marry Beatrix?  By G—! he shall marry Beatrix, or tell me the reason why.  We’ll marry with the best blood of England, and none but the best blood of England.  You are an Esmond, and you can’t help your birth, my boy.  Let’s have another bottle.  What! no more?  I’ve drunk three parts of this myself.  I had many a night with my father; you stood to him like a man, Harry.  You backed your blood; you can’t help your misfortune, you know,—­no man can help that.”

The elder said he would go in to his mistress’s tea-table.  The young lad, with a heightened color and voice, began singing a snatch of a song, and marched out of the room.  Esmond heard him presently calling his dogs about him, and cheering and talking to them; and by a hundred of his looks and gestures, tricks of voice and gait, was reminded of the dead lord, Frank’s father.

And so, the sylvester night passed away; the family parted long before midnight, Lady Castlewood remembering, no doubt, former New Years’ Eves, when healths were drunk, and laughter went round in the company of him, to whom years, past, and present, and future, were to be as one; and so cared not to sit with her children and hear the Cathedral bells ringing the birth of the year 1703.  Esmond heard the chimes as he sat in his own chamber, ruminating by the blazing fire there, and listened to the last notes of them, looking out from his window towards the city, and the great gray towers of the Cathedral lying under the frosty sky, with the keen stars shining above.

The sight of these brilliant orbs no doubt made him think of other luminaries.  “And so her eyes have already done execution,” thought Esmond—­“on whom?—­who can tell me?” Luckily his kinsman was by, and Esmond knew he would have no difficulty in finding out Mistress Beatrix’s history from the simple talk of the boy.

CHAPTER VIII.

Family talk.

What Harry admired and submitted to in the pretty lad his kinsman was (for why should he resist it?) the calmness of patronage which my young lord assumed, as if to command was his undoubted right, and all the world (below his degree) ought to bow down to Viscount Castlewood.

“I know my place, Harry,” he said.  “I’m not proud—­the boys at Winchester College say I’m proud:  but I’m not proud.  I am simply Francis James Viscount Castlewood in the peerage of Ireland.  I might have been (do you know that?) Francis James Marquis and Earl of Esmond in that of England.  The late lord refused the title which was offered to him by my godfather, his late Majesty.  You should know that—­you are of our family, you know you cannot help your bar sinister, Harry, my dear fellow; and you belong to one of the best families in England, in spite of that; and you stood by my father, and by G—!  I’ll stand by you.  You shall never want a friend, Harry, while Francis James Viscount Castlewood has a shilling.  It’s