The House of Egremont

by Molly Elliot Seawell

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.”