The House of Egremont

ROGER WALKED AROUND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BUSH ... HAT IN HAND

The
House of Egremont

A Novel

By
Molly Elliot Seawell

ILLUSTRATED BY C. M. RELYEA

New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1900

Copyright, 1900
By Charles Scribner’s Sons

Dramatic and all other rights
reserved

UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE
HOUSE OF EGREMONT

CHAPTER I
IN WHICH ROGER EGREMONT MAKES HIS BOW TO THE WORLD

THE fortunes of the House of Egremont had their first great bloom through the agency of a platter of beans; and through a platter of beans more than a hundred years later the elder branch was ousted from one of the greatest estates in England, became wanderers and gentlemen adventurers throughout Europe, fought in quarrels not their own, served sovereigns of foreign countries, knew the dazzling heights of glory, and fell into the mire of penury and disrepute. An Egremont had the ear of kings, and another Egremont mounted the gallows. They mated sometimes with princes and dukes, and sometimes they were thought fit to mate with the daughters of their gaolers. Some of them were great at play, and met and vanquished the best players of Europe on the field of the cloth of green; other Egremonts were ascetics and wore hair shirts next their skins, and fasted and prayed extremely. They seemed the favorite playthings of destiny, which had a showman’s way of exhibiting them in all the ups and downs, the glories and shames, of human vicissitudes.

The first trick she played them was to their advantage. John Egremont, a handsome, red-blooded country squire, of infinite assurance, happened to catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth when she was befooling the world with the notion that she, at the age of forty, would marry the boy Duke of Anjou, twenty years younger than herself. Part of this play was that the Queen should pine and lose her appetite, and swear wildly one day that she would never marry a man who might “flout the old woman,” and then proceed to write the Duke a love-letter which would shame a dairymaid. The Duke, having tired of the whole business, took ship for France, while the Queen took to her bed at her palace of Westminster and moaned and wept incessantly. Nothing would she eat. John Egremont, being in the Queen’s anteroom when one of her maids came out lamenting that the Queen could eat nothing, ran down into the kitchen, snatched up a platter of beans, the first thing on which he could lay hands, and was about to run away with it. The cooks, however, were valiant men though humble, and they fell upon him with basting ladles and rolling-pins and turnspits, so that John Egremont had to draw his sword. This he did, slashing out right and left, and pinking more than one of them; but nevertheless, carrying his beans high above his head, he escaped from the mêlée, and flew back to the Queen’s apartments. Pushing his way into her presence,—a thing easily forgiven by her when the man was young and comely,—he presented the beans on his knees to her. The Queen, lying wrapped in a great mantle, with her face in her hands, was persuaded to turn and look at the kneeling Egremont. Something flashed from her cold bright eyes into his cold bright eyes, and the daughter of Henry the Eighth suddenly burst into that loud, ringing Tudor laugh, which was like the shout of a clarion. Whether it was the homeliness of the dish, or the expression of knowingness in Egremont’s handsome eyes, or that she was tired of the play, is all one. She ate the beans,—Egremont meanwhile telling her in moving language of his fight with the cooks, and showing her his mantle, which bore the marks of the greasy encounter. At this, Elizabeth Tudor laughed louder than ever; and when Egremont kissed her beautiful white hands, after she had washed them in a silver basin, she fingered fondly the short curls upon his neck, as she was wont to do with handsome young fellows. From that day to the time, six months before her death, when she fingered weakly the curls on the neck of Egremont’s son—a handsome young man—as she had fingered his father’s, and laughed feebly the old Tudor laugh, she was the sturdy friend of the Egremonts. It mattered little that they were staunch believers in the old religion, and that the Egremont dames had mass daily in a secret chapel, and at their chief estate of Egremont was a “priest’s hole,” where the priest was hidden when persecution raged. Elizabeth Tudor was the only one of her race who was not consumed with a rage for religion; but she, being a perfectly good-natured sceptic, merely laughed in her sleeve at those who risked their persons and estates for conscience’ sake. True, the queer Elizabethan religion afforded a very good club wherewith to pound those subjects, otherwise distasteful or insubordinate to her Majesty, but men as comely, well born, and debonair as John Egremont were at liberty to believe what they liked, as long as they came to court, flattered the Queen, and made her great presents. So she continued to give profitable places to the Egremonts, swearing flatly to her lords in council her great, mouth-filling oath, “By God’s Son!” that Egremont, to her certain knowledge, had conformed to the last new statutes, and to the very last days of her life remained a good friend and protector to that family.

The Egremonts seemed to be gifted with the art of pleasing kings. They were as much in favor with James the First as they had been with the mighty princess whose mantle fitted Scotch James as well as royal robes fit a sign-post. He played the fool with them as he did with all his favorites, but put money in their purses for it, and their estates grew. Poor stubborn Charles the First found the Egremonts loyal to him in his endeavors to rule the English people as they did not wish to be ruled; and, although they suffered somewhat at the hands of Cromwell, the second Charles found them to his heart’s liking, and repaid them twice over.

There were many Egremonts then, younger sons of younger sons, and they held together strongly in certain things, and differed angrily and loudly upon others. They were not a race of milksops, but sinewy men and women, red-blooded like their Elizabethan ancestor. Their motto was, “Fear God, and take your own part.” Some of them feared God, but all of them took their own part with firmness and determination. Although they held firmly to their religion, they frequently took liberties with the Decalogue; but having received great benefits from their sovereigns, repaid it with a handsome loyalty.

The head of the house in the merry days of Charles the Second was a certain John Egremont, comely and debonair, like his forbears, but cold of heart and a calculator. Like most men of that type, his loves were few and strange. He footed it at court with the best of them, was good at playing and at fighting, and thought with King Charles that God would not forever damn a man for taking a little pleasure out of the way. He was rather proud of his reputation as a sad dog, and it was in no way impaired during a brief married life. The yoke was light, and was soon lifted by death; so, within a year or two John Egremont was back at court, leaving a little motherless boy at Egremont. Then he took a notion to make the grand tour,—a quarrel with Lady Castlemaine rendering it very necessary that he should absent himself from England for a time. It was three years before he returned, but my Lady Castlemaine had not cooled off, nor did she during the remainder of John Egremont’s life.

The next seven years were spent by him in back-stairs negotiations to get back to court, and in long absences on the Continent; and meanwhile his son and heir, the little Roger, led at Egremont the most neglected life possible, so far as his father was concerned. He had, it is true, a tutor, a guzzling, tipsy creature, whom the boy despised and hated, and from whom he would learn nothing. The tutor, however, secure in the indifference of the lad’s father, troubled himself not at all about Roger’s learning, or want of learning; and so the boy grew up as ignorant as a clod concerning books, but not so ignorant about some other important things. John Egremont’s absences from England, and his stony nature, left him but few friends, even among his own kindred, thus breaking the traditions of his family. The little Roger, therefore, was reared in loneliness, except for the companionship of one other lad, a far-off cousin, Dicky Egremont. Dicky was almost as ill off for friends as Roger, his nearest relative being a paralytic old grandfather, who had served under Prince Rupert, and eked out an existence in what was little more than a cottage on the Egremont estate. The two boys were perpetually together, and had no other company but servants. Roger could not be called a handsome lad, although he had ever a straight, slender figure, fine white teeth in his wide mouth, and a profusion of beautifully curling light-brown hair. But Dicky was rather a homely little boy, in spite of his apple cheeks and his dimples and a very roguish smile; and although only two years younger than Roger, he always seemed very much more so, and Roger early acquired the habit of speaking to him and of him as if Dicky were an infant, and he, Roger, were an hundred years old. This was so marked that Roger, at eleven years of age, thought the nine-year-old Dicky too young to share many of his thoughts and dreams,—for he thought and dreamed, although he did not read and could scarcely write his name.

But, though a very ignorant boy, he was so far from uncouth and witless that his ignorance was anything but obvious. He had by nature a strong and acute understanding, and showed even as a little lad great art in concealing the defects of his education. He had, moreover, a natural grace, a careless sweetness in his air that made him the pet of the ladies in the drawing-room on the rare occasions when he saw them, as well as the favorite of Hoggins the cook, and Molly the housemaid. And though most of his days were passed with game-keepers and stablemen, and his evenings generally in the housekeeper’s room, Roger never forgot, or allowed these people to forget, that he knew the difference between the condition of gentle and simple. Indeed, the servants, out of pity for his forlorn childhood, had tried to console him by telling him that all the broad lands of Egremont and the stately Elizabethan house would one day be his. It sank deep in the boy’s mind, and he early acquired an idea of the beauty and value of his home and a passionate affection for it, that strongly colored all his later life. And Egremont was worthy to be loved. The manor-house lay upon a breezy upland, with the faint blue line of the hill country between it and the salt sea on the one side; and on the other, afar off, was the salt sea again, each but little more than a day’s ride away. The land was rich and well wooded and watered. A little brawling river ran through the estate, and fed the artificial lake and fish pond near the house, on which swans and ducks floated and made their reedy habitations. The woods of Egremont were celebrated, and particularly a great avenue of oaks, three miles long, standing in ranks like soldiers at parade, was the envy of all the timber merchants in the south of England. John Egremont, in the year of the Restoration, planted two thousand young oaks; the timber, already immensely valuable, was likely to become more so.

The park held a thousand acres, through which the dun deer ran, and where other wild creatures and many birds found undisturbed cover. It was in this park that Roger Egremont spent his boyhood and early manhood. The house, a vast parallelogram, had been built by that John Egremont of the bean-platter. It was full of tall windows; the Elizabethan architects, being new to glass, used it so lavishly that many Elizabethan mansions were little more than glass houses. There was a fine hall in the Egremont house, and a library with a respectable number of books in it, and much quaint carved woodwork, but the lad, Roger Egremont, was almost a stranger in the house, so little did he live in it, except to sleep in a little bedroom he had on the first floor, and to take his meals in a grimy den habited by the tutor. For at the break of day, every morning, fair or foul, Roger was out-of-doors, looking after his rabbit hutches and all his various contrivances for trapping wild creatures, and running about the stables backing the colts, cultivating the acquaintance of the great, mild-eyed cows, as they stood in line to be milked, listening to the call of birds and domestic fowls, and learning to imitate them, watching the budding or the falling of the leaf, feeding the ducks in the river, and gravely studying by the hour the antics of the fish in the fish pond. In short, the great book of nature lay open before him, and he read it diligently, and learned to understand it well, but of other books and of men he knew pitifully little.

In these hours of incessant bodily and actually mental activity, little Dicky was generally his companion, and it pleased the older boy’s vanity to tell him the magnificent things to be done for him when Roger should reign at Egremont. Yet, when the servants talked before him, as they often did, of “when master be dead,”—an event which they rather anticipated,—Roger would fly into a rage and cry,—

“Say no more to me of that. Do you think I want my father to die?”

To this, Molly the housemaid pertly replied,—

“La, Master Roger, he be dead enough a’ready to all of us.”

Roger’s feelings toward his father were strangely contradictory. The boy had a tender and loving heart, and it warmed at the name of father. He admired his father’s portrait, taken in a splendid court dress, with long, dark locks flowing on his shoulders. And on the few and short visits of John Egremont at his home, the lad always ran to meet him with delight. But he was always received coldly and carelessly, and he always had, in consequence, a revulsion of feeling, very much like hatred. For his mother’s memory the boy had a fond affection, and loved to hear the story of her short life under the roof of Egremont.

