The first trick she played them was to their advantage. John Egremont, a handsome, red-blooded country squire, of infinite assurance, happened to catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth when she was befooling the world with the notion that she, at the age of forty, would marry the boy Duke of Anjou, twenty years younger than herself. Part of this play was that the Queen should pine and lose her appetite, and swear wildly one day that she would never marry a man who might “flout the old woman,” and then proceed to write the Duke a love-letter which would shame a dairymaid. The Duke, having tired of the whole business, took ship for France, while the Queen took to her bed at her palace of Westminster and moaned and wept incessantly. Nothing would she eat. John Egremont, being in the Queen’s anteroom when one of her maids came out lamenting that the Queen could eat nothing, ran down into the kitchen, snatched up a platter of beans, the first thing on which he could lay hands, and was about to run away with it. The cooks, however, were valiant men though humble, and they fell upon him with basting ladles and rolling-pins and turnspits, so that John Egremont had to draw his sword. This he did, slashing out right and left, and pinking more than one of them; but nevertheless, carrying his beans high above his head, he escaped from the mêlée, and flew back to the Queen’s apartments. Pushing his way into her presence,—a thing easily forgiven by her when the man was young and comely,—he presented the beans on his knees to her. The Queen, lying wrapped in a great mantle, with her face in her hands, was persuaded to turn and look at the kneeling Egremont. Something flashed from her cold bright eyes into his cold bright eyes, and the daughter of Henry the Eighth suddenly burst into that loud, ringing Tudor laugh, which was like the shout of a clarion. Whether it was the homeliness of the dish, or the expression of knowingness in Egremont’s handsome eyes, or that she was tired of the play, is all one. She ate the beans,—Egremont meanwhile telling her in moving language of his fight with the cooks, and showing her his mantle, which bore the marks of the greasy encounter. At this, Elizabeth Tudor laughed louder than ever; and when Egremont kissed her beautiful white hands, after she had washed them in a silver basin, she fingered fondly the short curls upon his neck, as she was wont to do with handsome young fellows. From that day to the time, six months before her death, when she fingered weakly the curls on the neck of Egremont’s son—a handsome young man—as she had fingered his father’s, and laughed feebly the old Tudor laugh, she was the sturdy friend of the Egremonts. It mattered little that they were staunch believers in the old religion, and that the Egremont dames had mass daily in a secret chapel, and at their chief estate of Egremont was a “priest’s hole,” where the priest was hidden when persecution raged. Elizabeth Tudor was the only one of her race who was not consumed with a rage for religion; but she, being a perfectly good-natured sceptic, merely laughed in her sleeve at those who risked their persons and estates for conscience’ sake. True, the queer Elizabethan religion afforded a very good club wherewith to pound those subjects, otherwise distasteful or insubordinate to her Majesty, but men as comely, well born, and debonair as John Egremont were at liberty to believe what they liked, as long as they came to court, flattered the Queen, and made her great presents. So she continued to give profitable places to the Egremonts, swearing flatly to her lords in council her great, mouth-filling oath, “By God’s Son!” that Egremont, to her certain knowledge, had conformed to the last new statutes, and to the very last days of her life remained a good friend and protector to that family.
The Egremonts seemed to be gifted with the art of pleasing kings. They were as much in favor with James the First as they had been with the mighty princess whose mantle fitted Scotch James as well as royal robes fit a sign-post. He played the fool with them as he did with all his favorites, but put money in their purses for it, and their estates grew. Poor stubborn Charles the First found the Egremonts loyal to him in his endeavors to rule the English people as they did not wish to be ruled; and, although they suffered somewhat at the hands of Cromwell, the second Charles found them to his heart’s liking, and repaid them twice over.
There were many Egremonts then, younger sons of younger sons, and they held together strongly in certain things, and differed angrily and loudly upon others. They were not a race of milksops, but sinewy men and women, red-blooded like their Elizabethan ancestor. Their motto was, “Fear God, and take your own part.” Some of them feared God, but all of them took their own part with firmness and determination. Although they held firmly to their religion, they frequently took liberties with the Decalogue; but having received great benefits from their sovereigns, repaid it with a handsome loyalty.
The head of the house in the merry days of Charles the Second was a certain John Egremont, comely and debonair, like his forbears, but cold of heart and a calculator. Like most men of that type, his loves were few and strange. He footed it at court with the best of them, was good at playing and at fighting, and thought with King Charles that God would not forever damn a man for taking a little pleasure out of the way. He was rather proud of his reputation as a sad dog, and it was in no way impaired during a brief married life. The yoke was light, and was soon lifted by death; so, within a year or two John Egremont was back at court, leaving a little motherless boy at Egremont. Then he took a notion to make the grand tour,—a quarrel with Lady Castlemaine rendering it very necessary that he should absent himself from England for a time. It was three years before he returned, but my Lady Castlemaine had not cooled off, nor did she during the remainder of John Egremont’s life.
