The House of Egremont

by Molly Elliot Seawell

There was no ale or beer worth speaking of in the cellars, although much wine, Sir Hugo not much relishing English drinks; and so, to Roger’s relief, he found himself obliged to invite all his friends to go to the village alehouse for the wherewithal to drink his health, and he was at last left alone at Egremont.

So keen were his emotions when the last huzzaing villager was out of sight and sound that he was quite overcome with weakness and weariness. He walked straight to his own little room, a room so small and inconvenient that Hugo Stein had scorned to improve it, and there, locking the door and throwing himself into a chair, he covered his face and felt on his cheeks those rare, scalding tears that are sometimes wrung from strong men. All of his unloved youth, the wrongs his father had committed against him, his long misery of imprisonment, his poverty and exile for so many years came over him, and the first hour he spent at Egremont was among the saddest of his whole life. The past is a ghost which cannot be laid, and when it is driven out by a happy and living present, it yet waits and watches menacingly, to intrude itself and threaten. “Think not to forget me. I am a part of thee, and will be with thee as long as sense and memory inhabit thee.”

Roger looked about him and saw Dicky’s short, boyish figure flitting from room to room upstairs and down, indoors and out; heard Dicky’s sweet young voice, as when they had been lads together there, heard the vibrant music of Dicky’s violin in “Les Folies en Espagne.” He rose and went out of the house, through the well remembered path to the Dark Pool. He stood bareheaded by the low mound where Dicky slept so peacefully. It was quite green, although the time was early spring, but it had been newly turfed. There was nothing to mark it. Roger sat down by it, and pulled up carefully some weeds that had grown amid the soft grass. Could Dicky have but lived to see that hour! The sun was shining upon it, the Dark Pool was not dark, but full of light. Work, pain, death,—these were no more for Dicky, but joy and peace and life. This thought soothed him. And then Nature, the mighty mother, sweetly spoke to him as she had done in all that place for so many years. He listened to the voice of the laughing, sobbing, merry, melancholy river; he renewed his friendship with the trees, the fields. Once more he claimed acquaintance with the flying and creeping things, and the dun deer came timidly forth and ate out of his hand.

And that night he slept sweetly, ah, so sweetly, under his own roof, an exile no more, and prayed and swore in the same breath that the King should one day sleep at his palace of Whitehall as happily as he, Roger Egremont, slept at Egremont.

Next morning he began his reign by pitching out of the house and making a bonfire on the lawn of everything in the house savoring of Hugo Stein. The top of the pile was a handsome oil portrait of William of Orange. Roger drove his foot through the face before burning it.

He then sat himself down, and in his beautiful clerkly handwriting, strange to all whom he addressed, he wrote a letter to every Tory gentleman he knew in the county, advising them of his return, by the advice and consent of his Majesty James the Second, and boldly announcing that, if asked to take the oaths, he should refuse, and stood ready to go to Newgate again if need were. There was little danger, however. A Tory parliament was giving King William ample employment just then. Especially did it concern itself with forcing upon him the restitution of estates and crown revenues which he had bestowed upon his favorites. And so perpetually troublesome had been the Egremonts that a convenient blindness on the part of the government toward Roger Egremont was the only policy to be pursued. When certain red-hot Whigs in the county informed some of the court people that Roger Egremont had inaugurated his new reign at Egremont by making a bonfire of the portrait of King William, given by that Prince himself to Sir Hugo, they were met by a strange indifference,—so much so that they felt no inclination to repeat other disloyal things which Roger Egremont said and did. The government shrewdly suspected that this Jacobite gentleman would not object to a persecution, and they wisely declined to oblige him.

On the contrary, an intimation from a high quarter was given him, that if he did not molest the Government, the Government would not molest him—only, he must not visit London, and his comings and goings across the seas would be watched. To this, Roger made no objection. He had called his tenants about him, confirmed such arrangements as seemed necessary, and on the first quarter-day, and every quarter-day thereafter, the rents were paid him without cavil. Hugo Stein had left no will, so there was no one to dispute anything with Roger, unless it were King William—and that astute person had larger affairs on hand than the dispossession of one single Tory gentleman. Besides, the King was very weary and tired of life, and it seemed as if his earthly troubles would soon be overpast—and he cared less than nothing for sister-in-law Anne, or who and what she would find in England when he was gone. So, partly from policy, partly from lassitude and disgust, King William was minded to let bygones be bygones with Roger Egremont—which was better for both than another arrest, another state trial, and another raking up of the popular fury which had attended the trials of the Egremonts.

Roger Egremont settled himself down for a year of preparation for the greatest happiness in the world; he had no reason to doubt that Michelle was doing the same thing. And meanwhile there was happiness in finding himself once more master of Egremont. No man was ever less fitted for exile than Roger Egremont. His soul had struck deep roots in the soil, the air, the sky of his native country. He had always spoken French with an abominable English accent, and was proud rather than ashamed that no language sat well upon his tongue except his own. And he was now restored to that spot so dearly loved and longed for, and he had everything to hope. Even King William’s declining health gave him great joy, for he knew that the Orange Prince was not to be dispossessed by any force poor, feeble King James could bring to bear against him. Only the King of kings could get William of Orange out of England. But Roger had high hopes that God would soon remove the usurping King to Abraham’s bosom, and would by no means admit that any better quarters in the next world than Abraham’s bosom would be provided for him.

Roger Egremont was extremely well received in the county, not only by the Tory families, but by the Whigs as well. For was he not young—not yet three and thirty—and rich? For Hugh Stein had been a careful manager, and albeit he had made way with much ready money, such as the eight thousand pounds from the sale of the oak timber, yet he had not been able to alienate an acre of the land, and he had added several hundred acres to the estate. Many Whig fathers of handsome daughters thought it would be a righteous action to make a son-in-law even of so obstinate a Tory as Roger Egremont, and convert him. So thought many of the daughters, for Roger was a soldierly-looking man, much handsomer than he had been in his first youth, one who had seen hard campaigning, who was familiar with foreign courts and camps and cities, could sing charmingly when he chose, which was not often, and, better than ever, “could fight, could drink, and could be gallant to the ladies.”

But however gallant he might be to the sex in general, no one could say that he singled out any fair one in particular. He did not frequent gay places, and went not near London. He wore black that year for Dicky, and had the poor lad’s body laid in the family vault, with great honor. He had occasional short letters from Bess Lukens, and wrote her in reply long answers, telling her more than he told any one else of his daily life, his happenings, his hopes, his dreams, and always winding up with saying that he would be at St. Germains the next March. This specific promise gave a strange discomfort to Bess Lukens; she knew not why, and did not care to speculate. He wrote to Berwick too, sending all the political news he could gather, and dwelling joyfully upon the fact that William of Orange was said to be failing fast, and made no secret of his hatred for the English people since they had forced him to send his Dutch guards home.