"I trust we are so," replied the other.
"Ahem!" said Mr. Dry, "my name is Dry, sir; Dry, of Longsoaken."
"You may be soaked long enough," murmured the man at the table to himself; not loud enough to be heard; "you may be soaked long enough before you are moistened, Mr. Dry."
But his companion, who saw his lips move, gave him a grave look and replied to the intruder, "I am happy to hear it, sir. It is a godly name, which I have heard of before. Will you never have done with that beef, Master Barecolt?"
"But this mouthful, but this mouthful," replied the gentleman at the table, "and then I am with you."
"One word before you go," said Mr. Dry: "you seem, sir, a godly and well-disposed man, and I doubt not have been led into the right way; but there is an air of prelatic malignancy about this person at the table."
"You are altogether mistaken, worthy Dry," said the good gentleman who had been paying such devoted attention to the beef; "there is nothing malignant about my nature, and the air you talk of is but a remnant of French manners caught while I was serving our Calvinistic brethren in that poor, benighted land. In me, sir, you behold him whom you may have heard of--who in the morning preached to the people in the beleaguered city of Rochelle, from the 2nd verse of the 24th chapter of the book of Joshua, 'Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time;' and who in the evening led them out to battle, and smote the Philistines hip and thigh. That is to say, broke through the stockade, and defeated two regiments of the guards."
"I have heard of the deed," replied Mr. Dry.
"Then you must have heard likewise," said the gentleman at the table, rising up at full length, and making the intruder a low bow, "of Master Deciduous Barecolt."
"I think I have, I think I have," said Mr. Dry.
"Then, again," cried Barecolt, "when I defended the pass in the Cevennes, with only two godly companions, against the Count de Suza and a hundred and fifty bloodthirsty Papists--you must surely have heard of that exploit."
"I cannot say I have," replied Mr. Dry.
"Then, sir, you are ignorant of the history of Europe," answered the other with a look of high indignation; "for trust the name of Deciduous Barecolt is known from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Danube, and will descend to posterity upon the stream of time, only rendered imperishable by that which destroys other things. Goodnight, Mr. Dry. Now, Master Randal, I am ready to accompany you. Shall we sing a psalm before we go?"
"No," replied Randal abruptly, and picking up his hat, he led the way out of the room.
The inn was situated near the extremity of the town; and at the distance of about two hundred paces from the door, the two strangers emerged from between the lines of houses, and found themselves among the hedgerows. Without any hesitation as to the track which he was to pursue, the younger gentleman mounted a stile to the right, and took a path which, crossing the fields, wound gradually up over one slope after another till it reached the brow of the hill on which Bishop's Merton House was placed.
It was a fine clear moonlight night; and at the distance of about a mile from the mansion, they caught a sight of its wide front, extending along the hill till the wings were concealed by a little wood, behind which, as they walked on, the whole building was speedily lost.
"It is a fine old place," said Barecolt to his companion; "it always puts me in mind of the Escurial."
"More likely puts you in mind of the stocks," said Randal; "for you have both seen and felt the one, and never set eyes upon the other."
"How can you tell that I never saw it?" exclaimed his companion; "you have not had the dandling of me ever since I was a baby in arms."
"Heaven forbid!" cried Randal; "but I am sure you never have seen it, because you say you have. However, you must either speak truth to-night or hold your tongue. I did not stop you in your course of gasconade with that roundheaded knave at the inn, because I knew that you must void a certain quantity of falsehood in the day, and it was necessary to get rid of it before you came up here; for this young lord is not one to take counterfeit coin."
"The monster!" exclaimed Barecolt; "there is not a more cruel or barbarous creature in the earth than the man who drives from his door all the sweet little children of the imagination which you call lies. He is wanting in all human charity. Give me the generous and confiding soul who believes everything that is said to him, and enjoys the story of a traveller who relates to him wild scenes in lands he never has visited, just as much as if it were all as true as history----"
"Which is itself a lie," rejoined the other. "Had this young man's father been alive, you would have found a person after your own heart. He was a man of vast capabilities of belief. His mind was but a looking-glass, always representing what was before it; his religion was in the last sermon he had heard, his politics in the last broadsheet, his opinions those of his companions for the hour, his taste the newest mode that he had seen. He was the quintessence of an ordinary-minded man; but his son is a very different being."
Barecolt made no rash promise of abstaining from his favourite amusement, but walked on for about a hundred yards in silence, till suddenly his companion exclaimed, "Do you not see a strange light shining through the wood before us? Hark, there is an alarum-bell!" And hurrying his pace, he issued forth from the wood some three hundred yards farther on, where the cause of the light they had remarked became too visible.
Rising up from one of the flanking towers of the old house, in large white volumes, to the very sky, was a tall column of smoke, spreading out towards the top, while from the building itself poured forth the rushing flame like a huge beacon, illuminating all the country round. Each window in that tower and the neighbouring wing emitted the same blaze; and it was very evident--although a number of persons were seen moving about upon the terrace, engaged apparently in the endeavour to extinguish the fire--that it was making its way rapidly towards the rest of the house.
The two strangers ran as fast as possible to give assistance. But before I pursue their adventures on that night, I must turn to speak of all that had taken place within the mansion of Bishop's Merton during the evening preceding the disaster which I have described.
CHAPTER III.
There was in the mansion of Bishop's Merton one of those delightful old chambers which, like a warm and benevolent heart, have a nook for every one. It was a large wide room, with a recess on one side big enough to have formed another room, and a lesser recess at each corner, on the same side, made by two small square turrets, each lighted by its own windows, and containing tables and chairs of its own, so that the studious or the meditative, but not the unsociable, could sit and read, or muse apart, without being actually cut off from the society assembled. The walls were all covered with tapestry, descended through many generations in the same family, and which had covered the walls of a similar chamber in an old castle, partly destroyed luring the civil wars of the Roses, and pulled down at the commencement of the reign of Henry the Eighth.
Out from the tapestry, however, after an old fashion, which certainly showed pictures to much greater advantage than when plastered upon the face of the wall, stood a great many portraits of different degrees of art, supported at the lower part by a gilt iron bracket, and upheld in a slightly sloping position by an iron bar at the top. From the cold, severe Holbein to the rich and juicy Rubens and the poetical Vandyke, all the famous artists of the last two centuries had exercised their pencils in pourtraying the features of a race which had always been fruitful in beauty; and the history of the changeful mind of those two ages was shadowed forth in the varying costume in which the characters appeared. Nor is it, let me say, dear reader, in passing, a alight indication of the state of the popular mind that is afforded by the dress of the day. Look at the Chevalier