation my lady
frequently declared she should die. Her dependants one after another
relieved guard—’twas rather a dangerous post to play with her ladyship—and
took the cards turn about. Mr. Holt would sit with her at piquet during
hours together, at which time she behaved herself properly; and, as for
Dr. Tusher, I believe he would have left a parishioner’s dying bed, if
summoned to play a rubber with his patroness at Castlewood. Sometimes,
when they were pretty comfortable together, my lord took a hand. Besides
these my lady had her faithful poor Tusher, and one, two, three
gentlewomen whom Harry Esmond could recollect in his time. They could not
bear that genteel service very long; one after another tried and failed at
it. These and the housekeeper, and little Harry Esmond, had a table of
their own. Poor ladies! their life was far harder than the page’s. He was
found asleep tucked up in his little bed, whilst they were sitting by her
ladyship reading her to sleep, with the _News Letter_ or the _Grand
Cyrus_. My lady used to have boxes of new plays from London, and Harry was
forbidden, under the pain of a whipping, to look into them. I am afraid he
deserved the penalty pretty often, and got it sometimes. Father Holt
applied it twice or thrice, when he caught the young scapegrace with a
delightful wicked comedy of Mr. Shadwell’s or Mr. Wycherley’s under his
pillow.
These, when he took any, were my lord’s favourite reading. But he was
averse to much study, and, as his little page fancied, to much occupation
of any sort.
It always seemed to young Harry Esmond that my lord treated him with more
kindness when his lady was not present, and Lord Castlewood would take the
lad sometimes on his little journeys a-hunting or a-birding; he loved to
play at cards and tric-trac with him, which games the boy learned to
pleasure his lord: and was growing to like him better daily, showing a
special pleasure if Father Holt gave a good report of him, patting him on
the head, and promising that he would provide for the boy. However, in my
lady’s presence, my lord showed no such marks of kindness, and affected to
treat the lad roughly, and rebuked him sharply for little faults—for which
he in a manner asked pardon of young Esmond when they were private, saying
if he did not speak roughly, she would, and his tongue was not such a bad
one as his lady’s—a point whereof the boy, young as he was, was very well
assured.
Great public events were happening all this while, of which the simple
young page took little count. But one day, riding into the neighbouring
town on the step of my lady’s coach, his lordship and she and Father Holt
being inside, a great mob of people came hooting and jeering round the
coach, bawling out, “The bishops for ever!” “Down with the Pope!” “No
Popery! no Popery! Jezebel, Jezebel!” so that my lord began to laugh, my
lady’s eyes to roll with anger, for she was as bold as a lioness, and
feared nobody; whilst Mr. Holt, as Esmond saw from his place on the step,
sank back with rather an alarmed face, crying out to her ladyship, “For
God’s sake, madam, do not speak or look out of window, sit still.” But she
did not obey this prudent injunction of the father; she thrust her head
out of the coach window, and screamed out to the coachman, “Flog your way
through them, the brutes, James, and use your whip!”
The mob answered with a roaring jeer of laughter, and fresh cries of,
“Jezebel! Jezebel!” My lord only laughed the more: he was a languid
gentleman: nothing seemed to excite him commonly, though I have seen him
cheer and halloo the hounds very briskly, and his face (which was
generally very yellow and calm) grow quite red and cheerful during a burst
over the Downs after a hare, and laugh, and swear, and huzza at a
cockfight, of which sport he was very fond. And now, when the mob began to
hoot his lady, he laughed with something of a mischievous look, as though
he expected sport, and thought that she and they were a match.
James the coachman was more afraid of his mistress than the mob, probably,
for he whipped on his horses as he was bidden, and the postboy that rode
with the first pair (my lady always went with her coach-and-six) gave a
cut of his thong over the shoulders of one fellow who put his hand out
towards the leading horse’s rein.
It was a market day and the country people were all assembled with their
baskets of poultry, eggs, and such things; the postilion had no sooner
lashed the man who would have taken hold of his horse, but a great cabbage
came whirling like a bombshell into the carriage, at which my lord laughed
more, for it knocked my lady’s fan out of her hand, and plumped into
Father Holt’s stomach. Then came a shower of carrots and potatoes.
“For heaven’s sake be still!” says Mr. Holt; “we are not ten paces from
the ‘Bell’ archway, where they can shut the gates on us, and keep out this
_canaille_.”
The little page was outside the coach on the step, and a fellow in the
crowd aimed a potato at him, and hit him in the eye, at which the poor
little wretch set up a shout; the man laughed, a great big saddler’s
apprentice of the town. “Ah! you d—— little yelling Popish bastard,” he
said, and stooped to pick up another; the crowd had gathered quite between
the horses and in the inn door by this time, and the coach was brought to
a dead standstill. My lord jumped as briskly as a boy out of the door on
his side of the coach, squeezing little Harry behind it; had hold of the
potato-thrower’s collar in an instant, and the next moment the brute’s
heels were in the air, and he fell on the stones with a thump.
“You hulking coward!” says he; “you pack of screaming blackguards! how
dare you attack children, and insult women? Fling another shot at that
carriage, you sneaking pigskin cobbler, and by the Lord I’ll send my
rapier through you!”
Some of the mob cried, “Huzza, my lord!” for they knew him, and the
saddler’s man was a known bruiser, near twice as big as my lord viscount.
“Make way, there,” says he (he spoke in a high shrill voice, but with a
great air of authority). “Make way, and let her ladyship’s carriage pass.”
The men that were between the coach and the gate of the “Bell” actually
did make way, and the horses went in, my lord walking after them with his
hat on his head.
As he was going in at the gate, through which the coach had just rolled,
another cry begins of “No Popery—no Papists!” My lord turns round and
faces them once more.
“God save the king!” says he at the highest pitch of his voice. “Who dares
abuse the king’s religion? You, you d——d psalm-singing cobbler, as sure as
I’m a magistrate of this county I’ll commit you!” The fellow shrunk back,
and my lord retreated with all the honours of the day. But when the little
flurry caused by the scene was over, and the flush passed off his face, he
relapsed into his usual languor, trifled with his little dog, and yawned
when my lady spoke to him.
This mob was one of many thousands that were going about the country at
that time, huzzaing for the acquittal of the seven bishops who had been
tried just then, and about whom little Harry Esmond at that time knew
scarce anything. It was assizes at Hexton, and there was a great meeting
of the gentry at the “Bell”; and my lord’s people had their new liveries
on, and Harry a little suit of blue and silver, which he wore upon
occasions of state; and the gentlefolks came round and talked to my lord;
and a judge in a red gown, who seemed a very great personage, especially
complimented him and my lady, who was mighty grand. Harry remembers her
train borne up by her gentlewoman. There was an assembly and ball at the
great room at the “Bell”, and other young gentlemen of the county families
looked on as he did. One of them jeered him for his black eye, which was
swelled by the potato, and another called him a bastard, on which he and
Harry fell to fisticuffs. My lord’s cousin, Colonel Esmond of Walcote, was
there, and separated the two lads, a great tall gentleman with a handsome,
good-natured face. The boy did not know how nearly in after-life he should
be allied to Colonel Esmond, and how much kindness he should have to owe
him.
There was little love between the two families. My lady used not to spare
Colonel Esmond in talking of him, for reasons which have been hinted
already; but about which, at his tender age, Henry Esmond could be
expected to know nothing.
Very soon afterwards my lord and lady went to London with Mr. Holt,
leaving, however, the page behind them. The little man had the great house
of Castlewood to himself; or between him and the housekeeper, Mrs.
Worksop, an old lady who was a kinswoman of the family in some distant
way, and a Protestant, but a stanch Tory and king’s-man, as all the
Esmonds were. He used to go to school to Dr. Tusher when he was at home,
though the doctor was much occupied too. There was a great stir and
commotion everywhere, even in the little quiet village of Castlewood,
whither a party of people came from the town, who would have broken
Castlewood Chapel windows, but the village people turned out, and even old
Sievewright, the republican blacksmith, along with them: for my lady,
though she was a Papist, and had many odd ways, was kind to the tenantry,
and there was always a plenty of beef, and blankets, and medicine for the
poor at Castlewood Hall.
A kingdom was changing hands whilst my lord and lady were away. King James
was flying, the Dutchmen were coming; awful stories about them and the
Prince of Orange used old Mrs. Worksop to tell to the idle little page.
He liked the solitude of the great house very well; he had all the
play-books to read, and no Father Holt to whip him, and a hundred childish
pursuits and pastimes, without doors and within, which made this time very
pleasant.
Chapter V. My Superiors Are Engaged In Plots For The Restoration Of King
James II
Not having been able to sleep, for thinking of some lines for eels which
he had placed the night before, the lad was lying in his little bed,
waiting for the hour when the gate would be open, and he and his comrade,
Job Lockwood, the porter’s son, might go to the pond and see what fortune
had brought them. At daybreak Job was to awaken him, but his own eagerness
for the sport had served as a réveille long since—so long, that it seemed
to him as if the day never would come.
It might have been four o’clock when he heard the door of the opposite
chamber, the chaplain’s room, open, and the voice of a man coughing in the
passage. Harry jumped up, thinking for certain it was a robber, or hoping
perhaps for a ghost, and, flinging open his own door, saw before him the
chaplain’s door open, and a light inside, and a figure standing in the
doorway, in the midst of a great smoke which issued from the room.
“Who’s there?” cried out the boy, who was of a good spirit.
“_Silentium!_” whispered the other; “’tis I, my boy!” and, holding his
hand out, Harry had no difficulty in recognizing his master and friend,
Father Holt. A curtain was over the window of the chaplain’s room that
looked to the court, and Harry saw that the smoke came from a great flame
of papers which were burning in a brazier when he entered the chaplain’s
room. After giving a hasty greeting and blessing to the lad, who was
charmed to see his tutor, the father continued the burning of his papers,
drawing them from a cupboard over the mantelpiece wall, which Harry had
never seen before.
Father Holt laughed, seeing the lad’s attention fixed at once on this
hole. “That is right, Harry,” he said; “faithful little famuli see all and
say nothing. You are faithful, I know.”
“I know I would go to the stake for you,” said Harry.
“I don’t want your head,” said the father, patting it kindly; “all you
have to do is to hold your tongue. Let us burn these papers, and say
nothing to anybody. Should you like to read them?”
Harry Esmond blushed, and held down his head; he _had_ looked as the fact
was, and without thinking, at the paper before him; and though he had seen
it, could not understand a word of it, the letters being quite clear
enough, but quite without meaning. They burned the papers, beating down
the ashes in a brazier, so that scarce any traces of them remained.
Harry had been accustomed to see Father Holt in more dresses than one; it
not being safe, or worth the danger, for Popish ecclesiastics to wear
their proper dress; and he was, in consequence, in no wise astonished that
the priest should now appear before him in a riding dress, with large buff
leather boots, and a feather to his hat, plain, but such as gentlemen
wore.
“You know the secret of the cupboard,” said he, laughing, “and must be
prepared for other mysteries;” and he opened—but not a secret cupboard
this time—only a wardrobe, which he usually kept locked, and from which he
now took out two or three dresses and perukes of different colours, and a
couple of swords of a pretty make (Father Holt was an expert practitioner
with the small sword, and every day, whilst he was at home, he and his
pupil practised this exercise, in which the lad became a very great
proficient), a military coat and cloak, and a farmer’s smock, and placed
them in the large hole over the mantelpiece from which the papers had been
taken.
“If they miss the cupboard,” he said, “they will not find these; if they
find them, they’ll tell no tales, except that Father Holt wore more suits
of clothes than one. All Jesuits do. You know what deceivers we are,
Harry.”
Harry was alarmed at the notion that his friend was about to leave him;
but “No”, the priest said; “I may very likely come back with my lord in a
few days. We are to be tolerated; we are not to be persecuted. But they
may take a fancy to pay a visit at Castlewood ere our return; and, as
gentlemen of my cloth are suspected, they might choose to examine my
papers, which concern nobody—at least, not them.” And to this day, whether
the papers in cipher related to politics, or to the affairs of that
mysterious society whereof Father Holt was a member, his pupil, Harry
Esmond, remains in entire ignorance.
The rest of his goods, his small wardrobe, &c., Holt left untouched on his
shelves and in his cupboard, taking down—with a laugh, however—and
flinging into the brazier, where he only half burned them, some
theological treatises which he had been writing against the English
divines. “And now,” said he, “Henry, my son, you may testify, with a safe
conscience, that you saw me burning Latin sermons the last time I was here
before I went away to London; and it will be daybreak directly, and I must
be away before Lockwood is stirring.”
“Will not Lockwood let you out, sir?” Esmond asked. Holt laughed; he was
never more gay or good-humoured than when in the midst of action or
danger.
“Lockwood knows nothing of my being here, mind you,” he said; “nor would
you, you little wretch, had you slept better. You must forget that I have
been here; and now farewell. Close the door, and go to your own room, and
don’t come out till—stay, why should you not know one secret more? I know
you will never betray me.”
In the chaplain’s room were two windows; the one looking into the court
facing westwards to the fountain; the other, a small casement strongly
barred, and looking on to the green in front of the Hall. This window was
too high to reach from the ground; but, mounting on a buffet which stood
beneath it, Father Holt showed me how, by pressing on the base of the
window, the whole framework of lead, glass, and iron stanchions, descended
into a cavity worked below, from which it could be drawn and restored to
its usual place from without; a broken pane being purposely open to admit
the hand which was to work upon the spring of the machine.
“When I am gone,” Father Holt said, “you may push away the buffet, so that
no one may fancy that an exit has been made that way; lock the door; place
the key—where shall we put the key?—under _Chrysostom_ on the book-shelf;
and if any ask for it, say I keep it there, and told you where to find it,
if you had need to go to my room. The descent is easy down the wall into
the ditch; and so, once more farewell, until I see thee again, my dear
son.” And with this the intrepid father mounted the buffet with great
agility and briskness, stepped across the window, lifting up the bars and
framework again from the other side, and only leaving room for Harry
Esmond to stand on tiptoe and kiss his hand before the casement closed,
the bars fixing as firm as ever seemingly in the stone arch overhead. When
Father Holt next arrived at Castlewood, it was by the public gate on
horseback; and he never so much as alluded to the existence of the private
issue to Harry, except when he had need of a private messenger from
within, for which end, no doubt, he had instructed his young pupil in the
means of quitting the Hall.
Esmond, young as he was, would have died sooner than betray his friend and
master, as Mr. Holt well knew; for he had tried the boy more than once,
putting temptations in his way, to see whether he would yield to them and
confess afterwards, or whether he would resist them, as he did sometimes,
or whether he would lie, which he never did. Holt instructing the boy on
this point, however, that if to keep silence is not to lie, as it
certainly is not, yet silence is, after all, equivalent to a negation—and
therefore a downright No, in the interest of justice or your friend, and
in reply to a question that may be prejudicial to either, is not criminal,
but, on the contrary, praiseworthy; and as lawful a way as the other of
eluding a wrongful demand. For instance (says he), suppose a good citizen,
who had seen his Majesty take refuge there, had been asked, “Is King
Charles up that oak-tree?” His duty would have been not to say, Yes—so
that the Cromwellians should seize the king and murder him like his
father—but No; his Majesty being private in the tree, and therefore not to
be seen there by loyal eyes: all which instruction, in religion and
morals, as well as in the rudiments of the tongues and sciences, the boy
took eagerly and with gratitude from his tutor. When, then, Holt was gone,
and told Harry not to see him, it was as if he had never been. And he had
this answer pat when he came to be questioned a few days after.
The Prince of Orange was then at Salisbury, as young Esmond learned from
seeing Doctor Tusher in his best cassock (though the roads were muddy, and
he never was known to wear his silk, only his stuff one, a-horseback),
with a great orange cockade in his broad-leafed hat, and Nahum, his clerk,
ornamented with a like decoration. The doctor was walking up and down, in
front of his parsonage, when little Esmond saw him, and heard him say he
was going to pay his duty to his highness the prince, as he mounted his
pad and rode away with Nahum behind. The village people had orange
cockades too, and his friend the blacksmith’s laughing daughter pinned one
into Harry’s old hat, which he tore out indignantly when they bid him to
cry, “God save the Prince of Orange and the Protestant religion!” but the
people only laughed, for they liked the boy in the village, where his
solitary condition moved the general pity, and where he found friendly
welcomes and faces in many houses. Father Holt had many friends there too,
for he not only would fight the blacksmith at theology, never losing his
temper, but laughing the whole time in his pleasant way, but he cured him
of an ague with quinquina, and was always ready with a kind word for any
man that asked it, so that they said in the village ’twas a pity the two
were Papists.
The director and the Vicar of Castlewood agreed very well; indeed, the
former was a perfectly bred gentleman, and it was the latter’s business to
agree with everybody. Doctor Tusher and the lady’s maid, his spouse, had a
boy who was about the age of little Esmond; and there was such a
friendship between the lads, as propinquity and tolerable kindness and
good humour on either side would be pretty sure to occasion. Tom Tusher
was sent off early however to a school in London, whither his father took
him and a volume of sermons in the first year of the reign of King James;
and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years
of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom
of a perversion of his faith by the director, who scarce ever saw him,
than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the vicar’s company; but as
long as Harry’s religion was his Majesty’s, and my lord’s, and my lady’s,
the doctor said gravely, it should not be for him to disturb or disquiet
him: it was far from him to say that his Majesty’s Church was not a branch
of the Catholic Church; upon which Father Holt used, according to his
custom, to laugh and say, that the Holy Church throughout all the world,
and the noble army of martyrs, were very much obliged to the doctor.
It was while Dr. Tusher was away at Salisbury that there came a troop of
dragoons with orange scarfs, and quartered in Castlewood, and some of them
came up to the Hall, where they took possession, robbing nothing however
beyond the hen-house and the beer-cellar; and only insisting upon going
through the house and looking for papers. The first room they asked to
look at was Father Holt’s room, of which Harry Esmond brought the key, and
they opened the drawers and the cupboards, and tossed over the papers and
clothes—but found nothing except his books and clothes, and the vestments
in a box by themselves, with which the dragoons made merry, to Harry
Esmond’s horror. And to the questions which the gentleman put to Harry, he
replied, that Father Holt was a very kind man to him, and a very learned
man, and Harry supposed would tell him none of his secrets if he had any.
He was about eleven years old at this time, and looked as innocent as boys
of his age.
The family were away more than six months, and when they returned they
were in the deepest state of dejection, for King James had been banished,
the Prince of Orange was on the throne, and the direst persecutions of
those of the Catholic faith were apprehended by my lady, who said she did
not believe that there was a word of truth in the promises of toleration
that Dutch monster made, or in a single word the perjured wretch said. My
lord and lady were in a manner prisoners in their own house; so her
ladyship gave the little page to know, who was by this time growing of an
age to understand what was passing about him, and something of the
characters of the people he lived with.
“We are prisoners,” says she; “in everything but chains, we are prisoners.
Let them come, let them consign me to dungeons, or strike off my head from
this poor little throat” (and she clasped it in her long fingers). “The
blood of the Esmonds will always flow freely for their kings. We are not
like the Churchills—the Judases, who kiss their master and betray him. We
know how to suffer, how even to forgive in the royal cause” (no doubt it
was to that fatal business of losing the place of Groom of the Posset to
which her ladyship alluded, as she did half a dozen times in the day).
“Let the tyrant of Orange bring his rack and his odious Dutch tortures—the
beast! the wretch! I spit upon him and defy him. Cheerfully will I lay
this head upon the block; cheerfully will I accompany my lord to the
scaffold: we will cry, ‘God save King James!’ with our dying breath, and
smile in the face of the executioner.” And she told her page a hundred
times at least of the particulars of the last interview which she had with
his Majesty.
“I flung myself before my liege’s feet,” she said, “at Salisbury. I
devoted myself—my husband—my house, to his cause. Perhaps he remembered
old times, when Isabella Esmond was young and fair; perhaps he recalled
the day when ’twas not _I_ that knelt—at least he spoke to me with a voice
that reminded _me_ of days gone by. ‘Egad!’ said his Majesty, ‘you should
go to the Prince of Orange, if you want anything.’ ‘No, sire,’ I replied,
‘I would not kneel to a usurper; the Esmond that would have served your
Majesty will never be groom to a traitor’s posset.’ The royal exile
smiled, even in the midst of his misfortune; he deigned to raise me with
words of consolation. The viscount, my husband, himself, could not be
angry at the august salute with which he honoured me!”
The public misfortune had the effect of making my lord and his lady better
friends than they ever had been since their courtship. My lord viscount
had shown both loyalty and spirit, when these were rare qualities in the
dispirited party about the king; and the praise he got elevated him not a
little in his wife’s good opinion, and perhaps in his own. He wakened up
from the listless and supine life which he had been leading; was always
riding to and fro in consultation with this friend or that of the king’s;
the page of course knowing little of his doings, but remarking only his
greater cheerfulness and altered demeanour.
Father Holt came to the Hall constantly, but officiated no longer openly
as chaplain; he was always fetching and carrying: strangers, military and
ecclesiastic (Harry knew the latter though they came in all sorts of
disguises), were continually arriving and departing. My lord made long
absences and sudden reappearances, using sometimes the means of exit which
Father Holt had employed, though how often the little window in the
chaplain’s room let in or let out my lord and his friends, Harry could not
tell. He stoutly kept his promise to the father of not prying, and if at
midnight from his little room he heard noises of persons stirring in the
next chamber, he turned round to the wall and hid his curiosity under his
pillow until it fell asleep. Of course he could not help remarking that
the priest’s journeys were constant, and understanding by a hundred signs
that some active though secret business employed him: what this was may
pretty well be guessed by what soon happened to my lord.
No garrison or watch was put into Castlewood when my lord came back, but a
guard was in the village; and one or other of them was always on the Green
keeping a look-out on our great gate, and those who went out and in.
Lockwood said that at night especially every person who came in or went
out was watched by the outlying sentries. ’Twas lucky that we had a gate
which their worships knew nothing about. My lord and Father Holt must have
made constant journeys at night: once or twice little Harry acted as their
messenger and discreet little aide de camp. He remembers he was bidden to
go into the village with his fishing-rod, enter certain houses, ask for a
drink of water, and tell the good man, “There would be a horse-market at
Newbury next Thursday,” and so carry the same message on to the next house
on his list.
He did not know what the message meant at the time, nor what was
happening: which may as well, however, for clearness’ sake, be explained
here. The Prince of Orange being gone to Ireland, where the king was ready
to meet him with a great army, it was determined that a great rising of
his Majesty’s party should take place in this country: and my lord was to
head the force in our county. Of late he had taken a greater lead in
affairs than before, having the indefatigable Mr. Holt at his elbow, and
my lady viscountess strongly urging him on; and my Lord Sark being in the
Tower a prisoner, and Sir Wilmot Crawley, of Queen’s Crawley, having gone
over to the Prince of Orange’s side—my lord became the most considerable
person in our part of the county for the affairs of the king.
It was arranged that the regiment of Scots Greys and Dragoons, then
quartered at Newbury, should declare for the king on a certain day, when
likewise the gentry affected to his Majesty’s cause were to come in with
their tenants and adherents to Newbury, march upon the Dutch troops at
Reading under Ginckel; and, these overthrown, and their indomitable little
master away in Ireland, ’twas thought that our side might move on London
itself, and a confident victory was predicted for the king.
As these great matters were in agitation, my lord lost his listless manner
and seemed to gain health; my lady did not scold him, Mr. Holt came to and
fro, busy always; and little Harry longed to have been a few inches
taller, that he might draw a sword in this good cause.
One day, it must have been about the month of July, 1690, my lord, in a
great horseman’s coat, under which Harry could see the shining of a steel
breastplate he had on, called little Harry to him, put the hair off the
child’s forehead, and kissed him, and bade God bless him in such an
affectionate way as he never had used before. Father Holt blessed him too,
and then they took leave of my lady viscountess, who came from her
apartment with a pocket-handkerchief to her eyes, and her gentlewoman and
Mrs. Tusher supporting her.
“You are going to—to ride,” says she. “Oh, that I might come too!—but in
my situation I am forbidden horse exercise.”
“We kiss my lady marchioness’s hand,” says Mr. Holt.
“My lord, God speed you!” she said, stepping up and embracing my lord in a
grand manner. “Mr. Holt, I ask your blessing:” and she knelt down for
that, whilst Mrs. Tusher tossed her head up.
Mr. Holt gave the same benediction to the little page, who went down and
held my lord’s stirrups for him to mount; there were two servants waiting
there too—and they rode out of Castlewood gate.
As they crossed the bridge Harry could see an officer in scarlet ride up
touching his hat, and address my lord.
The party stopped, and came to some parley or discussion, which presently
ended, my lord putting his horse into a canter after taking off his hat
and making a bow to the officer who rode alongside him step for step: the
trooper accompanying him, falling back, and riding with my lord’s two men.
They cantered over the Green, and behind the elms (my lord waving his
hand, Harry thought), and so they disappeared.
That evening we had a great panic, the cow-boy coming at milking-time
riding one of our horses, which he had found grazing at the outer park
wall.
All night my lady viscountess was in a very quiet and subdued mood. She
scarce found fault with anybody; she played at cards for six hours; little
page Esmond went to sleep. He prayed for my lord and the good cause before
closing his eyes.
It was quite in the grey of the morning when the porter’s bell rang, and
old Lockwood waking up, let in one of my lord’s servants, who had gone
with him in the morning, and who returned with a melancholy story.
The officer who rode up to my lord had, it appeared, said to him, that it
was his duty to inform his lordship that he was not under arrest, but
under surveillance, and to request him not to ride abroad that day.
My lord replied that riding was good for his health, that if the captain
chose to accompany him he was welcome, and it was then that he made a bow,
and they cantered away together.
When he came on to Wansey Down, my lord all of a sudden pulled up, and the
party came to a halt at the crossway.
“Sir” says he to the officer, “we are four to two; will you be so kind as
to take that road, and leave me to go mine?”
“Your road is mine, my lord,” says the officer.
“Then,” says my lord, but he had no time to say more, for the officer,
drawing a pistol, snapped it at his lordship; as at the same moment Father
Holt, drawing a pistol, shot the officer through the head.
It was done, and the man dead in an instant of time. The orderly, gazing
at the officer, looked scared for a moment, and galloped away for his
life.
“Fire! fire!” cries out Father Holt, sending another shot after the
trooper, but the two servants were too much surprised to use their pieces,
and my lord calling to them to hold their hands, the fellow got away.
“Mr. Holt, _qui pensoit à tout_,” says Blaise, “gets off his horse,
examines the pockets of the dead officer for papers, gives his money to us
two, and says, ‘The wine is drawn, monsieur le marquis,’—why did he say
marquis to monsieur le vicomte?—‘we must drink it.’
“The poor gentleman’s horse was a better one than that I rode,” Blaise
continues; “Mr. Holt bids me get on him, and so I gave a cut to Whitefoot,
and she trotted home. We rode on towards Newbury; we heard firing towards
midday: at two o’clock a horseman comes up to us as we were giving our
cattle water at an inn—and says, All is done. The Ecossois declared an
hour too soon—General Ginckel was down upon them. The whole thing was at
an end.
“ ‘And we’ve shot an officer on duty, and let his orderly escape,’ says my
lord.
“ ‘Blaise,’ says Mr. Holt, writing two lines on his table-book, one for my
lady, and one for you, Master Harry; ‘you must go back to Castlewood, and
deliver these,’ and behold me.”
And he gave Harry the two papers. He read that to himself, which only
said, “Burn the papers in the cupboard, burn this. You know nothing about
anything.” Harry read this, ran upstairs to his mistress’s apartment,
where her gentlewoman slept near to the door, made her bring a light and
wake my lady, into whose hands he gave the paper. She was a wonderful
object to look at in her night attire, nor had Harry ever seen the like.
As soon as she had the paper in her hand, Harry stepped back to the
chaplain’s room, opened the secret cupboard over the fireplace, burned all
the papers in it, and, as he had seen the priest do before, took down one
of his reverence’s manuscript sermons, and half burnt that in the brazier.
By the time the papers were quite destroyed it was daylight. Harry ran
back to his mistress again. Her gentlewoman ushered him again into her
ladyship’s chamber; she told him (from behind her nuptial curtains) to bid
the coach be got ready, and that she would ride away anon.
But the mysteries of her ladyship’s toilet were as awfully long on this
day as on any other, and, long after the coach was ready, my lady was
still attiring herself. And just as the viscountess stepped forth from her
room, ready for departure, young Job Lockwood comes running up from the
village with news that a lawyer, three officers, and twenty or
four-and-twenty soldiers, were marching thence upon the house. Job had but
two minutes the start of them, and, ere he had well told his story, the
troop rode into our courtyard.
Chapter VI. The Issue Of The Plots.—The Death Of Thomas, Third Viscount Of
Castlewood; And The Imprisonment Of His Viscountess
At first my lady was for dying like Mary, Queen of Scots (to whom she
fancied she bore a resemblance in beauty), and, stroking her scraggy neck,
said, “They will find Isabel of Castlewood is equal to her fate.” Her
gentlewoman, Victoire, persuaded her that her prudent course was, as she
could not fly, to receive the troops as though she suspected nothing, and
that her chamber was the best place wherein to await them. So her black
japan casket which Harry was to carry to the coach was taken back to her
ladyship’s chamber, whither the maid and mistress retired. Victoire came
out presently, bidding the page to say her ladyship was ill, confined to
her bed with the rheumatism.
By this time the soldiers had reached Castlewood. Harry Esmond saw them
from the window of the tapestry parlour; a couple of sentinels were posted
at the gate—a half-dozen more walked towards the stable; and some others,
preceded by their commander, and a man in black, a lawyer probably, were
conducted by one of the servants to the stair leading up to the part of
the house which my lord and lady inhabited.
So the captain, a handsome kind man, and the lawyer, came through the
ante-room to the tapestry parlour, and where now was nobody but young
Harry Esmond, the page.
“Tell your mistress, little man,” says the captain kindly, “that we must
speak to her.”
“My mistress is ill abed,” said the page.
“What complaint has she?” asked the captain.
The boy said, “the rheumatism!”
“Rheumatism! that’s a sad complaint,” continues the good-natured captain;
“and the coach is in the yard to fetch the doctor, I suppose?”
“I don’t know,” says the boy.
“And how long has her ladyship been ill?”
“I don’t know,” says the boy.
“When did my lord go away?”
“Yesterday night.”
“With Father Holt?”
“With Mr. Holt.”
“And which way did they travel?” asks the lawyer.
“They travelled without me,” says the page.
“We must see Lady Castlewood.”
“I have orders that nobody goes in to her ladyship—she is sick,” says the
page; but at this moment Victoire came out. “Hush!” says she; and, as if
not knowing that any one was near, “What’s this noise?” says she. “Is this
gentleman the doctor?”
“Stuff! we must see Lady Castlewood,” says the lawyer, pushing by.
The curtains of her ladyship’s room were down, and the chamber dark, and
she was in bed with a nightcap on her head, and propped up by her pillows,
looking none the less ghastly because of the red which was still on her
cheeks, and which she could not afford to forgo.
