He held open the door for her, and, bowing, stood aside that she might pass.
But afterward the great Duke of Ormskirk continued for a long while motionless and faintly smiling as he gazed into the fire. Tricked and ignominiously defeated! Ay, but that was a trifle now, scarcely worthy of consideration. The girl had hoodwinked him, had lied more skilfully than he, yet in the fact that she had lied he found a prodigal atonement. Whigs and Jacobites might have their uses in the cosmic scheme, he reflected, as house-flies have, but what really mattered was that at Halvergate yonder Marian awaited his coming. And in place of statecraft he fell to thinking of two hazel eyes and of abundant hair the color of a dead oak-leaf.
_As Played at Halvergate House, April 9, 1750_
"_You cannot love, nor pleasure take, nor give, But life begin when 'tis too late to live. On a tired courser you pursue delight, Let slip your morning, and set out at night. If you have lived, take thankfully the past; Make, as you can, the sweet remembrance last. If you have not enjoyed what youth could give, But life sunk through you, like a leaky sieve._"
EARL OF BRUDENEL, father to Lady Marian Heleigh, who has retired sometime into the country.
LORD HUMPHREY DEGGE, a gamester, and Ormskirk's hireling.
LADY MARIAN HELEIGH, betrothed to Ormskirk, a young, beautiful girl of a mild and tender disposition.
It occurs to me that we here assume intimacy with a man of unusual achievement, and therefore tread upon quaggy premises. Yet I do but avail myself of to-day's privilege.... It is an odd thing that people will facilely assent to Don Adriano's protestation against a certain travestying of Hector,--"Sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the dead, for when he breathed he was a man,"--even while through the instant the tide of romance will be setting quite otherwhither, with their condonation. For in all the best approved romances the more sumptuous persons of antiquity are very guilty of twaddle on at least one printed page in ten, and nobody remonstrates; and here is John Bulmer, too, lugged from the grave for your delectation.
I presume, however, to palliate the offence. The curious may find the gist of what I narrate concerning Ormskirk in Heinrich Löwe's biography of the man, and will there discover that with established facts I have not made bold to juggle. Only when knowledge failed have I bridged the void with speculation. Perhaps I have guessed wrongly: the feat is not unhuman, and in provision against detection therein I can only protest that this lack of omniscience was never due to malice; faithfully I have endeavored to deduce from the known the probable, and in nothing to misrepresent to you this big man of a little age, this trout among a school of minnows.