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.
THE HOUSE OF EGREMONT
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.