“But men promise more than they are able to perform in marriage,” said my lady, with a sigh.  “I fear he has lost large sums; and our property, always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation.  I heard of him in London with very wild company.  Since his return, letters and lawyers are constantly coming and going:  he seems to me to have a constant anxiety, though he hides it under boisterousness and laughter.  I looked through—­through the door last night, and—­and before,” said my lady, “and saw them at cards after midnight; no estate will bear that extravagance, much less ours, which will be so diminished that my son will have nothing at all, and my poor Beatrix no portion!”

“I wish I could help you, madam,” said Harry Esmond, sighing, and wishing that unavailingly, and for the thousandth time in his life.

“Who can?  Only God,” said Lady Esmond—­“only God, in whose hands we are.”  And so it is, and for his rule over his family, and for his conduct to wife and children—­subjects over whom his power is monarchical—­any one who watches the world must think with trembling sometimes of the account which many a man will have to render.  For in our society there’s no law to control the King of the Fireside.  He is master of property, happiness—­life almost.  He is free to punish, to make happy or unhappy—­to ruin or to torture.  He may kill a wife gradually, and be no more questioned than the Grand seignior who drowns a slave at midnight.  He may make slaves and hypocrites of his children; or friends and freemen; or drive them into revolt and enmity against the natural law of love.  I have heard politicians and coffee-house wiseacres talking over the newspaper, and railing at the tyranny of the French King, and the Emperor, and wondered how these (who are monarchs, too, in their way) govern their own dominions at home, where each man rules absolute.  When the annals of each little reign are shown to the Supreme Master, under whom we hold sovereignty, histories will be laid bare of household tyrants as cruel as Amurath, and as savage as Nero, and as reckless and dissolute as Charles.

If Harry Esmond’s patron erred, ’twas in the latter way, from a disposition rather self-indulgent than cruel; and he might have been brought back to much better feelings, had time been given to him to bring his repentance to a lasting reform.

As my lord and his friend Lord Mohun were such close companions, Mistress Beatrix chose to be jealous of the latter; and the two gentlemen often entertained each other by laughing, in their rude boisterous way, at the child’s freaks of anger and show of dislike.  “When thou art old enough, thou shalt marry Lord Mohun,” Beatrix’s father would say:  on which the girl would pout and say, “I would rather marry Tom Tusher.”  And because the Lord Mohun always showed an extreme gallantry to my Lady Castlewood, whom he professed to admire devotedly, one day, in answer to this old joke of her father’s, Beatrix said, “I think my lord would rather marry mamma than marry me; and is waiting till you die to ask her.”