The Lady Castlewood looked after him with sad penetrating glances. “He wishes to be gone already, my lord,” said she to her husband.
The young man hung back abashed. “Indeed, I would stay for ever, if your ladyship bade me,” he said.
“And thou wouldst be a fool for thy pains, kinsman,” said my lord. “Tut, tut, man. Go and see the world. Sow thy wild oats; and take the best luck that Fate sends thee. I wish I were a boy again that I might go to college, and taste the Trumpington ale.”
“Ours indeed is but a dull home,” cries my lady, with a little of sadness, and maybe of satire, in her voice: “an old glum house, half ruined, and the rest only half furnished; a woman and two children are but poor company for men that are accustomed to better. We are only fit to be your worship’s handmaids, and your pleasures must of necessity lie elsewhere than at home.”
“Curse me, Rachel, if I know now whether thou art in earnest or not,” said my lord.
“In earnest, my lord!” says she, still clinging by one of her children. “Is there much subject here for joke?” And she made him a grand curtsy, and, giving a stately look to Harry Esmond, which seemed to say, “Remember; you understand me, though he does not,” she left the room with her children.
“Since she found out that confounded Hexton business,” my lord said—“and be hanged to them that told her!—she has not been the same woman. She, who used to be as humble as a milkmaid, is as proud as a princess,” says my lord. “Take my counsel, Harry Esmond, and keep clear of women. Since I have had anything to do with the jades, they have given me nothing but disgust. I had a wife at Tangier, with whom, as she couldn’t speak a word of my language, you’d have thought I might lead a quiet life. But she tried to poison me, because she was jealous of a Jew girl. There was your aunt, for aunt she is—aunt Jezebel, a pretty life your father led with _her_, and here’s my lady. When I saw her on a pillion riding behind the dean her father, she looked and was such a baby, that a sixpenny doll might have pleased her. And now you see what she is—hands off, highty-tighty, high and mighty, an empress couldn’t be grander. Pass us the tankard, Harry, my boy. A mug of beer and a toast at morn, says my host. A toast and a mug of beer at noon, says my dear. D——n it, Polly loves a mug of ale, too, and laced with brandy, by Jove!” Indeed, I suppose they drank it together; for my lord was often thick in his speech at mid-day dinner; and at night at supper, speechless altogether.