“Is that the doctor?” she said.
“There is no use with this deception, madam,” Captain Westbury said (for
so he was named). “My duty is to arrest the person of Thomas, Viscount
Castlewood, a nonjuring peer—of Robert Tusher, Vicar of Castlewood—and
Henry Holt, known under various other names and designations, a Jesuit
priest, who officiated as chaplain here in the late king’s time, and is
now at the head of the conspiracy which was about to break out in this
country against the authority of their Majesties King William and Queen
Mary—and my orders are to search the house for such papers or traces of
the conspiracy as may be found here. Your ladyship will please to give me
your keys, and it will be as well for yourself that you should help us, in
every way, in our search.”
“You see, sir, that I have the rheumatism, and cannot move,” said the
lady, looking uncommonly ghastly as she sat up in her bed, where however
she had had her cheeks painted, and a new cap put on, so that she might at
least look her best when the officers came.
“I shall take leave to place a sentinel in the chamber, so that your
ladyship, in case you should wish to rise, may have an arm to lean on,”
Captain Westbury said. “Your woman will show me where I am to look;” and
Madame Victoire, chattering in her half-French and half-English jargon,
opened while the captain examined one drawer after another; but, as Harry
Esmond thought, rather carelessly, with a smile on his face, as if he was
only conducting the examination for form’s sake.
Before one of the cupboards Victoire flung herself down, stretching out
her arms, and, with a piercing shriek, cried, “_Non, jamais, monsieur
l’officier! Jamais!_ I will rather die than let you see this wardrobe.”
But Captain Westbury would open it, still with a smile on his face, which,
when the box was opened, turned into a fair burst of laughter. It
contained—not papers regarding the conspiracy—but my lady’s wigs, washes,
and rouge-pots, and Victoire said men were monsters, as the captain went
on with his perquisition. He tapped the back to see whether or no it was
hollow, and as he thrust his hands into the cupboard, my lady from her bed
called out with a voice that did not sound like that of a very sick woman,
“Is it your commission to insult ladies as well as to arrest gentlemen,
captain?”
“These articles are only dangerous when worn by your ladyship,” the
captain said with a low bow, and a mock grin of politeness. “I have found
nothing which concerns the Government as yet—only the weapons with which
beauty is authorized to kill,” says he, pointing to a wig with his
sword-tip. “We must now proceed to search the rest of the house.”
“You are not going to leave that wretch in the room with me,” cried my
lady, pointing to the soldier.
“What can I do, madam? Somebody you must have to smooth your pillow and
bring your medicine—permit me——”
“Sir!” screamed out my lady—
“Madam, if you are too ill to leave the bed,” the captain then said,
rather sternly, “I must have in four of my men to lift you off in the
sheet: I must examine this bed, in a word; papers may be hidden in a bed
as elsewhere; we know that very well and——”
Here it was her ladyship’s turn to shriek, for the captain, with his fist
shaking the pillows and bolsters, at last came to “burn”, as they say in
the play of forfeits, and wrenching away one of the pillows, said, “Look,
did not I tell you so? Here is a pillow stuffed with paper.”
“Some villain has betrayed us,” cried out my lady, sitting up in the bed,
showing herself full dressed under her night-rail.
“And now your ladyship can move, I am sure; permit me to give you my hand
to rise. You will have to travel for some distance, as far as Hexton
Castle to-night. Will you have your coach? Your woman shall attend you if
you like—and the japan-box?”
“Sir! you don’t strike a _man_ when he is down,” said my lady, with some
dignity: “can you not spare a woman?”
“Your ladyship must please to rise and let me search the bed,” said the
captain; “there is no more time to lose in bandying talk.”
And, without more ado, the gaunt old woman got up. Harry Esmond
recollected to the end of his life that figure, with the brocade dress and
the white night-rail, and the gold-clocked red stockings, and white
red-heeled shoes sitting up in the bed, and stepping down from it. The
trunks were ready packed for departure in her ante-room, and the horses
ready harnessed in the stable: about all which the captain seemed to know,
by information got from some quarter or other; and, whence, Esmond could
make a pretty shrewd guess in after-times, when Dr. Tusher complained that
King William’s Government had basely treated him for services done in that
cause.
And here he may relate, though he was then too young to know all that was
happening, what the papers contained, of which Captain Westbury had made a
seizure, and which papers had been transferred from the japan-box to the
bed when the officers arrived.
There was a list, of gentlemen of the county in Father Holt’s
handwriting—Mr. Freeman’s (King James’s) friends—a similar paper being
found among those of Sir John Fenwick and Mr. Coplestone, who suffered
death for this conspiracy.
There was a patent conferring the title of Marquis of Esmond on my Lord
Castlewood, and the heirs male of his body; his appointment as lord
lieutenant of the county, and major-general.(7)
There were various letters from the nobility and gentry, some ardent and
some doubtful, in the king’s service; and (very luckily for him) two
letters concerning Colonel Francis Esmond; one from Father Holt, which
said, “I have been to see this colonel at his house at Walcote near to
Wells, where he resides since the king’s departure, and pressed him very
eagerly in Mr. Freeman’s cause, showing him the great advantage he would
have by trading with that merchant, offering him large premiums there as
agreed between us. But he says no: he considers Mr. Freeman the head of
the firm, will never trade against him or embark with any other trading
company, but considers his duty was done when Mr. Freeman left England.
This colonel seems to care more for his wife and his beagles than for
affairs. He asked me much about young H. E., ‘that bastard,’ as he called
him: doubting my lord’s intentions respecting him. I reassured him on this
head, stating what I knew of the lad, and our intentions respecting him,
but with regard to Freeman he was inflexible.”
And another letter was from Colonel Esmond to his kinsman, to say that one
Captain Holton had been with him offering him large bribes to join, _you
know who_, and saying that the head of the house of Castlewood was deeply
engaged in that quarter. But for his part he had broke his sword when the
K. left the country, and would never again fight in that quarrel. The P.
of O. was a man, at least, of a noble courage, and his duty and, as he
thought, every Englishman’s, was to keep the country quiet, and the French
out of it: and, in fine, that he would have nothing to do with the scheme.
Of the existence of these two letters and the contents of the pillow,
Colonel Frank Esmond, who became Viscount Castlewood, told Henry Esmond
afterwards, when the letters were shown to his lordship, who congratulated
himself, as he had good reason, that he had not joined in the scheme which
proved so fatal to many concerned in it. But, naturally, the lad knew
little about these circumstances when they happened under his eyes: only
being aware that his patron and his mistress were in some trouble, which
had caused the flight of the one, and the apprehension of the other by the
officers of King William.
The seizure of the papers effected, the gentlemen did not pursue their
further search through Castlewood house very rigorously. They examined Mr.
Holt’s room, being led thither by his pupil, who showed, as the father had
bidden him, the place where the key of his chamber lay, opened the door
for the gentlemen, and conducted them into the room.
When the gentlemen came to the half-burned papers in the brazier, they
examined them eagerly enough, and their young guide was a little amused at
their perplexity.
“What are these?” says one.
“They’re written in a foreign language,” says the lawyer. “What are you
laughing at, little whelp?” adds he, turning round as he saw the boy
smile.
“Mr. Holt said they were sermons,” Harry said, “and bade me to burn them;”
which indeed was true of those papers.
“Sermons, indeed—it’s treason, I would lay a wager,” cries the lawyer.
“Egad! it’s Greek to me,” says Captain Westbury. “Can you read it, little
boy?”
“Yes, sir, a little,” Harry said.
“Then read, and read in English, sir, on your peril,” said the lawyer. And
Harry began to translate:—
“Hath not one of your own writers said, ‘The children of Adam are now
labouring as much as he himself ever did, about the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, shaking the boughs thereof, and seeking the fruit, being
for the most part unmindful of the tree of life.’ O blind generation! ’tis
this tree of knowledge to which the serpent has led you”—and here the boy
was obliged to stop, the rest of the page being charred by the fire: and
asked of the lawyer—“Shall I go on, sir?”
The lawyer said—“This boy is deeper than he seems: who knows that he is
not laughing at us?”
“Let’s have in Dick the Scholar,” cried Captain Westbury, laughing; and he
called to a trooper out of the window—“Ho, Dick, come in here and
construe.”
A thick-set soldier, with a square good-humoured face, came in at the
summons, saluting his officer.
“Tell us what is this, Dick,” says the lawyer.
“My name is Steele, sir,” says the soldier. “I may be Dick for my friends,
but I don’t name gentlemen of your cloth amongst them.”
“Well then, Steele.”
“Mr. Steele, sir, if you please. When you address a gentleman of his
Majesty’s Horse Guards, be pleased not to be so familiar.”
“I didn’t know, sir,” said the lawyer.
“How should you? I take it you are not accustomed to meet with gentlemen,”
says the trooper.
“Hold thy prate, and read that bit of paper,” says Westbury.
“’Tis Latin,” says Dick, glancing at it, and again saluting his officer,
“and from a sermon of Mr. Cudworth’s,” and he translated the words pretty
much as Henry Esmond had rendered them.
“What a young scholar you are,” says the captain to the boy.
“Depend on’t, he knows more than he tells,” says the lawyer. “I think we
will pack him off in the coach with old Jezebel.”
“For construing a bit of Latin?” said the captain very good-naturedly.
“I would as lief go there as anywhere,” Harry Esmond said, simply, “for
there is nobody to care for me.”
There must have been something touching in the child’s voice, or in this
description of his solitude—for the captain looked at him very
good-naturedly, and the trooper, called Steele, put his hand kindly on the
lad’s head, and said some words in the Latin tongue.
“What does he say?” says the lawyer.
“Faith, ask Dick himself,” cried Captain Westbury.
“I said I was not ignorant of misfortune myself, and had learned to
succour the miserable, and that’s not _your_ trade, Mr. Sheepskin,” said
the trooper.
“You had better leave Dick the Scholar alone, Mr. Corbet,” the captain
said. And Harry Esmond, always touched by a kind face and kind word, felt
very grateful to this good-natured champion.
The horses were by this time harnessed to the coach; and the countess and
Victoire came down and were put into the vehicle. This woman, who
quarrelled with Harry Esmond all day, was melted at parting with him, and
called him “dear angel”, and “poor infant”, and a hundred other names.
The viscountess, giving him her lean hand to kiss, bade him always be
faithful to the house of Esmond. “If evil should happen to my lord,” says
she, “his _successor_ I trust will be found, and give you protection.
Situated as I am, they will not dare wreak their vengeance on me _now_.”
And she kissed a medal she wore with great fervour, and Henry Esmond knew
not in the least what her meaning was; but hath since learned that, old as
she was, she was for ever expecting, by the good offices of saints and
relics, to have an heir to the title of Esmond.
Harry Esmond was too young to have been introduced into the secrets of
politics in which his patrons were implicated; for they put but few
questions to the boy (who was little of stature, and looked much younger
than his age), and such questions as they put he answered cautiously
enough, and professing even more ignorance than he had, for which his
examiners willingly enough gave him credit. He did not say a word about
the window or the cupboard over the fireplace; and these secrets quite
escaped the eyes of the searchers.
So then my lady was consigned to her coach, and sent off to Hexton, with
her woman and the man of law to bear her company, a couple of troopers
riding on either side of the coach. And Harry was left behind at the Hall,
belonging as it were to nobody, and quite alone in the world. The captain
and a guard of men remained in possession there; and the soldiers, who
were very good-natured and kind, ate my lord’s mutton and drank his wine,
and made themselves comfortable, as they well might do, in such pleasant
quarters.
The captains had their dinner served in my lord’s tapestry parlour, and
poor little Harry thought his duty was to wait upon Captain Westbury’s
chair, as his custom had been to serve his lord when he sat there.
After the departure of the countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond
under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities, and
talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and
his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more
proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them from a
Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never tired of
speaking, Dick, rather to the boy’s surprise, who began to have an early
shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great deal of
theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue between the two
Churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of controversy together,
in which the boy was certainly worsted by the arguments of this singular
trooper. “I am no common soldier,” Dick would say, and indeed it was easy
to see by his learning, breeding, and many accomplishments, that he was
not. “I am of one of the most ancient families in the Empire; I have had
my education at a famous school, and a famous university; I learned my
first rudiments of Latin near to Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs
were roasted.”
“You hanged as many of ours,” interposed Harry; “and, for the matter of
persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh,
eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for heresy
only last year, though he recanted, and solemnly asked pardon for his
errors.”
“Faith! there has been too much persecution on both sides: but ’twas you
taught us.”
“Nay, ’twas the pagans began it,” cried the lad, and began to instance a
number of saints of the Church, from the Protomartyr downwards—“this one’s
fire went out under him: that one’s oil cooled in the cauldron: at a third
holy head the executioner chopped three times and it would not come off.
Show us martyrs in _your_ Church for whom such miracles have been done.”
“Nay,” says the trooper gravely, “the miracles of the first three
centuries belong to my Church as well as yours, Master Papist,” and then
added, with something of a smile upon his countenance, and a queer look at
Harry—“And yet, my little catechizer, I have sometimes thought about those
miracles, that there was not much good in them, since the victim’s head
always finished by coming off at the third or fourth chop, and the
cauldron, if it did not boil one day, boiled the next. Howbeit, in our
times, the Church has lost that questionable advantage of respites. There
never was a shower to put out Ridley’s fire, nor an angel to turn the edge
of Campion’s axe. The rack tore the limbs of Southwell the Jesuit and
Sympson the Protestant alike. For faith, everywhere multitudes die
willingly enough. I have read in Monsieur Rycaut’s _History of the Turks_,
of thousands of Mahomet’s followers rushing upon death in battle as upon
certain Paradise; and in the Great Mogul’s dominions people fling
themselves by hundreds under the cars of the idols annually, and the
widows burn themselves on their husbands’ bodies, as ’tis well known. ’Tis
not the dying for a faith that’s so hard, Master Harry—every man of every
nation has done that—’tis the living up to it that is difficult, as I know
to my cost,” he added, with a sigh. “And ah!” he added, “my poor lad, I am
not strong enough to convince thee by my life—though to die for my
religion would give me the greatest of joys—but I had a dear friend in
Magdalen College in Oxford; I wish Joe Addison were here to convince thee,
as he quickly could—for I think he’s a match for the whole College of
Jesuits; and what’s more, in his life too. In that very sermon of Dr.
Cudworth’s which your priest was quoting from, and which suffered
martyrdom in the brazier,” Dick added, with a smile, “I had a thought of
wearing the black coat (but was ashamed of my life you see, and took to
this sorry red one)—I have often thought of Joe Addison—Doctor Cudworth
says, ‘A good conscience is the best looking-glass of Heaven’—and there’s
a serenity in my friend’s face which always reflects it—I wish you could
see him, Harry.”
“Did he do you a great deal of good?” asked the lad, simply.
“He might have done,” said the other—“at least he taught me to see and
approve better things. ’Tis my own fault, _deteriora sequi_.”
“You seem very good,” the boy said.
“I’m not what I seem, alas!” answered the trooper—and indeed, as it turned
out, poor Dick told the truth—for that very night, at supper in the hall,
where the gentlemen of the troop took their repasts, and passed most part
of their days dicing and smoking of tobacco, and singing and cursing, over
the Castlewood ale—Harry Esmond found Dick the Scholar in a woful state of
drunkenness. He hiccuped out a sermon; and his laughing companions bade
him sing a hymn, on which Dick, swearing he would run the scoundrel
through the body who insulted his religion, made for his sword, which was
hanging on the wall, and fell down flat on the floor under it, saying to
Harry, who ran forward to help him, “Ah, little Papist, I wish Joseph
Addison was here!”
Though the troopers of the king’s Life Guards were all gentlemen, yet the
rest of the gentlemen seemed ignorant and vulgar boors to Harry Esmond,
with the exception of this good-natured Corporal Steele the Scholar, and
Captain Westbury and Lieutenant Trant, who were always kind to the lad.
They remained for some weeks or months encamped in Castlewood, and Harry
learned from them, from time to time, how the lady at Hexton Castle was
treated, and the particulars of her confinement there. ’Tis known that
King William was disposed to deal very leniently with the gentry who
remained faithful to the old king’s cause; and no prince usurping a crown,
as his enemies said he did (righteously taking it as I think now), ever
caused less blood to be shed. As for women-conspirators, he kept spies on
the least dangerous, and locked up the others. Lady Castlewood had the
best rooms in Hexton Castle, and the gaoler’s garden to walk in; and
though she repeatedly desired to be led out to execution, like Mary Queen
of Scots, there never was any thought of taking her painted old head off,
or any desire to do aught but keep her person in security.
And it appeared she found that some were friends in her misfortune, whom
she had, in her prosperity, considered as her worst enemies. Colonel
Francis Esmond, my lord’s cousin and her ladyship’s, who had married the
Dean of Winchester’s daughter, and, since King James’s departure out of
England, had lived not very far away from Hexton town, hearing of his
kinswoman’s strait, and being friends with Colonel Brice, commanding for
King William in Hexton, and with the Church dignitaries there, came to
visit her ladyship in prison, offering to his uncle’s daughter any
friendly services which lay in his power. And he brought his lady and
little daughter to see the prisoner, to the latter of whom, a child of
great beauty, and many winning ways, the old viscountess took not a little
liking, although between her ladyship and the child’s mother there was
little more love than formerly. There are some injuries which women never
forgive one another; and Madam Francis Esmond, in marrying her cousin, had
done one of those irretrievable wrongs to Lady Castlewood. But as she was
now humiliated, and in misfortune, Madam Francis could allow a truce to
her enmity, and could be kind for a while, at least, to her husband’s
discarded mistress. So the little Beatrix, her daughter, was permitted
often to go and visit the imprisoned viscountess, who, in so far as the
child and its father were concerned, got to abate in her anger towards
that branch of the Castlewood family. And the letters of Colonel Esmond
coming to light, as has been said, and his conduct being known to the
king’s council, the colonel was put in a better position with the existing
Government than he had ever before been; any suspicions regarding his
loyalty were entirely done away; and so he was enabled to be of more
service to his kinswoman than he could otherwise have been.
And now there befell an event by which this lady recovered her liberty,
and the house of Castlewood got a new owner, and fatherless little Harry
Esmond a new and most kind protector and friend. Whatever that secret was
which Harry was to hear from my lord, the boy never heard it; for that
night when Father Holt arrived, and carried my lord away with him, was the
last on which Harry ever saw his patron. What happened to my lord may be
briefly told here. Having found the horses at the place where they were
lying, my lord and Father Holt rode together to Chatteris, where they had
temporary refuge with one of the father’s penitents in that city; but the
pursuit being hot for them, and the reward for the apprehension of one or
the other considerable, it was deemed advisable that they should separate;
and the priest betook himself to other places of retreat known to him,
whilst my lord passed over from Bristol into Ireland, in which kingdom
King James had a Court and an army. My lord was but a small addition to
this; bringing, indeed, only his sword and the few pieces in his pocket;
but the king received him with some kindness and distinction in spite of
his poor plight, confirmed him in his new title of marquis, gave him a
regiment, and promised him further promotion. But titles or promotion were
not to benefit him now. My lord was wounded at the fatal battle of the
Boyne, flying from which field (long after his master had set him an
example), he lay for a while concealed in the marshy country near to the
town of Trim, and more from catarrh and fever caught in the bogs than from
the steel of the enemy in the battle, sank and died. May the earth lie
light upon Thomas of Castlewood! He who writes this must speak in charity,
though this lord did him and his two grievous wrongs: for one of these he
would have made amends, perhaps, had life been spared him; but the other
lay beyond his power to repair, though ’tis to be hoped that a greater
Power than a priest has absolved him of it. He got the comfort of this
absolution, too, such as it was: a priest of Trim writing a letter to my
lady to inform her of this calamity.
But in those days letters were slow of travelling, and our priest’s took
two months or more on its journey from Ireland to England: where, when it
did arrive, it did not find my lady at her own house; she was at the
king’s house of Hexton Castle when the letter came to Castlewood, but it
was opened for all that by the officer in command there.
Harry Esmond well remembered the receipt of this letter, which Lockwood
brought in as Captain Westbury and Lieutenant Trant were on the green
playing at bowls, young Esmond looking on at the sport, or reading his
book in the arbour.
“Here’s news for Frank Esmond,” says Captain Westbury; “Harry, did you
ever see Colonel Esmond?” And Captain Westbury looked very hard at the boy
as he spoke.
Harry said he had seen him but once when he was at Hexton, at the ball
there.
“And did he say anything?”
“He said what I don’t care to repeat,” Harry answered. For he was now
twelve years of age: he knew what his birth was and the disgrace of it;
and he felt no love towards the man who had most likely stained his
mother’s honour and his own.
“Did you love my Lord Castlewood?”
“I wait until I know my mother, sir, to say,” the boy answered, his eyes
filling with tears.
“Something has happened to Lord Castlewood,” Captain Westbury said, in a
vary grave tone—“something which must happen to us all. He is dead of a
wound received at the Boyne, fighting for King James.”
“I am glad my lord fought for the right cause,” the boy said.
“It was better to meet death on the field like a man, than face it on
Tower Hill, as some of them may,” continued Mr. Westbury. “I hope he has
made some testament, or provided for thee somehow. This letter says, he
recommends _unicum filium suum dilectissimum_ to his lady. I hope he has
left you more than that.”
Harry did not know, he said. He was in the hands of Heaven and Fate; but
more lonely now, as it seemed to him, than he had been all the rest of his
life; and that night, as he lay in his little room which he still
occupied, the boy thought with many a pang of shame and grief of his
strange and solitary condition:—how he had a father and no father; a
nameless mother that had been brought to ruin, perhaps, by that very
father whom Harry could only acknowledge in secret and with a blush, and
whom he could neither love nor revere. And he sickened to think how Father
Holt, a stranger, and two or three soldiers, his acquaintances of the last
six weeks, were the only friends he had in the great wide world, where he
was now quite alone. The soul of the boy was full of love, and he longed
as he lay in the darkness there for some one upon whom he could bestow it.
He remembers, and must to his dying day, the thoughts and tears of that
long night, the hours tolling through it. Who was he and what? Why here
rather than elsewhere? I have a mind, he thought, to go to that priest at
Trim, and find out what my father said to him on his death-bed confession.
Is there any child in the whole world so unprotected as I am? Shall I get
up and quit this place, and run to Ireland? With these thoughts and tears
the lad passed that night away until he wept himself to sleep.
The next day, the gentlemen of the guard who had heard what had befallen
him were more than usually kind to the child, especially his friend
Scholar Dick, who told him about his own father’s death, which had
happened when Dick was a child at Dublin, not quite five years of age.
“That was the first sensation of grief,” Dick said, “I ever knew. I
remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat
weeping beside it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the
coffin, and calling papa; on which my mother caught me in her arms, and
told me in a flood of tears papa could not hear me, and would play with me
no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could
never come to us again. And this,” said Dick kindly, “has made me pity all
children ever since; and caused me to love thee, my poor fatherless,
motherless lad. And if ever thou wantest a friend, thou shalt have one in
Richard Steele.”
Harry Esmond thanked him, and was grateful. But what could Corporal Steele
do for him? take him to ride a spare horse, and be servant to the troop?
Though there might be a bar in Harry Esmond’s shield, it was a noble one.
The counsel of the two friends was, that little Harry should stay where he
was, and abide his fortune: so Esmond stayed on at Castlewood, awaiting
with no small anxiety the fate, whatever it was, which was over him.
Chapter VII. I Am Left At Castlewood An Orphan, And Find Most Kind
Protectors There
During the stay of the soldiers in Castlewood, honest Dick the Scholar was
the constant companion of the lonely little orphan lad Harry Esmond: and
they read together, and they played bowls together, and when the other
troopers or their officers, who were free-spoken over their cups (as was
the way of that day, when neither men nor women were over-nice), talked
unbecomingly of their amours and gallantries before the child, Dick, who
very likely was setting the whole company laughing, would stop their jokes
with a _maxima debetur pueris reverentia_, and once offered to lug out
against another trooper called Hulking Tom, who wanted to ask Harry Esmond
a ribald question.
Also, Dick seeing that the child had, as he said, a sensibility above his
years, and a great and praiseworthy discretion, confided to Harry his love
for a vintner’s daughter, near to the Tollyard, Westminster, whom Dick
addressed as Saccharissa in many verses of his composition, and without
whom he said it would be impossible that he could continue to live. He
vowed this a thousand times in a day, though Harry smiled to see the
lovelorn swain had his health and appetite as well as the most heart-whole
trooper in the regiment: and he swore Harry to secrecy too, which vow the
lad religiously kept, until he found that officers and privates were all
taken into Dick’s confidence, and had the benefit of his verses. And it
must be owned likewise that, while Dick was sighing after Saccharissa in
London, he had consolations in the country; for there came a wench out of
Castlewood village who had washed his linen, and who cried sadly when she
heard he was gone: and without paying her bill too, which Harry Esmond
took upon himself to discharge by giving the girl a silver pocket-piece,
which Scholar Dick had presented to him, when, with many embraces and
prayers for his prosperity, Dick parted from him, the garrison of
Castlewood being ordered away. Dick the Scholar said he would never forget
his young friend, nor indeed did he: and Harry was sorry when the kind
soldiers vacated Castlewood, looking forward with no small anxiety (for
care and solitude had made him thoughtful beyond his years) to his fate
when the new lord and lady of the house came to live there. He had lived
to be past twelve years old now; and had never had a friend, save this
wild trooper perhaps, and Father Holt; and had a fond and affectionate
heart, tender to weakness, that would fain attach itself to somebody, and
did not seem at rest until it had found a friend who would take charge of
it.
The instinct which led Henry Esmond to admire and love the gracious
person, the fair apparition of whose beauty and kindness had so moved him
when he first beheld her, became soon a devoted affection and passion of
gratitude, which entirely filled his young heart, that as yet, except in
the case of dear Father Holt, had had very little kindness for which to be
thankful. _O Dea certè_, thought he, remembering the lines out of the
_Aeneis_ which Mr. Holt had taught him. There seemed, as the boy thought,
in every look or gesture of this fair creature, an angelical softness and
bright pity—in motion or repose she seemed gracious alike; the tone of her
voice, though she uttered words ever so trivial, gave him a pleasure that
amounted almost to anguish. It cannot be called love, that a lad of twelve
years of age, little more than a menial, felt for an exalted lady, his
mistress: but it was worship. To catch her glance, to divine her errand
and run on it before she had spoken it; to watch, to follow, adore her;
became the business of his life. Meanwhile, as is the way often, his idol
had idols of her own, and never thought of or suspected the admiration of
her little pigmy adorer.
My lady had on her side her three idols: first and foremost, Jove and
supreme ruler, was her lord, Harry’s patron, the good Viscount of
Castlewood. All wishes of his were laws with her. If he had a headache,
she was ill. If he frowned, she trembled. If he joked, she smiled and was
charmed. If he went a-hunting, she was always at the window to see him
ride away, her little son crowing on her arm, or on the watch till his
return. She made dishes for his dinner: spiced his wine for him: made the
toast for his tankard at breakfast: hushed the house when he slept in his
chair, and watched for a look when he woke. If my lord was not a little
proud of his beauty, my lady adored it. She clung to his arm as he paced
the terrace, her two fair little hands clasped round his great one; her
eyes were never tired of looking in his face and wondering at its
perfection. Her little son was his son, and had his father’s look and
curly brown hair. Her daughter Beatrix was his daughter, and had his
eyes—were there ever such beautiful eyes in the world? All the house was
arranged so as to bring him ease and give him pleasure. She liked the
small gentry round about to come and pay him court, never caring for
admiration for herself; those who wanted to be well with the lady must
admire him. Not regarding her dress, she would wear a gown to rags,
because he had once liked it: and, if he brought her a brooch or a ribbon,
would prefer it to all the most costly articles of her wardrobe.
My lord went to London every year for six weeks, and the family being too
poor to appear at Court with any figure, he went alone. It was not until
he was out of sight that her face showed any sorrow: and what a joy when
he came back! What preparation before his return! The fond creature had
his arm-chair at the chimney-side—delighting to put the children in it,
and look at them there. Nobody took his place at the table; but his silver
tankard stood there as when my lord was present.
A pretty sight it was to see, during my lord’s absence, or on those many
mornings when sleep or headache kept him abed, this fair young lady of
Castlewood, her little daughter at her knee, and her domestics gathered
round her reading the Morning Prayer of the English Church. Esmond long
remembered how she looked and spoke kneeling reverently before the sacred
book, the sun shining upon her golden hair until it made a halo round
about her. A dozen of the servants of the house kneeled in a line opposite
their mistress; for awhile Harry Esmond kept apart from these mysteries,
but Doctor Tusher showing him that the prayers read were those of the
Church of all ages, and the boy’s own inclination prompting him to be
always as near as he might to his mistress, and to think all things she
did right, from listening to the prayers in the antechamber, he came
presently to kneel down with the rest of the household in the parlour; and
before a couple of years my lady had made a thorough convert. Indeed, the
boy loved his catechizer so much that he would have subscribed to anything
she bade him, and was never tired of listening to her fond discourse and
simple comments upon the book, which she read to him in a voice of which
it was difficult to resist the sweet persuasion and tender appealing
kindness. This friendly controversy, and the intimacy which it occasioned,
bound the lad more fondly than ever to his mistress. The happiest period
of all his life was this; and the young mother, with her daughter and son,
and the orphan lad whom she protected, read and worked and played, and
were children together. If the lady looked forward—as what fond woman does
not?—towards the future, she had no plans from which Harry Esmond was left
out; and a thousand and a thousand times in his passionate and impetuous
way he vowed that no power should separate him from his mistress, and only
asked for some chance to happen by which he might show his fidelity to
her. Now, at the close of his life, as he sits and recalls in tranquillity
the happy and busy scenes of it, he can think, not ungratefully, that he
has been faithful to that early vow. Such a life is so simple that years
may be chronicled in a few lines. But few men’s life-voyages are destined
to be all prosperous; and this calm of which we are speaking was soon to
come to an end.
As Esmond grew, and observed for himself, he found of necessity much to
read and think of outside that fond circle of kinsfolk who had admitted
him to join hand with them. He read more books than they cared to study
with him; was alone in the midst of them many a time, and passed nights
over labours, futile perhaps, but in which they could not join him. His
dear mistress divined his thoughts with her usual jealous watchfulness of
affection: began to forebode a time when he would escape from his
home-nest; and, at his eager protestations to the contrary, would only
sigh and shake her head. Before those fatal decrees in life are executed,
there are always secret previsions and warning omens. When everything yet
seems calm, we are aware that the storm is coming. Ere the happy days were
over, two at least of that home-party felt that they were drawing to a
close; and were uneasy, and on the look-out for the cloud which was to
obscure their calm.
