While he was yet at the university, both his parents died--within a few months of each other. And when Audley Egerton came of age, he succeeded to a paternal property which was supposed to be large, and, indeed, had once been so; but Colonel Egerton had been too lavish a man to enrich his heir, and about £1500 a year was all that sales and mortgages left of an estate that had formerly approached a rental of ten thousand pounds.
Still, Audley was considered to be opulent, and he did not dispel that favorable notion by any imprudent exhibition of parsimony. On entering the world of London, the Clubs flew open to receive him; and he woke one morning to find himself, not indeed famous--but the fashion. To this fashion he at once gave a certain gravity and value--he associated as much as possible with public men and political ladies--he succeeded in confirming the notion that he was "born to ruin or to rule the State."
Now, his dearest and most intimate friend was Lord L'Estrange, from whom he had been inseparable at Eton: and who now, if Audley Egerton was the fashion, was absolutely the rage in London.
Harley Lord L'Estrange was the only son of the Earl of Lansmere, a nobleman of considerable wealth, and allied by intermarriages to the loftiest and most powerful families in England. Lord Lansmere, nevertheless, was but little known in the circles of London. He lived chiefly on his estates, occupying himself with the various duties of a great proprietor, and rarely came to the metropolis; so that he could afford to give his son a very ample allowance, when Harley, at the age of sixteen (having already attained to the sixth form at Eton), left school for one of the regiments of the Guards.
Few knew what to make of Harley L'Estrange--and that was, perhaps, the reason why he was so much thought of. He had been by far the most brilliant boy of his time at Eton--not only the boast of the cricket-ground, but the marvel of the school-room--yet so full of whims and oddities, and seeming to achieve his triumphs with so little aid from steadfast application, that he had not left behind him the same expectations of solid eminence which his friend and senior, Audley Egerton, had excited. His eccentricities--his quaint sayings and out-of-the-way actions, became as notable in the great world as they had been in the small one of public school. That he was very clever there was no doubt, and that the cleverness was of a high order might be surmised not only from the originality but the independence of his character. He dazzled the world, without seeming to care for its praise or its censure--dazzled it, as it were, because he could not help shining. He had some strange notions, whether political or social, which rather frightened his father. According to Southey, "A man should be no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been young." Youth and extravagant opinions naturally go together. I don't know whether Harley L'Estrange was a republican at the age of eighteen; but there was no young man in London who seemed to care less for being heir to an illustrious name and some forty or fifty thousand pounds a year. It was a vulgar fashion in that day to play the exclusive, and cut persons who wore bad neckcloths and called themselves Smith or Johnson. Lord L'Estrange never cut any one, and it was quite enough to slight some worthy man because of his neckcloth or his birth, to insure to the offender the pointed civilities of this eccentric successor to the Dorimonts and the Wildairs.