CHAPTER V

MY SUPERIORS ARE ENGAGED IN PLOTS FOR THE RESTORATION OF KING JAMES II

NOT having been able to sleep, for thinking of some lines for eels which he had placed the night before, the lad was lying in his little bed, waiting for the hour when the gate would be open, and he and his comrade, Job Lockwood, the porter's son, might go to the pond and see what fortune had brought them. At daybreak Job was to awaken him, but his own eagerness for the sport had served as a réveille long since so long, that it seemed to him as if the day never would come.

It might have been four o'clock when he heard the door of the opposite chamber, the chaplain's room, open, and the voice of a man coughing in the passage. Harry jumped up, thinking for certain it was a robber, or hoping perhaps for a ghost, and, flinging open his own door, saw before him the chaplain's door open, and a light inside, and a figure standing in the doorway, in the midst of a great smoke which issued from the room.

Who's there?' cried out the boy, who was of a good spirit.

'Silentium!' whispered the other; 'tis I, my boy!' and, holding his hand out, Harry had no difficulty in recognizing his master and friend, Father Holt. A curtain was over the window of the chaplain's room that looked to the court, and Harry saw that the smoke came from a great flame of papers which were burning in a brazier when he entered the chaplain's room. After giving a hasty greeting and blessing to the lad, who was charmed to see his tutor, the father continued the burning of his papers, drawing them from a cupboard over the mantelpiece wall, which Harry had never seen before.

Father Holt laughed, seeing the lad's attention fixed at once on this hole. That is right, Harry,' he said; 'faithful little famuli see all and say nothing. You are faithful, I know.'

I know I would go to the stake for you,' said Harry.

'I don't want your head,' said the father, patting it kindly; all you have to do is to hold your tongue. Let us burn these papers, and say nothing to anybody. Should you like to read them?'

Harry Esmond blushed, and held down his head; he had looked as the fact was, and without thinking, at the paper before him; and though he had seen it, could not understand a word of it, the letters being quite clear enough, but quite without meaning. They burned the papers, beating down the ashes in a brazier, so that scarce any traces of them remained.

Harry had been accustomed to see Father Holt in more dresses than one; it not being safe, or worth the danger, for Popish ecclesiastics to wear their proper dress; and he was, in consequence, in no wise astonished that the priest should now appear before him in a riding dress, with large buff leather boots, and a feather to his hat, plain, but such as gentlemen wore.

You know the secret of the cupboard,' said he, laughing, and must be prepared for other mysteries; ' and he opened -but not a secret cupboard this time-only a wardrobe, which he usually kept locked, and from which he now took out two or three dresses and perukes of different colours, and a couple of swords of a pretty make (Father Holt was an expert practitioner with the small sword, and every day, whilst he was at home, he and his pupil practised this exercise, in which the lad became a very great proficient), a military coat and cloak, and a farmer's smock, and placed them in the large hole over the mantelpiece from which the papers had been taken.

'If they miss the cupboard,' he said, 'they will not find these; if they find them, they'll tell no tales, except that Father Holt wore more suits of clothes than one. All Jesuits do. You know what deceivers we are, Harry.'

Harry was alarmed at the notion that his friend was about to leave him; but No', the priest said; I may very likely come back with my lord in a few days. We are to be tolerated; we are not to be persecuted. But they may take a fancy to pay a visit at Castlewood ere our return; and, as gentlemen of my cloth are suspected, they might choose to examine my papers, which concern nobody-at least, not them.' And to this day, whether the papers in cipher related to politics, or to the affairs of that mysterious society

whereof Father Holt was a member, his pupil, Harry Esmond, remains in entire ignorance.

The rest of his goods, his small wardrobe, &c., Holt left untouched on.his shelves and in his cupboard, taking down. —with a laugh, however-and flinging into the brazier, where he only half burned them, some theological treatises which he had been writing against the English divines. · And now,' said he,' Henry, my son, you may testify, with a safe conscience, that you saw me burning Latin şermons the last time I was here before I went away to London; and it will be daybreak directly, and I must be away before Lockwood is stirring.'

'Will not Lockwood let you out, sir?' Esmond asked. Holt laughed; he was never more gay or good-humoured than when in the midst of action or danger.

Lockwood knows nothing of my being here, mind you,' he said; nor would you, you little wretch, had you slept better. You must forget that I have been here; and now farewell. Close the door, and go to your own room, and don't come out till-stay, why should you not know one secret more? I know you will never betray me.'