’Twas easy for Harry to see, however much his lady persisted in obedience
and admiration for her husband, that my lord tired of his quiet life, and
grew weary, and then testy, at those gentle bonds with which his wife
would have held him. As they say the Grand Lama of Thibet is very much
fatigued by his character of divinity, and yawns on his altar as his
bonzes kneel and worship him, many a home-god grows heartily sick of the
reverence with which his family devotees pursue him, and sighs for freedom
and for his old life, and to be off the pedestal on which his dependants
would have him sit for ever, whilst they adore him, and ply him with
flowers, and hymns, and incense, and flattery;—so, after a few years of
his marriage, my honest Lord Castlewood began to tire; all the high-flown
raptures and devotional ceremonies with which his wife, his chief
priestess, treated him, first sent him to sleep, and then drove him out of
doors; for the truth must be told, that my lord was a jolly gentleman,
with very little of the august or divine in his nature, though his fond
wife persisted in revering it—and, besides, he had to pay a penalty for
this love, which persons of his disposition seldom like to defray: and, in
a word, if he had a loving wife, had a very jealous and exacting one. Then
he wearied of this jealousy: then he broke away from it; then came, no
doubt, complaints and recriminations; then, perhaps, promises of amendment
not fulfilled; then upbraidings not the more pleasant because they were
silent, and only sad looks and tearful eyes conveyed them. Then, perhaps,
the pair reached that other stage which is not uncommon in married life,
when the woman perceives that the god of the honeymoon is a god no more;
only a mortal like the rest of us—and so she looks into her heart, and lo!
_vacuae sedes et inania arcana_. And now, supposing our lady to have a
fine genius and a brilliant wit of her own, and the magic spell and
infatuation removed from her which had led her to worship as a god a very
ordinary mortal—and what follows? They live together, and they dine
together, and they say “my dear” and “my love” as heretofore; but the man
is himself, and the woman herself: that dream of love is over, as
everything else is over in life; as flowers and fury, and griefs and
pleasures, are over.
Very likely the Lady Castlewood had ceased to adore her husband herself
long before she got off her knees, or would allow her household to
discontinue worshipping him. To do him justice, my lord never exacted this
subservience: he laughed and joked, and drank his bottle, and swore when
he was angry, much too familiarly for any one pretending to sublimity; and
did his best to destroy the ceremonial with which his wife chose to
surround him. And it required no great conceit on young Esmond’s part to
see that his own brains were better than his patron’s, who, indeed, never
assumed any airs of superiority over the lad, or over any dependant of
his, save when he was displeased, in which case he would express his mind,
in oaths, very freely; and who, on the contrary, perhaps, spoiled “Parson
Harry”, as he called young Esmond, by constantly praising his parts, and
admiring his boyish stock of learning.
It may seem ungracious in one who has received a hundred favours from his
patron to speak in any but a reverential manner of his elders; but the
present writer has had descendants of his own, whom he has brought up with
as little as possible of the servility at present exacted by parents from
children (under which mask of duty there often lurks indifference,
contempt, or rebellion): and as he would have his grandsons believe or
represent him to be not an inch taller than Nature has made him: so, with
regard to his past acquaintances, he would speak without anger, but with
truth, as far as he knows it, neither extenuating nor setting down aught
in malice.
So long, then, as the world moved according to Lord Castlewood’s wishes,
he was good-humoured enough; of a temper naturally sprightly and easy,
liking to joke, especially with his inferiors, and charmed to receive the
tribute of their laughter. All exercises of the body he could perform to
perfection—shooting at a mark and flying, breaking horses, riding at the
ring, pitching the quoit, playing at all games with great skill. And not
only did he do these things well, but he thought he did them to
perfection; hence he was often tricked about horses, which he pretended to
know better than any jockey; was made to play at ball and billiards by
sharpers who took his money; and came back from London wofully poorer each
time than he went, as the state of his affairs testified, when the sudden
accident came by which his career was brought to an end.
He was fond of the parade of dress, and passed as many hours daily at his
toilette as an elderly coquette. A tenth part of his day was spent in the
brushing of his teeth and the oiling of his hair, which was curling and
brown, and which he did not like to conceal under a periwig, such as
almost everybody of that time wore (we have the liberty of our hair back
now, but powder and pomatum along with it. When, I wonder, will these
monstrous poll-taxes of our age be withdrawn, and men allowed to carry
their colours, black, red, or grey, as nature made them?) And, as he liked
her to be well dressed, his lady spared no pains in that matter to please
him; indeed, she would dress her head or cut it off if he had bidden her.
It was a wonder to young Esmond, serving as page to my lord and lady, to
hear, day after day, to such company as came, the same boisterous stories
told by my lord, at which his lady never failed to smile or hold down her
head, and Doctor Tusher to burst out laughing at the proper point, or cry,
“Fie, my lord, remember my cloth,” but with such a faint show of
resistance, that it only provoked my lord further. Lord Castlewood’s
stories rose by degrees, and became stronger after the ale at dinner and
the bottle afterwards; my lady always taking flight after the very first
glass to Church and King, and leaving the gentlemen to drink the rest of
the toasts by themselves.
And, as Harry Esmond was her page, he also was called from duty at this
time. “My lord has lived in the army and with soldiers,” she would say to
the lad, “amongst whom great licence is allowed. You have had a different
nurture, and I trust these things will change as you grow older; not that
any fault attaches to my lord, who is one of the best and most religious
men in this kingdom.” And very likely she believed so. ’Tis strange what a
man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.
And as Esmond has taken truth for his motto, it must be owned, even with
regard to that other angel, his mistress, that she had a fault of
character, which flawed her perfections. With the other sex perfectly
tolerant and kindly, of her own she was invariably jealous, and a proof
that she had this vice is, that though she would acknowledge a thousand
faults that she had not, to this which she had she could never be got to
own. But if there came a woman with even a semblance of beauty to
Castlewood, she was so sure to find out some wrong in her, that my lord,
laughing in his jolly way, would often joke with her concerning her
foible. Comely servant-maids might come for hire, but none were taken at
Castlewood. The housekeeper was old; my lady’s own waiting-woman squinted,
and was marked with the small-pox; the housemaids and scullion were
ordinary country wenches, to whom Lady Castlewood was kind, as her nature
made her to everybody almost; but as soon as ever she had to do with a
pretty woman, she was cold, retiring, and haughty. The country ladies
found this fault in her; and though the men all admired her, their wives
and daughters complained of her coldness and airs, and said that
Castlewood was pleasanter in Lady Jezebel’s time (as the dowager was
called) than at present. Some few were of my mistress’s side. Old Lady
Blenkinsop Jointure, who had been at Court in King James the First’s time,
always took her side; and so did old Mistress Crookshank, Bishop
Crookshank’s daughter, of Hexton, who, with some more of their like,
pronounced my lady an angel; but the pretty women were not of this mind;
and the opinion of the country was, that my lord was tied to his wife’s
apron-strings, and that she ruled over him.
The second fight which Harry Esmond had, was at fourteen years of age,
with Bryan Hawkshaw, Sir John Hawkshaw’s son, of Bramblebrook, who
advancing this opinion, that my lady was jealous, and henpecked my lord,
put Harry into such a fury, that Harry fell on him, and with such rage,
that the other boy, who was two years older, and by far bigger than he,
had by far the worst of the assault, until it was interrupted by Doctor
Tusher walking out of the dinner room.
Bryan Hawkshaw got up, bleeding at the nose, having, indeed, been
surprised, as many a stronger man might have been, by the fury of the
assault upon him.
“You little bastard beggar!” he said, “I’ll murder you for this!”
And indeed he was big enough.
“Bastard or not,” said the other, grinding his teeth, “I have a couple of
swords, and if you like to meet me, as a man, on the terrace to-night——”
And here the doctor coming up, the colloquy of the young champions ended.
Very likely, big as he was, Hawkshaw did not care to continue a fight with
such a ferocious opponent as this had been.
Chapter VIII. After Good Fortune Comes Evil
Since my Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought home the custom of inoculation
from Turkey (a perilous practice many deem it, and only a useless rushing
into the jaws of danger), I think the severity of the small-pox, that
dreadful scourge of the world, has somewhat been abated in our part of it;
and remembering in my time hundreds of the young and beautiful who have
been carried to the grave, or have only risen from their pillows
frightfully scarred and disfigured by this malady. Many a sweet face hath
left its roses on the bed, on which this dreadful and withering blight has
laid them. In my early days this pestilence would enter a village and
destroy half its inhabitants: at its approach it may well be imagined not
only the beautiful but the strongest were alarmed, and those fled who
could. One day in the year 1694 (I have good reason to remember it),
Doctor Tusher ran into Castlewood House, with a face of consternation,
saying that the malady had made its appearance at the blacksmith’s house
in the village, and that one of the maids there was down in the small-pox.
The blacksmith, beside his forge and irons for horses, had an alehouse for
men, which his wife kept, and his company sat on benches before the inn
door, looking at the smithy while they drank their beer. Now, there was a
pretty girl at this inn, the landlord’s men called Nancy Sievewright, a
bouncing fresh-looking lass, whose face was as red as the hollyhocks over
the pales of the garden behind the inn. At this time Harry Esmond was a
lad of sixteen, and somehow in his walks and rambles it often happened
that he fell in with Nancy Sievewright’s bonny face; if he did not want
something done at the blacksmith’s he would go and drink ale at the “Three
Castles”, or find some pretext for seeing this poor Nancy. Poor thing,
Harry meant or imagined no harm; and she, no doubt, as little, but the
truth is they were always meeting—in the lanes, or by the brook, or at the
garden-palings, or about Castlewood: it was, “Lord, Mr. Henry!” and “How
do you do, Nancy?” many and many a time in the week. ’Tis surprising the
magnetic attraction which draws people together from ever so far. I blush
as I think of poor Nancy now, in a red bodice and buxom purple cheeks and
a canvas petticoat; and that I devised schemes, and set traps, and made
speeches in my heart, which I seldom had courage to say when in presence
of that humble enchantress, who knew nothing beyond milking a cow, and
opened her black eyes with wonder when I made one of my fine speeches out
of Waller or Ovid. Poor Nancy! from the mist of far-off years thine honest
country face beams out; and I remember thy kind voice as if I had heard it
yesterday.
When Doctor Tusher brought the news that the small-pox was at the “Three
Castles”, whither a tramper, it was said, had brought the malady, Henry
Esmond’s first thought was of alarm for poor Nancy, and then of shame and
disquiet for the Castlewood family, lest he might have brought this
infection; for the truth is that Mr. Harry had been sitting in a back room
for an hour that day, where Nancy Sievewright was with a little brother
who complained of headache, and was lying stupefied and crying, either in
a chair by the corner of the fire, or in Nancy’s lap, or on mine.
Little Lady Beatrix screamed out at Dr. Tusher’s news; and my lord cried
out, “God bless me!” He was a brave man, and not afraid of death in any
shape but this. He was very proud of his pink complexion and fair hair—but
the idea of death by small-pox scared him beyond all other ends. “We will
take the children and ride away to-morrow to Walcote:” this was my lord’s
small house, inherited from his mother, near to Winchester.
“That is the best refuge in case the disease spreads,” said Dr. Tusher.
“’Tis awful to think of it beginning at the alehouse. Half the people of
the village have visited that to-day, or the blacksmith’s, which is the
same thing. My clerk Simons lodges with them—I can never go into my
reading-desk and have that fellow so near me. I won’t have that man near
me.”
“If a parishioner dying in the small-pox sent to you, would you not go?”
asked my lady, looking up from her frame of work, with her calm blue eyes.
“By the Lord, _I_ wouldn’t,” said my lord.
“We are not in a Popish country: and a sick man doth not absolutely need
absolution and confession,” said the doctor. “’Tis true they are a comfort
and a help to him when attainable, and to be administered with hope of
good. But in a case where the life of a parish priest in the midst of his
flock is highly valuable to them, he is not called upon to risk it (and
therewith the lives, future prospects, and temporal, even spiritual
welfare of his own family) for the sake of a single person, who is not
very likely in a condition even to understand the religious message
whereof the priest is the bringer—being uneducated, and likewise stupefied
or delirious by disease. If your ladyship or his lordship, my excellent
good friend and patron, were to take it——”
“God forbid!” cried my lord.
“Amen,” continued Dr. Tusher. “Amen to that prayer, my very good lord! for
your sake I would lay my life down”—and, to judge from the alarmed look of
the doctor’s purple face, you would have thought that that sacrifice was
about to be called for instantly.
To love children, and be gentle with them, was an instinct, rather than a
merit, in Henry Esmond, so much so, that he thought almost with a sort of
shame of his liking for them, and of the softness into which it betrayed
him; and on this day the poor fellow had not only had his young friend,
the milkmaid’s brother, on his knee, but had been drawing pictures, and
telling stories to the little Frank Esmond, who had occupied the same
place for an hour after dinner, and was never tired of Henry’s tales, and
his pictures of soldiers and horses. As luck would have it, Beatrix had
not on that evening taken her usual place, which generally she was glad
enough to have, upon her tutor’s lap. For Beatrix, from the earliest time,
was jealous of every caress which was given to her little brother Frank.
She would fling away even from the maternal arms, if she saw Frank had
been there before her; insomuch that Lady Castlewood was obliged not to
show her love for her son in the presence of the little girl, and embrace
one or the other alone. She would turn pale and red with rage if she
caught signs of intelligence or affection between Frank and his mother;
would sit apart, and not speak for a whole night, if she thought the boy
had a better fruit or a larger cake than hers; would fling away a ribbon
if he had one; and from the earliest age, sitting up in her little chair
by the great fireplace opposite to the corner where Lady Castlewood
commonly sat at her embroidery, would utter infantine sarcasms about the
favour shown to her brother. These, if spoken in the presence of Lord
Castlewood, tickled and amused his humour; he would pretend to love Frank
best, and dandle and kiss him, and roar with laughter at Beatrix’s
jealousy. But the truth is, my lord did not often witness these scenes,
nor very much trouble the quiet fireside at which his lady passed many
long evenings. My lord was hunting all day when the season admitted; he
frequented all the cockfights and fairs in the country, and would ride
twenty miles to see a main fought, or two clowns break their heads at a
cudgelling match; and he liked better to sit in his parlour drinking ale
and punch with Jack and Tom, than in his wife’s drawing-room: whither, if
he came, he brought only too often bloodshot eyes, a hiccuping voice, and
a reeling gait. The management of the house and the property, the care of
the few tenants and the village poor, and the accounts of the estate, were
in the hands of his lady and her young secretary, Harry Esmond. My lord
took charge of the stables, the kennel, and the cellar—and he filled this
and emptied it too.
So it chanced that upon this very day, when poor Harry Esmond had had the
blacksmith’s son, and the peer’s son, alike upon his knee, little Beatrix,
who would come to her tutor willingly enough with her book and her
writing, had refused him, seeing the place occupied by her brother, and,
luckily for her, had sat at the further end of the room, away from him,
playing with a spaniel dog which she had (and for which, by fits and
starts, she would take a great affection), and talking at Harry Esmond
over her shoulder, as she pretended to caress the dog, saying, that Fido
would love her, and she would love Fido, and nothing but Fido, all her
life.
When, then, the news was brought that the little boy at the “Three
Castles” was ill with the small-pox, poor Harry Esmond felt a shock of
alarm, not so much for himself as for his mistress’s son, whom he might
have brought into peril. Beatrix, who had pouted sufficiently (and who
whenever a stranger appeared began, from infancy almost, to play off
little graces to catch his attention), her brother being now gone to bed,
was for taking her place upon Esmond’s knee: for, though the doctor was
very obsequious to her, she did not like him, because he had thick boots
and dirty hands (the pert young miss said), and because she hated learning
the catechism.
But as she advanced towards Esmond from the corner where she had been
sulking, he started back and placed the great chair on which he was
sitting between him and her—saying in the French language to Lady
Castlewood, with whom the young lad had read much, and whom he had
perfected in this tongue—“Madam, the child must not approach me; I must
tell you that I was at the blacksmith’s to-day, and had his little boy
upon my lap.”
“Where you took my son afterwards,” Lady Castlewood said, very angry, and
turning red. “I thank you, sir, for giving him such company. Beatrix,” she
said in English, “I forbid you to touch Mr. Esmond. Come away, child—come
to your room. Come to your room—I wish your reverence good night—and you,
sir, had you not better go back to your friends at the alehouse?” Her
eyes, ordinarily so kind, darted flashes of anger as she spoke; and she
tossed up her head (which hung down commonly) with the mien of a princess.
“Hey-day!” says my lord, who was standing by the fireplace—indeed he was
in the position to which he generally came by that hour of the
evening—“Hey-day! Rachel, what are you in a passion about? Ladies ought
never to be in a passion. Ought they, Doctor Tusher? though it does good
to see Rachel in a passion—Damme, Lady Castlewood, you look dev’lish
handsome in a passion.”
“It is, my lord, because Mr. Henry Esmond, having nothing to do with his
time here, and not having a taste for our company, has been to the
alehouse, where he has _some friends_.”
My lord burst out with a laugh and an oath—“You young sly-boots, you’ve
been at Nancy Sievewright. D—— the young hypocrite, who’d have thought it
in him? I say, Tusher, he’s been after——”
“Enough, my lord,” said my lady, “don’t insult me with this talk.”
“Upon my word,” said poor Harry, ready to cry with shame and
mortification, “the honour of that young person is perfectly unstained for
me.”
“Oh, of course, of course,” says my lord, more and more laughing and
tipsy. “Upon his _honour_, doctor—Nancy Sieve——”
“Take Mistress Beatrix to bed,” my lady cried at this moment to Mrs.
Tucker her woman, who came in with her ladyship’s tea. “Put her into my
room—no, into yours,” she added quickly. “Go, my child: go, I say: not a
word!” And Beatrix, quite surprised at so sudden a tone of authority from
one who was seldom accustomed to raise her voice, went out of the room
with a scared countenance and waited even to burst out a-crying, until she
got to the door with Mrs. Tucker.
For once her mother took little heed of her sobbing, and continued to
speak eagerly—“My lord,” she said, “this young man—your dependant—told me
just now in French—he was ashamed to speak in his own language—that he had
been at the ale-house all day, where he has had that little wretch who is
now ill of the small-pox on his knee. And he comes home reeking from that
place—yes, reeking from it—and takes my boy into his lap without shame,
and sits down by me, yes, by _me_. He may have killed Frank for what I
know—killed our child. Why was he brought in to disgrace our house? Why is
he here? Let him go—let him go, I say, to-night, and pollute the place no
more.”
She had never once uttered a syllable of unkindness to Harry Esmond; and
her cruel words smote the poor boy, so that he stood for some moments
bewildered with grief and rage at the injustice of such a stab from such a
hand. He turned quite white from red, which he had been.
“I cannot help my birth, madam,” he said, “nor my other misfortune. And as
for your boy, if—if my coming nigh to him pollutes him now, it was not so
always. Good night, my lord. Heaven bless you and yours for your goodness
to me. I have tired her ladyship’s kindness out, and I will go;” and,
sinking down on his knee, Harry Esmond took the rough hand of his
benefactor and kissed it.
“He wants to go to the ale-house—let him go,” cried my lady.
“I’m d——d if he shall,” said my lord. “I didn’t think you could be so d——d
ungrateful, Rachel.”
Her reply was to burst into a flood of tears, and to quit the room with a
rapid glance at Harry Esmond. As my lord, not heeding them, and still in
great good humour, raised up his young client from his kneeling posture
(for a thousand kindnesses had caused the lad to revere my lord as a
father), and put his broad hand on Harry Esmond’s shoulder—
“She was always so,” my lord said; “the very notion of a woman drives her
mad. I took to liquor on that very account, by Jove, for no other reason
than that; for she can’t be jealous of a beer-barrel or a bottle of rum,
can she, doctor? D—— it, look at the maids—just look at the maids in the
house” (my lord pronounced all the words
together—just-look-at-the-maze-in-the-house: jever-see-such-maze?) “You
wouldn’t take a wife out of Castlewood now, would you, doctor?” and my
lord burst out laughing.
The doctor, who had been looking at my Lord Castlewood from under his
eyelids, said, “But joking apart, and, my lord, as a divine, I cannot
treat the subject in a jocular light, nor, as a pastor of this
congregation, look with anything but sorrow at the idea of so very young a
sheep going astray.”
“Sir,” said young Esmond, bursting out indignantly, “she told me that you
yourself were a horrid old man, and had offered to kiss her in the dairy.”
“For shame, Henry,” cried Doctor Tusher, turning as red as a turkey-cock,
while my lord continued to roar with laughter. “If you listen to the
falsehoods of an abandoned girl——”
“She is as honest as any woman in England, and as pure for me,” cried out
Henry, “and as kind, and as good. For shame on you to malign her!”
“Far be it from me to do so,” cried the doctor. “Heaven grant I may be
mistaken in the girl, and in you, sir, who have a truly _precocious_
genius; but that is not the point at issue at present. It appears that the
small-pox broke out in the little boy at the ‘Three Castles’; that it was
on him when you visited the ale-house, for your _own_ reasons; and that
you sat with the child for some time, and immediately afterwards with my
young lord.” The doctor raised his voice as he spoke, and looked towards
my lady, who had now come back, looking very pale, with a handkerchief in
her hand.
“This is all very true, sir,” said Lady Esmond, looking at the young man.
“’Tis to be feared that he may have brought the infection with him.”
“From the ale-house—yes,” said my lady.
“D—— it, I forgot when I collared you, boy,” cried my lord, stepping back.
“Keep off, Harry, my boy; there’s no good in running into the wolf’s jaws,
you know.”
My lady looked at him with some surprise, and instantly advancing to Henry
Esmond, took his hand. “I beg your pardon, Henry,” she said; “I spoke very
unkindly. I have no right to interfere with you—with your——”
My lord broke out into an oath. “Can’t you leave the boy alone, my lady?”
She looked a little red, and faintly pressed the lad’s hand as she dropped
it.
“There is no use, my lord,” she said; “Frank was on his knee as he was
making pictures, and was running constantly from Henry to me. The evil is
done, if any.”
“Not with me, damme,” cried my lord. “I’ve been smoking”—and he lighted
his pipe again with a coal—“and it keeps off infection; and as the disease
is in the village—plague take it—I would have you leave it. We’ll go
tomorrow to Walcote, my lady.”
“I have no fear,” said my lady; “I may have had it as an infant, it broke
out in our house then; and when four of my sisters had it at home, two
years before our marriage, I escaped it, and two of my dear sisters died.”
“I won’t run the risk,” said my lord; “I’m as bold as any man, but I’ll
not bear that.”
“Take Beatrix with you and go,” said my lady. “For us the mischief is
done; and Tucker can wait upon us, who has had the disease.”
“You take care to choose ’em ugly enough,” said my lord, at which her
ladyship hung down her head and looked foolish: and my lord, calling away
Tusher, bade him come to the oak parlour and have a pipe. The doctor made
a low bow to her ladyship (of which salaams he was profuse), and walked
off on his creaking square-toes after his patron.
When the lady and the young man were alone, there was a silence of some
moments, during which he stood at the fire, looking rather vacantly at the
dying embers, whilst her ladyship busied herself with her tambour-frame
and needles.
“I am sorry,” she said, after a pause, in a hard, dry voice,—“I _repeat_ I
am sorry that I showed myself so ungrateful for the safety of my son. It
was not at all my wish that you should leave us, I am sure, unless you
found pleasure elsewhere. But you must perceive, Mr. Esmond, that at your
age, and with your tastes, it is impossible that you can continue to stay
upon the intimate footing in which you have been in this family. You have
wished to go to the University, and I think ’tis quite as well that you
should be sent thither. I did not press this matter, thinking you a child,
as you are, indeed, in years—quite a child; and I should never have
thought of treating you otherwise until—until these _circumstances_ came
to light. And I shall beg my lord to dispatch you as quick as possible:
and will go on with Frank’s learning as well as I can (I owe my father
thanks for a little grounding, and you, I’m sure, for much that you have
taught me),—and—and I wish you a good night, Mr. Esmond.”
And with this she dropped a stately curtsy, and, taking her candle, went
away through the tapestry door, which led to her apartments. Esmond stood
by the fireplace, blankly staring after her. Indeed, he scarce seemed to
see until she was gone; and then her image was impressed upon him, and
remained for ever fixed upon his memory. He saw her retreating, the taper
lighting up her marble face, her scarlet lip quivering, and her shining
golden hair. He went to his own room, and to bed, where he tried to read,
as his custom was; but he never knew what he was reading until afterwards
he remembered the appearance of the letters of the book (it was in
Montaigne’s _Essays_), and the events of the day passed before him—that
is, of the last hour of the day; for as for the morning, and the poor
milkmaid yonder, he never so much as once thought. And he could not get to
sleep until daylight, and woke with a violent headache, and quite
unrefreshed.
He had brought the contagion with him from the “Three Castles” sure
enough, and was presently laid up with the small-pox, which spared the
Hall no more than it did the cottage.
Chapter IX. I Have The Small-Pox, And Prepare To Leave Castlewood
When Harry Esmond passed through the crisis of that malady, and returned
to health again, he found that little Frank Esmond had also suffered and
rallied after the disease, and the lady his mother was down with it, with
a couple more of the household. “It was a providence, for which we all
ought to be thankful,” Doctor Tusher said, “that my lady and her son were
spared, while Death carried off the poor domestics of the house;” and
rebuked Harry for asking, in his simple way—for which we ought to be
thankful—that the servants were killed, or the gentlefolks were saved? Nor
could young Esmond agree in the doctor’s vehement protestations to my
lady, when he visited her during her convalescence, that the malady had
not in the least impaired her charms, and had not been churl enough to
injure the fair features of the Viscountess of Castlewood, whereas in
spite of these fine speeches, Harry thought that her ladyship’s beauty was
very much injured by the smallpox. When the marks of the disease cleared
away, they did not, it is true, leave furrows or scars on her face (except
one, perhaps, on her forehead over her left eyebrow); but the delicacy of
her rosy colour and complexion were gone: her eyes had lost their
brilliancy, her hair fell, and her face looked older. It was as if a
coarse hand had rubbed off the delicate tints of that sweet picture, and
brought it, as one has seen unskilful painting-cleaners do, to the dead
colour. Also, it must be owned, that for a year or two after the malady,
her ladyship’s nose was swollen and redder.
There would be no need to mention these trivialities, but that they
actually influenced many lives, as trifles will in the world, where a gnat
often plays a greater part than an elephant, and a mole-hill, as we know
in King William’s case, can upset an empire. When Tusher in his courtly
way (at which Harry Esmond always chafed and spoke scornfully) vowed and
protested that my lady’s face was none the worse—the lad broke out and
said, “It _is_ worse: and my mistress is not near so handsome as she was”;
on which poor Lady Esmond gave a rueful smile, and a look into a little
Venice glass she had, which showed her I suppose that what the stupid boy
said was only too true, for she turned away from the glass and her eyes
filled with tears.
The sight of these in Esmond’s heart always created a sort of rage of
pity, and seeing them on the face of the lady whom he loved best, the
young blunderer sank down on his knees, and besought her to pardon him,
saying that he was a fool and an idiot, that he was a brute to make such a
speech, he who had caused her malady, and Doctor Tusher told him that a
bear he was indeed, and a bear he would remain, at which speech poor young
Esmond was so dumb-stricken that he did not even growl.
“He is _my_ bear, and I will not have him baited, doctor,” my lady said,
patting her hand kindly on the boy’s head, as he was still kneeling at her
feet. “How your hair has come off! And mine, too,” she added with another
sigh.
“It is not for myself that I cared,” my lady said to Harry, when the
parson had taken his leave; “but _am_ I very much changed? Alas! I fear
’tis too true.”
“Madam, you have the dearest, and kindest, and sweetest face in the world,
I think,” the lad said; and indeed he thought and thinks so.
“Will my lord think so when he comes back?” the lady asked, with a sigh,
and another look at her Venice glass. “Suppose he should think as you do,
sir, that I am hideous—yes, you said hideous—he will cease to care for me.
’Tis all men care for in women, our little beauty. Why did he select me
from among my sisters? ’Twas only for that. We reign but for a day or two:
and be sure that Vashti knew Esther was coming.”
“Madam,” said Mr. Esmond, “Ahasuerus was the Grand Turk, and to change was
the manner of his country, and according to his law.”
“You are all Grand Turks for that matter,” said my lady, “or would be if
you could. Come, Frank, come, my child. You are well, praised be Heaven.
_Your_ locks are not thinned by this dreadful small-pox: nor your poor
face scarred—is it, my angel?”
Frank began to shout and whimper at the idea of such a misfortune. From
the very earliest time the young lord had been taught to admire his beauty
by his mother: and esteemed it as highly as any reigning toast valued
hers.
One day, as he himself was recovering from his fever and illness, a pang
of something like shame shot across young Esmond’s breast as he remembered
that he had never once, during his illness, given a thought to the poor
girl at the smithy, whose red cheeks but a month ago he had been so eager
to see. Poor Nancy! her cheeks had shared the fate of roses, and were
withered now. She had taken the illness on the same day with Esmond—she
and her brother were both dead of the small-pox, and buried under the
Castlewood yew-trees. There was no bright face looking now from the
garden, or to cheer the old smith at his lonely fireside. Esmond would
have liked to have kissed her in her shroud (like the lass in Mr. Prior’s
pretty poem), but she rested many foot below the ground, when Esmond after
his malady first trod on it.
Doctor Tusher brought the news of this calamity, about which Harry Esmond
longed to ask, but did not like. He said almost the whole village had been
stricken with the pestilence; seventeen persons were dead of it, among
them mentioning the names of poor Nancy and her little brother. He did not
fail to say how thankful we survivors ought to be. It being this man’s
business to flatter and make sermons, it must be owned he was most
industrious in it, and was doing the one or the other all day.
And so Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single
tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the
rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs
deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that
surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright’s wife was an
ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard afterwards. He made a long
face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a
funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and
are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last
day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty
lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good
he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of
it. ’Tis an error, surely, to talk of the simplicity of youth. I think no
persons are more hypocritical, and have a more affected behaviour to one
another, than the young. They deceive themselves and each other with
artifices that do not impose upon men of the world; and so we got to
understand truth better, and grow simpler as we grow older.
When my lady heard of the fate which had befallen poor Nancy, she said
nothing so long as Tusher was by, but when he was gone, she took Harry
Esmond’s hand and said—
“Harry, I beg your pardon for those cruel words I used on the night you
were taken ill. I am shocked at the fate of the poor creature, and am sure
that nothing had happened of that with which, in my anger, I charged you.
And the very first day we go out, you must take me to the blacksmith, and
we must see if there is anything I can do to console the poor old man.
Poor man! to lose both his children! What should I do without mine!”
And this was, indeed, the very first walk which my lady took, leaning on
Esmond’s arm, after her illness. But her visit brought no consolation to
the old father; and he showed no softness, or desire to speak. “The Lord
gave and took away,” he said; and he knew what His servant’s duty was. He
wanted for nothing—less now than ever before, as there were fewer mouths
to feed. He wished her ladyship and Master Esmond good morning—he had
grown tall in his illness, and was but very little marked; and with this,
and a surly bow, he went in from the smithy to the house, leaving my lady,
somewhat silenced and shamefaced, at the door. He had a handsome stone put
up for his two children, which may be seen in Castlewood churchyard to
this very day; and before a year was out his own name was upon the stone.