So life went on until Roger was twelve years old, when one day he got a letter from his father,—the first in his life. He could not read it alone, and he would not take it to his tutor, so he went after little Dicky, who was an expert at reading and writing. And the news which Dicky read to him, sitting on the bench by the fish pond, was that John Egremont was coming home to live, and would bring with him a younger son, Hugo, the child of a second marriage made in Germany; and the father hoped the two brothers would be good friends.

The two lads gazed into each other’s eyes with consternation,—staggered and alarmed at the notion of the new boy. Roger, however, had a good courage, and spoke up sturdily.

“At least, I am the oldest and the biggest; and if he will not behave, I can trounce him, that I will.”

Some time after, one morning as Roger was returning to the house for breakfast after a gallop on his pony since daybreak, he was seized at the buttery door by Molly the housemaid, who burst out,—

“Your dad’s come, Master Roger, and another boy with him, as master told the housekeeper was two year younger nor you. It’s your new brother—ha! ha!”

Molly’s laughter was anything but merry, and her news made Roger an unresisting victim in her hands, while she scrubbed his face and hands violently, curled his long light hair, and whisked him into his best suit, she clacking angrily meanwhile about “lads as was said to be ten, and any fool could see warn’t a day under fourteen.”

And then Roger, very white and very straight, walked to the hall where his father and his newly arrived brother awaited him.

Some premonition of evil flashed into the boy’s young soul as he stood for five minutes outside the door, before he could screw his courage up to opening it, and he was not a boy of faint heart either. At the end of the hall, by the fireplace, sat his father and a strange boy. Roger advanced, still pale, but graceful and outwardly at ease. As he approached, his father rose, and said in the kindest tone that Roger had ever heard from his lips,—

“Roger, this is your younger brother, Hugo; I hope you will be good friends.”

To have an unknown brother sprung on one would have disconcerted an older and wiser person than poor little Roger Egremont. He became still whiter as his dark eyes grew larger and darker, and he glanced uneasily from his father to the new brother, without making any advance at all. Hugo, a tall, well-grown boy, was the image of his father, and Roger made the alarming discovery that Hugo was much bigger than he, and instead of his licking Hugo, Hugo would be quite able to lick him. The two lads looked at each other for a moment, and then Hugo, slipping off his chair, ran forward and kissed his half-brother on both cheeks, French fashion.

To be kissed at all was disconcerting to Roger, and to be kissed by another boy was an insult and a humiliation. Roger’s reception, therefore, of these endearments was a vigorous push.

“I’ll shake hands if you like,” he said sulkily, “but I’ll have no kissing.”

John Egremont, secretly enraged, could not but remember that any English boy would resent such an advance. He said, therefore, without any exhibition of wrath: “Your brother has been brought up abroad, and does not know English manners, although he speaks English. But you two should have fine times together. Hugo will live here after this.”

The two boys eyed each other distrustfully. It vexed their father to see how much taller and bigger was Hugo, the alleged younger, than Roger. Hugo was a handsomer boy, but Roger had more the air of a gentleman.

They shook hands, nevertheless, and Hugo, making a pirouette, said something in French and something in German to his father, quite as if they were equals: and John Egremont laughed, while Hugo burst into the fragment of a song about Ce monstre là which seemed to tickle his father mightily.

All this time a thousand maddening questions were chasing each other through Roger’s disturbed mind. Had he a step-mother, and any more brothers and sisters? He had an immediate opportunity of finding this out, for their father at once dismissed them, thinking they would the more speedily become friends alone.

Once outside, upon the terrace that led down to the fish pond, Roger turned to Hugo, and asked,—

“Where is your mother?”

“In Germany,” replied Hugo, with much readiness; and then, stopping still with a frightened look, he caught Roger by the arm and cried,—

“Oh, no, no!—they told me to say she was dead, and I forgot. Don’t tell my father, please.”

“I am no tell-tale,” replied Roger, with ready contempt; “somebody told you to tell a lie and you told the truth.”

Hugo was not pleased at the frankness of this speech, but he had been warned by his father concerning the code of morals and manners he was likely to meet with among English boys, and privately concluded they were all a pack of brutes.

Nevertheless, the boys made some efforts at a good understanding, in which they were mutually helped by little Dicky, who presently turned up. Dicky loved Roger better than anything in the world, and was secretly cut to the heart by Roger’s inferiority in certain things to Hugo, which soon became apparent. For Hugo was a miracle of boyish accomplishments. He could chatter both French and German, could sing in three languages and dance in four, could play the viol da gamba, and draw, and knew the sword exercise perfectly on foot. He could not, however, do it on horseback, and was quite unlearned about horses, dogs, and fowling-pieces. Here, Roger excelled; and Dicky suggested timidly to him that he should learn some things of Hugo, and in return teach Hugo to ride. This sensible advice both boys took, and got on the better for it. Yet never were two creatures more dissimilar. Roger fought when he was angry, Hugo quarrelled; in that lay enormous differences.

Soon, however, they were thrown so completely upon each other for companionship that perforce they were compelled to become playmates, or have no playmates at all. For to John Egremont’s infinite rage and disgust, Hugo was coldly looked upon by all the Egremont kindred, and by the gentry round about Egremont. A tale was industriously circulated that this lad’s mother, a certain Madame Stein, had neither married John Egremont nor died, but was still flourishing in Germany. As for Hugo’s being younger than Roger, his appearance flatly contradicted his father’s assertions, and the story which John Egremont had concocted with infinite pains found no believers. The Egremonts were angered by the giving of their name to the boy. The gentry would not let their sons associate with Hugo; and, as Hugo was the one object dear to John Egremont’s hard heart, he bitterly resented the attitude of his world toward his favorite child. And as it refused to accept this favorite child, John Egremont decided that it should not accept his other son; so Roger was forbidden to go where Hugo was not invited. As Hugo was never invited anywhere, the two boys stayed very closely at home. John Egremont was kinder to Roger than he had ever been before, because, looking into the future, he saw that Hugo might profit some day by his brother’s good-will. But there was no disguising the blind partiality of the father for the boy who was like him. Hugo was upon terms of familiarity with his father that were simply amazing in that age of extreme filial respect and obedience. Roger never dared the smallest liberty. It made his boyish heart swell with anguish when he heard his father gravely discussing with Hugo, as if Hugo were the heir and a man grown, certain alterations he wished to make in the house and various improvements on the estate. By way of revenge, when the two boys were alone, Roger would not fail to remind Hugo which one was the heir, and, instead of begging him not to tell their father, menaced him; and as Roger was a fighter, Hugo very prudently held his tongue.

The ill-will of my Lady Castlemaine was not over in a day, and year after year, as John Egremont showed his face at Whitehall Palace, he was civilly invited to take himself off. This lasted until Roger was sixteen years old and Hugo was alleged to be fourteen, when a very unexpected summons into the other world came to John Egremont, and he was forced to mount and go behind the gentleman on a pale horse. He had not even time to sign a will he had made, in which he gave all he could of the estate, and much that was not his to give, to Hugo. This darling of his father’s heart was left penniless. Sir Thomas Buckstone, a money-getting, puritanical person, was named as guardian of the two lads in this unsigned will, and nobody objecting, he qualified, and immediately took charge of them.

Now, as none of John Egremont’s friends and neighbors had believed his story concerning Hugo, when the boy was by this mischance left a beggar a great outcry was raised against him. This was intensified by letters received from the lad’s mother, who came to life most unopportunely, and followed her letters to England. She was a painted, shrill-voiced, handsome harpy of a woman, whose wild protestations and vehement assertions and multitude and variety of asseverations that she was John Egremont’s widow, did away with the small chance Hugo had of getting a younger brother’s portion; and she retired defeated and discredited from the beginning.

Sir Thomas Buckstone, a dull-witted man, saw only in Roger Egremont a graceful, shy, uneducated stripling, who knew nothing but horses and dogs, and conceived it would be for their mutual advantage that there should be but one mind between them, and that mind Sir Thomas’s. And there were, besides, eight Buckstone maidens, any one of whom was eligible to become Madam Egremont. Therefore Sir Thomas solemnly assured Roger of the intention to protect him from being robbed in favor of Hugo.

“A very small allowance, my dear lad—enough to keep him from beggary; that is all which I can in conscience allow him out of your estate.”

Roger heard this in silence for a moment and then said,—

“But he is my father’s son. He should have enough to live upon as becomes a gentleman.”

“One hundred pounds a year,” replied Sir Thomas, virtuously.

“Make it what you like, sir; but although I am not great friends with my half-brother, I would not stint him in his living. If I cannot give him enough out of my own allowance, I can promise him to give him a sum down when I am of age, and I shall do it.”

Which he did, and of which Hugo was perfectly sure as soon as Roger told him, and straightway borrowed money on the strength of it. But he borrowed prudently,—Hugo being ever prudent. The two brothers continued to live at Egremont, and were more nearly friends than they had ever been before. Hugo read and studied diligently, and Roger never looked into a book. Sir Thomas Buckstone, thinking money on education wasted, made no move toward supplying his ward with book-learning, and Roger’s religion debarred him from the universities; so he lived on, the same lazy, happy, idle, and apparently unprofitable life he had always led. He was not the soberest young man in the parish, and did not follow Hugo’s example of always watering his wine; by which as others grew drunk, Hugo remained sober and smiling. Nor was Roger immaculate in other respects, but where Hugo had one friend, Roger had a dozen.

It is not to be supposed that Roger gave no thought to the future mistress of Egremont, but beyond plainly indicating it was not to be one of the eight Buckstone maidens, he made no sign. He was a favorite in the hunting-field, where he was a bold and dashing rider, and at balls, where he danced well, and he could sing a good song, accompanying himself upon the viol,—an accomplishment he had picked up from Hugo. Nor was he at all shy with the ladies, and knew quite well how to turn a compliment with perfect grace. But he was so sensible of his deficiencies in education, and knew so little to talk about, that he did not very much cultivate the society of women. Nevertheless, Roger Egremont was fully able to reach the standard of a man as defined by Henry the Great of France, in his song descriptive of himself,—

“This devil of a Henry the Fourth,

Has the three gifts that make a man.

He can drink, he can fight,

And he can be gallant to the ladies.”

Hugo, on the contrary, cultivated assiduously all who would notice him. What mattered it that the sheriff of the county invited Roger, before Hugo’s face, to dine at his house, and pointedly omitted Hugo? Hugo smiling met him next day, and asked cordially after her ladyship and her ladyship’s daughters, and rode by his lordship’s side for the space of a mile or more. What if there were talk about whether he should be permitted to attend the county ball? Hugo worked for an invitation hard, and went upon a very slim one, and bore amiably the cold looks of the people generally who were assembled. He was far more regularly handsome than Roger, infinitely accomplished, and made considerable headway with the other sex. Roger despised his half-brother for this way of getting on in the world, but he was at a loss how to explain his feelings in the matter.

By that time, Dicky Egremont was growing manward. He was as eager about learning as Roger was indifferent, and was likewise a great toast among the ladies, a tireless dancer, an expert fiddler, and had a voice in singing like the sweetest thrush that ever sang. His old grandfather being dead, and having no estate, Dicky, like his cousins, had liberty to follow his natural bent, and it led him wherever there was youth, gayety, and music. Roger, who could well afford it, made him a handsome allowance, of which Dicky made ducks and drakes. Much of it went on horses and dogs, but stray fiddlers, professional beggars, and occasionally the deserving poor got the best part of it. Unlike Roger, Dicky sorrowfully lamented that he was shut out, by the religion of his family, from a liberal education, and sometimes talked wildly of running away to St. Omer’s or Douai, or Clermont, where he could learn what was out of his reach at Oxford and Cambridge. But as these aspirations were usually followed by a screeching run after the hounds, or a roaring night at cards and dice, nobody took little Dicky very seriously. One March morning, however, after a convivial night of it, beginning with the county ball and ending in countless jorums of punch, Roger, on rising and going out, found Dicky with a solemn face, round and rosy though it might be, walking up and down the terrace.

