Read Ebook: The House of Egremont by Seawell Molly Elliot Relyea C M Charles M Illustrator

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Ebook has 2259 lines and 155847 words, and 46 pages

PAGE

"HERE ARE PENS, INK, AND PAPER" 40

THEN, WALKING DOWN THE STAIRWAY, CAME THE POOR KING 218

THEY WAIT TO BID THE PRINCESS GOOD-NIGHT 296

DICKY WHISTLED TO BOLD, WHO CAME AND LICKED HIS HAND 334

ROGER RAISED THE PISTOL AND FIRED 400

THE

HOUSE OF EGREMONT

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 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.

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.

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."

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