In the chaplain's room were two windows; the one looking into the court facing westwards to the fountain; the other, a small casement strongly barred, and looking on to the green in front of the Hall. This window was too high to reach from the ground; but, mounting on a buffet which stood beneath it, Father Holt showed me how, by pressing on the base of the window, the whole framework of lead, glass, and iron stanchions, descended into a cavity worked below, from which it could be drawn and restored to its usual place from without; a broken pane being purposely open to admit the hand which was to work upon the spring of the machine.

When I am gone,' Father Holt said, 'you may push away the buffet, so that no one may fancy that an exit has been made that way; lock the door; place the keywhere shall we put the key ?-under_Chrysostom on the book-shelf; and if any ask for it, say I keep it there, and told you where to find it, if you had need to go to my room. The descent is easy down the wall into the ditch; and so, once more farewell, until I see thee again, my dear son.' And with this the intrepid father mounted the buffet with great agility and briskness, stepped across the window,

lifting up the bars and framework again from the other side, and only leaving room for Harry Esmond to stand on tiptoe and kiss his hand before the casement closed, the bars fixing as firm as ever seemingly in the stone arch overhead. When Father Holt next arrived at Castlewood, it was by the public gate on horseback; and he never so much as alluded to the existence of the private issue to Harry, except when he had need of a private messenger from within, for which end, no doubt, he had instructed his young pupil in the means of quitting the Hall.

Esmond, young as he was, would have died sooner than betray his friend and master, as Mr. Holt well knew; for he had tried the boy more than once, putting temptations in his way, to see whether he would yield to them and confess afterwards, or whether he would resist them, as he did sometimes, or whether he would lie, which he never did. Holt instructing the boy on this point, however, that if to keep silence is not to lie, as it certainly is not, yet silence is, after all, equivalent to a negation-and therefore a downright No, in the interest of justice or your friend, and in reply to a question that may be prejudicial to either, is not criminal, but, on the contrary, praiseworthy; and as lawful a way as the other of eluding a wrongful demand. For instance (says he), suppose a good citizen, who had seen his Majesty take refuge there, had been asked, 'Is King Charles up that oak-tree?' His duty would have been not to say, Yes-so that the Cromwellians should seize the king and murder him like his father-but No; his Majesty being private in the tree, and therefore not to be seen there by loyal eyes: all which instruction, in religion and morals, as well as in the rudiments of the tongues and sciences, the boy took eagerly and with gratitude from his tutor. When, then, Holt was gone, and told Harry not to see him, it was as if he had never been. And he had this answer pat when he came to be questioned a few days after. The Prince of Orange was then at Salisbury, as young Esmond learned from seeing Doctor Tusher in his best cassock (though the roads were muddy, and he never was known to wear his silk, only his stuff one, a-horseback), with a great orange cockade in his broad-leafed hat, and Nahum, his clerk, ornamented with a like decoration. The doctor was walking up and down, in front of his parsonage, when little Esmond saw him, and heard him say he was going to pay

his duty to his highness the prince, as he mounted his pad and rode away with Nahum behind. The village people had orange cockades too, and his friend the blacksmith's laughing daughter pinned one into Harry's old hat, which he tore out indignantly when they bid him to cry, ' God save the Prince of Orange and the Protestant religion!' but the people only laughed, for they liked the boy in the village, where his solitary condition moved the general pity, and where he found friendly welcomes and faces in many houses. Father Holt had many friends there too, for he not only would fight the blacksmith at theology, never losing his temper, but laughing the whole time in his pleasant way, but he cured him of an ague with quinquina, and was always ready with a kind word for any man that asked it, so that they said in the village 'twas a pity the two were Papists.

The director and the Vicar of Castlewood agreed very well; indeed, the former was a perfectly bred gentleman, and it was the latter's business to agree with everybody. Doctor Tusher and the lady's maid, his spouse, had a boy who was about the age of little Esmond; and there was such a friendship between the lads, as propinquity and tolerable kindness and good humour on either side would be pretty sure to occasion. Tom Tusher was sent off early however to a school in London, whither his father took him and a volume of sermons in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the vicar's company; but as long as Harry's religion was his Majesty's, and my lord's, and my lady's, the doctor said gravely, it should not be for him to disturb or disquiet him it was far from him to say that his Majesty's Church was not a branch of the Catholic Church; upon which Father Holt used, according to his custom, to laugh and say, that the Holy Church throughout all the world, and the noble army of martyrs, were very much obliged to the doctor.

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It was while Dr. Tusher was away at Salisbury that there came a troop of dragoons with orange scarfs, and quartered in Castlewood, and some of them came up to the Hall, where they took possession, robbing nothing however