“Halloa!” cried Roger, gayly, “I did not think to find thee sober this morning. The last I remember was the chorus we were having—”

“Roger,” said Dicky, going up to his cousin, and holding him by the lappel as he had done as a little lad. “This life is idle and sinful. I am going to France to be educated—to St. Omer’s; I am going, I tell you.”

Roger’s ringing laugh startled the lazy fish in the fish pond.

“You going to St Omer’s—such a promising little rake as you are?”

Dicky blushed scarlet, and then fell to smiling so that the dimples came out all over his round, rosy face. “I know,” he said presently, becoming preposterously grave, and blinking his eyes solemnly, “I have been a very wild, bad fellow, but I mean to reform—that I do, Cousin Roger.”

“Do, little Dicky,” cried Roger, beginning to laugh again, and throwing his arm around Dicky’s neck. “You’ll have to give over punch—”

“I had too much last night, God forgive me,” piously said Dicky, and then, Hugo suddenly appearing, Dicky stopped short, and the three young men went in to breakfast. Roger did not take Dicky any too seriously. He remembered that Dicky, as a boy, frequently announced his intention to be a priest, chiefly for the pleasure of hiding himself in the “priest’s hole” that mysterious place behind the mantel in the little yellow parlor, out of which Roger, as executioner, would haul him and proceed to decapitate him on the stone horse-block outside. And Dicky was very young, and extravagantly fond of fiddling and dancing; so Roger thought no more about the scheme until one day, about a week after that, when a letter was put in his hand. It was in Dicky’s handwriting, and ran thus:—

Dear Roger,—Do not be angry; I am on my way as fast as a good horse will carry me, to Torbay, where I shall take ship for France. Pray, Cousin Roger, do not be very angry. I have some money, and I have no one in the world to love or think of except you; and I want to have some college learning, and that is why I have gone. Dear Roger, you have been the best and truest friend I ever had, except my grandfather. You need not look for my fiddle. I could not take it with me, so I hid it in a place where some day I shall come after it. God bless you, Roger.

Your aff. cousin,
Richd. Egremont.

Roger was, indeed, very angry with Dicky. He went to the yellow parlor, and drawing back a panel of the wainscoting, revealed the well-known place in the wall,—pierced with auger-holes for air and light,—and there lay Dicky’s beloved fiddle; and in the midst of Roger’s wrath the sight made him smile.

Egremont was lonely to Roger for a long while after Dicky’s departure, for although he and Hugo were upon perfectly friendly terms, there was little sympathy between them. And troublous times were ahead for all Englishmen, for it was then the summer of 1688. England seethed like a pot over the repeal of the Test Act, and the substitution of the Act of Toleration. Naturally, Roger Egremont was strongly predisposed toward the abolition of the Test Act, which, as long as it lasted, excluded him not only from the universities and the learned professions, for which he cared nothing, but from the profession of arms, for which he cared a great deal. Few, even of the strongest advocates of King James, went as far as Roger Egremont in his views. Reasoning naturally, his ideas were lofty, but often impractical. He dared assert that it was inherently wrong to molest any man, in his person or estate, for his religious belief. This was but a step removed from treason, according to the lights of his time, when, everywhere, a difference in religion was considered a crime against the State. This and many other ideas, which Robert Egremont was accused of getting from game-keepers and poachers, he really drew from the thoughts that flooded his mind when he saw the pale glory of the stars gleaming in the serene sky of evening, or felt the vagrant wind blowing, or watched the awakening of the spring, or the solemn farewell that nature takes in the dying time of year.

These notions mattered little as long as Roger was a minor, living idly and pleasantly at Egremont. But when he came of age, and openly advocated the cause of dissenters and papists, it was altogether different. The Egremont estates gave him great political interest, and he made no secret of the way he meant to use it,—in treasonable practices, so his world thought, but really in the advancement of human liberty.

Meanwhile things were going badly for another advocate of the Act of Toleration—to wit, his Majesty, James the Second. It grew toward the autumn of the year 1688, and England was filled with rumors of revolution, while the gaols were filled with dissenters, and the Catholics shivered at the prospect of soon joining them. At Exeter, not far from Egremont, a number of dissenting ministers had been imprisoned, and typhus fever broke out among them. One of them had preached in the parish of Egremont, and great complaint had been made of Roger Egremont’s indifference to the maintenance of the law concerning dissenters. Some of the followers of these poor men had visited these unfortunates in gaol and brought away the infection of fever, which raged thereafter in the country round about. When the trial came off, a few weeks later, one of the judges and several of the jury and of the spectators caught the fever from the prisoners, and many deaths resulted.

Roger Egremont and his half-brother were speaking of this one November afternoon in 1688, as they sat at dinner in the great dining-hall at Egremont. The main entrance opened directly into this vast hall, hung with portraits, with ancient armor, and with hunting trophies. A fine musicians’ gallery faced a huge fireplace in which a coach and four could have turned around. Innumerable tall slits of windows let in the light, and faintly illuminated the carved ceiling almost lost in the gloom of the dull autumn afternoon.

The pretence, so carefully cultivated by their father, that Roger was the elder had become more obvious as the young men grew older. Hugo, tall, dark, and well made, was at least twenty-three years old, and everybody but himself laughed when he gravely spoke of himself as barely twenty. Hugo always uttered it with the utmost seriousness. Roger had never been so regularly handsome as Hugo, but he retained the charming, arch expression of his boyish days in his dark eyes, and his was one of those faces on which both women and men look with favor.

The two brothers were seated at a small square table, close by the fireplace. They talked together of the parliamentary struggles, and of the chances of the King’s party. The conflict between James the Second and William of Orange was on, and every day news was expected of the landing of the Dutch Prince.

“For my part,” said Roger, very earnestly, “I look in amazement at this England of ours. The people prate of liberty, and yet are panic-stricken at the mere notion that a man should have liberty of conscience to worship God as he likes. I am for the repeal of the Test Act, and the penal laws, and in favor of the Act of Toleration, not simply because it will make me a free man, but because it will mean the breaking of the dawn to many who have stumbled along in the darkness, thinking the figures of their fellow-men huge, misshapen devils menacing them. And if all Englishmen were equally free, we would see each other as we are and have no fear.”

“What book did you get that fine speech out of, brother?” asked Hugo, smiling indulgently, as he always did, at the views of the unlettered Roger. A dull flush came into Roger’s face.

“Surely, I did not get it out of any book; it is a thought out of my own head. Books are well enough, but I can learn nothing from them—true, I have not much tried,” he added hastily. “But I know that to keep me, a freeborn Briton, subject to imprisonment and infamy, and to take my lands away from me, if I openly practise the religion of our fathers, is wrong. And to forbid me, an English gentleman, to walk in St. James’s Park, whither every Dutch spy can have access, is a gross affront to me,—nay more, an invasion of my liberty. And I also know that to keep those unfortunate poor creatures languishing in gaol at Exeter, because they go to hear a weaver preach in a barn of Sundays, is inhuman. And I would like to see my country be the first, and not the last, to see this great truth of toleration.”

Hugo, who was not fond of these discussions, remarked: “In my ride to-day, I heard that two of the nonconformist ministers in gaol at Exeter are dead of the gaol fever, and that fourteen persons, including the judge that sentenced them, are ill, and several likely to die. There should be precautions taken in bringing prisoners with the infection on them into court.”

“If the judge that sentenced them and the jury that convicted them all died of the fever, it would be the just reward of iniquity,” cried Roger, excitedly. “I need no book-learning for that!”

As he raised his eyes he saw, through the window opposite, a number of armed men who seemed to have sprung from the ground, and who fairly surrounded the house as far as he could see. And at the same moment the great door of the hall was opened, and a long-nosed gentleman, in military dress and a black peruke, entered, followed by three other persons, evidently of the suite of the long-nosed gentleman. They advanced without bowing; one of the party ran ahead, pulled out a chair, and the long-nosed gentleman seated himself at the table without removing his hat.

Roger Egremont watched this silently and without rising. Nor did he move when the long-nosed gentleman, coolly helping himself to a piece of a fowl on the table, said in English with a Dutch accent: “Sir, I am under no disguise. I am the Prince of Orange. My horse lost a shoe at your park gates, and knowing it to be near dinner-time, I claim your hospitality until the blacksmith is through with the horse.”

As soon as he uttered the words “I am the Prince of Orange,” Hugo rose and made obeisance. Roger, quietly picking up his hat, which lay on a chair nearby, put it on his head; he and the Prince of Orange were the only persons covered.

The Prince, without noticing the action, continued to gnaw and tug at his chicken, while Roger continued to observe in silence his four uninvited guests. Two of the Dutchmen helped themselves to mutton from the dish, while the third gulped down wine, and making a wry face after it, spat upon the floor.

Roger Egremont’s black eyes began to blaze. The Prince of Orange, with the drumstick of the chicken sticking out of his mouth, spoke in a tone of explanation rather than apology.

“The wine drunk in England does not suit Dutch palates. Have you no other liquor?”

“I have a variety of liquor,” responded Roger, with the greatest politeness, “but none of it will suit Dutch palates. It was bought by English gentlemen for English gentlemen, of whom I am one, by God!”

The Prince of Orange glanced up at Roger, who wore a cool, insulting smile. The Prince’s saturnine features contorted into a smile too, as, drawing his sword, he leaned over the table, and catching Roger’s hat on the sword’s point, flicked it off. A platter of the same kind of white beans with which Roger Egremont’s ancestor won the favor of Elizabeth Tudor was at hand. Roger took it up gently, poised it carefully, and then threw it full in the face of the Prince of Orange.

That day, six months, Roger Egremont appeared in the prisoner’s dock at Westminster Hall, before the Court of the King’s Bench, to be tried for his life upon the charge of sedition and treason. He sat, because the fetters upon his legs prevented him from standing.

CHAPTER II
ROGER EGREMONT MAKES INTIMATE ACQUAINTANCE WITH TWO PERSONS, WHO EXERCISE GREAT BUT WIDELY DIFFERING INFLUENCES UPON HIS LIFE,—TO WIT, THE DEVIL AND MISS BESS LUKENS.

THE trial of Roger Egremont took place before a full bench, Chief Justice Holt presiding, and was among the first trials for sedition and treason resulting from the Revolution. It was memorable in another way; for from that day ceased the dreadful practice of trying prisoners in their chains. The Chief Justice, hearing a clanking when the prisoner rose to plead, said,—

“I should like to know why the prisoner is brought in ironed. If fetters were necessary for his safe custody before, there is no danger of escape or rescue here. Let them be instantly knocked off. When prisoners are tried, they should stand at their ease.”

“I thank your lordship,” replied Roger, rising with difficulty, and bowing.

When he was free from his chains and stood up, he was seen to be a young man of presence most fair, and of a cool courage.