In the presence of Death, that sovereign ruler, a woman’s coquetry is
scared; and her jealousy will hardly pass the boundaries of that grim
kingdom. ’Tis entirely of the earth that passion, and expires in the cold
blue air, beyond our sphere.
At length, when the danger was quite over, it was announced that my lord
and his daughter would return. Esmond well remembered the day. The lady,
his mistress, was in a flurry of fear: before my lord came, she went into
her room, and returned from it with reddened cheeks. Her fate was about to
be decided. Her beauty was gone—was her reign, too, over? A minute would
say. My lord came riding over the bridge—he could be seen from the great
window, clad in scarlet, and mounted on his grey hackney—his little
daughter ambled by him in a bright riding-dress of blue, on a shining
chestnut horse. My lady leaned against the great mantelpiece, looking on,
with one hand on her heart—she seemed only the more pale for those red
marks on either cheek. She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and withdrew
it, laughing hysterically—the cloth was quite red with the rouge when she
took it away. She ran to her room again, and came back with pale cheeks
and red eyes—her son in her hand—just as my lord entered, accompanied by
young Esmond, who had gone out to meet his protector, and to hold his
stirrup as he descended from horseback.
“What, Harry, boy!” my lord said good-naturedly, “you look as gaunt as a
greyhound. The small-pox hasn’t improved your beauty, and your side of the
house hadn’t never too much of it—ho, ho!”
And he laughed, and sprang to the ground with no small agility, looking
handsome and red, with a jolly face and brown hair, like a beef-eater;
Esmond kneeling again, as soon as his patron had descended, performed his
homage, and then went to greet the little Beatrix, and help her from her
horse.
“Fie! how yellow you look,” she said; “and there are one, two, red holes
in your face;” which, indeed, was very true; Harry Esmond’s harsh
countenance bearing, as long as it continued to be a human face, the marks
of the disease.
My lord laughed again, in high good humour.
“D—— it!” said he, with one of his usual oaths, “the little slut sees
everything. She saw the dowager’s paint t’other day, and asked her why she
wore that red stuff—didn’t you, Trix? and the Tower; and St. James’s; and
the play; and the Prince George, and the Princess Anne—didn’t you, Trix?”
“They are both very fat, and smelt of brandy,” the child said.
Papa roared with laughing.
“Brandy!” he said. “And how do you know, Miss Pert?”
“Because your lordship smells of it after supper, when I embrace you
before you go to bed,” said the young lady, who, indeed, was as pert as
her father said, and looked as beautiful a little gipsy as eyes ever gazed
on.
“And now for my lady,” said my lord, going up the stairs, and passing
under the tapestry curtain that hung before the drawing-room door. Esmond
remembered that noble figure handsomely arrayed in scarlet. Within the
last few months he himself had grown from a boy to be a man, and with his
figure, his thoughts had shot up, and grown manly.
My lady’s countenance, of which Harry Esmond was accustomed to watch the
changes, and with a solicitous affection to note and interpret the signs
of gladness or care, wore a sad and depressed look for many weeks after
her lord’s return: during which it seemed as if, by caresses and
entreaties, she strove to win him back from some ill humour he had, and
which he did not choose to throw off. In her eagerness to please him she
practised a hundred of those arts which had formerly charmed him, but
which seemed now to have lost their potency. Her songs did not amuse him;
and she hushed them and the children when in his presence. My lord sat
silent at his dinner, drinking greatly, his lady opposite to him, looking
furtively at his face, though also speechless. Her silence annoyed him as
much as her speech; and he would peevishly, and with an oath, ask her why
she held her tongue and looked so glum, or he would roughly check her when
speaking, and bid her not talk nonsense. It seemed as if, since his
return, nothing she could do or say could please him.
When a master and mistress are at strife in a house, the subordinates in
the family take the one side or the other. Harry Esmond stood in so great
fear of my lord, that he would run a league barefoot to do a message for
him; but his attachment for Lady Esmond was such a passion of grateful
regard, that to spare her a grief, or to do her a service, he would have
given his life daily: and it was by the very depth and intensity of this
regard that he began to divine how unhappy his adored lady’s life was, and
that a secret care (for she never spoke of her anxieties) was weighing
upon her.
Can any one, who has passed through the world and watched the nature of
men and women there, doubt what had befallen her? I have seen, to be sure,
some people carry down with them into old age the actual bloom of their
youthful love, and I know that Mr. Thomas Parr lived to be a hundred and
sixty years old. But, for all that, threescore and ten is the age of men,
and few get beyond it; and ’tis certain that a man who marries for mere
_beaux yeux_, as my lord did, considers his part of the contract at end
when the woman ceases to fulfil hers, and his love does not survive her
beauty. I know ’tis often otherwise, I say; and can think (as most men in
their own experience may) of many a house, where, lighted in early years,
the sainted lamp of love hath never been extinguished; but so there is Mr.
Parr, and so there is the great giant at the fair that is eight feet
high—exceptions to men—and that poor lamp whereof I speak, that lights at
first the nuptial chamber, is extinguished by a hundred winds and draughts
down the chimney, or sputters out for want of feeding. And then—and then
it is Chloe, in the dark, stark awake, and Strephon snoring unheeding; or
_vice versa_, ’tis poor Strephon that has married a heartless jilt, and
awoke out of that absurd vision of conjugal felicity, which was to last
for ever, and is over like any other dream. One and other has made his
bed, and so must lie in it, until that final day when life ends, and they
sleep separate.
About this time young Esmond, who had a knack of stringing verses, turned
some of Ovid’s epistles into rhymes, and brought them to his lady for her
delectation. Those which treated of forsaken women touched her immensely,
Harry remarked; and when Oenone called after Paris, and Medea bade Jason
come back again, the lady of Castlewood sighed, and said she thought that
part of the verses was the most pleasing. Indeed, she would have chopped
up the dean, her old father, in order to bring her husband back again. But
her beautiful Jason was gone, as beautiful Jasons will go, and the poor
enchantress had never a spell to keep him.
My lord was only sulky as long as his wife’s anxious face or behaviour
seemed to upbraid him. When she had got to master these, and to show an
outwardly cheerful countenance and behaviour, her husband’s good humour
returned partially, and he swore and stormed no longer at dinner, but
laughed sometimes, and yawned unrestrainedly; absenting himself often from
home, inviting more company thither, passing the greater part of his days
in the hunting-field, or over the bottle as before; but, with this
difference, that the poor wife could no longer see now, as she had done
formerly, the light of love kindled in his eyes. He was with her, but that
flame was out; and that once welcome beacon no more shone there.
What were this lady’s feelings when forced to admit the truth whereof her
foreboding glass had given her only too true warning, that with her beauty
her reign had ended, and the days of her love were over? What does a
seaman do in a storm if mast and rudder are carried away? He ships a
jurymast, and steers as he best can with an oar. What happens if your roof
falls in a tempest? After the first stun of the calamity the sufferer
starts up, gropes around to see that the children are safe, and puts them
under a shed out of the rain. If the palace burns down, you take shelter
in the barn. What man’s life is not overtaken by one or more of these
tornadoes that send us out of the course, and fling us on rocks to shelter
as best we may?
When Lady Castlewood found that her great ship had gone down, she began as
best she might, after she had rallied from the effects of the loss, to put
out small ventures of happiness; and hope for little gains and returns, as
a merchant on “Change, _indocilis pauperiem pati_,” having lost his
thousands, embarks a few guineas upon the next ship. She laid out her all
upon her children, indulging them beyond all measure, as was inevitable
with one of her kindness of disposition; giving all her thoughts to their
welfare—learning, that she might teach them, and improving her own many
natural gifts and feminine accomplishments, that she might impart them to
her young ones. To be doing good for some one else, is the life of most
good women. They are exuberant of kindness, as it were, and must impart it
to some one. She made herself a good scholar of French, Italian, and
Latin, having been grounded in these by her father in her youth: hiding
these gifts from her husband out of fear, perhaps, that they should offend
him, for my lord was no bookman—pish’d and psha’d at the notion of learned
ladies, and would have been angry that his wife could construe out of a
Latin book of which he could scarce understand two words. Young Esmond was
usher, or house tutor, under her or over her, as it might happen. During
my lord’s many absences, these schooldays would go on uninterruptedly: the
mother and daughter learning with surprising quickness: the latter by fits
and starts only, and as suited her wayward humour. As for the little lord,
it must be owned that he took after his father in the matter of
learning—liked marbles and play, and the great horse, and the little one
which his father brought him, and on which he took him out a-hunting—a
great deal better than Corderius and Lily; marshalled the village boys,
and had a little court of them, already flogging them, and domineering
over them with a fine imperious spirit, that made his father laugh when he
beheld it, and his mother fondly warn him. The cook had a son, the woodman
had two, the big lad at the porter’s lodge took his cuffs and his orders.
Doctor Tusher said he was a young nobleman of gallant spirit; and Harry
Esmond, who was his tutor, and eight years his little lordship’s senior,
had hard work sometimes to keep his own temper, and hold his authority
over his rebellious little chief and kinsman.
In a couple of years after that calamity had befallen which had robbed
Lady Castlewood of a little—a very little—of her beauty, and her careless
husband’s heart (if the truth must be told, my lady had found not only
that her reign was over, but that her successor was appointed, a princess
of a noble house in Drury Lane somewhere, who was installed and visited by
my lord at the town eight miles off—_pudet haec opprobria dicere nobis_)—a
great change had taken place in her mind, which, by struggles only known
to herself, at least never mentioned to any one, and unsuspected by the
person who caused the pain she endured—had been schooled into such a
condition as she could not very likely have imagined possible a score of
months since, before her misfortunes had begun.
She had oldened in that time as people do who suffer silently great mental
pain; and learned much that she had never suspected before. She was taught
by that bitter teacher Misfortune. A child, the mother of other children,
but two years back her lord was a god to her; his words her law; his smile
her sunshine; his lazy commonplaces listened to eagerly, as if they were
words of wisdom—all his wishes and freaks obeyed with a servile devotion.
She had been my lord’s chief slave and blind worshipper. Some women bear
farther than this, and submit not only to neglect but to unfaithfulness
too—but here this lady’s allegiance had failed her. Her spirit rebelled
and disowned any more obedience. First she had to bear in secret the
passion of losing the adored object; then to get a farther initiation, and
to find this worshipped being was but a clumsy idol: then to admit the
silent truth, that it was she was superior, and not the monarch her
master: that she had thoughts which his brains could never master, and was
the better of the two; quite separate from my lord although tied to him,
and bound as almost all people (save a very happy few) to work all her
life alone. My lord sat in his chair, laughing his laugh, cracking his
joke, his face flushing with wine—my lady in her place over against him—he
never suspecting that his superior was there, in the calm resigned lady,
cold of manner, with downcast eyes. When he was merry in his cups, he
would make jokes about her coldness, and, “D—— it, now my lady is gone, we
will have t’other bottle,” he would say. He was frank enough in telling
his thoughts, such as they were. There was little mystery about my lord’s
words or actions. His fair Rosamond did not live in a labyrinth, like the
lady of Mr. Addison’s opera, but paraded with painted cheeks and a tipsy
retinue in the country town. Had she a mind to be revenged, Lady
Castlewood could have found the way to her rival’s house easily enough;
and, if she had come with bowl and dagger, would have been routed off the
ground by the enemy with a volley of Billingsgate, which the fair person
always kept by her.
Meanwhile, it has been said, that for Harry Esmond his benefactress’s
sweet face had lost none of its charms. It had always the kindest of looks
and smiles for him—smiles, not so gay and artless perhaps as those which
Lady Castlewood had formerly worn, when, a child herself, playing with her
children, her husband’s pleasure and authority were all she thought of;
but out of her griefs and cares, as will happen I think when these trials
fall upon a kindly heart, and are not too unbearable, grew up a number of
thoughts and excellences which had never come into existence, had not her
sorrow and misfortunes engendered them. Sure, occasion is the father of
most that is good in us. As you have seen the awkward fingers and clumsy
tools of a prisoner cut and fashion the most delicate little pieces of
carved work; or achieve the most prodigious underground labours, and cut
through walls of masonry, and saw iron bars and fetters; ’tis misfortune
that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude, or endurance, in hearts where these
qualities had never come to life but for the circumstance which gave them
a being.
“’Twas after Jason left her, no doubt,” Lady Castlewood once said with one
of her smiles to young Esmond (who was reading to her a version of certain
lines out of Euripides), “that Medea became a learned woman and a great
enchantress.”
“And she could conjure the stars out of heaven,” the young tutor added,
“but she could not bring Jason back again.”
“What do you mean?” asked my lady, very angry.
“Indeed I mean nothing,” said the other, “save what I’ve read in books.
What should I know about such matters? I have seen no woman save you and
little Beatrix, and the parson’s wife and my late mistress, and your
ladyship’s woman here.”
“The men who wrote your books,” says my lady, “your Horaces, and Ovids,
and Virgils, as far as I know of them, all thought ill of us, as all the
heroes they wrote about used us basely. We were bred to be slaves always;
and even of our own times, as you are still the only lawgivers, I think
our sermons seem to say that the best woman is she who bears her master’s
chains most gracefully. ’Tis a pity there are no nunneries permitted by
our Church: Beatrix and I would fly to one, and end our days in peace
there away from you.”
“And is there no slavery in a convent?” says Esmond.
“At least if women are slaves there, no one sees them,” answered the lady.
“They don’t work in street-gangs with the public to jeer them: and if they
suffer, suffer in private. Here comes my lord home from hunting. Take away
the books. My lord does not love to see them. Lessons are over for to-day,
Mr. Tutor.” And with a curtsy and a smile she would end this sort of
colloquy.
Indeed “Mr. Tutor”, as my lady called Esmond, had now business enough on
his hands in Castlewood House. He had three pupils, his lady and her two
children, at whose lessons she would always be present; besides writing my
lord’s letters, and arranging his accompts for him—when these could be got
from Esmond’s indolent patron.
Of the pupils the two young people were but lazy scholars, and as my lady
would admit no discipline such as was then in use, my lord’s son only
learned what he liked, which was but little, and never to his life’s end
could be got to construe more than six lines of Virgil. Mistress Beatrix
chattered French prettily from a very early age; and sang sweetly, but
this was from her mother’s teaching—not Harry Esmond’s, who could scarce
distinguish between “Green Sleeves” and “Lillabullero”; although he had no
greater delight in life than to hear the ladies sing. He sees them now
(will he ever forget them?) as they used to sit together of the summer
evenings—the two golden heads over the page—the child’s little hand and
the mother’s beating the time, with their voices rising and falling in
unison.
But if the children were careless, ’twas a wonder how eagerly the mother
learned from her young tutor—and taught him too. The happiest instinctive
faculty was this lady’s—a faculty for discerning latent beauties and
hidden graces of books, especially books of poetry, as in a walk she would
spy out field-flowers and make posies of them, such as no other hand
could. She was a critic not by reason but by feeling; the sweetest
commentator of those books they read together; and the happiest hours of
young Esmond’s life, perhaps, were those passed in the company of this
kind mistress and her children.
These happy days were to end soon, however; and it was by the Lady
Castlewood’s own decree that they were brought to a conclusion. It
happened about Christmastime, Harry Esmond being now past sixteen years of
age, that his old comrade, adversary, and friend, Tom Tusher, returned
from his school in London, a fair, well-grown, and sturdy lad, who was
about to enter college, with an exhibition from his school, and a prospect
of after promotion in the Church. Tom Tusher’s talk was of nothing but
Cambridge, now; and the boys, who were good friends, examined each other
eagerly about their progress in books. Tom had learned some Greek and
Hebrew, besides Latin, in which he was pretty well skilled, and also had
given himself to mathematical studies under his father’s guidance, who was
a proficient in those sciences, of which Esmond knew nothing, nor could he
write Latin so well as Tom, though he could talk it better, having been
taught by his dear friend the Jesuit father, for whose memory the lad ever
retained the warmest affection, reading his books, keeping his swords
clean in the little crypt where the father had shown them to Esmond on the
night of his visit; and often of a night sitting in the chaplain’s room,
which he inhabited, over his books, his verses, and rubbish, with which
the lad occupied himself, he would look up at the window, thinking he
wished it might open and let in the good father. He had come and passed
away like a dream; but for the swords and books Harry might almost think
the father was an imagination of his mind—and for two letters which had
come to him, one from abroad full of advice and affection, another soon
after he had been confirmed by the Bishop of Hexton, in which Father Holt
deplored his falling away. But Harry Esmond felt so confident now of his
being in the right, and of his own powers as a casuist, that he thought he
was able to face the father himself in argument, and possibly convert him.
To work upon the faith of her young pupil, Esmond’s kind mistress sent to
the library of her father the dean, who had been distinguished in the
disputes of the late king’s reign; and, an old soldier now, had hung up
his weapons of controversy. These he took down from his shelves willingly
for young Esmond, whom he benefited by his own personal advice and
instruction. It did not require much persuasion to induce the boy to
worship with his beloved mistress. And the good old nonjuring dean
flattered himself with a conversion which in truth was owing to a much
gentler and fairer persuader.
Under her ladyship’s kind eyes (my lord’s being sealed in sleep pretty
generally), Esmond read many volumes of the works of the famous British
divines of the last age, and was familiar with Wake and Sherlock, with
Stillingfleet and Patrick. His mistress never tired to listen or to read,
to pursue the text with fond comments, to urge those points which her
fancy dwelt on most, or her reason deemed most important. Since the death
of her father the dean, this lady hath admitted a certain latitude of
theological reading, which her orthodox father would never have allowed;
his favourite writers appealing more to reason and antiquity than to the
passions or imaginations of their readers, so that the works of Bishop
Taylor, nay, those of Mr. Baxter and Mr. Law, have in reality found more
favour with my Lady Castlewood than the severer volumes of our great
English schoolmen.
In later life, at the University, Esmond reopened the controversy, and
pursued it in a very different manner, when his patrons had determined for
him that he was to embrace the ecclesiastical life. But though his
mistress’s heart was in this calling, his own never was much. After that
first fervour of simple devotion, which his beloved Jesuit priest had
inspired in him, speculative theology took but little hold upon the young
man’s mind. When his early credulity was disturbed, and his saints and
virgins taken out of his worship, to rank little higher than the
divinities of Olympus, his belief became acquiescence rather than ardour;
and he made his mind up to assume the cassock and bands, as another man
does to wear a breastplate and jack-boots, or to mount a merchant’s desk
for a livelihood, and from obedience and necessity, rather than from
choice. There were scores of such men in Mr. Esmond’s time at the
Universities, who were going to the Church with no better calling than
his.
When Thomas Tusher was gone, a feeling of no small depression and disquiet
fell upon young Esmond, of which, though he did not complain, his kind
mistress must have divined the cause: for soon after she showed not only
that she understood the reason of Harry’s melancholy, but could provide a
remedy for it. Her habit was thus to watch, unobservedly, those to whom
duty or affection bound her, and to prevent their designs, or to fulfil
them, when she had the power. It was this lady’s disposition to think
kindnesses, and devise silent bounties, and to scheme benevolence for
those about her. We take such goodness, for the most part, as if it was
our due; the Marys who bring ointment for our feet get but little thanks.
Some of us never feel this devotion at all, or are moved by it to
gratitude or acknowledgement; others only recall it years after, when the
days are past in which those sweet kindnesses were spent on us, and we
offer back our return for the debt by a poor tardy payment of tears. Then
forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the
past—oh, so bright and clear!—oh, so longed after!—because they are out of
reach; as holiday music from withinside a prison wall—or sunshine seen
through the bars; more prized because unattainable—more bright because of
the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
All the notice, then, which Lady Castlewood seemed to take of Harry
Esmond’s melancholy, upon Tom Tusher’s departure, was, by a gaiety unusual
to her, to attempt to dispel his gloom. She made his three scholars
(herself being the chief one) more cheerful than ever they had been
before, and more docile too, all of them learning and reading much more
than they had been accustomed to do. “For who knows,” said the lady, “what
may happen, and whether we may be able to keep such a learned tutor long?”
Frank Esmond said he for his part did not want to learn any more, and
Cousin Harry might shut up his book whenever he liked, if he would come
out a-fishing; and little Beatrix declared she would send for Tom Tusher,
and _he_ would be glad enough to come to Castlewood, if Harry chose to go
away.
At last comes a messenger from Winchester one day, bearer of a letter with
a great black seal from the dean there, to say that his sister was dead,
and had left her fortune of 2,000_l._ among her six nieces, the dean’s
daughters; and many a time since has Harry Esmond recalled the flushed
face and eager look wherewith, after this intelligence, his kind lady
regarded him. She did not pretend to any grief about the deceased
relative, from whom she and her family had been many years parted.
When my lord heard of the news, he also did not make any very long face.
“The money will come very handy to furnish the music-room and the cellar,
which is getting low, and buy your ladyship a coach and a couple of horses
that will do indifferent to ride or for the coach. And Beatrix, you shall
have a spinet: and Frank, you shall have a little horse from Hexton Fair;
and Harry, you shall have five pounds to buy some books,” said my lord,
who was generous with his own, and indeed with other folks’ money. “I wish
your aunt would die once a year, Rachel; we could spend your money, and
all your sisters’, too.”
“I have but one aunt—and—and I have another use for the money, my lord,”
says my lady, turning very red.
“Another use, my dear; and what do you know about money?” cries my lord.
“And what the devil is there that I don’t give you which you want?”
“I intend to give this money—can’t you fancy how, my lord?”
My lord swore one of his large oaths that he did not know in the least
what she meant.
“I intend it for Harry Esmond to go to college.—Cousin Harry,” says my
lady, “you mustn’t stay longer in this dull place, but make a name to
yourself, and for us too, Harry.”
“D——n it, Harry’s well enough here,” says my lord, for a moment looking
rather sulky.
“Is Harry going away? You don’t mean to say you will go away?” cry out
Frank and Beatrix at one breath.
“But he will come back: and this will always be his home,” cries my lady,
with blue eyes looking a celestial kindness: “and his scholars will always
love him; won’t they?”
“By G——d, Rachel, you’re a good woman!” says my lord, seizing my lady’s
hand, at which she blushed very much, and shrank back, putting her
children before her. “I wish you joy, my kinsman,” he continued, giving
Harry Esmond a hearty slap on the shoulder. “I won’t balk your luck. Go to
Cambridge, boy; and when Tusher dies you shall have the living here, if
you are not better provided by that time. We’ll furnish the dining-room
and buy the horses another year. I’ll give thee a nag out of the stable:
take any one except my hack and the bay gelding and the coach-horses; and
God speed thee, my boy!”
“Have the sorrel, Harry; ’tis a good one. Father says ’tis the best in the
stable,” says little Frank, clapping his hands, and jumping up. “Let’s
come and see him in the stable.” And the other, in his delight and
eagerness, was for leaving the room that instant to arrange about his
journey.
The Lady Castlewood looked after him with sad penetrating glances. “He
wishes to be gone already, my lord,” said she to her husband.
The young man hung back abashed. “Indeed, I would stay for ever, if your
ladyship bade me,” he said.
“And thou wouldst be a fool for thy pains, kinsman,” said my lord. “Tut,
tut, man. Go and see the world. Sow thy wild oats; and take the best luck
that Fate sends thee. I wish I were a boy again that I might go to
college, and taste the Trumpington ale.”
“Ours indeed is but a dull home,” cries my lady, with a little of sadness,
and maybe of satire, in her voice: “an old glum house, half ruined, and
the rest only half furnished; a woman and two children are but poor
company for men that are accustomed to better. We are only fit to be your
worship’s handmaids, and your pleasures must of necessity lie elsewhere
than at home.”
“Curse me, Rachel, if I know now whether thou art in earnest or not,” said
my lord.
“In earnest, my lord!” says she, still clinging by one of her children.
“Is there much subject here for joke?” And she made him a grand curtsy,
and, giving a stately look to Harry Esmond, which seemed to say,
“Remember; you understand me, though he does not,” she left the room with
her children.
“Since she found out that confounded Hexton business,” my lord said—“and
be hanged to them that told her!—she has not been the same woman. She, who
used to be as humble as a milkmaid, is as proud as a princess,” says my
lord. “Take my counsel, Harry Esmond, and keep clear of women. Since I
have had anything to do with the jades, they have given me nothing but
disgust. I had a wife at Tangier, with whom, as she couldn’t speak a word
of my language, you’d have thought I might lead a quiet life. But she
tried to poison me, because she was jealous of a Jew girl. There was your
aunt, for aunt she is—aunt Jezebel, a pretty life your father led with
_her_, and here’s my lady. When I saw her on a pillion riding behind the
dean her father, she looked and was such a baby, that a sixpenny doll
might have pleased her. And now you see what she is—hands off,
highty-tighty, high and mighty, an empress couldn’t be grander. Pass us
the tankard, Harry, my boy. A mug of beer and a toast at morn, says my
host. A toast and a mug of beer at noon, says my dear. D——n it, Polly
loves a mug of ale, too, and laced with brandy, by Jove!” Indeed, I
suppose they drank it together; for my lord was often thick in his speech
at mid-day dinner; and at night at supper, speechless altogether.
Harry Esmond’s departure resolved upon, it seemed as if the Lady
Castlewood, too, rejoiced to lose him; for more than once, when the lad,
ashamed perhaps at his own secret eagerness to go away (at any rate
stricken with sadness at the idea of leaving those from whom he had
received so many proofs of love and kindness inestimable), tried to
express to his mistress his sense of gratitude to her, and his sorrow at
quitting those who had so sheltered and tended a nameless and houseless
orphan, Lady Castlewood cut short his protests of love and his
lamentations, and would hear of no grief, but only look forward to Harry’s
fame and prospects in life. “Our little legacy will keep you for four
years like a gentleman. Heaven’s Providence, your own genius, industry,
honour, must do the rest for you. Castlewood will always be a home for
you; and these children, whom you have taught and loved, will not forget
to love you. And Harry,” said she (and this was the only time when she
spoke with a tear in her eye, or a tremor in her voice), “it may happen in
the course of nature that I shall be called away from them: and their
father—and—and they will need true friends and protectors. Promise me that
you will be true to them—as—as I think I have been to you—and a mother’s
fond prayer and blessing go with you.”
“So help me God, madam, I will,” said Harry Esmond, falling on his knees,
and kissing the hand of his dearest mistress. “If you will have me stay
now, I will. What matters whether or no I make my way in life, or whether
a poor bastard dies as unknown as he is now? ’Tis enough that I have your
love and kindness surely; and to make you happy is duty enough for me.”
“Happy!” says she; “but indeed I ought to be, with my children, and——”
“Not happy!” cried Esmond (for he knew what her life was, though he and
his mistress never spoke a word concerning it). “If not happiness, it may
be ease. Let me stay and work for you—let me stay and be your servant.”
“Indeed, you are best away,” said my lady, laughing, as she put her hand
on the boy’s head for a moment. “You shall stay in no such dull place. You
shall go to college and distinguish yourself as becomes your name. That is
how you shall please me best; and—and if my children want you, or I want
you, you shall come to us; and I know we may count on you.”
“May Heaven forsake me if you may not,” Harry said, getting up from his
knee.
“And my knight longs for a dragon this instant that he may fight,” said my
lady, laughing; which speech made Harry Esmond start, and turn red; for
indeed the very thought was in his mind, that he would like that some
chance should immediately happen whereby he might show his devotion. And
it pleased him to think that his lady had called him “her knight”, and
often and often he recalled this to his mind, and prayed that he might be
her true knight, too.
My lady’s bedchamber window looked out over the country, and you could see
from it the purple hills beyond Castlewood village, the green common
betwixt that and the Hall, and the old bridge which crossed over the
river. When Harry Esmond went away for Cambridge, little Frank ran
alongside his horse as far as the bridge, and there Harry stopped for a
moment, and looked back at the house where the best part of his life had
been passed. It lay before him with its grey familiar towers, a pinnacle
or two shining in the sun, the buttresses and terrace walls casting great
blue shades on the grass. And Harry remembered all his life after how he
saw his mistress at the window looking out on him, in a white robe, the
little Beatrix’s chestnut curls resting at her mother’s side. Both waved a
farewell to him, and little Frank sobbed to leave him. Yes, he _would_ be
his lady’s true knight, he vowed in his heart; he waved her an adieu with
his hat. The village people had good-bye to say to him too. All knew that
Master Harry was going to college, and most of them had a kind word and a
look of farewell. I do not stop to say what adventures he began to
imagine, or what career to devise for himself, before he had ridden three
miles from home. He had not read Monsieur Galland’s ingenious Arabian
tales as yet; but be sure that there are other folks who build castles in
the air, and have fine hopes, and kick them down too, besides honest
Alnaschar.
Chapter X. I Go To Cambridge, And Do But Little Good There
My lord, who said he should like to revisit the old haunts of his youth,
kindly accompanied Harry Esmond in his first journey to Cambridge. Their
road lay through London, where my lord viscount would also have Harry stay
a few days to show him the pleasures of the town, before he entered upon
his University studies, and whilst here Harry’s patron conducted the young
man to my lady dowager’s house at Chelsey near London: the kind lady at
Castlewood having specially ordered that the young gentleman and the old
should pay a respectful visit in that quarter.
Her ladyship the viscountess dowager occupied a handsome new house in
Chelsey, with a garden behind it, and facing the river, always a bright
and animated sight with its swarms of sailors, barges, and wherries. Harry
laughed at recognizing in the parlour the well-remembered old piece of Sir
Peter Lely, wherein his father’s widow was represented as a virgin
huntress, armed with a gilt bow and arrow, and encumbered only with that
small quantity of drapery which it would seem the virgins in King
Charles’s day were accustomed to wear.
My lady dowager had left off this peculiar habit of huntress when she
married. But though she was now considerably past sixty years of age, I
believe she thought that airy nymph of the picture could still be easily
recognized in the venerable personage who gave an audience to Harry and
his patron.
She received the young man with even more favour than she showed to the
elder, for she chose to carry on the conversation in French, in which my
Lord Castlewood was no great proficient, and expressed her satisfaction at
finding that Mr. Esmond could speak fluently in that language. “’Twas the
only one fit for polite conversation,” she condescended to say, “and
suitable to persons of high breeding.”
My lord laughed afterwards, as the gentlemen went away, at his kinswoman’s
behaviour. He said he remembered the time when she could speak English
fast enough, and joked in his jolly way at the loss he had had of such a
lovely wife as that.
My lady viscountess deigned to ask his lordship news of his wife and
children; she had heard that Lady Castlewood had had the small-pox; she
hoped she was not so _very_ much disfigured as people said.
At this remark about his wife’s malady, my lord viscount winced and turned
red; but the dowager, in speaking of the disfigurement of the young lady,
turned to her looking-glass and examined her old wrinkled countenance in
it with such a grin of satisfaction, that it was all her guests could do
to refrain from laughing in her ancient face.
She asked Harry what his profession was to be; and my lord, saying that
the lad was to take orders, and have the living of Castlewood when old Dr.
