“Hush! I am Mr. or Captain von Holtz, in the Bavarian Elector's service, and on a mission to his Highness the Prince of Savoy. You can keep a secret I know from old times.”
“Captain von Holtz,” says Esmond, “I am your very humble servant.”
“And you, too, have changed your coat,” continues the other in his laughing way; “I have heard of you at Cambridge and afterwards: we have friends everywhere; and I am told that Mr. Esmond at Cambridge was as good a fencer as he was a bad theologian.” (So, thinks Esmond, my old maitre d'armes was a Jesuit, as they said.)
“Perhaps you are right,” says the other, reading his thoughts quite as he used to do in old days; “you were all but killed at Hochstedt of a wound in the left side. You were before that at Vigo, aide-de-camp to the Duke of Ormonde. You got your company the other day after Ramillies; your general and the Prince-Duke are not friends; he is of the Webbs of Lydiard Tregoze, in the county of York, a relation of my Lord St. John. Your cousin, M. de Castlewood, served his first campaign this year in the Guard; yes, I do know a few things, as you see.”
Captain Esmond laughed in his turn. “You have indeed a curious knowledge,” he says. A foible of Mr. Holt's, who did know more about books and men than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience; thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but not quite. Esmond's wound was in the right side, not the left; his first general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of Yorkshire; and so forth. Esmond did not think fit to correct his old master in these trifling blunders, but they served to give him a knowledge of the other's character, and he smiled to think that this was his oracle of early days; only now no longer infallible or divine.
“Yes,” continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, “for a man who has not been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London very well. The old Dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood's father. Do you know that your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop of Southampton, and that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same imposition? The Princess Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the King returns, Collier will be an archbishop.”
“Amen!” says Esmond, laughing; “and I hope to see your Eminence no longer in jack-boots, but red stockings, at Whitehall.”
“You are always with us—I know that—I heard of that when you were at Cambridge; so was the late lord; so is the young viscount.”
“And so was my father before me,” said Mr. Esmond, looking calmly at the other, who did not, however, show the least sign of intelligence in his impenetrable gray eyes—how well Harry remembered them and their look! only crows' feet were wrinkled round them—marks of black old Time had settled there.
Esmond's face chose to show no more sign of meaning than the Father's. There may have been on the one side and the other just the faintest glitter of recognition, as you see a bayonet shining out of an ambush; but each party fell back, when everything was again dark.