The trial attracted a great concourse of people, and much violence of feeling was shown both for and against the prisoner. The Whigs, resenting far more than William of Orange the personal insult offered him, clamored for Roger Egremont’s blood; and truly, if any man in England deserved to be hanged for the share he took against the Dutch Prince, Roger Egremont was the man. He had endeavored to raise the county against the new-comer, and had actually succeeded in getting together a band, chiefly of his own kindred and tenantry, which pursued the Prince of Orange secretly almost to London, and were only prevented from waylaying him by the rapidity and secrecy with which he travelled. The whole Egremont connection stood firmly by King James; several of their number had followed him to St. Germains, and were openly in communication with their kinsmen in England; and Roger Egremont had publicly and frequently denounced William of Orange in a manner impossible for any government to overlook which expected to stand. On the other hand, there were a vast number of Englishmen who thought as Roger Egremont did, and expressed themselves privately as he had done publicly. Sympathy for his youth, for the gross invasion of his house, for the spirit he showed as an English gentleman impatient of the rule of foreigners, made him many friends. It was felt that the new government had a hard nut to crack in handling him so that justice would not appear cruelty, and mercy weakness.

The Chief Justice and his associates dealt with him kindly, nor was the Attorney General unduly severe. But the evidence against him was enough to hang ten men. Among the first witnesses put in the box was his half-brother, Hugo Egremont, as he was still called, in spite of the fact that no soul in England, not excepting Hugo himself, believed his mother to have been at any time the wife of John Egremont.

Hugo had not wasted the first six months in which William of Orange was on the English throne. Having concluded that King James was gone, never to return, Hugo acted accordingly. He frequented the court, and was one among the English gentlemen who stood against the wall while William and his Dutch companions sat at their ease, and ate and drank and smoked, and talked in the Dutch language concerning the English people, their conduct and affairs, and laughed loudly at things which these attendant English gentlemen heard but could not understand. Hugo Egremont, however, being a very crafty young man, learned the Dutch language, to the mingled delight and chagrin of the Dutchmen, and conversed with them affably in their own tongue. He conformed so absolutely, and went to church so often, that even William of Orange grinned a sardonic grin when he heard of it, and my Lord Halifax, the prince of trimmers, laughed outright, and made it an after-dinner joke.

At the trial, Hugo’s appearance—handsome, well dressed, sly, composed, and polished—gave rise to a groan from the spectators in the great hall. He went up to Roger and offered his hand, saying smoothly,—

“I am sorry, brother, to see you in this case.”

Roger, disdaining his hand, replied,—

“Call me not brother. Had you been loyal to your King, as all true Egremonts are, I would have forgotten that you are the child of my father’s leman. But you chose the other part, so go your way from me, Hugo Stein.” This imprudent speech was heard by many persons. Hugo winced under it, but when he came to be examined, he showed no animus against Roger, and seemed to testify unwillingly. Yet, on his evidence alone, Roger could have been hanged twice over. When he was questioned in regard to Roger Egremont’s designs in his pursuit of the Prince of Orange, he hesitated and seemed distressed. Roger, however, replied for him, addressing the judges in the following cool and daring words,—

“My lords, of your goodness permit me to say, ’tis useless to probe this man, Hugo Stein, sometime known as Hugo Egremont. My motive in pursuing His Highness was to capture him and send him out of the kingdom; and though I did not expressly seek His Highness’s life, yet had he been killed I should have felt no more regret than if I had killed a robber, coming by night to seize my goods.”

The Chief Justice at that moment was taken with a sharp coughing spell, as if he had not heard the prisoner’s rash words, and leaning forward flashed Roger a look of distinct warning. But it was of no avail—the mischief had been done. It was commonly thought that Roger had given away his life in those words, and something like a sob went around in the great assemblage. Nevertheless, when sentence came to be pronounced, he was only sentenced to the forfeiture of his estate, and imprisonment in Newgate during his Majesty’s pleasure.

It was night—a soft May night, following the day of his conviction—when Roger entered Newgate prison. Hitherto he had borne up manfully, and jested and laughed with his gaolers. But at the moment of passing under the dark and dreadful archway a panic seized his soul. Fear was new to him, and he was more frightened at being afraid than at anything else whatever. As he, with Lukens, the turnkey, to whom he had been handed over, passed along one of the great corridors, they heard a great shout of laughter and crying out, and clatter of drinking, and presently they came to an open door, and within were more than fifty persons, carousing, drinking, and playing with greasy cards and rude dice.

Now, Roger Egremont was no Puritan, nor was he given to low company, but, scared by the spectre of Fear which stalked through his mind, he would have welcomed a company of gallows-birds at that moment. Therefore, with a wink to Lukens, and slipping a couple of shillings in his hand,—for Roger still had some money,—he walked into the dim, foul, and noisy room, and making a low bow said,—

“Gentlemen, may I be allowed to be of your company?”

Huzzas arose, and a great black fellow, with a patch over his eye, replied,—

“Certainly, sir, if you will make your footing good.” Which meant paying for liquor wherewith all could get fuddled.

Roger threw some money to the turnkey, and the liquor being brought, sat and boozed and sang and gambled and cursed with the motley crew until the day looked pallidly in at the barred windows.

A prisoner with money, in Newgate, could have all he wanted and do as he listed, except he could not escape. And the reason of this was plain. Every prisoner became a source of revenue to his gaolers, and to let him go was to part with the goose that laid the golden egg; and consequently never was there such liberty within the walls of a prison, and never was prison better watched.

The assemblage in which Roger Egremont found himself was made up of all sorts and conditions of men. His friend with the patch over his eye was a highwayman.

There were thieves and counterfeiters, Jacobite gentlemen and recusant curates; nearly all trades and professions were represented. No one present, not even the highwayman, drank and swore and talked so recklessly as Roger Egremont. For to fear had succeeded despair. He shouted and sang and drank, because had he stopped for one moment to think he would have dashed his brains out against the stone wall. His head was steady and his nerves strong, so that it took much liquor and extreme brawling to bring him to the point where physical fatigue overcame mental anguish. But soon after daylight he was carried like a log to his cell, by Lukens and his assistant, Diggory Hutchinson, a brawny fellow, and new to the gaoler’s business.

“They be often like this, at first,” said Lukens, with a grin, as they threw Roger, limp and maudlin, on his rude bed. “’Tis apt to take gentlemen and clergymen this a-way. Sometimes they gits over it—sometimes they don’t.”

Roger fell into a deep sleep, which lasted until the afternoon. He waked, his vigorous frame recovered entirely from his debauch, but in an instant the horror of his situation returned upon him so that he rose, dressed himself quickly, and finding some money that he had concealed upon his person, coolly took out what seemed enough for him to get drunk on, and put the other away, and then sallied forth from his miserable room in search of the hell he had found the night before. He was not familiar with his surroundings, and, following a blind corridor, he heard the sound of a woman’s voice, singing very sweetly. Presently he came upon an open door, leading to the quarters of Lukens, the turnkey, and there, in a room clean and bright, sat, spinning, Bess Lukens, the turnkey’s niece, otherwise known as Red Bess from the warm color of her auburn hair.

She was tall, well formed, and vigorous beyond the common for a woman. Her complexion had retained its original fairness from the usual darkness of the abode in which she dwelt, but it had not robbed her cheek of its ruddy bloom, nor her lips of their scarlet tint. Her large, liquid eyes were of a reddish-brown, with black lashes and eyebrows, and when she opened her wide handsome mouth she showed teeth as white and regular as Roger’s own.

She was about twenty years of age, and dressed in a plain brown stuff gown and a spotless linen cap, and she was spinning industriously and singing in a loud, sweet, rich voice as she spun. Had Roger Egremont been his natural and normal self, the sight of her sumptuous beauty would have warmed and interested him; but to all intent, he was not Roger Egremont at that moment, but a devil of despair and wickedness who had cast out Roger’s identity and was masquerading in his body.

The girl caught sight of him, however, and stopped her spinning and singing. As she rose and advanced toward him, the light of a May afternoon falling on her supple figure, he could not but note, dull as his senses were, the natural grace of her movements, and her rich voice in speaking as in singing. She showed not a particle of bashfulness or coquetry in speaking to the haggard young gentleman before her, but said pleasantly,—

“You’ve missed your way, sir. This is where my uncle, Mr. Lukens lives, and the prisoners go not beyond the turn in the corridor, where the lantern hangs against the wall.”

“I know it, mistress; I have missed my way. Will you please to conduct me to the common room of the prisoners?”

“Now, look here, young gentleman,” said Bess, suddenly adopting an authoritative tone, “you’d best keep away from that gang. You’re new to it,—that I see with half an eye,—and if it’s going with those people in the common room you are, you’ll soon be in a bad way.”

“Mistress,” replied Roger, with great respect, “May I ask if you are head nurse in this little nursery? And what will you do with me in case I do not obey you? Give me a switching, perhaps.”

The ever-ready blood poured into Bess’s smooth cheek, and sparks flew from her red-brown eyes. She seemed about to speak impetuously, but checked herself, and then said, pointing with a contemptuous finger,—

“Go back to where the lantern hangs, then turn to the right, and straight ahead.”

She scudded back to her wheel, began to turn it violently, and burst into a song by way of showing her indifference. But, singing, she turned her head stealthily, and saw Roger’s graceful figure, with his light-brown curls floating over his shapely shoulders, disappearing rapidly into the gloom of the corridor, where not even the May sunshine could penetrate.

As soon as he was out of sight and sound she stopped spinning and singing, and resting her chin on her hand thought,—

“Poor young gentleman. That is the very gentleman they brought in yesterday, and who got so drunk last night.”

Bess Lukens was reckoned hard-hearted toward the other sex, although willing enough to do them a kindness provided she could hector over them in the act of doing it; but a strange softness came into her heart as she thought about Roger Egremont. He looked a man, every inch; and the saucy reply he gave Bess she secretly liked. But Bess had no time to waste in sentimental reflections. She was by nature one of the most energetic of mortals, with a passion for clean linen, order, and industry. Soon her wheel began to buzz again; but she could still see Roger Egremont’s figure standing in the doorway, against the blackness of the corridor behind him, with the light shining full on his debonair face. As for Roger, he sped toward the scene of his degradation of the night before as if a thousand devils were after him, and gave not one thought to Red Bess, the turnkey’s niece.

The second night was spent as was the first; and so, for one whole week, did Roger Egremont give himself up to liquor and cards and dice and the lowest company accessible in Newgate prison. At the end of that time even his strong, country-bred frame began to show the effects of his long debauch, and his mind, too, experienced the benefit of being turned from the consideration of its misery into the channel of cards and drink.

One night—the eighth after he entered the prison—Roger’s strength gave out temporarily. Bess, passing along the corridor beyond her uncle’s quarters, saw a figure lying prone, and going up to it found it to be Roger Egremont, not only drunk, but ill,—the Roger Egremont who had said so haughtily to William of Orange at their first meeting, “I am an English gentleman, by God!”

Bess looked at him, with pity and contempt struggling in her breast. She was as strong as any man, and leaning down, she actually managed to raise Roger to his feet, and to lead him to his dismal little room, where he fell, groaning, upon the bed.

Something in his face, something in his fate would have touched even a hard heart, and Bess Lukens had one of the softest of hearts, along with a turbulent tongue and a warm temper. She covered him up with a thick quilt brought from her own quarters,—for he was shivering with cold,—rubbed his throbbing head, and at last soothed him into quietness and sleep. Then she went after Diggory Hutchinson, and commanded him to watch by Roger during the night; and Diggory, being a slave to her, did it.

Next morning early, Bess was at Roger’s bedside. He was himself then, as far as liquor went, but the devil still possessed him.

“Why did you not let me die?” he said sullenly. “It’s better than being in prison.”

“Now, that’s because you are a countryman,” replied Bess, briskly. “They always take on worse than any others. They want to be out in the fields, a-hunting and what not. But you’ll be out yet; some day, they’ll get tired of keeping you. Haven’t you got some relations or friends in London that might come to see you?”

