“Well then, Steele.”
“Mr. Steele, sir, if you please. When you address a gentleman of his Majesty’s Horse Guards, be pleased not to be so familiar.”
“I didn’t know, sir,” said the lawyer.
“How should you? I take it you are not accustomed to meet with gentlemen,” says the trooper.
“Hold thy prate, and read that bit of paper,” says Westbury.
“ ’Tis Latin,” says Dick, glancing at it, and again saluting his officer, “and from a sermon of Mr. Cudworth’s,” and he translated the words pretty much as Henry Esmond had rendered them.
“What a young scholar you are,” says the Captain to the boy.
“Depend on’t, he knows more than he tells,” says the lawyer. “I think we will pack him off in the coach with old Jezebel.”
“For construing a bit of Latin?” said the Captain, very good-naturedly.
“I would as lief go there as anywhere,” Harry Esmond said, simply, “for there is nobody to care for me.”
There must have been something touching in the child’s voice, or in this description of his solitude—for the Captain looked at him very good-naturedly, and the trooper, called Steele, put his hand kindly on the lad’s head, and said some words in the Latin tongue.
“What does he say?” says the lawyer.
“Faith, ask Dick himself,” cried Captain Westbury.
“I said I was not ignorant of misfortune myself, and had learned to succor the miserable, and that’s not your trade, Mr. Sheepskin,” said the trooper.
“You had better leave Dick the Scholar alone, Mr. Corbet,” the Captain said. And Harry Esmond, always touched by a kind face and kind word, felt very grateful to this good-natured champion.
The horses were by this time harnessed to the coach; and the Countess and Victoire came down and were put into the vehicle. This woman, who quarrelled with Harry Esmond all day, was melted at parting with him, and called him “dear angel,” and “poor infant,” and a hundred other names.
The Viscountess, giving him her lean hand to kiss, bade him always be faithful to the house of Esmond. “If evil should happen to my lord,” says she, “his successor, I trust, will be found, and give you protection. Situated as I am, they will not dare wreak their vengeance on me now.” And she kissed a medal she wore with great fervor, and Henry Esmond knew not in the least what her meaning was; but hath since learned that, old as she was, she was forever expecting, by the good offices of saints and relics, to have an heir to the title of Esmond.
Harry Esmond was too young to have been introduced into the secrets of politics in which his patrons were implicated; for they put but few questions to the boy (who was little of stature, and looked much younger than his age), and such questions as they put he answered cautiously enough, and professing even more ignorance than he had, for which his examiners willingly enough gave him credit. He did not say a word about the window or the cupboard over the fireplace; and these secrets quite escaped the eyes of the searchers.
So then my lady was consigned to her coach, and sent off to Hexton, with her woman and the man of law to bear her company, a couple of troopers riding on either side of the coach. And Harry was left behind at the Hall, belonging as it were to nobody, and quite alone in the world. The captain and a guard of men remained in possession there; and the soldiers, who were very good-natured and kind, ate my lord’s mutton and drank his wine, and made themselves comfortable, as they well might do in such pleasant quarters.
The captains had their dinner served in my lord’s tapestry parlor, and poor little Harry thought his duty was to wait upon Captain Westbury’s chair, as his custom had been to serve his lord when he sat there.
After the departure of the Countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities and talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them from a Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never tired of speaking, Dick, rather to the boy’s surprise, who began to have an early shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great deal of theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue between the two churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of controversy together, in which the boy was certainly worsted by the arguments of this singular trooper. “I am no common soldier,” Dick would say, and indeed it was easy to see by his learning, breeding, and many accomplishments, that he was not. “I am of one of the most ancient families in the empire; I have had my education at a famous school, and a famous university; I learned my first rudiments of Latin near to Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs were roasted.”
“You hanged as many of ours,” interposed Harry; “and, for the matter of persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh, eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for heresy only last year, though he recanted, and solemnly asked pardon for his errors.”
“Faith! there has been too much persecution on both sides: but ’twas you taught us.”
“Nay, ’twas the Pagans began it,” cried the lad, and began to instance a number of saints of the Church, from the proto-martyr downwards—“this one’s fire went out under him: that one’s oil cooled in the cauldron: at a third holy head the executioner chopped three times and it would not come off. Show us martyrs in your church for whom such miracles have been done.”
“Nay,” says the trooper gravely, “the miracles of the first three centuries belong to my Church as