Tusher vacated it; she did not seem to show any particular anger at the
notion of Harry’s becoming a Church of England clergyman, nay, was rather
glad than otherwise, that the youth should be so provided for. She bade
Mr. Esmond not to forget to pay her a visit whenever he passed through
London, and carried her graciousness so far as to send a purse with twenty
guineas for him, to the tavern at which my lord put up (the “Greyhound”,
in Charing Cross); and, along with this welcome gift for her kinsman, she
sent a little doll for a present to my lord’s little daughter Beatrix, who
was growing beyond the age of dolls by this time, and was as tall almost
as her venerable relative.
After seeing the town, and going to the plays, my Lord Castlewood and
Esmond rode together to Cambridge, spending two pleasant days upon the
journey. Those rapid new coaches were not established as yet, that
performed the whole journey between London and the University in a single
day; however, the road was pleasant and short enough to Harry Esmond, and
he always gratefully remembered that happy holiday, which his kind patron
gave him.
Mr. Esmond was entered a pensioner of Trinity College in Cambridge, to
which famous college my lord had also in his youth belonged. Dr. Montague
was master at this time, and received my lord viscount with great
politeness: so did Mr. Bridge, who was appointed to be Harry’s tutor. Tom
Tusher, who was of Emmanuel College, and was by this time a junior soph,
came to wait upon my lord, and to take Harry under his protection; and
comfortable rooms being provided for him in the great court close by the
gate, and near to the famous Mr. Newton’s lodgings, Harry’s patron took
leave of him with many kind words and blessings, and an admonition to him
to behave better at the University than my lord himself had ever done.
’Tis needless in these memoirs to go at any length into the particulars of
Harry Esmond’s college career. It was like that of a hundred young
gentlemen of that day. But he had the ill fortune to be older by a couple
of years than most of his fellow students; and by his previous solitary
mode of bringing up, the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar
thoughtfulness and melancholy that had naturally engendered, he was, in a
great measure, cut off from the society of comrades who were much younger
and higher-spirited than he. His tutor, who had bowed down to the ground,
as he walked my lord over the college grass-plats, changed his behaviour
as soon as the nobleman’s back was turned, and was—at least Harry thought
so—harsh and overbearing. When the lads used to assemble in their _greges_
in hall, Harry found himself alone in the midst of that little flock of
boys; they raised a great laugh at him when he was set on to read Latin,
which he did with the foreign pronunciation taught to him by his old
master, the Jesuit, than which he knew no other. Mr. Bridge, the tutor,
made him the object of clumsy jokes, in which he was fond of indulging.
The young man’s spirit was chafed, and his vanity mortified; and he found
himself, for some time, as lonely in this place as ever he had been at
Castlewood, whither he longed to return. His birth was a source of shame
to him, and he fancied a hundred slights and sneers from young and old,
who, no doubt, had treated him better had he met them himself more
frankly. And as he looks back, in calmer days, upon this period of his
life, which he thought so unhappy, he can see that his own pride and
vanity caused no small part of the mortifications which he attributed to
others’ ill will. The world deals good-naturedly with good-natured people,
and I never knew a sulky misanthropist who quarrelled with it, but it was
he, and not it, that was in the wrong. Tom Tusher gave Harry plenty of
good advice on this subject, for Tom had both good sense and good humour;
but Mr. Harry chose to treat his senior with a great deal of superfluous
disdain and absurd scorn, and would by no means part from his darling
injuries, in which, very likely, no man believed but himself. As for
honest Doctor Bridge, the tutor found, after a few trials of wit with the
pupil, that the younger man was an ugly subject for wit, and that the
laugh was often turned against him. This did not make tutor and pupil any
better friends; but had, so far, an advantage for Esmond, that Mr. Bridge
was induced to leave him alone; and so long as he kept his chapels, and
did the college exercises required of him, Bridge was content not to see
Harry’s glum face in his class, and to leave him to read and sulk for
himself in his own chamber.
A poem or two in Latin and English, which were pronounced to have some
merit, and a Latin oration (for Mr. Esmond could write that language
better than pronounce it), got him a little reputation both with the
authorities of the University and amongst the young men, with whom he
began to pass for more than he was worth. A few victories over their
common enemy Mr. Bridge, made them incline towards him, and look upon him
as the champion of their order against the seniors. Such of the lads as he
took into his confidence, found him not so gloomy and haughty as his
appearance led them to believe; and Don Dismallo, as he was called, became
presently a person of some little importance in his college, and was, as
he believes, set down by the seniors there as rather a dangerous
character.
Don Dismallo was a stanch young Jacobite, like the rest of his family;
gave himself many absurd airs of loyalty; used to invite young friends to
burgundy, and give the king’s health on King James’s birthday; wore black
on the day of his abdication; fasted on the anniversary of King William’s
coronation; and performed a thousand absurd antics, of which he smiles now
to think.
These follies caused many remonstrances on Tom Tusher’s part, who was
always a friend to the powers that be, as Esmond was always in opposition
to them. Tom was a Whig, while Esmond was a Tory. Tom never missed a
lecture, and capped the proctor with the profoundest of bows. No wonder he
sighed over Harry’s insubordinate courses, and was angry when the others
laughed at him. But that Harry was known to have my lord viscount’s
protection, Tom no doubt would have broken with him altogether. But honest
Tom never gave up a comrade as long as he was the friend of a great man.
This was not out of scheming on Tom’s part, but a natural inclination
towards the great. ’Twas no hypocrisy in him to flatter, but the bent of
his mind, which was always perfectly good-humoured, obliging, and servile.
Harry had very liberal allowances, for his dear mistress of Castlewood not
only regularly supplied him, but the dowager at Chelsey made her donation
annual, and received Esmond at her house near London every Christmas; but,
in spite of these benefactions, Esmond was constantly poor; whilst ’twas a
wonder with how small a stipend from his father, Tom Tusher contrived to
make a good figure. ’Tis true that Harry both spent, gave, and lent his
money very freely, which Thomas never did. I think he was like the famous
Duke of Marlborough in this instance, who, getting a present of fifty
pieces, when a young man, from some foolish woman who fell in love with
his good looks, showed the money to Cadogan in a drawer scores of years
after, where it had lain ever since he had sold his beardless honour to
procure it. I do not mean to say that Tom ever let out his good looks so
profitably, for nature had not endowed him with any particular charms of
person, and he ever was a pattern of moral behaviour, losing no
opportunity of giving the very best advice to his younger comrade; with
which article, to do him justice, he parted very freely. Not but that he
was a merry fellow, too, in his way; he loved a joke, if by good fortune
he understood it, and took his share generously of a bottle if another
paid for it, and especially if there was a young lord in company to drink
it. In these cases there was not a harder drinker in the University than
Mr. Tusher could be; and it was edifying to behold him, fresh shaved and
with smug face, singing out “Amen!” at early chapel in the morning. In his
reading, poor Harry permitted himself to go a-gadding after all the Nine
Muses, and so very likely had but little favour from any one of them;
whereas Tom Tusher, who had no more turn for poetry than a ploughboy,
nevertheless, by a dogged perseverance and obsequiousness in courting the
divine Calliope, got himself a prize, and some credit in the University,
and a fellowship at his college, as a reward for his scholarship. In this
time of Mr. Esmond’s life, he got the little reading which he ever could
boast of, and passed a good part of his days greedily devouring all the
books on which he could lay hand. In this desultory way the works of most
of the English, French, and Italian poets came under his eyes, and he had
a smattering of the Spanish tongue likewise, besides the ancient
languages, of which, at least of Latin, he was a tolerable master.
Then, about midway in his University career, he fell to reading for the
profession to which worldly prudence rather than inclination called him,
and was perfectly bewildered in theological controversy. In the course of
his reading (which was neither pursued with that seriousness or that
devout mind which such a study requires), the youth found himself, at the
end of one month, a Papist, and was about to proclaim his faith; the next
month a Protestant, with Chillingworth; and the third a sceptic, with
Hobbs and Bayle. Whereas honest Tom Tusher never permitted his mind to
stray out of the prescribed University path, accepted the Thirty-nine
Articles with all his heart, and would have signed and sworn to other
nine-and-thirty with entire obedience. Harry’s wilfulness in this matter,
and disorderly thoughts and conversation, so shocked and afflicted his
senior, that there grew up a coldness and estrangement between them, so
that they became scarce more than mere acquaintances, from having been
intimate friends when they came to college first. Politics ran high, too,
at the University; and here, also, the young men were at variance. Tom
professed himself, albeit a High Churchman, a strong King William’s-man;
whereas Harry brought his family Tory politics to college with him, to
which he must add a dangerous admiration for Oliver Cromwell, whose side,
or King James’s by turns, he often chose to take in the disputes which the
young gentlemen used to hold in each other’s rooms, where they debated on
the state of the nation, crowned and deposed kings, and toasted past and
present heroes or beauties in flagons of college ale.
Thus, either from the circumstances of his birth, or the natural
melancholy of his disposition, Esmond came to live very much by himself
during his stay at the University, having neither ambition enough to
distinguish himself in the college career, nor caring to mingle with the
mere pleasures and boyish frolics of the students, who were, for the most
part, two or three years younger than he. He fancied that the gentlemen of
the common-room of his college slighted him on account of his birth, and
hence kept aloof from their society. It may be that he made the ill will,
which he imagined came from them, by his own behaviour, which, as he looks
back on it in after-life, he now sees was morose and haughty. At any rate,
he was as tenderly grateful for kindness as he was susceptible of slight
and wrong; and, lonely as he was generally, yet had one or two very warm
friendships for his companions of those days.
One of these was a queer gentleman that resided in the University, though
he was no member of it, and was the professor of a science scarce
recognized in the common course of college education. This was a French
refugee officer, who had been driven out of his native country at the time
of the Protestant persecutions there, and who came to Cambridge, where he
taught the science of the small-sword, and set up a saloon-of-arms. Though
he declared himself a Protestant, ’twas said Mr. Moreau was a Jesuit in
disguise; indeed, he brought very strong recommendations to the Tory
party, which was pretty strong in that University, and very likely was one
of the many agents whom King James had in this country. Esmond found this
gentleman’s conversation very much more agreeable, and to his taste, than
the talk of the college divines in the common-room; he never wearied of
Moreau’s stories of the wars of Turenne and Condé, in which he had borne a
part; and being familiar with the French tongue from his youth, and in a
place where but few spoke it, his company became very agreeable to the
brave old professor of arms, whose favourite pupil he was, and who made
Mr. Esmond a very tolerable proficient in the noble science of _escrime_.
At the next term Esmond was to take his degree of Bachelor of Arts, and
afterwards, in proper season, to assume the cassock and bands which his
fond mistress would have him wear. Tom Tusher himself was a parson and a
fellow of his college by this time; and Harry felt that he would very
gladly cede his right to the living of Castlewood to Tom, and that his own
calling was in no way the pulpit. But as he was bound, before all things
in the world, to his dear mistress at home, and knew that a refusal on his
part would grieve her, he determined to give her no hint of his
unwillingness to the clerical office; and it was in this unsatisfactory
mood of mind that he went to spend the last vacation he should have at
Castlewood before he took orders.
Chapter XI. I Come Home For A Holiday To Castlewood, And Find A Skeleton
In The House
At his third long vacation, Esmond came as usual to Castlewood, always
feeling an eager thrill of pleasure when he found himself once more in the
house where he had passed so many years, and beheld the kind familiar eyes
of his mistress looking upon him. She and her children (out of whose
company she scarce ever saw him) came to greet him. Miss Beatrix was grown
so tall that Harry did not quite know whether he might kiss her or no; and
she blushed and held back when he offered that salutation, though she took
it, and even courted it, when they were alone. The young lord was shooting
up to be like his gallant father in look, though with his mother’s kind
eyes: the Lady of Castlewood herself seemed grown, too, since Harry saw
her—in her look more stately, in her person fuller, in her face, still as
ever most tender and friendly, a greater air of command and decision than
had appeared in that guileless sweet countenance which Harry remembered so
gratefully. The tone of her voice was so much deeper and sadder when she
spoke and welcomed him, that it quite startled Esmond, who looked up at
her surprised as she spoke, when she withdrew her eyes from him; nor did
she ever look at him afterwards when his own eyes were gazing upon her. A
something hinting at grief and secret, and filling his mind with alarm
undefinable, seemed to speak with that low thrilling voice of hers, and
look out of those dear sad eyes. Her greeting to Esmond was so cold that
it almost pained the lad (who would have liked to fall on his knees and
kiss the skirt of her robe, so fond and ardent was his respect and regard
for her), and he faltered in answering the questions which she, hesitating
on her side, began to put to him. Was he happy at Cambridge? Did he study
too hard? She hoped not. He had grown very tall, and looked very well.
“He has got a moustache!” cries out Master Esmond.
“Why does he not wear a peruke like my Lord Mohun?” asked Miss Beatrix.
“My lord says that nobody wears their own hair.”
“I believe you will have to occupy your old chamber,” says my lady. “I
hope the housekeeper has got it ready.”
“Why, mamma, you have been there ten times these three days yourself!”
exclaims Frank.
“And she cut some flowers which you planted in my garden—do you remember,
ever so many years ago?—when I was quite a little girl,” cries out Miss
Beatrix, on tiptoe. “And mamma put them in your window.”
“I remember when you grew well after you were ill that you used to like
roses,” said the lady, blushing like one of them. They all conducted Harry
Esmond to his chamber; the children running before, Harry walking by his
mistress hand-in-hand.
The old room had been ornamented and beautified not a little to receive
him. The flowers were in the window in a china vase; and there was a fine
new counterpane on the bed, which chatterbox Beatrix said mamma had made
too. A fire was crackling on the hearth, although it was June. My lady
thought the room wanted warming; everything was done to make him happy and
welcome: “And you are not to be a page any longer, but a gentleman and
kinsman, and to walk with papa and mamma,” said the children. And as soon
as his dear mistress and children had left him to himself, it was with a
heart overflowing with love and gratefulness that he flung himself down on
his knees by the side of the little bed, and asked a blessing upon those
who were so kind to him.
The children, who are always house tell-tales, soon made him acquainted
with the little history of the house and family. Papa had been to London
twice. Papa often went away now. Papa had taken Beatrix to Westlands,
where she was taller than Sir George Harper’s second daughter, though she
was two years older. Papa had taken Beatrix and Frank both to Bellminster,
where Frank had got the better of Lord Bellminster’s son in a
boxing-match—my lord, laughing, told Harry afterwards. Many gentlemen came
to stop with papa, and papa had gotten a new game from London, a French
game, called a billiard—that the French king played it very well: and the
Dowager Lady Castlewood had sent Miss Beatrix a present; and papa had
gotten a new chaise, with two little horses, which he drove himself,
beside the coach, which mamma went in; and Dr. Tusher was a cross old
plague, and they did not like to learn from him at all; and papa did not
care about them learning, and laughed when they were at their books, but
mamma liked them to learn, and taught them; and “I don’t think papa is
fond of mamma”, said Miss Beatrix, with her great eyes. She had come quite
close up to Harry Esmond by the time this prattle took place, and was on
his knee, and had examined all the points of his dress, and all the good
or bad features of his homely face.
“You shouldn’t say that papa is not fond of mamma,” said the boy, at this
confession. “Mamma never said so; and mamma forbade you to say it, Miss
Beatrix.”
’Twas this, no doubt, that accounted for the sadness in Lady Castlewood’s
eyes, and the plaintive vibrations of her voice. Who does not know of
eyes, lighted by love once, where the flame shines no more?—of lamps
extinguished, once properly trimmed and tended? Every man has such in his
house. Such mementoes make our splendidest chambers look blank and sad;
such faces seen in a day cast a gloom upon our sunshine. So oaths mutually
sworn, and invocations of Heaven, and priestly ceremonies, and fond
belief, and love, so fond and faithful that it never doubted but that it
should live for ever, are all of no avail towards making love eternal: it
dies, in spite of the banns and the priest; and I have often thought there
should be a visitation of the sick for it, and a funeral service, and an
extreme unction, and an _abi in pace_. It has its course, like all mortal
things—its beginning, progress, and decay. It buds and it blooms out into
sunshine, and it withers and ends. Strephon and Chloe languish apart; join
in a rapture: and presently you hear that Chloe is crying, and Strephon
has broken his crook across her back. Can you mend it so as to show no
marks of rupture? Not all the priests of Hymen, not all the incantations
to the gods, can make it whole!
Waking up from dreams, books, and visions of college honours, in which,
for two years, Harry Esmond had been immersed, he found himself instantly,
on his return home, in the midst of this actual tragedy of life, which
absorbed and interested him more than all his tutor taught him. The
persons whom he loved best in the world, and to whom he owed most, were
living unhappily together. The gentlest and kindest of women was suffering
ill-usage and shedding tears in secret: the man who made her wretched by
neglect, if not by violence, was Harry’s benefactor and patron. In houses
where, in place of that sacred, inmost flame of love, there is discord at
the centre, the whole, household becomes hypocritical, and each lies to
his neighbour. The husband (or it may be the wife) lies when the visitor
comes in, and wears a grin of reconciliation or politeness before him. The
wife lies (indeed, her business is to do that, and to smile, however much
she is beaten), swallows her tears, and lies to her lord and master; lies
in bidding little Jacky respect dear papa; lies in assuring grandpapa that
she is perfectly happy. The servants lie, wearing grave faces behind their
master’s chair, and pretending to be unconscious of the fighting; and so,
from morning till bedtime, life is passed in falsehood. And wiseacres call
this a proper regard of morals, and point out Baucis and Philemon as
examples of a good life.
If my lady did not speak of her griefs to Harry Esmond, my lord was by no
means reserved when in his cups, and spoke his mind very freely, bidding
Harry in his coarse way, and with his blunt language, beware of all women
as cheats, jades, jilts, and using other unmistakable monosyllables in
speaking of them. Indeed, ’twas the fashion of the day as I must own; and
there’s not a writer of my time of any note, with the exception of poor
Dick Steele, that does not speak of a woman as of a slave, and scorn and
use her as such. Mr. Pope, Mr. Congreve, Mr. Addison, Mr. Gay, every one
of ’em, sing in this key, each according to his nature and politeness; and
louder and fouler than all in abuse is Dr. Swift, who spoke of them as he
treated them, worst of all.
Much of the quarrels and hatred which arise between married people come in
my mind from the husband’s rage and revolt at discovering that his slave
and bedfellow, who is to minister to all his wishes, and is church-sworn
to honour and obey him—is his superior; and that _he_, and not she, ought
to be the subordinate of the twain; and in these controversies, I think,
lay the cause of my lord’s anger against his lady. When he left her, she
began to think for herself, and her thoughts were not in his favour. After
the illumination, when the love-lamp is put out that anon we spoke of, and
by the common daylight we look at the picture, what a daub it looks! what
a clumsy effigy! How many men and wives come to this knowledge, think you?
And if it be painful to a woman to find herself mated for life to a boor,
and ordered to love and honour a dullard; it is worse still for the man
himself perhaps, whenever in his dim comprehension the idea dawns that his
slave and drudge yonder is, in truth, his superior; that the woman who
does his bidding, and submits to his humour, should be his lord; that she
can think a thousand things beyond the power of his muddled brains; and
that in yonder head, on the pillow opposite to him, lie a thousand
feelings, mysteries of thought, latent scorns and rebellions, whereof he
only dimly perceives the existence as they look out furtively from her
eyes: treasures of love doomed to perish without a hand to gather them;
sweet fancies and images of beauty that would grow and unfold themselves
into flower; bright wit that would shine like diamonds could it be brought
into the sun: and the tyrant in possession crushes the outbreak of all
these, drives them back like slaves into the dungeon and darkness, and
chafes without that his prisoner is rebellious, and his sworn subject
undutiful and refractory. So the lamp was out in Castlewood Hall, and the
lord and lady there saw each other as they were. With her illness and
altered beauty my lord’s fire for his wife disappeared; with his
selfishness and faithlessness her foolish fiction of love and reverence
was rent away. Love!—who is to love what is base and unlovely?
Respect!—who is to respect what is gross and sensual? Not all the marriage
oaths sworn before all the parsons, cardinals, ministers, muftis, and
rabbins in the world, can bind to that monstrous allegiance. This couple
was living apart then; the woman happy to be allowed to love and tend her
children (who were never of her own goodwill away from her) and thankful
to have saved such treasures as these out of the wreck in which the better
part of her heart went down.
These young ones had had no instructors save their mother, and Doctor
Tusher for their theology occasionally, and had made more progress than
might have been expected under a tutor so indulgent and fond as Lady
Castlewood. Beatrix could sing and dance like a nymph. Her voice was her
father’s delight after dinner. She ruled over the house with little
imperial ways, which her parents coaxed and laughed at. She had long
learned the value of her bright eyes, and tried experiments in coquetry,
_in corpore vili_, upon rustics and country squires, until she should
prepare to conquer the world and the fashion. She put on a new ribbon to
welcome Harry Esmond, made eyes at him, and directed her young smiles at
him, not a little to the amusement of the young man, and the joy of her
father, who laughed his great laugh, and encouraged her in her thousand
antics. Lady Castlewood watched the child gravely and sadly: the little
one was pert in her replies to her mother, yet eager in her protestations
of love and promises of amendment; and as ready to cry (after a little
quarrel brought on by her own giddiness) until she had won back her
mamma’s favour, as she was to risk the kind lady’s displeasure by fresh
outbreaks of restless vanity. From her mother’s sad looks she fled to her
father’s chair and boozy laughter. She already set the one against the
other: and the little rogue delighted in the mischief which she knew how
to make so early.
The young heir of Castlewood was spoiled by father and mother both. He
took their caresses as men do, and as if they were his right. He had his
hawks and his spaniel dog, his little horse and his beagles. He had
learned to ride and to drink, and to shoot flying: and he had a small
court, the sons of the huntsman and woodman, as became the heir-apparent,
taking after the example of my lord his father. If he had a headache, his
mother was as much frightened as if the plague were in the house: my lord
laughed and jeered in his abrupt way—(indeed, ’twas on the day after New
Year’s Day, and an excess of mince-pie)—and said with some of his usual
oaths—“D——n it, Harry Esmond—you see how my lady takes on about Frank’s
megrim. She used to be sorry about me, my boy (pass the tankard, Harry),
and to be frightened if I had a headache once. She don’t care about my
head now. They’re like that—women are—all the same, Harry, all jilts in
their hearts. Stick to college—stick to punch and buttery ale: and never
see a woman that’s handsomer than an old cinder-faced bedmaker. That’s my
counsel.”
It was my lord’s custom to fling out many jokes of this nature, in
presence of his wife and children, at meals—clumsy sarcasms which my lady
turned many a time, or which, sometimes, she affected not to hear, or
which now and again would hit their mark and make the poor victim wince
(as you could see by her flushing face and eyes filling with tears), or
which again worked her up to anger and retort, when, in answer to one of
these heavy bolts, she would flash back with a quivering reply. The pair
were not happy; nor indeed was it happy to be with them. Alas that
youthful love and truth should end in bitterness and bankruptcy! To see a
young couple loving each other is no wonder; but to see an old couple
loving each other is the best sight of all. Harry Esmond became the
confidant of one and the other—that is, my lord told the lad all his
griefs and wrongs (which were indeed of Lord Castlewood’s own making), and
Harry divined my lady’s; his affection leading him easily to penetrate the
hypocrisy under which Lady Castlewood generally chose to go disguised, and
see her heart aching whilst her face wore a smile. ’Tis a hard task for
women in life, that mask which the world bids them wear. But there is no
greater crime than for a woman who is ill used and unhappy to show that
she is so. The world is quite relentless about bidding her to keep a
cheerful face; and our women, like the Malabar wives, are forced to go
smiling and painted to sacrifice themselves with their husbands; their
relations being the most eager to push them on to their duty, and, under
their shouts and applauses, to smother and hush their cries of pain.
So, into the sad secret of his patron’s household, Harry Esmond became
initiated, he scarce knew how. It had passed under his eyes two years
before, when he could not understand it; but reading, and thought, and
experience of men, had oldened him; and one of the deepest sorrows of a
life which had never, in truth, been very happy, came upon him now, when
he was compelled to understand and pity a grief which he stood quite
powerless to relieve.
-------------------------------------
It hath been said my lord would never take the oath of allegiance, nor his
seat as a peer of the kingdom of Ireland, where, indeed, he had but a
nominal estate; and refused an English peerage which King William’s
Government offered him as a bribe to secure his loyalty.
He might have accepted this, and would doubtless, but for the earnest
remonstrances of his wife (who ruled her husband’s opinions better than
she could govern his conduct), and who being a simple-hearted woman, with
but one rule of faith and right, never thought of swerving from her
fidelity to the exiled family, or of recognizing any other sovereign but
King James; and, though she acquiesced in the doctrine of obedience to the
reigning power, no temptation, she thought, could induce her to
acknowledge the Prince of Orange as rightful monarch, nor to let her lord
so acknowledge him. So my Lord Castlewood remained a nonjuror all his life
nearly, though his self-denial caused him many a pang, and left him sulky
and out of humour.
The year after the Revolution, and all through King William’s life, ’tis
known there were constant intrigues for the restoration of the exiled
family; but if my Lord Castlewood took any share of these, as is probable,
’twas only for a short time, and when Harry Esmond was too young to be
introduced into such important secrets.
But in the year 1695, when that conspiracy of Sir John Fenwick, Colonel
Lowick, and others, was set on foot, for waylaying King William as he came
from Hampton Court to London, and a secret plot was formed, in which a
vast number of the nobility and people of honour were engaged; Father Holt
appeared at Castlewood, and brought a young friend with him, a gentleman
whom ’twas easy to see that both my lord and the father treated with
uncommon deference. Harry Esmond saw this gentleman, and knew and
recognized him in after-life, as shall be shown in its place; and he has
little doubt now that my lord viscount was implicated somewhat in the
transactions which always kept Father Holt employed and travelling hither
and thither under a dozen of different names and disguises. The father’s
companion went by the name of Captain James; and it was under a very
different name and appearance that Harry Esmond afterwards saw him.
It was the next year that the Fenwick conspiracy blew up, which is a
matter of public history now, and which ended in the execution of Sir John
and many more, who suffered manfully for their treason, and who were
attended to Tyburn by my lady’s father, Dean Armstrong, Mr. Collier, and
other stout nonjuring clergymen, who absolved them at the gallows’ foot.
’Tis known that when Sir John was apprehended, discovery was made of a
great number of names of gentlemen engaged in the conspiracy; when, with a
noble wisdom and clemency, the prince burned the list of conspirators
furnished to him, and said he would know no more. Now it was, after this,
that Lord Castlewood swore his great oath, that he would never, so help
him Heaven, be engaged in any transaction against that brave and merciful
man; and so he told Holt when the indefatigable priest visited him, and
would have had him engage in a farther conspiracy. After this my lord ever
spoke of King William as he was—as one of the wisest, the bravest, and the
greatest of men. My Lady Esmond (for her part) said she could never pardon
the king, first, for ousting his father-in-law from his throne, and
secondly, for not being constant to his wife, the Princess Mary. Indeed, I
think if Nero were to rise again, and be king of England, and a good
family man, the ladies would pardon him. My lord laughed at his wife’s
objections—the standard of virtue did not fit him much.
The last conference which Mr. Holt had with his lordship took place when
Harry was come home for his first vacation from college (Harry saw his old
tutor but for a half-hour, and exchanged no private words with him), and
their talk, whatever it might be, left my lord viscount very much
disturbed in mind—so much so, that his wife, and his young kinsman, Henry
Esmond, could not but observe his disquiet. After Holt was gone, my lord
rebuffed Esmond, and again treated him with the greatest deference; he
shunned his wife’s questions and company, and looked at his children with
such a face of gloom and anxiety, muttering, “Poor children—poor
children!” in a way that could not but fill those whose life it was to
watch him and obey him, with great alarm. For which gloom, each person
interested in the Lord Castlewood, framed in his or her own mind an
interpretation.
My lady, with a laugh of cruel bitterness, said, “I suppose the person at
Hexton has been ill, or has scolded him” (for my lord’s infatuation about
Mrs. Marwood was known only too well). Young Esmond feared for his money
affairs, into the condition of which he had been initiated; and that the
expenses, always greater than his revenue, had caused Lord Castlewood
disquiet.
One of the causes why my lord viscount had taken young Esmond into his
special favour was a trivial one, that hath not before been mentioned,
though it was a very lucky accident in Henry Esmond’s life. A very few
months after my lord’s coming to Castlewood, in the winter-time—the little
boy, being a child in a petticoat, trotting about—it happened that little
Frank was with his father after dinner, who fell asleep over his wine,
heedless of the child, who crawled to the fire; and, as good fortune would
have it, Esmond was sent by his mistress for the boy just as the poor
little screaming urchin’s coat was set on fire by a log; when Esmond,
rushing forward, tore the dress off the infant, so that his own hands were
burned more than the child’s, who was frightened rather than hurt, by this
accident. But certainly ’twas providential that a resolute person should
have come in at that instant, or the child had been burned to death
probably, my lord sleeping very heavily after drinking, and not waking so
cool as a man should who had a danger to face.
Ever after this the father, loud in his expressions of remorse and
humility for being a tipsy good-for-nothing, and of admiration for Harry
Esmond, whom his lordship would style a hero for doing a very trifling
service, had the tenderest regard for his son’s preserver, and Harry
became quite as one of the family. His burns were tended with the greatest
care by his kind mistress, who said that Heaven had sent him to be the
guardian of her children, and that she would love him all her life.
And it was after this, and from the very great love and tenderness which
had grown up in this little household, rather than to the exhortations of
Dean Armstrong (though these had no small weight with him), that Harry
came to be quite of the religion of his house and his dear mistress, of
which he has ever since been a professing member. As for Dr. Tusher’s
boasts that he was the cause of this conversion—even in these young days
Mr. Esmond had such a contempt for the doctor, that had Tusher bade him
believe anything (which he did not—never meddling at all), Harry would
that instant have questioned the truth on’t.
My lady seldom drank wine; but on certain days of the year, such as
birthdays (poor Harry had never a one) and anniversaries, she took a
little; and this day, the 29th December, was one. At the end, then, of
this year, ’96, it might have been a fortnight after Mr. Holt’s last
visit, Lord Castlewood being still very gloomy in mind, and sitting at
table—my lady bidding a servant bring her a glass of wine, and looking at
her husband with one of her sweet smiles, said—
“My lord, will you not fill a bumper too, and let me call a toast?”
“What is it, Rachel?” says he, holding out his empty glass to be filled.
“’Tis the 29th of December,” says my lady, with her fond look of
gratitude; “and my toast is, ‘Harry—and God bless him, who saved my boy’s
life!’ ”
My lord looked at Harry hard, and drank the glass, but clapped it down on
the table in a moment, and, with a sort of groan, rose up, and went out of
the room. What was the matter? We all knew that some great grief was over
him.
Whether my lord’s prudence had made him richer, or legacies had fallen to
him, which enabled him to support a greater establishment than that frugal
one which had been too much for his small means, Harry Esmond knew not;
but the house of Castlewood was now on a scale much more costly than it
had been during the first year of his lordship’s coming to the title.