Roger shook his head.

“I know scarce any one in London, and all my relations and friends that I care anything about are in the South, or with the King in France.”

Bess nodded her head gravely, and, the two being alone, she said,—

“And they’re right. I’m no papist, nor dissenter neither, but I don’t like the Whigs. They’re a low-born crew, and that’s why I don’t like ’em.”

Roger had never expected to smile, much less laugh again; but the energy with which the turnkey’s niece reviled the Whigs on account of their low birth, made him laugh in spite of himself.

Bess, who was quick of wit, divined in a moment what he was laughing at, and flushing with anger and mortification, she told him so.

“And if I say they’re low born, who should know it any better than I?” she said, bitterly. “Don’t I know what it is to be low born? Don’t people say, ‘There goes Bess Lukens, niece of Lukens, the turnkey’? And though my uncle be an honest man, yet his calling is vile, and I know it. And I would rather be well born than to have all the money in the King’s chests—that I would!”

Unshed tears were flashing in Bess’s eyes, and her red mouth was quivering. Roger was ashamed of his thoughtlessness, but Bess was still, to him, only the handsome niece of the turnkey. His reply, therefore, was an attempt to flip her under the chin (which Bess skilfully avoided) and to say,—

“Never mind, my girl. One may be well born, and very miserable, too.”

The devil did not leave Roger Egremont at once, although he had come in full panoply at short notice; but for a little while longer he alternated, coming and going fitfully. However, Roger was no longer ill, and so no longer in need of Bess Lukens’s pity and nursing. But Bess, who treated Diggory Hutchinson—an honest lad, for all he was an under-turnkey—like a dog, and whose sharp tongue and strong arm were ample protection against any man in Newgate, could not so easily put Roger out of her mind. Oftentimes she stopped in her spinning and knitting and sweeping and dusting and bent her handsome brows to listen for the sound of his footstep, or his pleasant, courtier-like voice, as he passed to and fro at the end of the corridor. But she neither saw him nor had speech with him, until, near a fortnight later, one evening just at dusk, she met him face to face in the mouth of the corridor.

Bess had been out to buy a broom, and had brought her purchase home with her. Roger was walking along immersed in black melancholy, but as Bess came into the circle of light made by the lantern on the wall, he noticed how handsome she looked, with her hood thrown back, and her face flushed with exercise. The devil in Roger Egremont made him pretend to be tipsy, and lurching forward he fell against her. Bess, with the most innocent good-will, mingled with wrath at his supposed condition, held him up; and the return he made for this was to clasp her in his arms, crying:

“Ah, my girl, you knew I was after those sweet lips of yours!” and he kissed her furiously and insultingly.

For one moment Bess stood dazed, then, commanding all her young strength, she thrust him away from her, so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered, and a fierce and well directed shove actually threw him on the floor. Then, like an active and capable general who knows how to follow up an advantage, Bess whipped out her broom, and attacking the prostrate Roger with the handle, gave him then and there the first and last beating of his life—all the time crying out,—

“Oh, you wicked man! Is this the way to treat a respectable girl? You call yourself a gentleman! I would not give a farthing for a wagon-load of such gentlemen!” and the while she whacked him unmercifully.

Roger was so dazed and staggered by this sharp and unexpected assault that for a minute he made no resistance. Then, suddenly springing up, his forehead came in hard contact with Bess’s broom. Without a groan, he sank backward, blood gushing from his temple.

Immediately, Bess Lukens proved herself a true woman, and having only given Roger his just deserts, fell to weeping over him and reproaching herself, meanwhile tearing up her apron to make a bandage for his bleeding head.

Roger lay, half stunned by the violence of the blow, until his head was bandaged, and then he was so white and still that Bess was frightened half to death, and cried,—

“I will go for help! Sure, I have near killed him!”

“No—don’t go,” said Roger, in a quiet voice, seizing her. “There was much blood, but little hurt. Help me, rather, away from this public place.”

With the aid of Bess’s strong arm, he got up, and managed to walk as far as Lukens’s quarters, where he sank on a bench, near the open window. The air from without was cool and sweet, the room was quiet, and the blow from Bess’s broom, which had knocked the memory of all things from Roger for a moment, seemed to mark his waking into another and a better mind. Bess sat near him, fanning him anxiously, and the tears welling up into her brown eyes. In truth, Roger’s air of dejection, his bandaged head, and the sudden sadness of his manner, might have softened any woman.

“Bess,” said he after a long silence—the first time he had called her by her name—“I thank thee for that blow. I think you have beat the devil out of me with your broom, for I feel now to be myself; a thing I have not been before since I entered these walls.”

“I knew you were not yourself, Master Roger,” replied Bess, tearfully. “I knew it was just rage and misery and the like that had you by the throat and would not let you go.”

“Pity you thought not of that when you belabored me,” replied Roger, with the ghost of a smile.

“That was different,” said Bess coolly, but with a brighter color. “’Twas very rude of you to try and make free with me, and ’twas for that I struck you.”

Roger turned his one free eye toward her, and burst out laughing, and then said, in a voice at once gay, sweet, and earnest,—

“Fair mistress, I promise you I will never dare to make free with you again; and I swear to you I do not respect the Queen’s Majesty herself more than I do you, Bess Lukens.”

“Thank you, Master Roger Egremont,” was all that Bess said in reply, but her heart was filled with joy, keen and piercing.

Roger did not long remain, but rising and saying good evening to Bess, walked steadily to his cell, and sat him down to consider. And Bess Lukens fell to work at her knitting, and was strangely lifted up into a blue and sunny heaven, as she sat alone in the twilight, and her face was quite glorified with a new softness and sweetness—until poor Diggory Hutchinson shambled in and tried awkwardly to make love to her, when she flew out against him and crossly bade him hold his tongue.

Roger Egremont spent that night and many succeeding nights and days in a self-examination which brought him to extreme anguish. And the natural vigor and clearness of his understanding coming to his aid to show him where he stood, he perceived that he was a very ignorant man, and that his ignorance had done much to land him where he was. All this came to him in the days after his rencounter with Bess, when he spent his time in silence in his room, looking fixedly at the little slip of blue sky to be seen through his one narrow window, and thinking how the hawthorn buds were swelling at Egremont, and that the tiny young of the game birds were hopping about fearlessly in the ferny thickets of the park, and the fish were flashing their silvery backs in the still and shadowed pools where the river ceased its brawling for a time. At night he lay wide-awake all night long, asking himself a thousand questions he had never asked before, his mind groping like a blind Samson, and crying out for light. And at last light came. He was ignorant, and he swore he would be so no longer.

Like most unlettered men, he knew little of the scope and power of learning. It represented to him then some vast unknown force with which other men ruled him. He jumped to the conclusion that only his own illiterateness and Hugo’s book-learning had put him in Newgate prison, and he determined to remedy it as soon as possible.

This determination came to him in the dead of night, and by sunrise he was knocking at Lukens the turnkey’s door, with a plan to carry his resolve into effect.

Bess was already up and hard at work when she opened the door to Roger.

“Bess,” cried he, eagerly, “I must have books, pens, and paper. Go you into the city this morning, and bring them to me;” for Roger had still much the habit of command, instead of asking.

“Here are pens, ink, and paper,” replied Bess, producing a few inferior specimens of each; “and as for reading, here are five or six books—one, of sermons; a good thing for a papist to read.”

Roger knew so little that he regarded even these things with respect. However, he recalled the names of some of the books in the library at Egremont, and it struck him they would be more useful to him than sermons; so, taking some of the coarse paper Bess offered him, he made out, in a slovenly, ill-spelled way, a list of what he wanted. Bess was in no haste to get him things so useless as she considered books and pens and paper, and it was two whole days before he got what he wished. Meanwhile he avoided his late friends in the gaol—of whom most were rascals of a very black type—and sickened at the thought of his late carouses. And he struggled manfully, if awkwardly, with such literary appliances as the Lukens’s household possessed. In those two days so great was the illumination of his mind that he found out the length, the breadth, the depth, and the height of his ignorance. He discerned that he could scarcely read his own writing, that he knew no arithmetic, no history, no geography,—nothing, in short, except what he had examined with his hands and seen with his eyes.

“HERE ARE PENS, INK, AND PAPER”

Bess brought him a miscellaneous collection, bought, not on the recommendation of the shop-keeper, for it was a principle with her never to take a shopman’s opinion of his own wares, but with a view chiefly to getting the worth of Roger’s money in the size of the books. To poor Roger then all books were alike, and he fell upon them ravenously. Nor did this book hunger abate during the days he stayed in prison. In time—in six short months—he got a very true notion of what he wished to learn, and after that he continued his fierce pursuit of knowledge with order and system. He studied history, poetry, and belles-lettres, and made headway in French and Latin, of which he acquired a scholastic knowledge. He practised much with his pen, and from writing like a footman he acquired the most beautiful handwriting imaginable. He spent every waking hour with a book or a pen in his hand,—even the hour allotted him for exercise in the prison yard; and often he rose in the night to study and to write. His mind, naturally powerful, had been forced by his early ignorance to depend upon its own powers of observation entirely,—a thing commonly neglected by what are called educated men. But when on this noble superstructure of natural talents and keen observation was reared a knowledge of letters and tongues, Roger Egremont was mentally the full stature of a man. In short, the greatest benefactor he ever had was William of Orange, who returned the affront given him by making Roger Egremont twice the man he was before, or was likely ever to be.

Absorbed as Roger was in this new world of books and thought, it is not to be supposed that he was entirely forgetful of all else beside or that he became a saint as he became an educated man. He had still occasional communication with the outside world, and heard with inexpressible and ineffable rage that King William had bestowed the estate of Egremont upon Hugo, who was in the highest favor with the Whigs. The new King gave away English estates rashly, especially to his Dutch followers, and some years later the English Parliament forced a very general restitution; but no one, least of all, Roger Egremont, looked forward to the coming turn of affairs. The Egremonts, root and branch, were dispossessed, and being naturally men of adventure, were speedily heard from in various parts of Europe,—some living honorably, like decent, poor soldiers and exiles, others very basely if brilliantly. For all these was Roger concerned, but chiefly for little Dicky.

Almost a year had passed since Roger’s trial, when, in response to a letter smuggled out of prison by Bess Lukens, Roger got a letter from Dicky, smuggled in. It ran,—

Clermont, April, 1689.

Dear Roger,—Was it you who wrote the beautiful letter signed with your name? I hear you do spend your days in learning. How excellent it is, and when the K. comes to his own again, you, Roger, will be a great man; I know it. I hear the P. of O. has given Hugo your estate. Well, I love you as much when you are poor as when you were rich. The K., the Q., and the little P. are very well. I saw them when I went to pay my devoirs at Christmas. I am studying very hard for a purpose I cannot put on paper. You’ll know it in time—and I am well satisfied. But, oh, Roger, if you and I could only be together at Egremont once again! I love it as much as you do, and it makes me fierce to think it is not yours any more.

Mr. Egremont of the Sandhills and his sons were here of late, playing cards extremely, and have gone to Luxembourg with the Count Deslaudes, and a Scots gentleman, who also plays cards. I hear the Egremonts sometimes play the very shirts off their backs, and it makes me ashamed of the Egremont gentlemen. All of the others are not so, however. Cousin Hilary is grown very sober, and is in the corps of gentlemen-at-arms of the K. He and his family have nothing, poor souls, their estates being sequestered, as you know. For myself, I have found friends, and they give me my education. All I can complain of is that they do not give me all the time I want to play the fiddle. ’Tis but an idle amusement, but I love it. Dear Roger, I long to see you.

