Mr. Nathaniel Royston, of Cheapside, in the City of London, was of a well-known and highly respected west-country parentage. Apprenticed in London at an early age to a merchant of repute, he had soon displayed considerable sagacity, not only in the intricacies of the Turkey trade, but also in the more perilous and no less subtile labyrinth of matters political. As in the first, after winning his way to a large share in the undertakings of him who had been his master, he had devoted himself to the patient amassing of a large fortune, so in the second he had used his judgment and foresight to the one end of retaining intact what he had so laboriously gathered. I would not be understood to throw anything of blame on his conduct of his life. Ned hath often told me that to his father all governments were alike, for all, he would say, were equally at fault, and that it became a man of his temper and estate to make in each case the best of a bad business. The Turkey trade thriving, Mr. Royston continued to increase by this means of regarding affairs of state, in despite of King and Parliament, Army and Protector, Presbyterian and Independent. And this in so great measure that, in the year 1653, he acquired by honest purchase those lands of the family whose scion he was, which lay in the county of Somerset. So he came to live among us, but it was not until two years after the Restoration that his son Edward was born, that being six years after his marriage to the Lady Mary Harlowe. He was wont to say that it was indeed strange that the sole precarious venture in the life of a solid and cautious merchant should prove his most profitable, referring in this to his marriage with a lady whose family had been proscribed for its affection to the royal cause. In this circumstance, indeed, there would appear to be some resemblance between the fates of my mother and Ned's; with this difference, however, that in Mr. Royston's case love impelled to the single hazardous act of a lifetime, while in my dear father's, duty and the very danger itself brought about a union ultimately rewarded with affection.

This Mr. Nathaniel Royston, after some twenty years spent mostly at his estate of Royston Chase in our neighborhood, during which time he had much endeared himself to my father by many acts of a thoughtful and temperate goodness, which his wealth and general esteem well enabled him to perform, died quietly in his bed in the same winter as my dear mother.

Of my own brother Philip, my early recollection is most slender. His was, I believe, ever a studious and contemplative complexion of mind, which had led him at an early age to adopt, against the earnest wish of his father, the erroneous opinions in the matter of religion pressed on him, I am sure, far more earnestly by his mother's spiritual advisers than by herself. I have neither wish nor ability to expatiate on this subject, and will only say, in justice to both sides, that it was more on account of the sorrow I had seen deeply graved upon my father's face when Philip's adhesion to the Church of Rome was mentioned, than from any ecclesiastical predilection of my own, that I found means to resist certain assaults by Philip and others on my own acquiescence in the position and authority of the Church of England as by law established.

It fell shortly after the Restoration that the death of the childless Silas Holroyd much simplified the process at law whereby the attempt was making to recover my mother's property. The matter being brought to a successful issue, the revenues of our family became so vastly improved that in the year 1676, when I was eight years of age, and Philip eighteen, he was sent travelling on the continent of Europe with a governor. I heard my father murmur, as he returned to the house after bidding his son farewell: "Pray God it drive some of the folly out of him!"

This, in my father's view of it, was far from the result of that foreign tour. After a while he ceased to tell me of Philip and his letters, reading them ever in a clouded silence; till at length I was bidden not to speak of my brother, and I knew some bad thing had befallen, but what, for many years, I did not learn. Nor did I see him after that departure for a space of twelve years. And when at length I did see him—but that I will tell in its place.

I had thought clearly to lay, as it were, the groundwork of my narrative in far fewer words than these that stretch already behind me like a dusty and winding road at the traveller's back.

Now, when as a child I would read a tale or history (after that Ned had coaxed and driven both desire and skill of reading into my little head), I did use to pass over the early pages in scorn, and "to come to the part," I would tell the chiding Ned, "where things fall to happening." Since many in graver years do keep lively this desire of action and movement in what they read, I am now resolved to reach, as quickly as may be, the place "where things begin happening."

CHAPTER II

I have said above of this early friendship between a lad of eleven and a maid not half that age, that it endured five years. For at the end of that period the comradeship indeed was broken, and a term was set to the habit of community in all things that was to me at least so comfortable. The day that took my companion to reside in the town of Sherborne, there to attend the King's School, brought on my small mind its first remembered sorrow; wherefore I wept greatly, and would not for many days be comforted. At the time I did not understand (as how should I, being but ten years of age?) the reasons of this so sudden change in his mother's intention. But I have since learned that two causes, of which I myself, poor maid, was one, determined the Lady Mary Royston to take her son from the hands of the learned and pious governor who should have led him in the path of learning and conduct even up to the gates of the University of Oxford. Thus her late husband had intended, but, the tutor growing lazy and overeasy perhaps, while Ned would ever more frequently take the bit of control fast between the teeth of stubbornness, she was minded to subject him to sterner authority. She was moved, moreover, like many another parent of an only son, by some measure of jealousy, directed, in her case, toward "the wild little maid of Drayton," as she would call me; for, with all his duty to his mother, no words or wishes of hers could shake that notable and constant affection that Ned did then, as ever, spend upon me. Knowing, too, by her late husband, of the papistical bias (as she would say) of the Drayton family more than others of those parts had learned, she was ever in dread (pursuing Mr. Nathaniel Royston's policy of caution) lest our acquaintance should lead her or her son into some seeming of complicity with traitors. For we were then in the year 1678 and the full tide of the Popish Plot. But I have always believed that I was far more in this matter of sending Ned to Sherborne than Dr. Titus Gates or the whole College of Cardinals.