Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.

CHAPTER XLIV

The nephews of the earl, and another exhibition of the two passions in Beauchamp

It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her provinces, and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction, Captain Baskelett arrived.  Although not a personage in the House of Commons, he was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils of a speech, he made himself heard.  His was the part of chorus, which he performed with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of periods before parliaments were instituted, thus representing a stage in the human development besides the borough of Bevisham.  He arrived in the best of moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds; otherwise in the worst of tempers.  His uncle had notified an addition of his income to him at Romfrey, together with commands that he should quit the castle instantly:  and there did that woman, Mistress Culling, do the honours to Nevil Beauchamp’s French party.  He assured Lord Palmet of his positive knowledge of the fact, incredible as the sanction of such immoral proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear to that young nobleman.  Additions to income are of course acceptable, but in the form of a palpable stipulation for silence, they neither awaken gratitude nor effect their purpose.  Quite the contrary; they prick the moral mind to sit in judgement on the donor.  It means, she fears me!  Cecil confidently thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his patron.

The town-house was open to him.  Lord Romfrey was at Steynham.  Cecil could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it.  He happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.  She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling’s orders.  The old woman lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess.  This she knew for a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the very words—­the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling for the Countess of Romfrey.  What was more, my lord’s coachman caught it up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had seen a ghost.  ‘She have such power,’ Cecil’s admirer concluded.