From your ever affectionate friend and kinsman,

Rich’d Egremont.

As Roger’s new passion for learning did not make a cloud between him and the few he loved, so it made him not blind to the attractions of a beautiful and humbly born girl, who was now his chiefest friend and daily companion; and he could not fail to see that this girl, so capable of love, anger, softness, revenge, and devotion, was wholly attached to him. But she had a sturdy self-respect, that kept the man she loved from presuming in any way. She had not the delicate reserves of speech and manner that mark the born gentlewoman; she drudged willingly and openly for Roger, spoke her mind freely when angry with him, and did not understand why he often blushed and refused her services. Her attitude toward him was rather one of keep-your-distance-or-I’ll-make-you-sorry-for-it, but it was effective. She was already experienced in that school of temptation which must needs surround a girl of her beauty and condition. Her native honesty and a truly sublime common-sense had kept her in the right path heretofore. And when she realized, as she shortly did, that she was deeply and desperately in love with the Jacobite gentleman, the elevation of his station produced an elevation in her mind. She saw that Roger had an invincible pride, and if ever he could be brought to marry the turnkey’s niece, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depths of the sea; and she scornfully refused to think of herself as that millstone. So she loved and drudged and sang, and if she wept and sobbed sometimes in the darkness of the night at her hard fate, she did no outward, daily fretting. As for Roger, he could not but love her, if only for her kindness to him; and however much he might doubt his own power of resistance to Bess’s charms, he had the wit to see, and the candor to acknowledge to himself, that this poor girl was the least likely to fall of any woman in the world.

After much labor in learning, at last the joy of it came to him, and then, meaning to communicate that joy, he offered to teach Bess. She readily agreed, and being complete owner of her own time, Roger came to Lukens’s rooms to play schoolmaster. No duchess in the land was more mistress of her establishment than Bess Lukens of her three rooms in Newgate. Her uncle, a watchful gaoler, but an indifferent uncle, made up his mind with great perspicacity about Bess from the first hour that she came to him, an orphan girl of sixteen or thereabouts. She was likely to go straight, but if she chose to go crooked she was not of the sort that could be stopped. And as she cooked his meals well for him, and kept his rooms clean and avoided the prisoners, as well as the other gaolers, he had no fault whatever to find with her. Latterly she had taken to keeping the earnings of her knitting and spinning to herself, and when her uncle asked for them, had flatly refused to give them up.

“I’ll make ye,” said Lukens, feebly, to this.

“Come and take ’em then,” replied Bess; but the invitation remained unheeded. Therefore Lukens had nothing to say when Bess informed him that Master Egremont was intending to teach her to write and cipher. She could already read a little, and easily made out the words in the song-books, which she studied diligently, being ever singing, very much as Dicky Egremont was ever fiddling.

Her education in reading, writing, and ciphering progressed rapidly; but when Roger would have taught her something farther, she declined.

“No,” she said. “There is no need for any more learning for me. I have enough.” As the ideas of the higher education were unknown in that age and place, Roger secretly approved her good sense.

When they were talking thus, they sat, as usual, in Lukens’s main room. It was May again, and Roger had been a year in Newgate. In spite of his mind and heart being given over to the new empire of thought, he had strong and strange yearnings after his home. As Bess had said, he was a countryman, blood and bone of him, and sometimes the longing for Egremont and the whole bright world of out-of-doors came over him with a sharpness of pain for which he had no words. This fit had been on him for several days, and after Bess had announced that her education was finished his thoughts fled away to Egremont.

“Do you know,” he said, “I can feel the grass growing at Egremont. ’Tis very green now; I think there is not, in England or anywhere else, such emerald green as we have there. And there are a couple of doves in an old rose tree near the fish pond, that have come every year for four years past; I wonder if they are there now. You’d be charmed to hear their sweet complaining, Bess; they sing as sweetly as you.”

Bess smiled one of her broad, bright smiles at this, and continued to knit, for she was never idle a waking moment.

“I thought much of my hunting and fowling in the winter time,” Roger kept on, “but at this time of year I did not think of killing any living thing. If I could but lay my leg on a good horse once more, and clap my boot heels into him, and have one good gallop through the park and over the hills— You should see the roll of the hills; ’tis beautiful at this hour in the day, they are so calm, with the sheep nibbling the young grass that grows in the sheltered places. And the oaks, the best in England—oh, you may laugh—I would not take St. James’s in exchange for Egremont. Not that it is so costly; there are many estates worth more,—but it is Egremont, ’tis all I had to love, except little Dicky, and that is why I play the fool about it.”

As he spoke he threw back wearily from his forehead his curling light hair, and his dark eyes had such a look of misery that it went to Bess’s heart. And she saw, besides, a small red scar on Roger’s temple, which she had never noticed before.

“Roger,” she said, leaning forward eagerly,—for they called each other frankly by their names then,—“what scar is that? I never noted it before.”

Roger smiled in the midst of his low spirits.

“I’m sure you ought to know it, as you gave it me with your broom-handle. By combing my hair over it, though, no one can see it.”

A passion of pity and remorse swept over poor Bess’s soul. Although small, the scar was very disfiguring, and Roger’s endeavor to conceal it showed that he was sorry to have it.

Bess laid down her knitting, and leaned closer toward him, her liquid eyes filling with tears, and her red mouth quivering. Some strange weakness possessed her; she would, at that moment, have given her right hand to have spared Roger that blow. The stress of her feeling went like an arrow in its flight to Roger’s soul. His glance met here, and they gazed, like ones enchanted, into each other’s speaking eyes. Bess, scarce knowing what she did, laid her lips upon the scar, and two bright tears dropped from her eyes upon Roger’s face. And then, her dark head rested against Roger’s cheek, and their lips met. Time was no more for them.

They were roused from their dream in Paradise by a vast and thunderous sound, that rolled and reverberated through the hollow arches of the prison, and was like the roar of the heavens and the earth coming together. It was only the firing of the cannon at nightfall, to close the prison for the night, but to Bess Lukens and Roger Egremont, in their exaltation, it was like the crack of doom. They started apart, and each rose at the same moment, and looked at the other with a pale face. Bess spoke first, very calmly and quietly.

“I was to blame. I know I never can be your wife, not because of my fault, but because of my uncle’s vile calling. But, Roger, neither one of us is of the stuff of which philanderers are made, and we must be on our guard lest harm come; and let there never be any more of this. For I tell you truly that love, in my mind, is mighty near to death, and I could kill myself if shamed, and kill the man that shamed me, albeit I loved him better than ten thousand lives.”

“And love and death are near in my mind too,” replied Roger, with the same quiet tone in which Bess spoke. “It will be death to any man who speaks an ill word against the woman I love, and death to her if she betrays me; and in every way my love will be guarded by my life. You are right; we are made of sterner stuff than most, and—”

“We must beware. But know this: if this moment you should offer to make me your wife, I have the courage to say nay, for I know ’twould mean life-long shame for you, and I am not the woman to make so evil a return for honorable love. And so, I say, let us not again so forget ourselves, and remember rather the gulf between us.”

“Bess Lukens,” said Roger, taking her hand as if he were taking that of a princess, “I have not the words to tell you how much I hold you in honor,—the more so that you have had no shield in this stormy life but your own born goodness, and I love you from the bottom of my heart. You have said there is a gulf between us, but that need not prevent us from being loving friends, and I hold you as the dearest friend I have on earth.”

CHAPTER III
ONCE MORE AT EGREMONT

THE summer and the winter, and again the summer and the winter came and went, and still Robert Egremont lay in prison. There was some murmuring about his case, but King William was in the midst of his Irish campaign, and had little thought of one contumacious Jacobite more or less. When William returned to England, he inaugurated a policy of conciliation toward the disaffected, and most of the Jacobites in prison were offered their liberty on easy terms.

Roger Egremont’s case had always been a perplexing one, the more so as he continued to be an object of popular sympathy. A parliamentary inquiry was threatened by the Tory parliament of 1690, in particular concerning the giving away of his estate to his half-brother. The Danby ministry thought it had found a solution of the problem in this particular case, by causing Roger Egremont to be informed that if he would make an application for pardon, it would be readily granted, together with a considerable sum of money, and that he might eventually hope for the restitution of his land.

To this, Roger made no answer except by a contemptuous silence. The offer was therefore repeated, and the reply, in Roger Egremont’s handwriting,—very beautiful by this time,—was:—

“Mr. Egremont, of Egremont, in the County of Devon, has done nothing for which he should ask pardon of the Prince of Orange. Mr. Egremont confidently expects to be released at an early day, on the demand of English freemen, and would not therefore lower himself by asking favors of a foreigner and a usurping prince.”

Clearly, imprisonment had not broken the spirit of this rash and headstrong young man. In truth, although Roger could never have brought his haughty spirit to ask pardon for what he had done, yet, at that very time, a Jacobite rising was daily expected in England, and Roger fully expected to have the pleasure of shortly telling King James at his palace of Whitehall, of the manner in which the Earl of Danby’s offer had been spurned.

The years that had passed had improved Roger’s looks as well as his mind, although not to so great a degree.

He had learned much, and he had suffered much,—two great improvers of the human countenance. And the same improvers had been at work on Bess Lukens, to her advantage. Moreover, having a quick ear, her speech had become far more polished. Their relations had not altered in the least, except that the longer Roger knew her, the more he loved her, and the longer Bess knew him, the more she was in love with him,—two very different things, be it observed.

The two attempts of Lord Danby having failed to get Roger Egremont out of Newgate, and there being a considerable agitation in many quarters concerning him, King William himself bent his shrewd head to the business. And the result was that in April, 1692, after Roger Egremont had been nearly three years in prison, he was roused one night from a deep sleep, by armed men, and forced to dress himself, blindfolded, taken out of the prison, set and tied on horseback, and ridden southward at a smart pace.

All through the mild spring night the party travelled. Blindfolded as Roger was, and tied to his horse, a kind of intoxication of bliss came with the pungent sweet air of the budding spring, and the steady trot of a good horse under him. He did not apprehend any violence; no one threatened or offered to harm him, and he was by nature devoid of fear.

All through the night they rode, and when the day was breaking rosily, and the rooks cawing loudly, and the low of kine was heard, they stopped in a wood. This being the first horse exercise Roger had taken since he chased King William, he was overpowered with fatigue, and after having eaten ravenously he threw himself on the ground, and fell into a delicious slumber.

When he waked, although he was still blindfolded, he knew it was in the afternoon. He lay quite still, listening partly to the scant conversation of the men with him, from whom he could learn nothing, though they were civil enough. They gave him food again, and told him they would not start until sunset. Roger lay on his back on the new-springing grass, and drank in greedily all the sweet sounds, and imagined the fair sights of nature around him. He remembered Red Bess, and his heart softened when he knew how lonely she must be then, and, no doubt, anxious about him. He conjectured what was to be done with him, and concluded that he was to be put aboard a ship for France or Holland. Either would be an agreeable change from Newgate.

At sunset they again took the road, and travelled all the second night, and rested all the second day, and again set forth at sunset on the second day.

Roger felt the strangeness of this kind of travel, this blindness to night and day, and to the faces of his companions. But he was travelling steadily away from prison walls, and sweet to him were the cool dews of night, the silence and the softness as his horse’s hoofs beat the highroad; and sweeter was the coming of the dawn, the wide sweep of the wind across fields and woods and hedges, and the day sleep in the heart of the woods, the scent of the leaves and grasses, the mellow drumming of the insects in the sun.