There were more horses in the stable and more servants in the hall, and
many more guests coming and going now than formerly, when it was found
difficult enough by the strictest economy to keep the house as befitted
one of his lordship’s rank, and the estate out of debt. And it did not
require very much penetration to find, that many of the new acquaintances
at Castlewood were not agreeable to the lady there: not that she ever
treated them or any mortal with anything but courtesy; but they were
persons who could not be welcome to her; and whose society a lady so
refined and reserved could scarce desire for her children. There came
fuddling squires from the country round, who bawled their songs under her
windows and drank themselves tipsy with my lord’s punch and ale: there
came officers from Hexton, in whose company our little lord was made to
hear talk and to drink, and swear too in a way that made the delicate lady
tremble for her son. Esmond tried to console her by saying what he knew of
his college experience; that with this sort of company and conversation a
man must fall in sooner or later in his course through the world: and it
mattered very little whether he heard it at twelve years old or twenty—the
youths who quitted mother’s apron-strings the latest being not uncommonly
the wildest rakes. But it was about her daughter that Lady Castlewood was
the most anxious, and the danger which she thought menaced the little
Beatrix from the indulgences which her father gave her (it must be owned
that my lord, since these unhappy domestic differences especially, was at
once violent in his language to the children when angry, as he was too
familiar, not to say coarse, when he was in a good humour), and from the
company into which the careless lord brought the child.
Not very far off from Castlewood is Sark Castle, where the Marchioness of
Sark lived, who was known to have been a mistress of the late King
Charles—and to this house, whither indeed a great part of the country
gentry went, my lord insisted upon going, not only himself, but on taking
his little daughter and son to play with the children there. The children
were nothing loath, for the house was splendid, and the welcome kind
enough. But my lady, justly no doubt, thought that the children of such a
mother as that noted Lady Sark had been, could be no good company for her
two; and spoke her mind to her lord. His own language when he was thwarted
was not indeed of the gentlest: to be brief, there was a family dispute on
this, as there had been on many other points—and the lady was not only
forced to give in, for the other’s will was law—nor could she, on account
of their tender age, tell her children what was the nature of her
objection to their visit of pleasure, or indeed mention to them any
objection at all—but she had the additional secret mortification to find
them returning delighted with their new friends, loaded with presents from
them, and eager to be allowed to go back to a place of such delights as
Sark Castle. Every year she thought the company there would be more
dangerous to her daughter, as from a child Beatrix grew to a woman, and
her daily increasing beauty, and many faults of character too, expanded.
It was Harry Esmond’s lot to see one of the visits which the old lady of
Sark paid to the lady of Castlewood Hall: whither she came in state with
six chestnut horses and blue ribbons, a page on each carriage step, a
gentleman of the horse, and armed servants riding before and behind her.
And, but that it was unpleasant to see Lady Castlewood’s face, it was
amusing to watch the behaviour of the two enemies: the frigid patience of
the younger lady, and the unconquerable good humour of the elder—who would
see no offence whatever her rival intended, and who never ceased to smile
and to laugh, and to coax the children, and to pay compliments to every
man, woman, child, nay dog, or chair and table, in Castlewood, so bent was
she upon admiring everything there. She lauded the children, and wished—as
indeed she well might—that her own family had been brought up as well as
those cherubs. She had never seen such a complexion as dear
Beatrix’s—though to be sure she had a right to it from father and
mother—Lady Castlewood’s was indeed a wonder of freshness, and Lady Sark
sighed to think she had not been born a fair woman; and remarking Harry
Esmond, with a fascinating superannuated smile, she complimented him on
his wit, which she said she could see from his eyes and forehead; and
vowed that she would never have _him_ at Sark until her daughter were out
of the way.
Chapter XII. My Lord Mohun Comes Among Us For No Good
There had ridden along with this old princess’s cavalcade, two gentlemen;
her son, my Lord Firebrace, and his friend, my Lord Mohun, who both were
greeted with a great deal of cordiality by the hospitable Lord of
Castlewood. My Lord Firebrace was but a feeble-minded and weak-limbed
young nobleman, small in stature and limited in understanding—to judge
from the talk young Esmond had with him; but the other was a person of a
handsome presence, with the _bel air_, and a bright daring warlike aspect,
which, according to the chronicle of those days, had already achieved for
him the conquest of several beauties and toasts. He had fought and
conquered in France, as well as in Flanders; he had served a couple of
campaigns with the Prince of Baden on the Danube, and witnessed the rescue
of Vienna from the Turk. And he spoke of his military exploits pleasantly,
and with the manly freedom of a soldier, so as to delight all his hearers
at Castlewood, who were little accustomed to meet a companion so
agreeable.
On the first day this noble company came, my lord would not hear of their
departure before dinner, and carried away the gentlemen to amuse them,
whilst his wife was left to do the honours of her house to the old
marchioness and her daughter within. They looked at the stables, where my
Lord Mohun praised the horses, though there was but a poor show there:
they walked over the old house and gardens, and fought the siege of
Oliver’s time over again: they played a game of rackets in the old court,
where my Lord Castlewood beat my Lord Mohun, who said he loved ball of all
things, and would quickly come back to Castlewood for his revenge. After
dinner they played bowls, and drank punch in the green alley; and when
they parted they were sworn friends, my Lord Castlewood kissing the other
lord before he mounted on horseback, and pronouncing him the best
companion he had met for many a long day. All night long, over his
tobacco-pipe Castlewood did not cease to talk to Harry Esmond in praise of
his new friend, and in fact did not leave off speaking of him until his
lordship was so tipsy that he could not speak plainly any more.
At breakfast next day it was the same talk renewed; and when my lady said
there was something free in the Lord Mohun’s looks and manner of speech
which caused her to mistrust him, her lord burst out with one of his
laughs and oaths; said that he never liked man, woman, or beast, but what
she was sure to be jealous of it; that Mohun was the prettiest fellow in
England; that he hoped to see more of him whilst in the country; and that
he would let Mohun know what my Lady Prude said of him.
“Indeed,” Lady Castlewood said, “I liked his conversation well enough.
’Tis more amusing than that of most people I know. I thought it, I own,
too free; not from what he said, as rather from what he implied.”
“Psha! your ladyship does not know the world,” said her husband; “and you
have always been as squeamish as when you were a miss of fifteen.”
“You found no fault when I was a miss at fifteen.”
“Begad, madam, you are grown too old for a pinafore now; and I hold that
’tis for me to judge what company my wife shall see,” said my lord,
slapping the table.
“Indeed, Francis, I never thought otherwise,” answered my lady, rising and
dropping him a curtsy, in which stately action, if there was obedience,
there was defiance too; and in which a bystander, deeply interested in the
happiness of that pair as Harry Esmond was, might see how hopelessly
separated they were; what a great gulf of difference and discord had run
between them.
“By G——d! Mohun is the best fellow in England; and I’ll invite him here,
just to plague that woman. Did you ever see such a frigid insolence as it
is, Harry? That’s the way she treats me,” he broke out, storming, and his
face growing red as he clenched his fists and went on. “I’m nobody in my
own house. I’m to be the humble servant of that parson’s daughter. By
Jove! I’d rather she should fling the dish at my head than sneer at me as
she does. She puts me to shame before the children with her d——d airs;
and, I’ll swear, tells Frank and Beaty that papa’s a reprobate, and that
they ought to despise me.”
“Indeed and indeed, sir, I never heard her say a word out of respect
regarding you,” Harry Esmond interposed.
“No, curse it! I wish she would speak. But she never does. She scorns me,
and holds her tongue. She keeps off from me, as if I was a pestilence. By
George! she was fond enough of her pestilence once. And when I came
a-courting, you would see miss blush—blush red, by George! for joy. Why,
what do you think she said to me, Harry? She said herself, when I joked
with her about her d—d smiling red cheeks: ‘’Tis as they do at St.
James’s; I put up my red flag when my king comes.’ I was the king, you
see, she meant. But now, sir, look at her! I believe she would be glad if
I was dead; and dead I’ve been to her these five years—ever since you all
of you had the small-pox: and she never forgave me for going away.”
“Indeed, my lord, though ’twas hard to forgive, I think my mistress
forgave it,” Harry Esmond said; “and remember how eagerly she watched your
lordship’s return, and how sadly she turned away when she saw your cold
looks.”
“Damme!” cries out my lord; “would you have had me wait and catch the
small-pox? Where the deuce had been the good of that? I’ll bear danger
with any man—but not useless danger—no, no. Thank you for nothing. And—you
nod your head, and I know very well, Parson Harry, what you mean. There
was the—the other affair to make her angry. But is a woman never to
forgive a husband who goes a-tripping? Do you take me for a saint?”
“Indeed, sir, I do not,” says Harry, with a smile.
“Since that time my wife’s as cold as the statue at Charing Cross. I tell
thee she has no forgiveness in her, Henry. Her coldness blights my whole
life, and sends me to the punch-bowl, or driving about the country. My
children are not mine, but hers, when we are together. ’Tis only when she
is out of sight with her abominable cold glances, that run through me,
that they’ll come to me, and that I dare to give them so much as a kiss;
and that’s why I take ’em and love ’em in other people’s houses, Harry.
I’m killed by the very virtue of that proud woman. Virtue! give me the
virtue that can forgive; give me the virtue that thinks not of preserving
itself, but of making other folks happy. Damme, what matters a scar or two
if ’tis got in helping a friend in ill fortune?”
And my lord again slapped the table, and took a great draught from the
tankard. Harry Esmond admired as he listened to him, and thought how the
poor preacher of this self-sacrifice had fled from the small-pox, which
the lady had borne so cheerfully, and which had been the cause of so much
disunion in the lives of all in this house. “How well men preach,” thought
the young man, “and each is the example in his own sermon. How each has a
story in a dispute, and a true one, too, and both are right, or wrong as
you will!” Harry’s heart was pained within him, to watch the struggles and
pangs that tore the breast of this kind, manly friend and protector.
“Indeed, sir,” said he, “I wish to God that my mistress could hear you
speak as I have heard you; she would know much that would make her life
the happier, could she hear it.” But my lord flung away with one of his
oaths, and a jeer; he said that Parson Harry was a good fellow; but that
as for women, all women were alike—all jades and heartless. So a man
dashes a fine vase down and despises it for being broken. It may be
worthless—true: but who had the keeping of it, and who shattered it?
Harry, who would have given his life to make his benefactress and her
husband happy, bethought him, now that he saw what my lord’s state of mind
was, and that he really had a great deal of that love left in his heart,
and ready for his wife’s acceptance if she would take it, whether he could
not be a means of reconciliation between these two persons, whom he
revered the most in the world. And he cast about how he should break a
part of his mind to his mistress, and warn her that in his, Harry’s
opinion, at least, her husband was still her admirer, and even her lover.
But he found the subject a very difficult one to handle, when he ventured
to remonstrate, which he did in the very gravest tone (for long confidence
and reiterated proofs of devotion and loyalty had given him a sort of
authority in the house, which he resumed as soon as ever he returned to
it); and with a speech that should have some effect, as, indeed, it was
uttered with the speaker’s own heart, he ventured most gently to hint to
his adored mistress, that she was doing her husband harm by her ill
opinion of him, and that the happiness of all the family depended upon
setting her right.
She, who was ordinarily calm and most gentle, and full of smiles and soft
attentions, flushed up when young Esmond so spoke to her, and rose from
her chair, looking at him with a haughtiness and indignation that he had
never before known her to display. She was quite an altered being for that
moment; and looked an angry princess insulted by a vassal.
“Have you ever heard me utter a word in my lord’s disparagement?” she
asked hastily, hissing out her words, and stamping her foot.
“Indeed, no,” Esmond said, looking down.
“Are you come to me as his ambassador—_You?_” she continued.
“I would sooner see peace between you than anything else in the world,”
Harry answered, “and would go of any embassy that had that end.”
“So _you_ are my lord’s go-between?” she went on, not regarding this
speech. “You are sent to bid me back into slavery again, and inform me
that my lord’s favour is graciously restored to his handmaid? He is weary
of Covent Garden, is he, that he comes home and would have the fatted calf
killed?”
“There’s good authority for it, surely,” said Esmond.
“For a son, yes; but my lord is not my son. It was he who cast me away
from him. It was he who broke our happiness down, and he bids me to repair
it. It was he who showed himself to me at last, as he was, not as I had
thought him. It is he who comes before my children stupid and senseless
with wine—who leaves our company for that of frequenters of taverns and
bagnios—who goes from his home to the city yonder and his friends there,
and when he is tired of them returns hither, and expects that I shall
kneel and welcome him. And he sends _you_ as his chamberlain! What a proud
embassy! Monsieur, I make you my compliment of the new place.”
“It would be a proud embassy, and a happy embassy too, could I bring you
and my lord together,” Esmond replied.
“I presume you have fulfilled your mission now, sir. ’Twas a pretty one
for you to undertake. I don’t know whether ’tis your Cambridge philosophy,
or time, that has altered your ways of thinking,” Lady Castlewood
continued, still in a sarcastic tone. “Perhaps you too have learned to
love drink, and to hiccup over your wine or punch;—which is your worship’s
favourite liquor? Perhaps you too put up at the ‘Rose’ on your way through
London, and have your acquaintances in Covent Garden. My services to you,
sir, to principal and ambassador, to master and—and lackey.”
“Great Heavens, madam,” cried Harry, “what have I done that thus, for a
second time, you insult me? Do you wish me to blush for what I used to be
proud of, that I lived on your bounty? Next to doing you a service (which
my life would pay for), you know that to receive one from you is my
highest pleasure. What wrong have I done you that you should wound me so,
cruel woman?”
“What wrong?” she said, looking at Esmond with wild eyes. “Well, none—none
that you know of, Harry, or could help. Why did you bring back the
small-pox,” she added, after a pause, “from Castlewood village? You could
not help it, could you? Which of us knows whither fate leads us? But we
were all happy, Henry, till then.” And Harry went away from this colloquy,
thinking still that the estrangement between his patron and his beloved
mistress was remediable, and that each had at heart a strong attachment to
the other.
The intimacy between the Lords Mohun and Castlewood appeared to increase
as long as the former remained in the country; and my Lord of Castlewood
especially seemed never to be happy out of his new comrade’s sight. They
sported together, they drank, they played bowls and tennis: my Lord
Castlewood would go for three days to Sark, and bring back my Lord Mohun
to Castlewood—where indeed his lordship made himself very welcome to all
persons, having a joke or a new game at romps for the children, all the
talk of the town for my lord, and music and gallantry and plenty of the
_beau langage_ for my lady, and for Harry Esmond, who was never tired of
hearing his stories of his campaigns and his life at Vienna, Venice,
Paris, and the famous cities of Europe which he had visited both in peace
and war. And he sang at my lady’s harpsichord, and played cards or
backgammon, or his new game of billiards with my lord (of whom he
invariably got the better); always having a consummate good humour, and
bearing himself with a certain manly grace, that might exhibit somewhat of
the camp and Alsatia perhaps, but that had its charm and stamped him a
gentleman: and his manner to Lady Castlewood was so devoted and
respectful, that she soon recovered from the first feelings of dislike
which she had conceived against him—nay, before long, began to be
interested in his spiritual welfare, and hopeful of his conversion,
lending him books of piety, which he promised dutifully to study. With her
my lord talked of reform, of settling into quiet life, quitting the Court
and town, and buying some land in the neighbourhood—though it must be
owned that, when the two lords were together over their burgundy after
dinner, their talk was very different, and there was very little question
of conversion on my Lord Mohun’s part. When they got to their second
bottle, Harry Esmond used commonly to leave these two noble topers, who,
though they talked freely enough, Heaven knows, in his presence (Good
Lord, what a set of stories, of Alsatia and Spring Garden, of the taverns
and gaming-houses, of the ladies of the Court, and mesdames of the
theatres, he can recall out of their godly conversation!)—although I say
they talked before Esmond freely, yet they seemed pleased when he went
away, and then they had another bottle, and then they fell to cards, and
then my Lord Mohun came to her ladyship’s drawing-room; leaving his boon
companion to sleep off his wine.
’Twas a point of honour with the fine gentlemen of those days to lose or
win magnificently at their horse-matches, or games of cards and dice—and
you could never tell, from the demeanour of these two lords afterwards,
which had been successful and which the loser at their games. And when my
lady hinted to my lord that he played more than she liked, he dismissed
her with a “pish”, and swore that nothing was more equal than play betwixt
gentlemen, if they did but keep it up long enough. And these kept it up
long enough you may be sure. A man of fashion of that time often passed a
quarter of his day at cards, and another quarter at drink: I have known
many a pretty fellow, who was a wit too, ready of repartee, and possessed
of a thousand graces, who would be puzzled if he had to write more than
his name.
There is scarce any thoughtful man or woman, I suppose, but can look back
upon his course of past life, and remember some point, trifling as it may
have seemed at the time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and
altered his whole career. ’Tis with almost all of us, as in Monsieur
Massillon’s magnificent image regarding King William, a _grain de sable_
that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word
flung in the air, a mere freak of a perverse child’s temper, that brought
down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry Esmond
formed a part.
Coming home to his dear Castlewood in the third year of his academical
course (wherein he had now obtained some distinction, his Latin Poem on
the death of the Duke of Gloucester, Princess Anne of Denmark’s son,
having gained him a medal, and introduced him to the society of the
University wits), Esmond found his little friend and pupil Beatrix grown
to be taller than her mother, a slim and lovely young girl, with cheeks
mantling with health and roses: with eyes like stars shining out of azure,
with waving bronze hair clustered about the fairest young forehead ever
seen: and a mien and shape haughty and beautiful, such as that of the
famous antique statue of the huntress Diana—at one time haughty, rapid,
imperious, with eyes and arrows that dart and kill. Harry watched and
wondered at this young creature, and likened her in his mind to Artemis
with the ringing bow and shafts flashing death upon the children of Niobe;
at another time she was coy and melting as Luna shining tenderly upon
Endymion. This fair creature, this lustrous Phoebe, was only young as yet,
nor had nearly reached her full splendour: but crescent and brilliant, our
young gentleman of the University, his head full of poetical fancies, his
heart perhaps throbbing with desires undefined, admired this rising young
divinity; and gazed at her (though only as at some “bright particular
star”, far above his earth) with endless delight and wonder. She had been
a coquette from the earliest times almost, trying her freaks and
jealousies, her wayward frolics and winning caresses, upon all that came
within her reach; she set her women quarrelling in the nursery, and
practised her eyes on the groom as she rode behind him on the pillion.
She was the darling and torment of father and mother. She intrigued with
each secretly; and bestowed her fondness and withdrew it, plied them with
tears, smiles, kisses, cajolements;—when the mother was angry, as happened
often, flew to the father, and sheltering behind him, pursued her victim;
when both were displeased, transferred her caresses to the domestics, or
watched until she could win back her parents’ good graces, either by
surprising them into laughter and good humour, or appeasing them by
submission and artful humility. She was _saevo laeta negotio_, like that
fickle goddess Horace describes, and of whose “malicious joy” a great poet
of our own has written so nobly—who, famous and heroic as he was, was not
strong enough to resist the torture of women.
It was but three years before, that the child, then but ten years old, had
nearly managed to make a quarrel between Harry Esmond and his comrade,
good-natured, phlegmatic Thomas Tusher, who never of his own seeking
quarrelled with anybody: by quoting to the latter some silly joke which
Harry had made regarding him—(it was the merest, idlest jest, though it
near drove two old friends to blows, and I think such a battle would have
pleased her)—and from that day Tom kept at a distance from her; and she
respected him, and coaxed him sedulously whenever they met. But Harry was
much more easily appeased, because he was fonder of the child: and when
she made mischief, used cutting speeches, or caused her friends pain, she
excused herself for her fault, not by admitting and deploring it, but by
pleading not guilty, and asserting innocence so constantly, and with such
seeming artlessness, that it was impossible to question her plea. In her
childhood, they were but mischiefs then which she did; but her power
became more fatal as she grew older—as a kitten first plays with a ball,
and then pounces on a bird and kills it. ’Tis not to be imagined that
Harry Esmond had all this experience at this early stage of his life,
whereof he is now writing the history—many things here noted were but
known to him in later days. Almost everything Beatrix did or undid seemed
good, or at least pardonable, to him then, and years afterwards.
It happened, then, that Harry Esmond came home to Castlewood for his last
vacation, with good hopes of a fellowship at his college, and a contented
resolve to advance his fortune that way. ’Twas in the first year of the
present century, Mr. Esmond (as far as he knew the period of his birth)
being then twenty-two years old. He found his quondam pupil shot up into
this beauty of which we have spoken, and promising yet more: her brother,
my lord’s son, a handsome high-spirited brave lad, generous and frank, and
kind to everybody, save perhaps his sister, with whom Frank was at war
(and not from his but her fault)—adoring his mother, whose joy he was: and
taking her side in the unhappy matrimonial differences which were now
permanent, while of course Mistress Beatrix ranged with her father. When
heads of families fall out, it must naturally be that their dependants
wear the one or the other party’s colour; and even in the parliaments in
the servants’ hall or the stables, Harry, who had an early observant turn,
could see which were my lord’s adherents and which my lady’s, and
conjecture pretty shrewdly how their unlucky quarrel was debated. Our
lackeys sit in judgement on us. My lord’s intrigues may be ever so
stealthily conducted, but his valet knows them; and my lady’s woman
carries her mistress’s private history to the servants’ scandal-market,
and exchanges it against the secrets of other abigails.
Chapter XIII. My Lord Leaves Us And His Evil Behind Him
My Lord Mohun (of whose exploits and fame some of the gentlemen of the
University had brought down but ugly reports) was once more a guest at
Castlewood, and seemingly more intimately allied with my lord even than
before. Once in the spring those two noblemen had ridden to Cambridge from
Newmarket, whither they had gone for the horse-racing, and had honoured
Harry Esmond with a visit at his rooms; after which Doctor Montague, the
master of the college, who had treated Harry somewhat haughtily, seeing
his familiarity with these great folks, and that my Lord Castlewood
laughed and walked with his hand on Harry’s shoulder, relented to Mr.
Esmond, and condescended to be very civil to him; and some days after his
arrival, Harry, laughing, told this story to Lady Esmond, remarking how
strange it was that men famous for learning and renowned over Europe,
should, nevertheless, so bow down to a title, and cringe to a nobleman
ever so poor. At this, Mistress Beatrix flung up her head, and said, it
became those of low origin to respect their betters; that the parsons made
themselves a great deal too proud, she thought; and that she liked the way
at Lady Sark’s best, where the chaplain, though he loved pudding, as all
parsons do, always went away before the custard.
“And when I am a parson,” says Mr. Esmond, “will you give me no custard,
Beatrix?”
“You—you are different,” Beatrix answered. “You are of our blood.”
“My father was a parson, as you call him,” said my lady.
“But mine is a peer of Ireland,” says Mistress Beatrix, tossing her head.
“Let people know their places. I suppose you will have me go down on my
knees and ask a blessing of Mr. Thomas Tusher, that has just been made a
curate, and whose mother was a waiting-maid.”
And she tossed out of the room, being in one of her flighty humours then.
When she was gone, my lady looked so sad and grave, that Harry asked the
cause of her disquietude. She said it was not merely what he said of
Newmarket, but what she had remarked, with great anxiety and terror, that
my lord, ever since his acquaintance with the Lord Mohun especially, had
recurred to his fondness for play, which he had renounced since his
marriage.
“But men promise more than they are able to perform in marriage,” said my
lady, with a sigh. “I fear he has lost large sums; and our property,
always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation. I heard
of him in London with very wild company. Since his return letters and
lawyers are constantly coming and going: he seems to me to have a constant
anxiety, though he hides it under boisterousness and laughter. I looked
through—through the door last night, and—and before,” said my lady, “and
saw them at cards after midnight; no estate will bear that extravagance,
much less ours, which will be so diminished that my son will have nothing
at all, and my poor Beatrix no portion!”
“I wish I could help you, madam,” said Harry Esmond, sighing, and wishing
that unavailingly, and for the thousandth time in his life.
“Who can? Only God,” said Lady Esmond—“only God, in whose hands we are.”
And so it is, and for his rule over his family, and for his conduct to
wife and children—subjects over whom his power is monarchical—any one who
watches the world must think with trembling sometimes of the account which
many a man will have to render. For in our society there’s no law to
control the King of the Fireside. He is master of property, happiness—life
almost. He is free to punish, to make happy or unhappy—to ruin or to
torture. He may kill a wife gradually, and be no more questioned than the
Grand Seignior who drowns a slave at midnight. He may make slaves and
hypocrites of his children; or friends and freemen; or drive them into
revolt and enmity against the natural law of love. I have heard
politicians and coffee-house wiseacres talking over the newspaper, and
railing at the tyranny of the French king, and the emperor, and wondered
how these (who are monarchs, too, in their way) govern their own dominions
at home, where each man rules absolute? When the annals of each little
reign are shown to the Supreme Master, under whom we hold sovereignty,
histories will be laid bare of household tyrants as cruel as Amurath, and
as savage as Nero, and as reckless and dissolute as Charles.
If Harry Esmond’s patron erred, ’twas in the latter way, from a
disposition rather self-indulgent than cruel; and he might have been
brought back to much better feelings, had time been given to him to bring
his repentance to a lasting reform.
As my lord and his friend Lord Mohun were such close companions, Mistress
Beatrix chose to be jealous of the latter; and the two gentlemen often
entertained each other by laughing, in their rude boisterous way, at the
child’s freaks of anger and show of dislike. “When thou art old enough,
thou shalt marry Lord Mohun,” Beatrix’s father would say: on which the
girl would pout and say, “I would rather marry Tom Tusher.” And because
the Lord Mohun always showed an extreme gallantry to my Lady Castlewood,
whom he professed to admire devotedly, one day, in answer to this old joke
of her father’s, Beatrix said, “I think my lord would rather marry mamma
than marry me; and is waiting till you die to ask her.”
The words were said lightly and pertly by the girl one night before
supper, as the family party were assembled near the great fire. The two
lords, who were at cards, both gave a start; my lady turned as red as
scarlet, and bade Mistress Beatrix go to her own chamber; whereupon the
girl, putting on, as her wont was, the most innocent air, said, “I am sure
I meant no wrong; I am sure mamma talks a great deal more to Harry Esmond
than she does to papa—and she cried when Harry went away, and she never
does when papa goes away; and last night she talked to Lord Mohun for ever
so long, and sent us out of the room, and cried when we came back, and——”
“D——n!” cried out my Lord Castlewood, out of all patience. “Go out of the
room, you little viper!” and he started up and flung down his cards.
“Ask Lord Mohun what I said to him, Francis,” her ladyship said, rising up
with a scared face, but yet with a great and touching dignity and candour
in her look and voice. “Come away with me, Beatrix.” Beatrix sprung up
too; she was in tears now.
“Dearest mamma, what have I done?” she asked. “Sure I meant no harm.” And
she clung to her mother, and the pair went out sobbing together.
“I will tell you what your wife said to me, Frank,” my Lord Mohun
cried—“Parson Harry may hear it; and, as I hope for heaven, every word I
say is true. Last night, with tears in her eyes, your wife implored me to
play no more with you at dice or at cards, and you know best whether what
she asked was not for your good.”
“Of course it was, Mohun,” says my lord, in a dry hard voice. “Of course,
you are a model of a man: and the world knows what a saint you are.”
My Lord Mohun was separated from his wife, and had had many affairs of
honour: of which women as usual had been the cause.
“I am no saint, though your wife is—and I can answer for my actions as
other people must for their words,” said my Lord Mohun.
“By G——, my lord, you shall,” cried the other, starting up.
“We have another little account to settle first, my lord,” says Lord
Mohun. Whereupon Harry Esmond, filled with alarm for the consequences to
which this disastrous dispute might lead, broke out into the most vehement
expostulations with his patron and his adversary. “Gracious Heavens!” he
said, “my lord, are you going to draw a sword upon your friend in your own
house? Can you doubt the honour of a lady who is as pure as Heaven, and
would die a thousand times rather than do you a wrong? Are the idle words
of a jealous child to set friends at variance? Has not my mistress, as
much as she dared to, besought your lordship, as the truth must be told,
to break your intimacy with my Lord Mohun; and to give up the habit which
may bring ruin on your family? But for my Lord Mohun’s illness, had he not
left you?”
“Faith, Frank, a man with a gouty toe can’t run after other men’s wives,”
broke out my Lord Mohun, who indeed was in that way, and with a laugh and
a look at his swathed limb so frank and comical, that the other dashing
his fist across his forehead was caught by that infectious good humour,
and said with his oath, “—— it, Harry, I believe thee,” and so this
quarrel was over, and the two gentlemen, at swords drawn but just now,
dropped their points, and shook hands.
_Beati pacifici._ “Go, bring my lady back,” said Harry’s patron. Esmond
went away only too glad to be the bearer of such good news. He found her
at the door; she had been listening there, but went back as he came. She
took both his hands, hers were marble cold. She seemed as if she would
fall on his shoulder. “Thank you, and God bless you, my dear brother
Harry,” she said. She kissed his hand, Esmond felt her tears upon it: and
leading her into the room, and up to my lord, the Lord Castlewood with an
outbreak of feeling and affection, such as he had not exhibited for many a
long day, took his wife to his heart, and bent over and kissed her and
asked her pardon.
“’Tis time for me to go to roost. I will have my gruel abed,” said my Lord
Mohun: and limped off comically on Harry Esmond’s arm. “By George, that
woman is a pearl!” he said; “and ’tis only a pig that wouldn’t value her.
Have you seen the vulgar trapesing orange-girl whom Esmond”—but here Mr.
Esmond interrupted him, saying, that these were not affairs for him to
know.
My lord’s gentleman came in to wait upon his master, who was no sooner in
his nightcap and dressing-gown than he had another visitor whom his host
insisted on sending to him: and this was no other than the Lady Castlewood
herself with the toast and gruel, which her husband bade her make and
carry with her own hands in to her guest.
Lord Castlewood stood looking after his wife as she went on this errand,
and as he looked, Harry Esmond could not but gaze on him, and remarked in
his patron’s face an expression of love, and grief, and care, which very
much moved and touched the young man. Lord Castlewood’s hands fell down at
his sides, and his head on his breast, and presently he said—
“You heard what Mohun said, parson?”
“That my lady was a saint?”
“That there are two accounts to settle. I have been going wrong these five
years, Harry Esmond. Ever since you brought that damned small-pox into the
house, there has been a fate pursuing me, and I had best have died of it,
and not run away from it like a coward. I left Beatrix with her relations,
and went to London; and I fell among thieves, Harry, and I got back to
confounded cards and dice, which I hadn’t touched since my marriage—no,
not since I was in the duke’s guard, with those wild Mohocks. And I have
been playing worse and worse, and going deeper and deeper into it; and I
owe Mohun two thousand pounds now; and when it’s paid I am little better
than a beggar. I don’t like to look my boy in the face; he hates me, I
know he does. And I have spent Beaty’s little portion; and the Lord knows
what will come if I live; the best thing I can do is to die, and release
what portion of the estate is redeemable for the boy.”