The next seven years were spent by him in back-stairs negotiations to get back to court, and in long absences on the Continent; and meanwhile his son and heir, the little Roger, led at Egremont the most neglected life possible, so far as his father was concerned. He had, it is true, a tutor, a guzzling, tipsy creature, whom the boy despised and hated, and from whom he would learn nothing. The tutor, however, secure in the indifference of the lad’s father, troubled himself not at all about Roger’s learning, or want of learning; and so the boy grew up as ignorant as a clod concerning books, but not so ignorant about some other important things. John Egremont’s absences from England, and his stony nature, left him but few friends, even among his own kindred, thus breaking the traditions of his family. The little Roger, therefore, was reared in loneliness, except for the companionship of one other lad, a far-off cousin, Dicky Egremont. Dicky was almost as ill off for friends as Roger, his nearest relative being a paralytic old grandfather, who had served under Prince Rupert, and eked out an existence in what was little more than a cottage on the Egremont estate. The two boys were perpetually together, and had no other company but servants. Roger could not be called a handsome lad, although he had ever a straight, slender figure, fine white teeth in his wide mouth, and a profusion of beautifully curling light-brown hair. But Dicky was rather a homely little boy, in spite of his apple cheeks and his dimples and a very roguish smile; and although only two years younger than Roger, he always seemed very much more so, and Roger early acquired the habit of speaking to him and of him as if Dicky were an infant, and he, Roger, were an hundred years old. This was so marked that Roger, at eleven years of age, thought the nine-year-old Dicky too young to share many of his thoughts and dreams,—for he thought and dreamed, although he did not read and could scarcely write his name.
But, though a very ignorant boy, he was so far from uncouth and witless that his ignorance was anything but obvious. He had by nature a strong and acute understanding, and showed even as a little lad great art in concealing the defects of his education. He had, moreover, a natural grace, a careless sweetness in his air that made him the pet of the ladies in the drawing-room on the rare occasions when he saw them, as well as the favorite of Hoggins the cook, and Molly the housemaid. And though most of his days were passed with game-keepers and stablemen, and his evenings generally in the housekeeper’s room, Roger never forgot, or allowed these people to forget, that he knew the difference between the condition of gentle and simple. Indeed, the servants, out of pity for his forlorn childhood, had tried to console him by telling him that all the broad lands of Egremont and the stately Elizabethan house would one day be his. It sank deep in the boy’s mind, and he early acquired an idea of the beauty and value of his home and a passionate affection for it, that strongly colored all his later life. And Egremont was worthy to be loved. The manor-house lay upon a breezy upland, with the faint blue line of the hill country between it and the salt sea on the one side; and on the other, afar off, was the salt sea again, each but little more than a day’s ride away. The land was rich and well wooded and watered. A little brawling river ran through the estate, and fed the artificial lake and fish pond near the house, on which swans and ducks floated and made their reedy habitations. The woods of Egremont were celebrated, and particularly a great avenue of oaks, three miles long, standing in ranks like soldiers at parade, was the envy of all the timber merchants in the south of England. John Egremont, in the year of the Restoration, planted two thousand young oaks; the timber, already immensely valuable, was likely to become more so.
The park held a thousand acres, through which the dun deer ran, and where other wild creatures and many birds found undisturbed cover. It was in this park that Roger Egremont spent his boyhood and early manhood. The house, a vast parallelogram, had been built by that John Egremont of the bean-platter. It was full of tall windows; the Elizabethan architects, being new to glass, used it so lavishly that many Elizabethan mansions were little more than glass houses. There was a fine hall in the Egremont house, and a library with a respectable number of books in it, and much quaint carved woodwork, but the lad, Roger Egremont, was almost a stranger in the house, so little did he live in it, except to sleep in a little bedroom he had on the first floor, and to take his meals in a grimy den habited by the tutor. For at the break of day, every morning, fair or foul, Roger was out-of-doors, looking after his rabbit hutches and all his various contrivances for trapping wild creatures, and running about the stables backing the colts, cultivating the acquaintance of the great, mild-eyed cows, as they stood in line to be milked, listening to the call of birds and domestic fowls, and learning to imitate them, watching the budding or the falling of the leaf, feeding the ducks in the river, and gravely studying by the hour the antics of the fish in the fish pond. In short, the great book of nature lay open before him, and he read it diligently, and learned to understand it well, but of other books and of men he knew pitifully little.
In these hours of incessant bodily and actually mental activity, little Dicky was generally his companion, and it pleased the older boy’s vanity to tell him the magnificent things to be done for him when Roger should reign at Egremont. Yet, when the servants talked before him, as they often did, of “when master be dead,”—an event which they rather anticipated,—Roger would fly into a rage and cry,—
“Say no more to me of that. Do you think I want my father to die?”
To this, Molly the housemaid pertly replied,—