A Minion of the Moon: A Romance of the King's Highway

by T. W. Speight

Andry--of whom we shall hear more later--was a man of forty, with a big, shaggy head and the torso of an athlete set on the short, bowed legs of a dwarf. Further, he was dumb (the result of a fright when a child), a deficiency which only caused his employer to value him the more. He was clever with his pen and at figures, and kept the Squire's accounts and wrote most of his letters, for Mr. Cortelyon hated pen work, and besides suffered occasionally from gout in his fingers.

Finally, Andry filled up his spare time by dabbling in chemistry in an amateurish fashion, being quite content to experiment on the discoveries of others, and having no ambition to adventure on any of his own.

A full-length oil painting of Squire Cortelyon, taken a short time before his accident, and still in existence, represents him as a thin, wiry-looking man of medium height, close shaven, with a long, narrow face--a handsome face, with its regular, clear-cut features, most people would call it; cold, unsympathetic light-blue eyes, and a dry, caustic smile. His dark, unpowdered hair, cut short in front, is doubtless gathered into a queue, only, as he stands facing the spectator, the picture fails to show it. He is dressed in a high-collared, swallow-tailed, chocolate-colored coat with gilt buttons. His waistcoat is of white satin, elaborately embroidered with sprays of flowers. His small-clothes, tight-fitting and of some dark woven material, reach to the ankle, where they are tied with a knot of ribbon and are supplemented by white silk stockings and buckled shoes. Round his throat is wound a soft cravat of many folds; his shirt is frilled, and he wears lace ruffles at his wrists. He stands in an easy and not ungraceful posture, looking right into the spectator's eyes. In one hand he clasps his snuffbox, deprived of which life for him would have lost half its value.

Although Squire Cortelyon courted and loved a cheap popularity, at heart he was a man of a hard and griping disposition, whose chief object in life, more especially of late years, had been the accumulation of wealth in the shape of landed property. Even in early life he had never either hunted or shot, but, for all that, he subscribed liberally to the nearest pack of hounds, as also--but less liberally--to the usual local charities. Although he employed a couple of keepers, he did not preserve too strictly, a fact which tended to his popularity among his poorer neighbors, while having an opposite effect among those of his own standing in the county. In point of fact, three-fourths of the game on his estates was shot by his keepers and sent, under his direction, for sale to the nearest large town.

When Ambrose Cortelyon, at the age of thirty-five, came into his patrimony, it was not only grievously burdened with debt, but, as far as mere acreage was concerned, owing to extravagant living on the part of his two immediate progenitors, had dwindled to little more than a third of what it had been sixty years before. From the first the new Squire made up his mind that the follies of his father and grandfather should not be repeated in his case. From the first he set two objects definitely before him, and never allowed himself to lose sight of them. Object number one was to wipe off the burden of debt he had inherited from his father. This, by the practice of rigid economy, he was enabled to do in the course of eight or ten years, after which he began to save. Object number two was to become, in the course of time, a large landowner, even as his great-grandfather and his more remote ancestors right away back to the sixteenth century had been.

Thus, in the course of time it came to pass that Ambrose Cortelyon had become the owner of sundry considerable properties (not all of them situated in his own county, but none of them farther off than a day's ride) which, owing to one cause or another, had come into the market. Every season--and what was true then seems equally true to-day--brought its own little crop of landed proprietors who, owing to improvidence or misfortune or both, had fallen upon evil days, and whenever there was a likely property in the neighborhood to be had a bargain, the Squire, or his agent Mr. Piljoy, was always to the fore.

With the former it was an article of faith that, for one reason or other, landed property would rise greatly in value in the course of the next generation or two, and so constitute a stable inheritance for those to come after him. In so believing the prescience with which he credited himself was undoubtedly at fault. Many things were to happen during the next half-century of which not even the most far-seeing of the statesmen of those days had the slightest prevision.

Squire Cortelyon was turned forty before he married. He fixed his mature affections on a banker's daughter, who brought him a dowry of ten thousand pounds, with the prospect of thirty thousand to follow at her father's demise. But three years later the bank in which Mr. Lowthian was senior partner failed, and the prospective thirty thousand went in the general smash. Such a loss to such a man was undoubtedly a terrible blow. A couple of years later still his wife died, leaving him with one child,--a son. He had felt no particular affection for her while living, and he was not hypocrite enough to pretend to mourn her very deeply now she was dead.

Ambrose Cortelyon was one of those men who never feel comfortable, or at home, in the presence of children, and as soon as Master Dick was old enough he was packed off to a public school, and for the next dozen or more years, except at holiday times, it was but little he saw either of his father or his home. From school he went to college, but with his twenty-first birthday his career at Cambridge came to an end. The life his father intended him for was that of a country gentleman, with, perhaps, an M.P.-ship in future. Where, then, would have been the use of wasting more time in competing for a degree which, even if he should succeed in taking it, would be of no after-value to him? Far better that he should spend a season or two in town, perfecting himself in his French meanwhile--the country swarmed with emigrés glad to give lessons for the merest pittance--and after that devote a couple of years to the Grand Tour. Mr. Cortelyon would have his son a man of the world, and neither a milksop nor a puritan. With his own hands he put a copy of "Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son" into Dick's valise. "A book to profit by," he said. "Let me adjure you to read and re-read it."

Dick felt more respect--which till he was grown-up had not been unmixed with awe--than affection for his father. All his life Mr. Cortelyon had been a reserved and undemonstrative man, and averse from any display of feeling or sentiment. Still, that his son was far dearer to him than aught else in life, and that he looked with secret pride and hope to moulding him in accordance with his own views and wishes, can hardly be doubted. The mistake he made was in imagining that Dick was fashioned on the same lines, mental and moral, as himself; whereas the lad took after his mother in almost every particular. Easy-going, affable to all, led far more by his heart than his head, everybody's friend and nobody's enemy but his own--how was such a young man, with his handsome person, well-lined purse, and a certain element of rustic simplicity which still clung to him, to escape shipwreck in the great maelstrom of London in one form or another?