Doctor Tusher brought the news of this calamity, about which Harry Esmond longed to ask, but did not like. He said almost the whole village had been stricken with the pestilence; seventeen persons were dead of it, among them mentioning the names of poor Nancy and her little brother. He did not fail to say how thankful we survivors ought to be. It being this man's business to flatter and make sermons, it must be owned he was most industrious in it, and was doing the one or the other all day.
And so Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard afterwards. He made a long face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of it. 'Tis an error, surely, to talk of the simplicity of youth. I think no persons are more hypocritical, and have a more affected behavior to one another, than the young. They deceive themselves and each other with artifices that do not impose upon men of the world; and so we get to understand truth better, and grow simpler as we grow older.
When my lady heard of the fate which had befallen poor Nancy, she said nothing so long as Tusher was by, but when he was gone, she took Harry Esmond's hand and said—
“Harry, I beg your pardon for those cruel words I used on the night you were taken ill. I am shocked at the fate of the poor creature, and am sure that nothing had happened of that with which, in my anger, I charged you. And the very first day we go out, you must take me to the blacksmith, and we must see if there is anything I can do to console the poor old man. Poor man! to lose both his children! What should I do without mine?”
And this was, indeed, the very first walk which my lady took, leaning on Esmond's arm, after her illness. But her visit brought no consolation to the old father; and he showed no softness, or desire to speak. “The Lord gave and took away,” he said; and he knew what His servant's duty was. He wanted for nothing—less now than ever before, as there were fewer mouths to feed. He wished her ladyship and Master Esmond good morning—he had grown tall in his illness, and was but very little marked; and with this, and a surly bow, he went in from the smithy to the house, leaving my lady, somewhat silenced and shamefaced, at the door. He had a handsome stone put up for his two children, which may be seen in Castlewood churchyard to this very day; and before a year was out his own name was upon the stone. In the presence of Death, that sovereign ruler, a woman's coquetry is seared; and her jealousy will hardly pass the boundaries of that grim kingdom. 'Tis entirely of the earth, that passion, and expires in the cold blue air, beyond our sphere.
At length, when the danger was quite over, it was announced that my lord and his daughter would return. Esmond well remembered the day. The lady his mistress was in a flurry of fear: before my lord came, she went into her room, and returned from it with reddened cheeks. Her fate was about to be decided. Her beauty was gone—was her reign, too, over? A minute would say. My lord came riding over the bridge—he could be seen from the great window, clad in scarlet, and mounted on his gray hackney—his little daughter ambled by him in a bright riding-dress of blue, on a shining chestnut horse. My lady leaned against the great mantel-piece, looking on, with one hand on her heart—she seemed only the more pale for those red marks on either cheek. She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and withdrew it, laughing hysterically—the cloth was quite red with the rouge when she took it away. She ran to her room again, and came back with pale cheeks and red eyes—her son in her hand—just as my lord entered, accompanied by young Esmond, who had gone out to meet his protector, and to hold his stirrup as he descended from horseback.
“What, Harry, boy!” my lord said, good-naturedly, “you look as gaunt as a greyhound. The small-pox hasn't improved your beauty, and your side of the house hadn't never too much of it—ho, ho!”
And he laughed, and sprang to the ground with no small agility, looking handsome and red, within a jolly face and brown hair, like a Beef-eater; Esmond kneeling again, as soon as his patron had descended, performed his homage, and then went to greet the little Beatrix, and help her from her horse.
“Fie! how yellow you look,” she said; “and there are one, two, red holes in your face;” which, indeed, was very true; Harry Esmond's harsh countenance bearing, as long as it continued to be a human face, the marks of the disease.
My lord laughed again, in high good-humor.
“D— it!” said he, with one of his usual oaths, “the little slut sees everything. She saw the Dowager's paint t'other day, and asked her why she wore that red stuff—didn't you, Trix? and the Tower; and St. James's; and the play; and the Prince George, and the Princess Anne—didn't you, Trix?”
“They are both very fat, and smelt of brandy,” the child said.
Papa roared with laughing.
“Brandy!” he said. “And how do you know, Miss Pert?”
“Because your lordship smells of it after supper, when I embrace you before you go to bed,” said the young lady, who, indeed, was as pert as her father said, and looked as beautiful a little gipsy as eyes ever gazed on.
“And now for my lady,” said my lord, going up the stairs, and passing under the tapestry curtain that hung before the drawing-room door. Esmond remembered that noble figure, handsomely arrayed in scarlet. Within the last few months he himself had grown from a boy to be a man, and with his figure his thoughts had shot up, and grown manly.
My lady's countenance, of which Harry Esmond was accustomed to watch the changes, and with a solicitous affection to note and interpret the signs of gladness or care, wore a sad and depressed look for many weeks after her lord's return: during which it seemed as if, by caresses and entreaties, she strove to win him back from some ill humor he had, and which he did not choose to throw off. In her eagerness to please him she practised a hundred of those arts which had formerly charmed him, but which seemed now to have lost their potency. Her songs did not amuse him; and she hushed them and the children when in his presence. My lord sat silent at his dinner, drinking greatly, his lady opposite to him, looking furtively at his face, though also speechless. Her silence annoyed him as much as her speech; and he would peevishly, and with an oath, ask her why she held her tongue and looked so glum; or he would roughly check her when speaking, and bid her not talk nonsense. It seemed as if, since his return, nothing she could do or say could please him.
When a master and mistress are at strife in a house, the subordinates in the family take the one side or the other. Harry Esmond stood in so great fear of my lord, that he would run a league barefoot to do a message for him; but his attachment for Lady Esmond was such a passion of grateful regard, that to spare her a grief, or to do her a service, he would have given his life daily: and it was by the very depth and intensity of this regard that he began to divine how unhappy his adored lady's life was, and that a secret care (for she never spoke of her anxieties) was weighing upon her.
Can any one, who has passed through the world and watched the nature of men and women there, doubt what had befallen her? I have seen, to be sure, some people carry down with them into old age the actual bloom of their youthful love, and I know that Mr. Thomas Parr lived to be a hundred and sixty years old. But, for all that, threescore and ten is the age of men, and few get beyond it; and 'tis certain that a man who marries for mere beaux yeux, as my lord did, considers this part of the contract at an end when the woman ceases to fulfil hers, and his love does not survive her beauty. I know 'tis often otherwise, I say; and can think (as most men in their own experience may) of many a house, where, lighted in early years, the sainted lamp of love hath never been extinguished; but so there is Mr. Parr, and so there is the great giant at the fair