The House of Egremont

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“I am leaving shortly for the campaign in the Low Countries, and wish to settle my affairs before the last hour before departure comes.”

Madame Michot expressed her regret at his going. Mr. Egremont had been so pleasant always, but so were all of the gentlemen who frequented her house.

“And madam,” said Roger, with an elaborate affectation of carelessness, “I hope you will continue to bestow your friendship on Miss Lukens.”

“I will; never fear,” replied Madame Michot; and Roger, floundering awkwardly, being at a loss for ideas as well as words, added,—

“If you would keep an eye upon her—”

Madame Michot’s mouth came open in a broad smile.

“It is hardly worth while for me to promise that, Mr. Egremont,” she said. “I know of no one better able to take care of herself than Miss Lukens; and if she takes it into her head to misbehave, I know of no one strong enough to stop her.”

At which Roger laughed and went his way. He reckoned Madame Michot as one of Bess Lukens’s most powerful friends.

On the third day Roger had an intimation that they would start on the following morning at sunrise. He had heard no word from Dicky, and feared he could not come to St. Germains. That day he spent strolling through the places grown dear to him in that past year. He walked through the forest. Spring was at hand, and the trees knew it. The brown earth was soft under his feet, and there was a faint blue haze over all the woods and fields and thickets. He had thought, when he first came to St. Germains, that he would not set forth from it until he should take the highroad for Calais, and thence to England. He had no more forgotten his own land and Egremont than the Jewish captives had forgotten their country when they wept by the waters of Babylon. Every time he looked upon the fair face of Nature, or heard her voice, it spoke to him of his home. For so long it had been all he had to love! When the wind blew softly, it brought him recollections of the wind that wandered through the laurel copse and sported upon the wide, green lawn at the south corner of Egremont. When it rained he could shut his eyes and dream he was in the little tower room where he slept as a boy, and that the pattering drops were coming down upon the tiled roof of the buttery hatch below his window. Sunshine and starshine, night and day, morning and evening, in France, were transformed in his eyes to England, and this dream of his home seemed real, and the foreign country round about him unreal. And with every thought of Egremont came the fixed determination to make Hugo Stein pay dearly for every hour that he had kept the rightful master out of his own.

Thinking these and other poignant thoughts, he descended from the heights into the lovely valley of the Seine. He passed the lodge gates of the place where dwelt Michelle—he could not see the château for the trees. He walked to the place where he had first seen her,—the little retired strip of meadow, with the old rose trees scattered about it. The spring had been farther advanced then,—it was not quite a year,—yet he had lived so much more in that time than in any other year of his life that it seemed a vast space of time. It occurred to him that he had already lived an eternity, although he was not six and twenty years old. Few men had known such outward vicissitudes; none that he knew had experienced those inner changes. He had gone into Newgate prison one man—he had come out of it another man. He was by nature and birth a country gentleman—he was about to become a soldier of fortune. Yet, such was the true, adventurous nature of the man that he thrilled with joy at the thought of the chances and changes, the delights and the dangers of the life upon which he was to enter.