On the last stages of the third night there was something curiously familiar to Roger, in the way he was blindly travelling. He knew instinctively the character of the roadway, the sound of the streams under the bridges; he tasted on his lips the faint saltness which the sea wafts across the Devon hills. The cry of the birds was like the greeting of old friends; the scents of the woods and fields were known to him. At midnight the party stopped in a thicket, rising a hill. Roger was told to dismount, and when his foot touched the earth his companions turned and galloped off, leading with them the horse he had ridden. As Roger struggled to tear away the bandage over his eyes, he could hear the disappearing hoof-beats of their horses echoing in the silent night.

In another moment his eyes were free, and he found himself alone upon a hillside, and on the ground by him a small portmanteau containing clothes and a considerable sum of money. As he would not accept of his liberty any other way, King William had simply flung him out of prison.

Roger recognized his surroundings at once. He was at Egremont. The night was radiant with moon and stars, and before him was a great rich beautiful moonlit landscape, the line of distant hills rising cloudlike upon the faint horizon, the masses of woods solemnly dark, the river making its way musically through copses and thickets, and then resting silently in broad black pools. Before him on the crest of a gentle hill, was a group of rustling elms, that he knew lay between him and the view of the mansion. Dashing through the trees he came in full sight of his home, lying in the plateau below. The house was lighted up, although it was late, and he could see servants and many persons moving about. Evidently some festivity was in progress. The rows of great windows blazed brilliantly, and the faint echo of music and the beating of the feet of the dancers was borne on the wandering wind of night. Roger Egremont stood and watched it, with a face pale with imprisonment, and pale with unspeakable wrath and anguish. The dazzling moon showed him that the oak avenue was gone, every tree cut down, and he struck his hands together in an agony of rage at what he considered robbery and mutilation of what was his. They thought, no doubt, that he would go, like a beaten hound, and ask his half-brother for a dole of money, and a roof to shelter him. Such indeed had been the King’s hope, knowing very well that it would be as much as Hugo Egremont’s life was worth, in the state of feeling of the country, to refuse a share of all he had with Roger. But Roger was of the temper which will have all or nothing. He would make no terms with those who had robbed him.

After an hour or two of anguish, he became calm. One of the things which he had found out, as the result of his newly acquired knowledge of books, was that he had more control over himself, more philosophy in short. He knew, sad as was his own case, that there had been worse. He recalled them to his mind, and fortified himself with them.

The moonlit hours were spent by Roger Egremont on the lonely hillside, contemplating the noble patrimony which he considered had been filched from him. Until his late introduction to the great new world of thought and books, Egremont had been his world. How to get it back unless the Dutchmen were driven from England, he did not know, but the sooner the actual struggle was begun, the better. He would go over to France, whither most of the active partisans of King James had gone, and would ask the honor of leading the very vanguard of the reconquering army.

The vivid moon grew pale and sank, leaving only the trembling stars set in the blue-black sky; the lights in the distant house went out; the earth and all its creatures slept; and Roger Egremont, throwing himself on the ground, fell into a heavy slumber. The night grew chill; he had no fire but the distant stars; he was hungry, but he had nothing to sup on except rage and sorrow. And at the same hour Bess Lukens, lying on her hard bed in Newgate, was crying her eyes out for him.

He awaked with the break of day. If the sight of Egremont by moonlight had pierced his soul with its beauty, it seemed to him even more beautiful in the still, pale loveliness of the early dawn. A faint rosy light lay over the green fields and stately woods; the little river, laughing between its alder banks, was like a young child in its first merry awakening. The larks and thrushes—Egremont had ever been celebrated for its birds—made themselves heard in sweet, soft chirpings before bursting into full-throated song. The deer, red and dun, came forth from the dells and thickets in the park, and tossing their delicate heads sniffed the freshness of the morning.

Roger Egremont noted all these things with a heart near to breaking. They had been his, and they were his enemy’s—and that enemy was the half-brother he had befriended.

He perceived, however, that he must determine upon his course. He concluded that he had been flung down at Egremont in hopes that the sight of the place might induce him to open some communication, friendly or otherwise, with Hugo; and he shrewdly suspected that, much as Hugo might wish to kick him away from Egremont, the terror of public opinion would force him to do the handsome thing. But Roger could by no means endure the thought of accepting anything from his half-brother’s bounty. He wished for nothing short of turning Hugo out, neck and crop, with such other vengeance as he might compass.

He could think of no place in England to go. In his prison he had gained no accurate account of who were the accredited agents of King James. He was near the sea, and he had money in his pocket; and in a little while he determined to make for France. But first he would go to his own village people and get food and a horse.

Before leaving the spot, he knelt down, and made what men call a prayer, but which was simply, as such prayers are, an outcry against his enemy and an appeal for God to lift His hand against that enemy. Nevertheless, Roger Egremont was a man of reverential heart, and devoutly believed that punishment would fall on him for his misdeeds, as he ardently hoped and believed it would fall on his half-brother.

Then, scraping up a handful of Egremont earth, he tied it up in a handkerchief, shouldered his portmanteau, and made for the village of Egremont, from whose cottage chimneys the light-blue smoke was rising in the golden morning.

He walked through the edge of the park, steadfastly keeping his eyes in front of him.

As soon as he struck the highroad leading to the village, he met some laborers going to their work. They hesitated a moment, and then ran toward him.

“Is it that you have come back to your own, sir?” they cried, crowding around him.

“No,” said Roger. “Our King, King James, has had his heritage filched from him,—why should I complain? But mark, all you men who till the fields of Egremont, that I shall yet come into my own. And I shall take no vengeance on any of you who eat the bread of my bastard brother,—you are poor men, laboring for your daily wage,—but I shall take vengeance on him.”

The rustics looked at each other with meaning in their dull faces. One of them, an old man who had taught Roger the lore of birds and rabbits and hares and other wild things, spoke up, respectfully but freely.

“Hodge, the shoemaker, sir, and myself, we have often talked of that thing; and Hodge, who can read like a clerk, says no good ever came to a man from taking his father’s or his mother’s or his own bastard under his roof.”

“Hodge is a philosopher,” replied Roger, with a wan smile. “Which of you has a good horse to sell?”

There was a silence, until a young ploughman in a smock frock spoke up.

“None of us, master Roger, have a horse to sell you, but I have a good one for your worship to ride. He has not been always at the plough tail, and so is fitter than the others.”

“Thank you,” said Roger, showing some money. “After having robbed me of Egremont, the Dutchman gave me fifty pounds. The horse is worth three pounds.”

“Nay, sir,” replied the young ploughman, “I would rather have it that you took Merrylegs, and would give me the lease on the barn field when you come back. The lease is more to me than the horse.”

Roger smiled again, not so sadly; these people expected him to come into his own; it was impossible that this topsy-turvy state of things should last.

While they had been standing in the road, talking, the word seemed to have spread like wildfire that Roger Egremont had come back. The general belief among the ignorant was that he would go straight to the mansion, and oust the interloper. As if by magic, every cottage on the estate was emptied, and in half an hour the whole tenantry had assembled in the village.

Roger, at the head of a kind of triumphal procession of ploughmen, ditchers, carters, and such humble people, walked to the village. There the women and children awaited him. Hodge, the shoemaker, more practical than the rest, made his wife stay indoors to prepare some breakfast for their former master; and then, announcing the fact in a stentorian voice, pushed his way through the crowd, and carried Roger off to his house at the end of the lane leading toward Egremont. That breakfast, of brown bread, a rasher of bacon, and cheese and ale, was something like the breakfast of royalty. Roger sat at a little table, in full sight of the village people, who clustered about the doors and windows, watching him eat as the courtiers watched Louis le Grand. His appetite was good, and, as he told Hodge and his wife, it was the best mouthful he had tasted since he left Egremont.

At the conclusion of his meal he rose, and taking the pewter tankard of home-brewed ale in his hand, he came to the door, and said in a loud voice,—

“My friends, I do not ask you to drink the health that I shall drink; but I call you all to witness that I drink death and destruction to the Prince of Orange, and health and long life to his Majesty King James.”

The crowd knew little of the merits of either, but King James was an Englishman, and King William was not; in King James’s time the true owner of Egremont was their lord; in King William’s time, they were under the rule of an alien and a bastard; so they hurrahed cheerfully for King James; the women, who were more partisan than the men, striking in with their piercing treble, and even the children raising their shrill cries.

In the midst of it, a gentleman on a fine bay horse was seen trotting down the lane that led from the park gates of Egremont. It was Hugo Egremont. He had ever been an early riser,—for Hugo had all the virtues that bring success to a bad man as well as a good one,—and it was his practice, like Roger’s, to ride over the estate before breakfast.

The vulgar dearly love a sensation, and so the crowd parted as the rider came nearer, and he rode directly up to the door of the shoemaker’s cottage. The ploughman, meanwhile, had fetched his horse, Merrylegs, a well fed but clumsy cart horse, and by no means bearing out his master’s high opinion of him as a roadster. A rusty bridle and a moth-eaten saddle, and Roger’s portmanteau strapped on the crupper completed his equipment.

“What is all this racket about?” asked Hugo Egremont, as he drew up his handsome bay among the people.

“Master Roger has come back, sir,” said Hodge, pointing to Roger standing in the low doorway.

Hugo Egremont’s handsome florid face turned a sickly green. He got off his horse, advanced toward Roger with outstretched hand, and said the speech he had been rehearsing for three years past.

“Welcome, brother. I see you are in bad case; but trust me, you shall never want while I have a shilling.”

For answer, Roger’s wide mouth came open in a wider grin, and he did what he had not done since the day he was sent to prison with his chains clanking about his legs,—he laughed loudly and merrily. Dull and stupid as the rustics were around him, some magnetic thrill was instantly communicated to them, and they at the same moment burst into hoarse haw-haws.

Hugo Egremont’s face grew greener. He was a man of great intelligence, and he knew the tremendous power of ridicule. He would have mounted his horse and ridden boldly through a stick-flinging and stone-throwing mob, but this grinning crew disconcerted him. He spoke again, however, covering his chagrin with much art.

“Your own imprudence, brother, has brought you to this pass,” he said with an inimitable air of brotherly reproof. “The violent and unprovoked attack you made upon the King at your own table was bound to do you a mischief. As a younger brother, I was helpless to prevent, but I was alarmed for you.”

Roger said not one word, but laughed again. He could not but admire the ineffable impudence of his half-brother.

Finding it difficult to carry on a one-sided conversation, Hugo turned, and his eye fell on the ploughman who held the horse by the bridle. The beast’s equipment for the road was certainly ridiculous, and Hugo Egremont found in it an excuse to laugh himself, as everybody around him was laughing.

“For whose journey,” he asked, “is that miserable hack intended?”

“For Master Roger’s, sir,” civilly replied the man. Hugo Egremont, still by a great effort, kept a scornful smile on his face; and then every other face grew grave, and the ploughman added,—

“If your honor smiles, sir, at the notion that such a horse is good enough for Master Roger, we all do smile with you. But if you smile because he has no better—well, sir, ’tis because there is no better one in this village.”

Hugo, always master of himself, and better able to see himself as others saw him than many worthier men, knew that his triumph would be to conquer Roger’s ill-will. So, taking his hat off, and showing a closely cropped black poll, to be surmounted later in the day by a handsome periwig, he said smoothly, as he patted his horse’s neck,—

“Whatever hard feelings, Roger, you may have for me, I cannot forget that you are my brother; nor do I wish to forget all the kindness I had from you. So I trust you will not refuse to come to Egremont. The estate was sequestered; what more right than that it should come to a younger brother, who could maintain the family name, and who would do by you as liberal a part as you could wish? So do not feed your resentment, but return with me.”