Mohun was as much master at Castlewood as the owner of the Hall itself;
and his equipages filled the stables, where, indeed, there was room in
plenty for many more horses than Harry Esmond’s impoverished patron could
afford to keep. He had arrived on horseback with his people; but when his
gout broke out my Lord Mohun sent to London for a light chaise he had,
drawn by a pair of small horses, and running as swift, wherever roads were
good, as a Laplander’s sledge. When this carriage came, his lordship was
eager to drive the Lady Castlewood abroad in it, and did so many times,
and at a rapid pace, greatly to his companion’s enjoyment, who loved the
swift motion and the healthy breezes over the downs which lie hard upon
Castlewood, and stretch thence towards the sea. As this amusement was very
pleasant to her, and her lord, far from showing any mistrust of her
intimacy with Lord Mohun, encouraged her to be his companion; as if
willing, by his present extreme confidence, to make up for any past
mistrust which his jealousy had shown; the Lady Castlewood enjoyed herself
freely in this harmless diversion, which, it must be owned, her guest was
very eager to give her; and it seemed that she grew the more free with
Lord Mohun, and pleased with his company, because of some sacrifice which
his gallantry was pleased to make in her favour.
Seeing the two gentlemen constantly at cards still of evenings, Harry
Esmond one day deplored to his mistress that this fatal infatuation of her
lord should continue; and now they seemed reconciled together, begged his
lady to hint to her husband that he should play no more.
But Lady Castlewood, smiling archly and gaily, said she would speak to him
presently, and that, for a few nights more at least, he might be let to
have his amusement.
“Indeed, madam,” said Harry, “you know not what it costs you; and ’tis
easy for any observer who knows the game, to see that Lord Mohun is by far
the stronger of the two.”
“I know he is,” says my lady, still with exceeding good humour; “he is not
only the best player, but the kindest player in the world.”
“Madam, madam,” Esmond cried, transported and provoked. “Debts of honour
must be paid some time or other; and my master will be ruined if he goes
on.”
“Harry, shall I tell you a secret?” my lady replied, with kindness and
pleasure still in her eyes. “Francis will not be ruined if he goes on; he
will be rescued if he goes on. I repent of having spoken and thought
unkindly of the Lord Mohun when he was here in the past year. He is full
of much kindness and good: and ’tis my belief that we shall bring him to
better things. I have lent him Tillotson and your favourite Bishop Taylor,
and he is much touched, he says; and as a proof of his repentance—(and
herein lies my secret)—what do you think he is doing with Francis? He is
letting poor Frank win his money back again. He hath won already at the
last four nights; and my Lord Mohun says that he will not be the means of
injuring poor Frank and my dear children.”
“And in God’s name, what do you return him for this sacrifice?” asked
Esmond, aghast; who knew enough of men, and of this one in particular, to
be aware that such a finished rake gave nothing for nothing. “How, in
Heaven’s name, are you to pay him?”
“Pay him! With a mother’s blessing and a wife’s prayers!” cries my lady,
clasping her hands together. Harry Esmond did not know whether to laugh,
to be angry, or to love his dear mistress more than ever for the obstinate
innocency with which she chose to regard the conduct of a man of the
world, whose designs he knew better how to interpret. He told the lady,
guardedly, but so as to make his meaning quite clear to her, what he knew
in respect of the former life and conduct of this nobleman; of other women
against whom he had plotted, and whom he had overcome; of the conversation
which he Harry himself had had with Lord Mohun, wherein the lord made a
boast of his libertinism, and frequently avowed that he held all women to
be fair game (as his lordship styled this pretty sport), and that they
were all, without exception, to be won. And the return Harry had for his
entreaties and remonstrances was a fit of anger on Lady Castlewood’s part,
who would not listen to his accusations, she said, and retorted that he
himself must be very wicked and perverted, to suppose evil designs, where
she was sure none were meant. “And this is the good meddlers get of
interfering,” Harry thought to himself with much bitterness; and his
perplexity and annoyance were only the greater, because he could not speak
to my Lord Castlewood himself upon a subject of this nature, or venture to
advise or warn him regarding a matter so very sacred as his own honour, of
which my lord was naturally the best guardian.
But though Lady Castlewood would listen to no advice from her young
dependant, and appeared indignantly to refuse it when offered, Harry had
the satisfaction to find that she adopted the counsel which she professed
to reject; for the next day she pleaded a headache, when my Lord Mohun
would have had her drive out, and the next day the headache continued; and
next day, in a laughing gay way she proposed that the children should take
her place in his lordship’s car, for they would be charmed with a ride of
all things; and she must not have all the pleasure for herself. My lord
gave them a drive with a very good grace, though I dare say with rage and
disappointment inwardly—not that his heart was very seriously engaged in
his designs upon this simple lady: but the life of such men is often one
of intrigue, and they can no more go through the day without a woman to
pursue, than a fox-hunter without his sport after breakfast.
Under an affected carelessness of demeanour, and though there was no
outward demonstration of doubt upon his patron’s part since the quarrel
between the two lords, Harry yet saw that Lord Castlewood was watching his
guest very narrowly; and caught signs of distrust and smothered rage (as
Harry thought) which foreboded no good. On the point of honour Esmond knew
how touchy his patron was; and watched him almost as a physician watches a
patient, and it seemed to him that this one was slow to take the disease,
though he could not throw off the poison when once it had mingled with his
blood. We read in Shakespeare (whom the writer for his part considers to
be far beyond Mr. Congreve, Mr. Dryden, or any of the wits of the present
period) that when jealousy is once declared, nor poppy, nor mandragora,
nor all the drowsy syrups of the East, will ever soothe it or medicine it
away.
In fine, the symptoms seemed to be so alarming to this young physician
(who indeed young as he was had felt the kind pulses of all those dear
kinsmen), that Harry thought it would be his duty to warn my Lord Mohun,
and let him know that his designs were suspected and watched. So one day,
when in rather a pettish humour, his lordship had sent to Lady Castlewood,
who had promised to drive with him, and now refused to come, Harry
said—“My lord, if you will kindly give me a place by your side I will
thank you; I have much to say to you, and would like to speak to you
alone.”
“You honour me by giving me your confidence, Mr. Henry Esmond,” says the
other, with a very grand bow. My lord was always a fine gentleman, and
young as he was there was that in Esmond’s manner which showed that he was
a gentleman too, and that none might take a liberty with him—so the pair
went out, and mounted the little carriage which was in waiting for them in
the court, with its two little cream-coloured Hanoverian horses covered
with splendid furniture and champing at the bit.
“My lord,” says Harry Esmond, after they were got into the country, and
pointing to my Lord Mohun’s foot, which was swathed in flannel, and put up
rather ostentatiously on a cushion—“my lord, I studied medicine at
Cambridge.”
“Indeed, Parson Harry,” says he: “and are you going to take out a diploma:
and cure your fellow student of the——”
“Of the gout,” says Harry, interrupting him, and looking him hard in the
face; “I know a good deal about the gout.”
“I hope you may never have it. ’Tis an infernal disease,” says my lord,
“and its twinges are diabolical. Ah!” and he made a dreadful wry face, as
if he just felt a twinge.
“Your lordship would be much better if you took off all that flannel—it
only serves to inflame the toe,” Harry continued, looking his man full in
the face.
“Oh! it only serves to inflame the toe, does it?” says the other, with an
innocent air.
“If you took off that flannel, and flung that absurd slipper away, and
wore a boot,” continues Harry.
“You recommend me boots, Mr. Esmond?” asks my lord.
“Yes, boots and spurs. I saw your lordship three days ago run down the
gallery fast enough,” Harry goes on. “I am sure that taking gruel at night
is not so pleasant as claret to your lordship; and besides it keeps your
lordship’s head cool for play, whilst my patron’s is hot and flustered
with drink.”
“’Sdeath, sir, you dare not say that I don’t play fair?” cries my lord,
whipping his horses, which went away at a gallop.
“You are cool when my lord is drunk,” Harry continued; “your lordship gets
the better of my patron. I have watched you as I looked up from my books.”
“You young Argus!” says Lord Mohun, who liked Harry Esmond—and for whose
company and wit, and a certain daring manner, Harry had a great liking
too—“You young Argus! you may look with all your hundred eyes and see we
play fair. I’ve played away an estate of a night, and I’ve played my shirt
off my back; and I’ve played away my periwig and gone home in a nightcap.
But no man can say I ever took an advantage of him beyond the advantage of
the game. I played a dice-cogging scoundrel in Alsatia for his ears and
won ’em, and have one of ’em in my lodging in Bow Street in a bottle of
spirits. Harry Mohun will play any man for anything—always would.”
“You are playing awful stakes, my lord, in my patron’s house,” Harry said,
“and more games than are on the cards.”
“What do you mean, sir?” cries my lord, turning round, with a flush on his
face.
“I mean,” answers Harry, in a sarcastic tone, “that your gout is well—if
ever you had it.”
“Sir!” cried my lord, getting hot.
“And to tell the truth I believe your lordship has no more gout than I
have. At any rate, change of air will do you good, my Lord Mohun. And I
mean fairly that you had better go from Castlewood.”
“And were you appointed to give me this message?” cries the Lord Mohun.
“Did Frank Esmond commission you?”
“No one did. ’Twas the honour of my family that commissioned me.”
“And you are prepared to answer this?” cries the other, furiously lashing
his horses.
“Quite, my lord: your lordship will upset the carriage if you whip so
hotly.”
“By George, you have a brave spirit!” my lord cried out, bursting into a
laugh. “I suppose ’tis that infernal _botte de Jésuite_ that makes you so
bold,” he added.
“’Tis the peace of the family I love best in the world,” Harry Esmond said
warmly—“’tis the honour of a noble benefactor—the happiness of my dear
mistress and her children. I owe them everything in life, my lord; and
would lay it down for any one of them. What brings you here to disturb
this quiet household? What keeps you lingering month after month in the
country? What makes you feign illness and invent pretexts for delay? Is it
to win my poor patron’s money? Be generous, my lord, and spare his
weakness for the sake of his wife and children. Is it to practise upon the
simple heart of a virtuous lady? You might as well storm the Tower
single-handed. But you may blemish her name by light comments on it, or by
lawless pursuits—and I don’t deny that ’tis in your power to make her
unhappy. Spare these innocent people, and leave them.”
“By the Lord, I believe thou hast an eye to the pretty Puritan thyself,
Master Harry,” says my lord, with his reckless, good-humoured laugh, and
as if he had been listening with interest to the passionate appeal of the
young man. “Whisper, Harry. Art thou in love with her thyself? Hath tipsy
Frank Esmond come by the way of all flesh?”
“My lord, my lord,” cried Harry, his face flushing and his eyes filling as
he spoke, “I never had a mother, but I love this lady as one. I worship
her as a devotee worships a saint. To hear her name spoken lightly seems
blasphemy to me. Would you dare think of your own mother so, or suffer any
one so to speak of her! It is a horror to me to fancy that any man should
think of her impurely. I implore you, I beseech you, to leave her. Danger
will come out of it.”
“Danger, psha!” says my lord, giving a cut to the horses, which at this
minute—for we were got on to the Downs—fairly ran off into a gallop that
no pulling could stop. The rein broke in Lord Mohun’s hands, and the
furious beasts scampered madly forwards, the carriage swaying to and fro,
and the persons within it holding on to the sides as best they might,
until seeing a great ravine before them, where an upset was inevitable,
the two gentlemen leapt for their lives, each out of his side of the
chaise. Harry Esmond was quit for a fall on the grass, which was so severe
that it stunned him for a minute; but he got up presently very sick, and
bleeding at the nose, but with no other hurt. The Lord Mohun was not so
fortunate; he fell on his head against a stone, and lay on the ground dead
to all appearance.
This misadventure happened as the gentlemen were on their return
homewards; and my Lord Castlewood, with his son and daughter, who were
going out for a ride, met the ponies as they were galloping with the car
behind, the broken traces entangling their heels, and my lord’s people
turned and stopped them. It was young Frank who spied out Lord Mohun’s
scarlet coat as he lay on the ground, and the party made up to that
unfortunate gentleman and Esmond, who was now standing over him. His large
periwig and feathered hat had fallen off, and he was bleeding profusely
from a wound on the forehead, and looking, and being, indeed, a corpse.
“Great God! he’s dead!” says my lord. “Ride, some one: fetch a
doctor—stay. I’ll go home and bring back Tusher; he knows surgery,” and my
lord, with his son after him, galloped away.
They were scarce gone when Harry Esmond, who was indeed but just come to
himself, bethought him of a similar accident which he had seen on a ride
from Newmarket to Cambridge, and taking off a sleeve of my lord’s coat,
Harry, with a penknife, opened a vein in his arm, and was greatly
relieved, after a moment, to see the blood flow. He was near half an hour
before he came to himself, by which time Doctor Tusher and little Frank
arrived, and found my lord not a corpse indeed, but as pale as one.
After a time, and when he was able to bear motion, they put my lord upon a
groom’s horse, and gave the other to Esmond, the men walking on each side
of my lord, to support him, if need were, and worthy Doctor Tusher with
them. Little Frank and Harry rode together at a foot pace.
When we rode together home, the boy said: “We met mamma, who was walking
on the terrace with the doctor, and papa frightened her, and told her you
were dead——”
“That I was dead?” asks Harry.
“Yes. Papa says: ‘Here’s poor Harry killed, my dear;’ on which mamma gives
a great scream; and oh, Harry! she drops down; and I thought she was dead,
too. And you never saw such a way as papa was in: he swore one of his
great oaths: and he turned quite pale; and then he began to laugh somehow,
and he told the doctor to take his horse, and me to follow him; and we
left him. And I looked back, and saw him dashing water out of the fountain
on to mamma. Oh, she was so frightened!”
Musing upon this curious history—for my Lord Mohun’s name was Henry too,
and they called each other Frank and Harry often—and not a little
disturbed and anxious, Esmond rode home. His dear lady was on the terrace
still, one of her women with her, and my lord no longer there. There are
steps and a little door thence down into the road. My lord passed, looking
very ghastly, with a handkerchief over his head, and without his hat and
periwig, which a groom carried, but his politeness did not desert him, and
he made a bow to the lady above.
“Thank Heaven you are safe,” she said.
“And so is Harry, too, mamma,” says little Frank,—“huzzay!”
Harry Esmond got off the horse to run to his mistress, as did little
Frank, and one of the grooms took charge of the two beasts, while the
other, hat and periwig in hand, walked by my lord’s bridle to the front
gate, which lay half a mile away.
“Oh, my boy! what a fright you have given me!” Lady Castlewood said, when
Harry Esmond came up, greeting him with one of her shining looks, and a
voice of tender welcome; and she was so kind as to kiss the young man
(’twas the second time she had so honoured him), and she walked into the
house between him and her son, holding a hand of each.
Chapter XIV. We Ride After Him To London
After a repose of a couple of days, the Lord Mohun was so far recovered of
his hurt as to be able to announce his departure for the next morning;
when, accordingly, he took leave of Castlewood, proposing to ride to
London by easy stages, and lie two nights upon the road. His host treated
him with a studied and ceremonious courtesy, certainly different from my
lord’s usual frank and careless demeanour; but there was no reason to
suppose that the two lords parted otherwise than good friends, though
Harry Esmond remarked that my lord viscount only saw his guest in company
with other persons, and seemed to avoid being alone with him. Nor did he
ride any distance with Lord Mohun, as his custom was with most of his
friends, whom he was always eager to welcome and unwilling to lose; but
contented himself, when his lordship’s horses were announced, and their
owner appeared booted for his journey, to take a courteous leave of the
ladies of Castlewood, by following the Lord Mohun downstairs to his
horses, and by bowing and wishing him a good day, in the courtyard. “I
shall see you in London before very long, Mohun,” my lord said, with, a
smile; “when we will settle our accounts together.”
“Do not let them trouble you, Frank,” said the other good-naturedly, and,
holding out his hand, looked rather surprised at the grim and stately
manner in which his host received his parting salutation: and so, followed
by his people, he rode away.
Harry Esmond was witness of the departure. It was very different to my
lord’s coming, for which great preparation had been made (the old house
putting on its best appearance to welcome its guest), and there was a
sadness and constraint about all persons that day, which filled Mr. Esmond
with gloomy forebodings, and sad indefinite apprehensions. Lord Castlewood
stood at the door watching his guest and his people as they went out under
the arch of the outer gate. When he was there, Lord Mohun turned once
more, my lord viscount slowly raised his beaver and bowed. His face wore a
peculiar livid look, Harry thought. He cursed and kicked away his dogs,
which came jumping about him—then he walked up to the fountain in the
centre of the court, and leaned against a pillar and looked into the
basin. As Esmond crossed over to his own room, late the chaplain’s, on the
other side of the court, and turned to enter in at the low door, he saw
Lady Castlewood looking through the curtains of the great window of the
drawing-room overhead, at my lord as he stood regarding the fountain.
There was in the court a peculiar silence somehow; and the scene remained
long in Esmond’s memory;—the sky bright overhead; the buttresses of the
building and the sundial casting shadow over the gilt _memento mori_
inscribed underneath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly
white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffing amongst
the grass and stones, and my lord leaning over the fountain, which was
plashing audibly. ’Tis strange how that scene and the sound of that
fountain remain fixed on the memory of a man who has beheld a hundred
sights of splendour, and danger too, of which he has kept no account.
It was Lady Castlewood, she had been laughing all the morning, and
especially gay and lively before her husband and his guest, who, as soon
as the two gentlemen went together from her room, ran to Harry, the
expression of her countenance quite changed now, and with a face and eyes
full of care, and said, “Follow them, Harry, I am sure something has gone
wrong.” And so it was that Esmond was made an eavesdropper at this lady’s
orders: and retired to his own chamber, to give himself time in truth to
try and compose a story which would soothe his mistress, for he could not
but have his own apprehension that some serious quarrel was pending
between the two gentlemen.
And now for several days the little company at Castlewood sat at table as
of evenings: this care, though unnamed and invisible, being nevertheless
present alway, in the minds of at least three persons there. My lord was
exceeding gentle and kind. Whenever he quitted the room, his wife’s eyes
followed him. He behaved to her with a kind of mournful courtesy and
kindness remarkable in one of his blunt ways and ordinary rough manner. He
called her by her Christian name often and fondly, was very soft and
gentle with the children, especially with the boy, whom he did not love,
and being lax about church generally, he went thither and performed all
the offices (down even to listening to Doctor Tusher’s sermon) with great
devotion.
“He paces his room all night; what is it? Henry, find out what it is,”
Lady Castlewood said constantly to her young dependant. “He has sent three
letters to London,” she said, another day.
“Indeed, madam, they were to a lawyer,” Harry answered, who knew of these
letters, and had seen a part of the correspondence, which related to a new
loan my lord was raising; and when the young man remonstrated with his
patron, my lord said, “He was only raising money to pay off an old debt on
the property, which must be discharged.”
Regarding the money, Lady Castlewood was not in the least anxious. Few
fond women feel money-distressed; indeed you can hardly give a woman a
greater pleasure than to bid her pawn her diamonds for the man she loves;
and I remember hearing Mr. Congreve say of my Lord Marlborough, that the
reason why my lord was so successful with women as a young man was,
because he took money of them. “There are few men who will make such a
sacrifice for them,” says Mr. Congreve, who knew a part of the sex pretty
well.
Harry Esmond’s vacation was just over, and, as hath been said, he was
preparing to return to the University for his last term before taking his
degree and entering into the Church. He had made up his mind for this
office, not indeed with that reverence which becomes a man about to enter
upon a duty so holy, but with a worldly spirit of acquiescence in the
prudence of adopting that profession for his calling. But his reasoning
was that he owed all to the family of Castlewood, and loved better to be
near them than anywhere else in the world; that he might be useful to his
benefactors, who had the utmost confidence in him and affection for him in
return; that he might aid in bringing up the young heir of the house and
acting as his governor; that he might continue to be his dear patron’s and
mistress’s friend and adviser, who both were pleased to say that they
should ever look upon him as such: and so, by making himself useful to
those he loved best, he proposed to console himself for giving up of any
schemes of ambition which he might have had in his own bosom. Indeed, his
mistress had told him that she would not have him leave her; and whatever
she commanded was will to him.
The Lady Castlewood’s mind was greatly relieved in the last few days of
this well-remembered holiday time, by my lord’s announcing one morning,
after the post had brought him letters from London, in a careless tone,
that the Lord Mohun was gone to Paris, and was about to make a great
journey in Europe; and though Lord Castlewood’s own gloom did not wear
off, or his behaviour alter, yet this cause of anxiety being removed from
his lady’s mind, she began to be more hopeful and easy in her spirits:
striving too, with all her heart, and by all the means of soothing in her
power, to call back my lord’s cheerfulness and dissipate his moody humour.
He accounted for it himself, by saying that he was out of health; that he
wanted to see his physician; that he would go to London, and consult
Doctor Cheyne. It was agreed that his lordship and Harry Esmond should
make the journey as far as London together; and of a Monday morning, the
10th of October, in the year 1700, they set forwards towards London on
horseback. The day before being Sunday, and the rain pouring down, the
family did not visit church; and at night my lord read the service to his
family, very finely, and with a peculiar sweetness and gravity—speaking
the parting benediction, Harry thought, as solemn as ever he heard it. And
he kissed and embraced his wife and children before they went to their own
chambers with more fondness than he was ordinarily wont to show, and with
a solemnity and feeling of which they thought in after days with no small
comfort.
They took horse the next morning (after adieux from the family as tender
as on the night previous), lay that night on the road, and entered London
at nightfall; my lord going to the “Trumpet”, in the Cockpit, Whitehall, a
house used by the military in his time as a young man, and accustomed by
his lordship ever since.
An hour after my lord’s arrival (which showed that his visit had been
arranged beforehand), my lord’s man of business arrived from Gray’s Inn;
and thinking that his patron might wish to be private with the lawyer,
Esmond was for leaving them: but my lord said his business was short;
introduced Mr. Esmond particularly to the lawyer, who had been engaged for
the family in the old lord’s time; who said that he had paid the money, as
desired that day, to my Lord Mohun himself, at his lodgings in Bow Street;
that his lordship had expressed some surprise, as it was not customary to
employ lawyers, he said, in such transactions between men of honour; but,
nevertheless, he had returned my lord viscount’s note of hand, which he
held at his client’s disposition.
“I thought the Lord Mohun had been in Paris!” cried Mr. Esmond, in great
alarm and astonishment.
“He is come back at my invitation,” said my lord viscount. “We have
accounts to settle together.”
“I pray Heaven they are over, sir,” says Esmond.
“Oh, quite,” replied the other, looking hard at the young man. “He was
rather troublesome about that money which I told you I had lost to him at
play. And now ’tis paid, and we are quits on that score, and we shall meet
good friends again.”
“My lord,” cried out Esmond, “I am sure you are deceiving me, and that
there is a quarrel between the Lord Mohun and you.”
“Quarrel—pish! We shall sup together this very night, and drink a bottle.
Every man is ill-humoured who loses such a sum as I have lost. But now
’tis paid, and my anger is gone with it.”
“Where shall we sup, sir?” says Harry.
“_We!_ Let some gentlemen wait till they are asked,” says my lord
viscount, with a laugh. “You go to Duke Street, and see Mr. Betterton. You
love the play, I know. Leave me to follow my own devices; and in the
morning we’ll breakfast together, with what appetite we may, as the play
says.”
“By G——! my lord, I will not leave you this night,” says Harry Esmond. “I
think I know the cause of your dispute. I swear to you ’tis nothing. On
the very day the accident befell Lord Mohun, I was speaking to him about
it. I know that nothing has passed but idle gallantry on his part.”
“You know that nothing has passed but idle gallantry between Lord Mohun
and my wife,” says my lord, in a thundering voice—“you knew of this, and
did not tell me?”
“I knew more of it than my dear mistress did herself, sir—a thousand times
more. How was she, who was as innocent as a child, to know what was the
meaning of the covert addresses of a villain?”
“A villain he is, you allow, and would have taken my wife away from me.”
“Sir, she is as pure as an angel,” cried young Esmond.
“Have I said a word against her?” shrieks out my lord. “Did I ever doubt
that she was pure? It would have been the last day of her life when I did.
Do you fancy I think that _she_ would go astray? No, she hasn’t passion
enough for that. She neither sins nor forgives. I know her temper—and now
I’ve lost her: by Heaven I love her ten thousand times more than ever I
did—yes, when she was young and as beautiful as an angel—when she smiled
at me in her old father’s house, and used to lie in wait for me there as I
came from hunting—when I used to fling my head down on her little knees
and cry like a child on her lap—and swear I would reform and drink no
more, and play no more, and follow women no more; when all the men of the
Court used to be following her—when she used to look with her child more
beautiful, by George, than the Madonna in the Queen’s Chapel. I am not
good like her, I know it. Who is—by Heaven, who is? I tired and wearied
her, I know that very well. I could not talk to her. You men of wit and
books could do that, and I couldn’t—I felt I couldn’t. Why, when you was
but a boy of fifteen I could hear you two together talking your poetry and
your books till I was in such a rage that I was fit to strangle you. But
you were always a good lad, Harry, and I loved you, you know I did. And I
felt she didn’t belong to me: and the children don’t. And I besotted
myself, and gambled, and drank, and took to all sorts of devilries out of
despair and fury. And now comes this Mohun, and she likes him, I know she
likes him.”
“Indeed, and on my soul, you are wrong, sir,” Esmond cried.
“She takes letters from him,” cries my lord—“look here Harry,” and he
pulled out a paper with a brown stain of blood upon it. “It fell from him
that day he wasn’t killed. One of the grooms picked it up from the ground
and gave it me. Here it is in their d——d comedy jargon. ‘Divine
Gloriana—Why look so coldly on your slave who adores you? Have you no
compassion on the tortures you have seen me suffering? Do you vouchsafe no
reply to billets that are written with the blood of my heart.’ She had
more letters from him.”
“But she answered none,” cries Esmond.
“That’s not Mohun’s fault,” says my lord, “and I will be revenged on him,
as God’s in heaven, I will.”
“For a light word or two, will you risk your lady’s honour and your
family’s happiness, my lord?” Esmond interposed beseechingly.
“Psha—there shall be no question of my wife’s honour,” said my lord; “we
can quarrel on plenty of grounds beside. If I live, that villain will be
punished; if I fall, my family will be only the better: there will only be
a spendthrift the less to keep in the world: and Frank has better teaching
than his father. My mind is made up, Harry Esmond, and whatever the event
is I am easy about it. I leave my wife and you as guardians to the
children.”
Seeing that my lord was bent upon pursuing this quarrel, and that no
entreaties would draw him from it, Harry Esmond (then of a hotter and more
impetuous nature than now, when care, and reflection, and grey hairs have
calmed him) thought it was his duty to stand by his kind generous patron,
and said—“My lord, if you are determined upon war, you must not go into it
alone. ’Tis the duty of our house to stand by its chief: and I should
neither forgive myself nor you if you did not call me, or I should be
absent from you at a moment of danger.”
“Why, Harry, my poor boy, you are bred for a parson,” says my lord, taking
Esmond by the hand very kindly: “and it were a great pity that you should
meddle in the matter.”
“Your lordship thought of being a churchman once,” Harry answered, “and
your father’s orders did not prevent him fighting at Castlewood against
the Roundheads. Your enemies are mine, sir: I can use the foils, as you
have seen, indifferently well, and don’t think I shall be afraid when the
buttons are taken off ’em.” And then Harry explained with some blushes and
hesitation (for the matter was delicate, and he feared lest, by having put
himself forward in the quarrel, he might have offended his patron), how he
had himself expostulated with the Lord Mohun, and proposed to measure
swords with him if need were, and he could not be got to withdraw
peaceably in this dispute. “And I should have beat him, sir,” says Harry,
laughing. “He never could parry that _botte_ I brought from Cambridge. Let
us have half an hour of it, and rehearse—I can teach it your lordship:
’tis the most delicate point in the world, and if you miss it your
adversary’s sword is through you.”
“By George, Harry! you ought to be the head of the house,” says my lord
gloomily. “You had been better Lord Castlewood than a lazy sot like me,”
he added, drawing his hand across his eyes, and surveying his kinsman with
very kind and affectionate glances.
“Let us take our coats off and have half an hour’s practice before
nightfall,” says Harry, after thankfully grasping his patron’s manly hand.
“You are but a little bit of a lad,” says my lord good-humouredly; “but,
in faith, I believe you could do for that fellow. No, my boy,” he
continued, “I’ll have none of your feints and tricks of stabbing: I can
use my sword pretty well too, and will fight my own quarrel my own way.”
“But I shall be by to see fair play,” cries Harry.
“Yes, God bless you—you shall be by.”
“When is it, sir?” says Harry, for he saw that the matter had been
arranged privately, and beforehand, by my lord.
“’Tis arranged thus: I sent off a courier to Jack Westbury to say that I
wanted him specially. He knows for what, and will be here presently, and
drink part of that bottle of sack. Then we shall go to the theatre in Duke
Street, where we shall meet Mohun; and then we shall all go sup at the
‘Rose’ or the ‘Greyhound’. Then we shall call for cards, and there will be
probably a difference over the cards—and then, God help us!—either a
wicked villain and traitor shall go out of the world, or a poor worthless
devil, that doesn’t care to remain in it. I am better away, Hal—my wife
will be all the happier when I am gone,” says my lord, with a groan, that
tore the heart of Harry Esmond so that he fairly broke into a sob over his
patron’s kind hand.
“The business was talked over with Mohun before he left home—Castlewood I
mean”—my lord went on. “I took the letter in to him, which I had read, and
I charged him with his villany, and he could make no denial of it, only he
said that my wife was innocent.”
“And so she is; before Heaven, my lord, she is!” cries Harry.
“No doubt, no doubt. They always are,” says my lord. “No doubt, when she
heard he was killed, she fainted from accident.”
“But, my lord, _my_ name is Harry,” cried out Esmond, burning red. “You
told my lady, ‘Harry was killed!’ ”
“Damnation! shall I fight you too?” shouts my lord, in a fury. “Are you,
you little serpent, warmed by my fire, going to sting—_you?_—No, my boy,
you’re an honest boy; you are a good boy.” (And here he broke from rage
into tears even more cruel to see.) “You are an honest boy, and I love
you; and, by Heavens, I am so wretched that I don’t care what sword it is
that ends me. Stop, here’s Jack Westbury. Well, Jack! Welcome, old boy!
This is my kinsman, Harry Esmond.”
“Who brought your bowls for you at Castlewood, sir,” says Harry, bowing;
and the three gentlemen sat down and drank of that bottle of sack which
was prepared for them.
“Harry is number three,” says my lord. “You needn’t be afraid of him,
Jack.” And the colonel gave a look, as much as to say, “Indeed, he don’t
look as if I need.” And then my lord explained what he had only told by
hints before. When he quarrelled with Lord Mohun he was indebted to his
lordship in a sum of sixteen hundred pounds, for which Lord Mohun said he
proposed to wait until my lord viscount should pay him. My lord had raised
the sixteen hundred pounds and sent them to Lord Mohun that morning, and
before quitting home had put his affairs into order, and was now quite
ready to abide the issue of the quarrel.
