Instead of going to dinner then at the “Rose” that night, Mr. Esmond bade his servant pack a portmanteau and get horses, and was at Farnham, half-way on the road to Walcote, thirty miles off, before his comrades had got to their supper after the play.  He bade his man give no hint to my Lady Dowager’s household of the expedition on which he was going; and as Chelsey was distant from London, the roads bad, and infested by footpads, and Esmond often in the habit, when engaged in a party of pleasure, of lying at a friend’s lodging in town, there was no need that his old aunt should be disturbed at his absence—­indeed, nothing more delighted the old lady than to fancy that mon cousin, the incorrigible young sinner, was abroad boxing the watch, or scouring St. Giles’s.  When she was not at her books of devotion, she thought Etheridge and Sedley very good reading.  She had a hundred pretty stories about Rochester, Harry Jermyn, and Hamilton; and if Esmond would but have run away with the wife even of a citizen, ’tis my belief she would have pawned her diamonds (the best of them went to our Lady of Chaillot) to pay his damages.

My lord’s little house of Walcote—­which he inhabited before he took his title and occupied the house of Castlewood—­lies about a mile from Winchester, and his widow had returned to Walcote after my lord’s death as a place always dear to her, and where her earliest and happiest days had been spent, cheerfuller than Castlewood, which was too large for her straitened means, and giving her, too, the protection of the ex-dean, her father.  The young Viscount had a year’s schooling at the famous college there, with Mr. Tusher as his governor.  So much news of them Mr. Esmond had had during the past year from the old Viscountess, his own father’s widow; from the young one there had never been a word.

Twice or thrice in his benefactor’s lifetime, Esmond had been to Walcote; and now, taking but a couple of hours’ rest only at the inn on the road, he was up again long before daybreak, and made such good speed that he was at Walcote by two o’clock of the day.  He rid to the end of the village, where he alighted and sent a man thence to Mr. Tusher, with a message that a gentleman from London would speak with him on urgent business.  The messenger came back to say the Doctor was in town, most likely at prayers in the Cathedral.  My Lady Viscountess was there, too; she always went to Cathedral prayers every day.

The horses belonged to the post-house at Winchester.  Esmond mounted again and rode on to the “George;” whence he walked, leaving his grumbling domestic at last happy with a dinner, straight to the Cathedral.  The organ was playing:  the winter’s day was already growing gray:  as he passed under the street-arch into the Cathedral yard, and made his way into the ancient solemn edifice.

CHAPTER VI.

The 29th December.