Harry Esmond well remembered the receipt of this letter, which Lockwood brought in as Captain Westbury and Lieutenant Trant were on the green playing at bowls, young Esmond looking on at the sport, or reading his book in the arbour.
“Here’s news for Frank Esmond,” says Captain Westbury; “Harry, did you ever see Colonel Esmond?” And Captain Westbury looked very hard at the boy as he spoke.
Harry said he had seen him but once when he was at Hexton, at the ball there.
“He said what I don’t care to repeat,” Harry answered. For he was now twelve years of age: he knew what his birth was and the disgrace of it; and he felt no love towards the man who had most likely stained his mother’s honour and his own.
“I wait until I know my mother, sir, to say,” the boy answered, his eyes filling with tears.
“Something has happened to Lord Castlewood,” Captain Westbury said, in a vary grave tone—“something which must happen to us all. He is dead of a wound received at the Boyne, fighting for King James.”
“I am glad my lord fought for the right cause,” the boy said.
“It was better to meet death on the field like a man, than face it on Tower Hill, as some of them may,” continued Mr. Westbury. “I hope he has made some testament, or provided for thee somehow. This letter says, he recommends _unicum filium suum dilectissimum_ to his lady. I hope he has left you more than that.”
Harry did not know, he said. He was in the hands of Heaven and Fate; but more lonely now, as it seemed to him, than he had been all the rest of his life; and that night, as he lay in his little room which he still occupied, the boy thought with many a pang of shame and grief of his strange and solitary condition:—how he had a father and no father; a nameless mother that had been brought to ruin, perhaps, by that very father whom Harry could only acknowledge in secret and with a blush, and whom he could neither love nor revere. And he sickened to think how Father Holt, a stranger, and two or three soldiers, his acquaintances of the last six weeks, were the only friends he had in the great wide world, where he was now quite alone. The soul of the boy was full of love, and he longed as he lay in the darkness there for some one upon whom he could bestow it. He remembers, and must to his dying day, the thoughts and tears of that long night, the hours tolling through it. Who was he and what? Why here rather than elsewhere? I have a mind, he thought, to go to that priest at Trim, and find out what my father said to him on his death-bed confession. Is there any child in the whole world so unprotected as I am? Shall I get up and quit this place, and run to Ireland? With these thoughts and tears the lad passed that night away until he wept himself to sleep.