Roger smiled again, not so sadly; these people expected him to come into his own; it was impossible that this topsy-turvy state of things should last.
While they had been standing in the road, talking, the word seemed to have spread like wildfire that Roger Egremont had come back. The general belief among the ignorant was that he would go straight to the mansion, and oust the interloper. As if by magic, every cottage on the estate was emptied, and in half an hour the whole tenantry had assembled in the village.
Roger, at the head of a kind of triumphal procession of ploughmen, ditchers, carters, and such humble people, walked to the village. There the women and children awaited him. Hodge, the shoemaker, more practical than the rest, made his wife stay indoors to prepare some breakfast for their former master; and then, announcing the fact in a stentorian voice, pushed his way through the crowd, and carried Roger off to his house at the end of the lane leading toward Egremont. That breakfast, of brown bread, a rasher of bacon, and cheese and ale, was something like the breakfast of royalty. Roger sat at a little table, in full sight of the village people, who clustered about the doors and windows, watching him eat as the courtiers watched Louis le Grand. His appetite was good, and, as he told Hodge and his wife, it was the best mouthful he had tasted since he left Egremont.
At the conclusion of his meal he rose, and taking the pewter tankard of home-brewed ale in his hand, he came to the door, and said in a loud voice,—
“My friends, I do not ask you to drink the health that I shall drink; but I call you all to witness that I drink death and destruction to the Prince of Orange, and health and long life to his Majesty King James.”
The crowd knew little of the merits of either, but King James was an Englishman, and King William was not; in King James’s time the true owner of Egremont was their lord; in King William’s time, they were under the rule of an alien and a bastard; so they hurrahed cheerfully for King James; the women, who were more partisan than the men, striking in with their piercing treble, and even the children raising their shrill cries.
In the midst of it, a gentleman on a fine bay horse was seen trotting down the lane that led from the park gates of Egremont. It was Hugo Egremont. He had ever been an early riser,—for Hugo had all the virtues that bring success to a bad man as well as a good one,—and it was his practice, like Roger’s, to ride over the estate before breakfast.
The vulgar dearly love a sensation, and so the crowd parted as the rider came nearer, and he rode directly up to the door of the shoemaker’s cottage. The ploughman, meanwhile, had fetched his horse, Merrylegs, a well fed but clumsy cart horse, and by no means bearing out his master’s high opinion of him as a roadster. A rusty bridle and a moth-eaten saddle, and Roger’s portmanteau strapped on the crupper completed his equipment.
“What is all this racket about?” asked Hugo Egremont, as he drew up his handsome bay among the people.
“Master Roger has come back, sir,” said Hodge, pointing to Roger standing in the low doorway.