When we had drunk a couple of bottles of sack, a coach was called, and the
three gentlemen went to the Duke’s Playhouse, as agreed. The play was one
of Mr. Wycherley’s—_Love in a Wood_.
Harry Esmond has thought of that play ever since with a kind of terror,
and of Mrs. Bracegirdle, the actress who performed the girl’s part in the
comedy. She was disguised as a page, and came and stood before the
gentlemen as they sat on the stage, and looked over her shoulder with a
pair of arch black eyes, and laughed at my lord, and asked what ailed the
gentlemen from the country, and had he had bad news from Bullock Fair?
Between the acts of the play the gentlemen crossed over and conversed
freely. There were two of Lord Mohun’s party, Captain Macartney, in a
military habit, and a gentleman in a suit of blue velvet and silver in a
fair periwig, with a rich fall of point of Venice lace—my lord the Earl of
Warwick and Holland. My lord had a paper of oranges, which he ate and
offered to the actresses, joking with them. And Mrs. Bracegirdle, when my
Lord Mohun said something rude, turned on him, and asked him what he did
there, and whether he and his friends had come to stab anybody else, as
they did poor Will Mountford? My lord’s dark face grew darker at this
taunt, and wore a mischievous fatal look. They that saw it remembered it,
and said so afterward.
When the play was ended the two parties joined company; and my Lord
Castlewood then proposed that they should go to a tavern and sup.
Lockit’s, the “Greyhound”, in Charing Cross, was the house selected. All
six marched together that way; the three lords going ahead, Lord Mohun’s
captain, and Colonel Westbury, and Harry Esmond, walking behind them. As
they walked, Westbury told Harry Esmond about his old friend Dick the
Scholar, who had got promotion, and was cornet of the Guards, and had
wrote a book called the _Christian Hero_, and had all the Guards to laugh
at him for his pains, for the Christian Hero was breaking the commandments
constantly, Westbury said, and had fought one or two duels already. And,
in a lower tone, Westbury besought young Mr. Esmond to take no part in the
quarrel. “There was no need for more seconds than one,” said the colonel,
“and the captain or Lord Warwick might easily withdraw.” But Harry said
no; he was bent on going through with the business. Indeed, he had a plan
in his head, which, he thought, might prevent my lord viscount from
engaging.
They went in at the bar of the tavern, and desired a private room and wine
and cards, and when the drawer had brought these, they began to drink and
call healths, and as long as the servants were in the room appeared very
friendly.
Harry Esmond’s plan was no other than to engage in talk with Lord Mohun,
to insult him, and so get the first of the quarrel. So when cards were
proposed he offered to play. “Psha!” says my Lord Mohun (whether wishing
to save Harry, or not choosing to try the _botte de Jésuite_, it is not to
be known)—“young gentlemen from college should not play these stakes. You
are too young.”
“Who dares say I am too young?” broke out Harry. “Is your lordship
afraid?”
“Afraid!” cries out Mohun.
But my good lord viscount saw the move—“I’ll play you for ten moidores,
Mohun,” says he—“You silly boy, we don’t play for groats here as you do at
Cambridge:” and Harry, who had no such sum in his pocket (for his
half-year’s salary was always pretty well spent before it was due), fell
back with rage and vexation in his heart that he had not money enough to
stake.
“I’ll stake the young gentleman a crown,” says the Lord Mohun’s captain.
“I thought crowns were rather scarce with the gentlemen of the army,” says
Harry.
“Do they birch at college?” says the captain.
“They birch fools,” says Harry, “and they cane bullies, and they fling
puppies into the water.”
“Faith, then, there’s some escapes drowning,” says the captain, who was an
Irishman; and all the gentlemen began to laugh, and made poor Harry only
more angry.
My Lord Mohun presently snuffed a candle. It was when the drawers brought
in fresh bottles and glasses and were in the room—on which my lord
viscount said—“The deuce take you, Mohun, how damned awkward you are!
Light the candle, you drawer.”
“Damned awkward is a damned awkward expression, my lord,” says the other.
“Town gentlemen don’t use such words—or ask pardon if they do.”
“I’m a country gentleman,” says my lord viscount.
“I see it by your manner,” says my Lord Mohun. “No man shall say ‘damned
awkward’ to me.”
“I fling the words in your face, my lord,” says the other; “shall I send
the cards too?”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! before the servants?” cry out Colonel Westbury and
my Lord Warwick in a breath. The drawers go out of the room hastily. They
tell the people below of the quarrel upstairs.
“Enough has been said,” says Colonel Westbury. “Will your lordships meet
to-morrow morning?”
“Will my Lord Castlewood withdraw his words?” asks the Earl of Warwick.
“My Lord Castlewood will be —— first,” says Colonel Westbury.
“Then we have nothing for it. Take notice, gentlemen, there have been
outrageous words—reparation asked and refused.”
“And refused,” says my Lord Castlewood, putting on his hat. “Where shall
the meeting be? and when?”
“Since my lord refuses me satisfaction, which I deeply regret, there is no
time so good as now,” says my Lord Mohun. “Let us have chairs and go to
Leicester Field.”
“Are your lordship and I to have the honour of exchanging a pass or two?”
says Colonel Westbury, with a low bow to my Lord of Warwick and Holland.
“It is an honour for me,” says my lord, with a profound congée, “to be
matched with a gentleman who has been at Mons and Namur.”
“Will your reverence permit me to give you a lesson?” says the captain.
“Nay, nay, gentlemen, two on a side are plenty,” says Harry’s patron.
“Spare the boy, Captain Macartney,” and he shook Harry’s hand—for the last
time, save one, in his life.
At the bar of the tavern all the gentlemen stopped, and my lord viscount
said, laughing, to the barwoman, that those cards set people sadly
a-quarrelling; but that the dispute was over now, and the parties were all
going away to my Lord Mohun’s house, in Bow Street, to drink a bottle more
before going to bed.
A half-dozen of chairs were now called, and the six gentlemen stepping
into them, the word was privately given to the chairmen to go to Leicester
Field, where the gentlemen were set down opposite the “Standard” Tavern.
It was midnight, and the town was abed by this time, and only a few lights
in the windows of the houses; but the night was bright enough for the
unhappy purpose which the disputants came about; and so all six entered
into that fatal square, the chairmen standing without the railing and
keeping the gate, lest any persons should disturb the meeting.
All that happened there hath been matter of public notoriety, and is
recorded, for warning to lawless men, in the annals of our country. After
being engaged for not more than a couple of minutes, as Harry Esmond
thought (though being occupied at the time with his own adversary’s point,
which was active, he may not have taken a good note of time), a cry from
the chairmen without, who were smoking their pipes, and leaning over the
railings of the field as they watched the dim combat within, announced
that some catastrophe had happened which caused Esmond to drop his sword
and look round, at which moment his enemy wounded him in the right hand.
But the young man did not heed this hurt much, and ran up to the place
where he saw his dear master was down.
My Lord Mohun was standing over him.
“Are you much hurt, Frank?” he asked, in a hollow voice.
“I believe I’m a dead man,” my lord said from the ground.
“No, no, not so,” says the other; “and I call God to witness, Frank
Esmond, that I would have asked your pardon, had you but given me a
chance. In—in the first cause of our falling out, I swear that no one was
to blame but me, and—and that my lady——”
“Hush!” says my poor lord viscount, lifting himself on his elbow, and
speaking faintly. “’Twas a dispute about the cards—the cursed cards.
Harry, my boy, are you wounded, too? God help thee! I loved thee, Harry,
and thou must watch over my little Frank—and—and carry this little heart
to my wife.”
And here my dear lord felt in his breast for a locket he wore there, and,
in the act, fell back, fainting.
We were all at this terrified, thinking him dead; but Esmond and Colonel
Westbury bade the chairmen to come into the field; and so my lord was
carried to one Mr. Aimes, a surgeon, in Long Acre, who kept a bath, and
there the house was wakened up, and the victim of this quarrel carried in.
My lord viscount was put to bed, and his wound looked to by the surgeon,
who seemed both kind and skilful. When he had looked to my lord, he
bandaged up Harry Esmond’s hand (who, from loss of blood, had fainted too,
in the house, and may have been some time unconscious); and when the young
man came to himself, you may be sure he eagerly asked what news there were
of his dear patron; on which the surgeon carried him to the room where the
Lord Castlewood lay; who had already sent for a priest; and desired
earnestly, they said, to speak with his kinsman. He was lying on a bed,
very pale and ghastly, with that fixed, fatal look in his eyes, which
betokens death; and faintly beckoning all the other persons away from him
with his hand, and crying out “Only Harry Esmond”, the hand fell powerless
down on the coverlet, as Harry came forward, and knelt down and kissed it.
“Thou art all but a priest, Harry,” my lord viscount gasped out, with a
faint smile, and pressure of his cold hand. “Are they all gone? Let me
make thee a death-bed confession.”
And with sacred Death waiting, as it were, at the bed-foot, as an awful
witness of his words, the poor dying soul gasped out his last wishes in
respect of his family;—his humble profession of contrition for his
faults;—and his charity towards the world he was leaving. Some things he
said concerned Harry Esmond as much as they astonished him. And my lord
viscount, sinking visibly, was in the midst of these strange confessions,
when the ecclesiastic for whom my lord had sent, Mr. Atterbury, arrived.
This gentleman had reached to no great church dignity as yet, but was only
preacher at St. Bride’s, drawing all the town thither by his eloquent
sermons. He was godson to my lord, who had been pupil to his father; had
paid a visit to Castlewood from Oxford more than once; and it was by his
advice, I think, that Harry Esmond was sent to Cambridge, rather than to
Oxford, of which place Mr. Atterbury, though a distinguished member, spoke
but ill.
Our messenger found the good priest already at his books, at five o’clock
in the morning, and he followed the man eagerly to the house where my poor
lord viscount lay—Esmond watching him, and taking his dying words from his
mouth.
My lord, hearing of Mr. Atterbury’s arrival, and squeezing Esmond’s hand,
asked to be alone with the priest; and Esmond left them there for this
solemn interview. You may be sure that his own prayers and grief
accompanied that dying benefactor. My lord had said to him that which
confounded the young man—informed him of a secret which greatly concerned
him. Indeed, after hearing it, he had had good cause for doubt and dismay;
for mental anguish as well as resolution. While the colloquy between Mr.
Atterbury and his dying penitent took place within, an immense contest of
perplexity was agitating Lord Castlewood’s young companion.
At the end of an hour—it may be more—Mr. Atterbury came out of the room
looking very hard at Esmond, and holding a paper.
“He is on the brink of God’s awful judgement,” the priest whispered. “He
has made his breast clean to me. He forgives and believes, and makes
restitution. Shall it be in public? Shall we call a witness to sign it?”
“God knows,” sobbed out the young man, “my dearest lord has only done me
kindness all his life.”
The priest put the paper into Esmond’s hand. He looked at it. It swam
before his eyes.
“’Tis a confession,” he said.
“’Tis as you please,” said Mr. Atterbury.
There was a fire in the room, where the cloths were drying for the baths,
and there lay a heap in a corner, saturated with the blood of my dear
lord’s body. Esmond went to the fire, and threw the paper into it. ’Twas a
great chimney with glazed Dutch tiles. How we remember such trifles in
such awful moments!—the scrap of the book that we have read in a great
grief—the taste of that last dish that we have eaten before a duel or some
such supreme meeting or parting. On the Dutch tiles at the bagnio was a
rude picture representing Jacob in hairy gloves, cheating Isaac of Esau’s
birthright. The burning paper lighted it up.
“’Tis only a confession, Mr. Atterbury,” said the young man. He leaned his
head against the mantelpiece: a burst of tears came to his eyes. They were
the first he had shed as he sat by his lord, scared by this calamity and
more yet by what the poor dying gentleman had told him, and shocked to
think that he should be the agent of bringing this double misfortune on
those he loved best.
“Let us go to him,” said Mr. Esmond. And accordingly they went into the
next chamber, where, by this time, the dawn had broke, which showed my
lord’s poor pale face and wild appealing eyes, that wore that awful fatal
look of coming dissolution. The surgeon was with him. He went into the
chamber as Atterbury came out thence. My lord viscount turned round his
sick eyes towards Esmond. It choked the other to hear that rattle in his
throat.
“My lord viscount,” says Mr. Atterbury, “Mr. Esmond wants no witnesses,
and hath burned the paper.”
“My dearest master!” Esmond said, kneeling down, and taking his hand and
kissing it.
My lord viscount sprang up in his bed, and flung his arms round Esmond.
“God bl—bless...,” was all he said. The blood rushed from his mouth,
deluging the young man. My dearest lord was no more. He was gone with a
blessing on his lips, and love and repentance and kindness in his manly
heart.
“_Benedicti benedicentes_,” says Mr. Atterbury, and the young man kneeling
at the bedside, groaned out an Amen.
“Who shall take the news to her?” was Mr. Esmond’s next thought. And on
this he besought Mr. Atterbury to bear the tidings to Castlewood. He could
not face his mistress himself with those dreadful news. Mr. Atterbury
complying kindly, Esmond writ a hasty note on his table-book to my lord’s
man, bidding him get the horses for Mr. Atterbury, and ride with him, and
send Esmond’s own valise to the Gatehouse prison, whither he resolved to
go and give himself up.
Book II. Contains Mr. Esmond’s Military Life, And Other Matters
Appertaining To The Esmond Family
Chapter I. I Am In Prison, And Visited, But Not Consoled There
Those may imagine, who have seen death untimely strike down persons
revered and beloved, and know how unavailing consolation is, what was
Harry Esmond’s anguish after being an actor in that ghastly midnight scene
of blood and homicide. He could not, he felt, have faced his dear
mistress, and told her that story. He was thankful that kind Atterbury
consented to break the sad news to her; but, besides his grief, which he
took into prison with him, he had that in his heart which secretly cheered
and consoled him.
A great secret had been told to Esmond by his unhappy stricken kinsman,
lying on his death-bed. Were he to disclose it, as in equity and honour he
might do, the discovery would but bring greater grief upon those whom he
loved best in the world, and who were sad enough already. Should he bring
down shame and perplexity upon all those beings to whom he was attached by
so many tender ties of affection and gratitude? degrade his father’s
widow? impeach and sully his father’s and kinsman’s honour? and for what?
for a barren title, to be worn at the expense of an innocent boy, the son
of his dearest benefactress. He had debated this matter in his conscience,
whilst his poor lord was making his dying confession. On one side were
ambition, temptation, justice even; but love, gratitude, and fidelity,
pleaded on the other. And when the struggle was over in Harry’s mind, a
glow of righteous happiness filled it; and it was with grateful tears in
his eyes that he returned thanks to God for that decision which he had
been enabled to make.
“When I was denied by my own blood,” thought he; “these dearest friends
received and cherished me. When I was a nameless orphan myself, and needed
a protector, I found one in yonder kind soul, who has gone to his account
repenting of the innocent wrong he has done.”
And with this consoling thought he went away to give himself up at the
prison, after kissing the cold lips of his benefactor.
It was on the third day after he had come to the Gatehouse prison (where
he lay in no small pain from his wound, which inflamed and ached
severely); and with those thoughts and resolutions that have been just
spoke of, to depress, and yet to console him, that H. Esmond’s keeper came
and told him that a visitor was asking for him, and though he could not
see her face, which was enveloped in a black hood, her whole figure, too,
being veiled and covered with the deepest mourning, Esmond knew at once
that his visitor was his dear mistress.
He got up from his bed, where he was lying, being very weak; and advancing
towards her, as the retiring keeper shut the door upon him and his guest
in that sad place, he put forward his left hand (for the right was wounded
and bandaged), and he would have taken that kind one of his mistress,
which had done so many offices of friendship for him for so many years.
But the Lady Castlewood went back from him, putting back her hood, and
leaning against the great stanchioned door which the gaoler had just
closed upon them. Her face was ghastly white, as Esmond saw it, looking
from the hood; and her eyes, ordinarily so sweet and tender, were fixed at
him with such a tragic glance of woe and anger, as caused the young man,
unaccustomed to unkindness from that person, to avert his own glances from
her face.
“And this, Mr. Esmond,” she said, “is where I see you; and ’tis to this
you have brought me!”
“You have come to console me in my calamity, madam,” said he (though, in
truth, he scarce knew how to address her, his emotions at beholding her,
so overpowered him).
She advanced a little, but stood silent and trembling, looking out at him
from her black draperies, with her small white hands clasped together, and
quivering lips and hollow eyes.
“Not to reproach me,” he continued, after a pause, “My grief is sufficient
as it is.”
“Take back your hand—do not touch me with it!” she cried. “Look! there’s
blood on it!”
“I wish they had taken it all,” said Esmond; “if you are unkind to me.”
“Where is my husband?” she broke out. “Give me back my husband, Henry? Why
did you stand by at midnight and see him murdered? Why did the traitor
escape who did it? You, the champion of your house, who offered to die for
us! You that he loved and trusted, and to whom I confided him—you that
vowed devotion and gratitude, and I believed you—yes, I believed you—why
are you here, and my noble Francis gone? Why did you come among us? You
have only brought us grief and sorrow; and repentance, bitter, bitter
repentance, as a return for our love and kindness. Did I ever do you a
wrong, Henry? You were but an orphan child when I first saw you—when _he_
first saw you, who was so good, and noble, and trusting. He would have had
you sent away, but, like a foolish woman, I besought him to let you stay.
And you pretended to love us, and we believed you—and you made our house
wretched, and my husband’s heart went from me: and I lost him through
you—I lost him—the husband of my youth, I say. I worshipped him: you know
I worshipped him—and he was changed to me. He was no more my Francis of
old—my dear, dear soldier. He loved me before he saw you; and I loved him;
oh, God is my witness how I loved him! Why did he not send you from among
us? ’Twas only his kindness, that could refuse me nothing then. And, young
as you were—yes, and weak and alone—there was evil, I knew there was evil
in keeping you. I read it in your face and eyes. I saw that they boded
harm to us—and it came, I knew it would. Why did you not die when you had
the small-pox—and I came myself and watched you, and you didn’t know me in
your delirium—and you called out for me, though I was there at your side.
All that has happened since, was a just judgement on my wicked heart—my
wicked jealous heart. Oh, I am punished—awfully punished! My husband lies
in his blood—murdered for defending me, my kind, kind, generous lord—and
you were by, and you let him die, Henry!”
These words, uttered in the wildness of her grief, by one who was
ordinarily quiet, and spoke seldom except with a gentle smile and a
soothing tone, rung in Esmond’s ear; and ’tis said that he repeated many
of them in the fever into which he now fell from his wound, and perhaps
from the emotion which such passionate, undeserved upbraidings caused him.
It seemed as if his very sacrifices and love for this lady and her family
were to turn to evil and reproach: as if his presence amongst them was
indeed a cause of grief, and the continuance of his life but woe and
bitterness to theirs. As the Lady Castlewood spoke bitterly, rapidly,
without a tear, he never offered a word of appeal or remonstrance; but sat
at the foot of his prison-bed, stricken only with the more pain at
thinking it was that soft and beloved hand which should stab him so
cruelly, and powerless against her fatal sorrow. Her words as she spoke
struck the chords of all his memory, and the whole of his boyhood and
youth passed within him; whilst this lady, so fond and gentle but
yesterday—this good angel whom he had loved and worshipped—stood before
him, pursuing him with keen words and aspect malign.
“I wish I were in my lord’s place,” he groaned out. “It was not my fault
that I was not there, madam. But Fate is stronger than all of us, and
willed what has come to pass. It had been better for me to have died when
I had the illness.”
“Yes, Henry,” said she—and as she spoke she looked at him with a glance
that was at once so fond and so sad, that the young man, tossing up his
arms, wildly fell back, hiding his head in the coverlet of the bed. As he
turned he struck against the wall with his wounded hand, displacing the
ligature; and he felt the blood rushing again from the wound. He
remembered feeling a secret pleasure at the accident—and thinking,
“Suppose I were to end now, who would grieve for me?”
This haemorrhage, or the grief and despair in which the luckless young man
was at the time of the accident, must have brought on a deliquium
presently; for he had scarce any recollection afterwards, save of some
one, his mistress probably, seizing his hand—and then of the buzzing noise
in his ears as he awoke, with two or three persons of the prison around
his bed, whereon he lay in a pool of blood from his arm.
It was now bandaged up again by the prison surgeon, who happened to be in
the place; and the governor’s wife and servant, kind people both, were
with the patient. Esmond saw his mistress still in the room when he awoke
from his trance; but she went away without a word; though the governor’s
wife told him that she sat in her room for some time afterward, and did
not leave the prison until she heard that Esmond was likely to do well.
Days afterwards, when Esmond was brought out of a fever which he had, and
which attacked him that night pretty sharply, the honest keeper’s wife
brought her patient a handkerchief fresh washed and ironed, and at the
corner of which he recognized his mistress’s well-known cipher and
viscountess’s crown. “The lady had bound it round his arm when he fainted,
and before she called for help,” the keeper’s wife said; “poor lady; she
took on sadly about her husband. He has been buried to-day, and a many of
the coaches of the nobility went with him,—my Lord Marlborough’s and my
Lord Sunderland’s, and many of the officers of the Guards, in which he
served in the old king’s time; and my lady has been with her two children
to the king at Kensington, and asked for justice against my Lord Mohun,
who is in hiding, and my lord the Earl of Warwick and Holland, who is
ready to give himself up and take his trial.”
Such were the news, coupled with assertions about her own honesty and that
of Molly her maid, who would never have stolen a certain trumpery gold
sleeve-button of Mr. Esmond’s that was missing after his fainting fit,
that the keeper’s wife brought to her lodger. His thoughts followed to
that untimely grave, the brave heart, the kind friend, the gallant
gentleman, honest of word and generous of thought (if feeble of purpose,
but are his betters much stronger than he?) who had given him bread and
shelter when he had none; home and love when he needed them; and who, if
he had kept one vital secret from him, had done that of which he repented
ere dying—a wrong indeed, but one followed by remorse, and occasioned by
almost irresistible temptation.
Esmond took his handkerchief when his nurse left him, and very likely
kissed it, and looked at the bauble embroidered in the corner. “It has
cost thee grief enough,” he thought, “dear lady, so loving and so tender.
Shall I take it from thee and thy children? No, never! Keep it, and wear
it, my little Frank, my pretty boy. If I cannot make a name for myself, I
can die without one. Some day, when my dear mistress sees my heart, I
shall be righted; or if not here or now, why, elsewhere; where Honour doth
not follow us, but where Love reigns perpetual.”
’Tis needless to narrate here, as the reports of the lawyers already have
chronicled them, the particulars or issue of that trial which ensued upon
my Lord Castlewood’s melancholy homicide. Of the two lords engaged in that
said matter, the second, my lord the Earl of Warwick and Holland, who had
been engaged with Colonel Westbury, and wounded by him, was found not
guilty by his peers, before whom he was tried (under the presidence of the
Lord Steward, Lord Somers); and the principal, the Lord Mohun, being found
guilty of the manslaughter (which, indeed, was forced upon him, and of
which he repented most sincerely), pleaded his clergy; and so was
discharged without any penalty. The widow of the slain nobleman, as it was
told us in prison, showed an extraordinary spirit; and, though she had to
wait for ten years before her son was old enough to compass it, declared
she would have revenge of her husband’s murderer. So much and suddenly had
grief, anger, and misfortune appeared to change her. But fortune, good or
ill, as I take it, does not change men and women. It but develops their
characters. As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he
does not know till he takes up the pen to write, so the heart is a secret
even to him (or her) who has it in his own breast. Who hath not found
himself surprised into revenge, or action, or passion, for good or evil;
whereof the seeds lay within him, latent and unsuspected, until the
occasion called them forth? With the death of her lord, a change seemed to
come over the whole conduct and mind of Lady Castlewood; but of this we
shall speak in the right season and anon.
The lords being tried then before their peers at Westminster, according to
their privilege, being brought from the Tower with state processions and
barges, and accompanied by lieutenants and axe-men, the commoners engaged
in that melancholy fray took their trial at Newgate, as became them; and,
being all found guilty, pleaded likewise their benefit of clergy. The
sentence, as we all know, in these cases is, that the culprit lies a year
in prison, or during the king’s pleasure, and is burned in the hand, or
only stamped with a cold iron; or this part of the punishment is
altogether remitted at the grace of the sovereign. So Harry Esmond found
himself a criminal and a prisoner at two-and-twenty years old; as for the
two colonels, his comrades, they took the matter very lightly. Duelling
was a part of their business; and they could not in honour refuse any
invitations of that sort.
But the case was different with Mr. Esmond. His life was changed by that
stroke of the sword which destroyed his kind patron’s. As he lay in
prison, old Dr. Tusher fell ill and died; and Lady Castlewood appointed
Thomas Tusher to the vacant living; about the filling of which she had a
thousand times fondly talked to Harry Esmond: how they never should part;
how he should educate her boy; how to be a country clergyman, like saintly
George Herbert, or pious Dr. Ken, was the happiness and greatest lot in
life; how (if he were obstinately bent on it, though, for her part, she
owned rather to holding Queen Bess’s opinion, that a bishop should have no
wife, and if not a bishop why a clergyman?) she would find a good wife for
Harry Esmond: and so on, with a hundred pretty prospects told by fireside
evenings, in fond prattle, as the children played about the hall. All
these plans were overthrown now. Thomas Tusher wrote to Esmond, as he lay
in prison, announcing that his patroness had conferred upon him the living
his reverend father had held for many years; that she never, after the
tragical events which had occurred (whereof Tom spoke with a very edifying
horror), could see in the revered Tusher’s pulpit, or at her son’s table,
the man who was answerable for the father’s life; that her ladyship bade
him to say that she prayed for her kinsman’s repentance and his worldly
happiness; that he was free to command her aid for any scheme of life
which he might propose to himself; but that on this side of the grave she
would see him no more. And Tusher, for his own part, added that Harry
should have his prayers as a friend of his youth, and commended him whilst
he was in prison to read certain works of theology, which his reverence
pronounced to be very wholesome for sinners in his lamentable condition.
And this was the return for a life of devotion—this the end of years of
affectionate intercourse and passionate fidelity! Harry would have died
for his patron, and was held as little better than his murderer: he had
sacrificed, she did not know how much, for his mistress, and she threw him
aside—he had endowed her family with all they had, and she talked about
giving him alms as to a menial! The grief for his patron’s loss: the pains
of his own present position, and doubts as to the future: all these were
forgotten under the sense of the consummate outrage which he had to
endure, and overpowered by the superior pang of that torture.
He writ back a letter to Mr. Tusher from his prison, congratulating his
reverence upon his appointment to the living of Castlewood: sarcastically
bidding him to follow in the footsteps of his admirable father, whose gown
had descended upon him—thanking her ladyship for her offer of alms, which
he said he should trust not to need; and beseeching her to remember that,
if ever her determination should change towards him, he would be ready to
give her proofs of a fidelity which had never wavered, and which ought
never to have been questioned by that house. “And if we meet no more, or
only as strangers in this world,” Mr. Esmond concluded, “a sentence
against the cruelty and injustice of which I disdain to appeal; hereafter
she will know who was faithful to her, and whether she had any cause to
suspect the love and devotion of her kinsman and servant.”
After the sending of this letter, the poor young fellow’s mind was more at
ease than it had been previously. The blow had been struck, and he had
borne it. His cruel goddess had shaken her wings and fled: and left him
alone and friendless, but _virtute sua_. And he had to bear him up, at
once the sense of his right and the feeling of his wrongs, his honour and
his misfortune. As I have seen men waking and running to arms at a sudden
trumpet; before emergency a manly heart leaps up resolute; meets the
threatening danger with undaunted countenance; and, whether conquered or
conquering, faces it always. Ah! no man knows his strength or his
weakness, till occasion proves them. If there be some thoughts and actions
of his life from the memory of which a man shrinks with shame, sure there
are some which he may be proud to own and remember; forgiven injuries,
conquered temptations (now and then), and difficulties vanquished by
endurance.
-------------------------------------
It was these thoughts regarding the living, far more than any great
poignancy of grief respecting the dead, which affected Harry Esmond whilst
in prison after his trial: but it may be imagined that he could take no
comrade of misfortune into the confidence of his feelings, and they
thought it was remorse and sorrow for his patron’s loss which affected the
young man, in error of which opinion he chose to leave them. As a
companion he was so moody and silent that the two officers, his fellow
sufferers, left him to himself mostly, liked little very likely what they
knew of him, consoled themselves with dice, cards, and the bottle, and
whiled away their own captivity in their own way. It seemed to Esmond as
if he lived years in that prison: and was changed and aged when he came
out of it. At certain periods of life we live years of emotion in a few
weeks—and look back on those times, as on great gaps between the old life
and the new. You do not know how much you suffer in those critical
maladies of the heart, until the disease is over and you look back on it
afterwards. During the time, the suffering is at least sufferable. The day
passes in more or less of pain, and the night wears away somehow. ’Tis
only in after-days that we see what the danger has been—as a man out
a-hunting or riding for his life looks at a leap, and wonders how he
should have survived the taking of it. O dark months of grief and rage! of
wrong and cruel endurance! He is old now who recalls you. Long ago he has
forgiven and blest the soft hand that wounded him: but the mark is there,
and the wound is cicatrized only—no time, tears, caresses, or repentance,
can obliterate the scar. We are indocile to put up with grief, however.
_Reficimus rates quassas_: we tempt the ocean again and again, and try
upon new ventures. Esmond thought of his early time as a novitiate, and of
this past trial as an initiation before entering into life—as our young
Indians undergo tortures silently before they pass to the rank of warriors
in the tribe.
The officers, meanwhile, who were not let into the secret of the grief
which was gnawing at the side of their silent young friend, and being
accustomed to such transactions, in which one comrade or another was daily
paying the forfeit of the sword, did not of course bemoan themselves very
inconsolably about the fate of their late companion in arms. This one told
stories of former adventures of love, or war, or pleasure, in which poor
Frank Esmond had been engaged; t’other recollected how a constable had
been bilked, or a tavern-bully beaten: whilst my lord’s poor widow was
sitting at his tomb worshipping him as an actual saint and spotless
hero—so the visitors said who had news of Lady Castlewood; and Westbury
and Macartney had pretty nearly had all the town to come and see them.
The duel, its fatal termination, the trial of the two peers and the three
commoners concerned, had caused the greatest excitement in the town. The
prints and News Letters were full of them. The three gentlemen in Newgate
were almost as much crowded as the bishops in the Tower, or a highwayman
before execution. We were allowed to live in the governor’s house, as hath
been said, both before trial and after condemnation, waiting the king’s
pleasure; nor was the real cause of the fatal quarrel known, so closely
had my lord and the two other persons who knew it kept the secret, but
every one imagined that the origin of the meeting was a gambling dispute.
Except fresh air, the prisoners had, upon payment, most things they could
desire. Interest was made that they should not mix with the vulgar
convicts, whose ribald choruses and loud laughter and curses could be
heard from their own part of the prison, where they and the miserable
debtors were confined pell-mell.