“I do you the justice to think, cousin,” says Mr. Warrington to his lordship, “that you would not give up any advantage for any friend in the world.”
“Eh! I am selfish: but am I more selfish than the rest of the world?” asks my lord, with a French shrug of his shoulders, and a pinch out of his box. Once, in their walks in the fields, his lordship happening to wear a fine scarlet coat, a cow ran towards him; and the ordinarily languid nobleman sprang over a stile with the agility of a schoolboy. He did not conceal his tremor, or his natural want of courage. “I dare say you respect me no more than I respect myself, George,” he would say, in his candid way, and begin a very pleasant sardonical discourse upon the fall of man, and his faults, and shortcomings; and wonder why Heaven had not made us all brave and tall, and handsome and rich? As for Mr. Warrington, who very likely loved to be king of his company (as some people do), he could not help liking this kinsman of his, so witty, graceful, polished, high-placed in the world—so utterly his inferior. Like the animal in Mr. Sterne's famous book, “Do not beat me,” his lordship's look seemed to say, “but, if you will, you may.” No man, save a bully and coward himself, deals hardly with a creature so spiritless.
CHAPTER LXXIII. We keep Christmas at Castlewood. 1759
We know, my dear children, from our favourite fairy story-books, how at all christenings and marriages some one is invariably disappointed, and vows vengeance; and so need not wonder that good cousin Will should curse and rage energetically at the news of his brother's engagement with the colonial heiress. At first, Will fled the house, in his wrath, swearing he would never return. But nobody, including the swearer, believed much in Master Will's oaths; and this unrepentant prodigal, after a day or two, came back to the paternal house. The fumes of the marriage-feast allured him: he could not afford to resign his knife and fork at Castlewood table. He returned, and drank and ate there in token of revenge. He pledged the young bride in a bumper, and drank perdition to her under his breath. He made responses of smothered maledictions as her father gave her away in the chapel, and my lord vowed to love, honour and cherish her. He was not the only grumbler respecting that marriage, as Mr. Warrington knew: he heard, then and afterwards, no end of abuse of my lady and her grandfather. The old gentleman's City friends, his legal adviser, the Dissenting clergyman at whose chapel they attended on their first arrival in England, and poor Jack Lambert, the orthodox young divine, whose eloquence he had fondly hoped had been exerted over her in private, were bitter against the little lady's treachery, and each had a story to tell of his having been enslaved, encouraged, jilted, by the young American. The lawyer, who had had such an accurate list of all her properties, estates, moneys, slaves, ships, expectations, was ready to vow and swear that he believed the whole account was false; that there was no such place as New York or Virginia; or at any rate, that Mr. Van den Bosch had no land there; that there was no such thing as a Guinea trade, and that the negroes were so many black falsehoods invented by the wily old planter. The Dissenting pastor moaned over his stray lambling—if such a little, wily, mischievous monster could be called a lamb at all. Poor Jack Lambert ruefully acknowledged to his mamma the possession of a lock of black hair, which he bedewed with tears and apostrophised in quite unclerical language: and, as for Mr. William Esmond, he, with the shrieks and curses in which he always freely indulged, even at Castlewood, under his sister-in-law's own pretty little nose, when under any strong emotion, called Acheron to witness, that out of that region there did not exist such an artful young devil as Miss Lydia. He swore that she was an infernal female Cerberus, and called down all the wrath of this world and the next upon his swindling rascal of a brother, who had cajoled him with fair words, and filched his prize from him.
“Why,” says Mr. Warrington (when Will expatiated on these matters with him), “if the girl is such a she-devil as you describe her, you are all the better for losing her. If she intends to deceive her husband, and to give him a dose of poison, as you say, how lucky for you, you are not the man! You ought to thank the gods, Will, instead of cursing them, for robbing you of such a fury, and can't be better revenged on Castlewood than by allowing him her sole possession.”
“All this was very well,” Will Esmond said; but—not unjustly, perhaps,—remarked that his brother was not the less a scoundrel for having cheated him out of the fortune which he expected to get, and which he had risked his life to win, too.
George Warrington was at a loss to know how his cousin had been made so to risk his precious existence (for which, perhaps, a rope's end had been a fitting termination), on which Will Esmond, with the utmost candour, told his kinsman how the little Cerbera had actually caused the meeting between them, which was interrupted somehow by Sir John Fielding's men; how she was always saying that George Warrington was a coward for ever sneering at Mr. Will, and the latter doubly a poltroon for not taking notice of his kinsman's taunts; how George had run away and nearly died of fright in Braddock's expedition; and “Deuce take me,” says Will, “I never was more surprised, cousin, than when you stood to your ground so coolly in Tottenham Court Fields yonder, for me and my second offered to wager that you would never come!”
Mr. Warrington laughed, and thanked Mr. Will for this opinion of him.
“Though,” says he, “cousin, 'twas lucky for me the constables came up, or you would have whipped your sword through my body in another minute. Didn't you see how clumsy I was as I stood before you? And you actually turned white and shook with anger!”