Roger, for once did not join in the chorus, although he removed his hat, out of respect to the sentiments of the song, as he passed upward to his attic. For his own part, he felt deeply that gibe of the Princess Michelle, and would have been glad to go fighting the very next morning.
CHAPTER VI
“YOUR LOVER IS EVER IN A BAD WAY WHEN THE OTHER WOMAN APPEARS.”
THE May came and waned, and so did the early and late summer, and Roger Egremont’s days so melted one into another that the Sundays seemed only a day, instead of a week, apart. In spite of that kind promise of the Queen’s that he should not be forever driving a quill, there was much writing to do. Roger solaced the long hours he spent listening to the droning voice of the King dictating to him, by the thought that in the autumn there would be an invasion of England; and if not in the autumn, in the winter; and if aught should prevent in the winter, certainly the spring would see the King at Whitehall, and himself at Egremont. One of the recompenses he promised himself for his three years’ imprisonment, and for his present poverty,—living frugally on the scanty pay of one of the King’s gentlemen-at-arms,—was that of kicking his half-brother out of the hall door of Egremont. For it was not enough for this hot-blooded and very faulty Roger to dispossess his brother of a stolen estate; he longed, with a strenuous longing, to feel his hand on Hugo’s collar, and the sole of his well-made foot trampling Hugo’s prostrate form.
It sometimes came to him, as he steadily covered reams of paper, that William of Orange could no more be written out of England than he could be sung out, as Mademoiselle d’Orantia had said. The same thought haunted many of the great multitude of exiles, who waited and waited for they knew not what. Except the King’s secretaries, never had people as much time as these dwellers in a foreign land. Men must be doing something, and most of them killed time in either a trivial or an evil way. Roger and Berwick spent a good many hours taming a squirrel for the little Prince of Wales. These two men, entertaining themselves with a child and a squirrel, looked uneasily into each other’s eyes. Roger said quietly,—
“As well be doing this as anything else;” to which Berwick gravely nodded. It was quite as well as spending long days, as Berwick often did, at Marly-le-Roi, only two miles away, where Louis le Grand, grown pious, held his court.
Roger too had a sight of Marly,—going there in company with Berwick,—and was neither pleased nor edified with what he saw there: a tedious ceremonial, a King who majestically ate and drank, dressed and undressed in public, and a horde of place and pension hunters after a snivelling hypocrite of a woman, as Roger truly esteemed Madame de Maintenon to be. As, however, all the people at St. Germains, from the King down to the kitchen scullions, lived upon the bounty of Louis le Grand, which was, it cannot be denied, very nobly given, Roger felt rather a painful sense of obligation. The pay he received monthly for his services in the corps, the little packet of money gently put into his hand by King James, saying, “Mr. Egremont, take this little sum to buy you a horse,”—all—all—came from the coffers of the French King, and were wrung from those toiling peasants in the fields and vineyards. The dead and gone Florentine who said,—
“Salt is the savor of another’s bread,
And weary are the feet which climbeth up
The stairs of others.”
might have looked into the hearts of the people at St. Germains for his words.