We are concerned with the present generation. With Rupert, Earl of Stowmaries, the direct descendant of the older twin, and with Michael Kestyon, the grandson of the younger.
Such as I have related is the true history of the grievance which this Michael nurtured against his cousin whom he deemed an usurper, and against all his peers, kinsmen and fellow gentlemen for the injustice which they abetted by admitting that usurper as one of themselves.
But unlike his father and grandfather before him Michael was not content to see any one else in possession of the family title and estates, which of a truth should have been his. From his father he had inherited among other family archives the mediæval document embodying the decree of Edward III and bearing that monarch's signature. How and wherefore this had remained as an heirloom in this branch of the family, tradition does not tell us. The fact seems to suggest that the younger twin—Michael—may have had some intention of enforcing his son's claim at a future time—an intention, mayhap, frustrated by death.
The man whom Lord Stowmaries saw at this moment, with flushed face and unsteady voice singing ribald songs to the accompaniment of boisterous laughter, chink of dice and sword, and blasphemous oaths, had at one time taken up his own cause with ardent and heart-whole enthusiasm.
At the age when boyhood first yields to maturity, Michael had lost his father and thereupon had begun to fight for his rights, with all the strength of a turbulent nature, full of instincts of luxury and driven to penury through flagrant injustice. He had spent some of the best years of his life, in a perpetual appeal to the King and to his peers to try his cause and if necessary to find it just. But the King was not fond of settling important questions himself and the Lords' House of Parliament was overbusy re-establishing a number of its own lapsed privileges to bother about a claimant with empty pockets.
Driven from pillar to post, Michael appealed to Common Law, to Chancery and to equity, setting up divers pleas in order to bring his case within the jurisdiction of these respective Courts. He spent all his substance in lawyer's fees, in sworn documents, in meeting constant demands for bribery, the while his kinsman sat comfortably enthroned at Maries Castle paying no heed to a claim, the justice of which one attempted to deny yet which no one was able legally to enforce.
Gradually as his pockets grew more and more empty, as constant rebuffs took the edge off his optimism, Michael carried on the fight with less and less hope if with unabated doggedness.
In the intervals he had sold his sword and his skin to the highest bidder, to Italy or Flanders, to the Emperor or to the King of France. He had led the life of the adventurer, who knows not from day to day whence will come the rations for the morrow, of the soldier of fortune who has neither kindred nor home.
His mother whom he adored—in his own turbulent passionate way—spent a life of humble penury in a remote Kentish village. To this lowly abode of peace Michael returned from time to time from his far-off wanderings in Sicily or Spain; here he would spend some few days in worshipping his mother, until the agony of seeing her patient and serene within measurable sight of starvation drove him frantic from out her doors.