Roger’s reply to this was what might have been expected from that headstrong and determined young man.

“No!” he shouted, his voice ringing so loud that it frightened the cawing rooks from the trees overhead, “I go not to my house as long as you, bastard, and your brood are in it. Some day I will come and turn you out on the roadside. Look out for that time.”

Roger Egremont mounted his awkward beast, and taking off his hat, made a low bow to the people, who returned it with shouts and cheers and tears,—some of the women sobbing loudly.

“I take with me,” he said, “a handful of earth from Egremont. Every night of my life shall it lie under my head, so that I may ever sleep on English ground. When the King returns and comes into his own, then will I come too. Until then, fare you well.”

CHAPTER IV
SHOWING HOW ROGER EGREMONT FALLS INTO GOOD COMPANY

THE inn of Michot was almost as well known at St. Germains as the palace itself—and Madame Michot and her lame son, Jacques, were as well known as the inn. For this inn was the rendezvous for all the gay blades, young and old, among the fifteen or twenty thousand English, Scotch, and Irish Jacobites, who crowded the little town of St. Germains. And especially was it the resort of the body of guards, known as the gentlemen-at-arms, who attended the poor, broken-down old King James Stuart, at the palace. Sad dogs some of these were, and great was the score chalked up against them—and oftentimes generously rubbed out by Madame Michot. For, as the good woman said, some of the worst debtors she had were among her pleasantest customers, and kept the old place lively; and Madame Michot took as much pride in having her common room a jovial place as any duchess in Paris gloried in the brilliance of her salon. These merry gentlemen from over the sea made many promises to their hostess of what they would do for her when the King came into his own again,—for, like most men ill-treated of fortune, they had great confidence in her future favors. In truth, if Madame Michot were granted a royal audience for every favor she had done an exiled Jacobite, she would have spent her whole time in the King’s company. She was a handsome, stout woman, gifted with a good heart and a true genius for inn-keeping, and cherished but one folly in the world. Her otherwise sound brain had been a little turned by the laughing promises made by these devil-may-care, rollicking exiles,—for that was the sort which most frequented the inn of Michot. In her inmost heart Madame Michot fancied herself going to court at the palace of Vitall, as she called it, escorted by noblemen and gentlemen whom she had supplied with meat and drink, never asking for payment. And the object of her visit would be to get something handsome for poor Jacques—Jacques, the only son the King had left her at home; who, but for his lame foot, would be with his brothers under Marshal Villeroy. Madame Michot had never been able to decide exactly what she would ask for Jacques, but it would be “something handsome,” and Jacques should be able to sit at table with gentlemen.

The inn was a stone building of only one story, with a half-story, in the shape of a great bare attic, over one part of it. Originally it had been a huge granary, but being pleasantly situated on the sloping ground between the forest of St. Germains and the rich low-lying meadows through which the silver Seine runs laughing, Madame Michot had seen its good points, and buying it, had turned it into an inn. It had no courtyard, but opened directly upon a grassy space with trees. Behind it, toward the river, was an ancient orchard, and all around it were sweet fields and vineyards. Afar off could be seen the stately châteaux of the nobility, proudly secluded in their pleasure grounds. Looking upward to the right, was that glorious terrace of St. Germains, made by Louis le Grand, and which he could not surpass even when he wished to make Versailles the wonder of Europe. This terrace, a full two miles long, and as straight as line and rule could make it, four hundred feet broad, with the formal clipped trees, as straight as soldiers on parade, lining the side toward the town and forest; the stone parapet with its iron balustrade on the other side, overlooking a sheer descent of two hundred feet into the valley of the Seine; the stately old palace of Francis the First, with the pavilion at the very edge of the terrace, built by the great Henry for his “Charmante Gabrielle;” the gigantic flights of stone steps, down which twenty men-at-arms could march abreast; and in the blue distance, the slender spire of St. Denis shining,—St. Denis, where all the French kings are buried, and of which that slender spire was such a bugaboo to the Grand Monarque that he utterly deserted the palace at St. Germains, and gave it over to his poor relations, the exiled King and Queen of England,—all this beauty, poetry, and romance was in full sight of the inn of Michot.

The public room of the inn opened directly from the roadway. It was long and low, with narrow slits of windows, and a great fireplace in one end. The only fault Madame Michot had to find with her foreign patrons, who had, as it were, taken possession of the house, was that they knew no moderation in feeding the fire. On mild nights, when a few fagots would have been a plenty, thought Madame Michot, these wasteful English and Irish and Scotch would throw on great armfuls of wood, making the blaze from the fire to light up the whole place, and to dim the candles placed in sockets along the walls. Madame Michot protested, sighed, charged for wood, and charged high; there was no breaking up the custom short of turning the exiles away, and she had no heart for that.

At the other end of the room, opposite the fireplace, was a broad, low stairway of oak, blackened with time and smoke, which led to the upper story. This was on one side of the great outer door. On the other was a raised platform, with a chair and a table for Madame Michot, and behind it a cupboard for her choice liquors. An iron grille screened this platform off from the main room, and presented a fiction that Madame Michot did not know everything that went on around the huge fireplace and at the long table. Madame Michot, however, had no illusions on this point. It was the custom for the frequenters of the inn—gentlemen all—to make a profound bow in passing the excellent woman, who, having grown very stout on her own good fare, did not rise, but returned these salaams by a polite inclination of her head. Dukes, marquises, and barons thus paid homage to her; for the inn of Michot was distinctively an aristocratic institution, although entirely different from most aristocratic institutions in being very jolly. The fact was, however, that the palace of St. Germains was exceedingly dull, and the inn was a city of refuge to gentlemen who loyally supported King James, but who had no mind for the austerities he practised. The royal table was stinted, and the wine was poor; the Queen went with shabby gowns and equipages, that the money might be given to penniless gentlemen and ladies, who eked out a living in lodgings in the town. Much of this money went to the inn, but all who spent there had full value received; and it was a place where a man could laugh and sing, after having done his duty by the great gloomy palace. And there was always laughing and singing going on of evenings, and sometimes all night long, in that quaint old common room, to say nothing of dancing and playing. The cards and dice were flying every night; the violins and viols da gamba were forever thrilling and making melody; some voice was ever being lifted up in song, proclaiming the joys that awaited all good Jacobites in England; and rattling choruses in praise of war and love and wine, and dispraise of William of Orange, were perpetually rolling and reverberating among the black rafters of the ceiling. And the Scotch gentlemen liked a loup and a fling when the fiddles played a Scotch reel, and the Irish gentlemen commonly jigged it when the fiddles spoke Irish, and the Englishmen footed it nimbly when “Kiss me sweetly,” was played.

On the whole, the inn of Michot was about the most cheerful place in the town of St. Germains. It was not, however, the most peaceable, although in general good feeling prevailed. Madame Michot could never recall without a shudder the night that the Irish gentleman, Mr. O’Mahoney, and Sir Thomas Chesbrough had it out with musquetoons in the orchard behind the house, by the light of a couple of stable lanterns, each gentleman protesting he could not wait until morning or for better weapons. And the look on the Irish gentleman’s gray face, when he was brought in shot through both lungs, haunted Madame Michot for long. Then, there was that affair between Colonel Macgregor, and Sandy Murray, Lord Tullibardine’s nephew, in which both were pretty nearly sawed to pieces with each other’s rapiers. Decidedly, the inn of Michot was like the Comédie Française—it had its tragedies as well as its comedies.

Like all truly aristocratic institutions, this inn was on a democratic basis. It was “First come, first served.” Nothing was reserved for anybody, and the poorest gentleman, who had not got a penny from England for a year, was as well served as he who had got a remittance yesterday. And so great was Madame Michot’s talent for inn-keeping that she prospered even under this system.

And of this pleasant inn was Roger Egremont to make acquaintance, about ten days after he had last seen Egremont. The evening was cold and chill for mid April, and a small, dismal rain was falling. The river was muddy, and the town, lighted only by the faint gleam from candle-lit windows, looked uninviting as Roger approached it in the misty gloom. Roger had with him, to make his way in a difficult world, a pair of pistols, some changes of linen, and less than fifty pounds in money. His soul was as gloomy as the evening. He ached, and was wearied with many days of riding, after three years of imprisonment. He had grown conscious, day by day, in seeing people at inns, and along the highroad, that he was poorly dressed, his horse was a scrub, his accoutrements ridiculous. As for poor Merrylegs, he was literally on his last legs, although Roger had been tender with him, and had often walked rather than burden the creature’s feeble back. At last, just as the highroad turned from the river, the horse suddenly sank upon his knees. Roger leaped off, and one look at the poor beast’s glazing eyes showed him that the end of journeys had come for the ploughman’s nag. Roger quickly unstrapped the saddle, and sat down on the ground patting the horse’s head. It came to him that the dumb creature felt the strangeness of his surroundings; used to the sweet fields of Egremont, and knowing only the air of Devon, he felt lonely in this strange land; and then Roger smiled at the conceit, but smiled very sadly.

After a while the horse scrambled to his feet, and just as he got upon his trembling legs with Roger’s help, a horseman, with a servant riding behind him, galloped out of the dusk. A clear, resonant voice rang out in the misty twilight, saying in French,—

“Hold! It is impossible you should mount that poor beast. The horse is dying.”

Roger deigned no answer to this, but gently led the poor tottering horse to the river’s brink.

When Merrylegs felt the cool water about his legs, he stooped down, and drank a little, and then lifted his head with an almost human look of resignation in his eyes. Roger, standing knee deep in the water, patted his head, saying kindly,—

“Good-bye; good-bye, old Merrylegs. You have been a faithful friend, and you shall have no more work nor pain in this world.”

Then, trying to help the horse along, Roger led him to the side of the road. This brought him nearer to the horseman, and quite close to the serving-man, who was watching with a grin the proceedings. Roger primed his pistol, put it to Merrylegs’ head, and fired. The poor beast dropped in his tracks, and the next instant, the servant, to his horror, found himself looking down the muzzle of the other pistol, and heard Roger Egremont, in a passion of rage, crying, “Laugh once at that poor horse, and you are a dead man!”

The man’s face changed as quickly as Punchinello’s in the show.

His master uttered no word of resentment; Roger had spoken in English, and the horseman responded in the same tongue, which was plainly his native language.

“Sir,” he said, “if you are subject to these gusts of rage, you will often find yourself in trouble. Nevertheless, I think you excusable just now. I had no mind to laugh, I assure you.”

At the first word Roger Egremont recognized that no ordinary man was speaking. The music of the stranger’s voice, his tall and graceful figure were obvious; his face was long and pale. Roger could see no more. But to hear once again the English tongue was sweet, and to know that here was a man who understood grief for the loss of a dumb creature was grateful. Roger recovered himself, and replied calmly:

“He was the gift of a very humble man, who could ill spare him, and he bore me faithfully until his strength gave out,—and he was the last living thing I owned from my country.”

“England?”

“Yes. He was not really worth bringing across the water, but I could not leave him behind.”

“If you will do me the honor,” said the stranger, “to accept of my servant’s horse, it is entirely at your service; and my man can take your saddle where you wish in the town, as I presume you are bound there. Permit me to introduce myself. I am the Duke of Berwick.”

Instead of warmly reaching out to take the hand that Berwick extended, Roger hesitated a moment. He hated bastards so—having good cause—that he hated the King’s bastard. However, he did offer his hand and replied,—

“And I am Mr. Egremont, of Egremont, but late from Newgate prison.”