Part 18 (1/2)

The farmer and his wife, who had already grown attached to their pleasant guest, were by no means unwilling to accept the offer; nor did they raise any protest when the days grew into weeks and months. These were halcyon days for the world-weary man--delightful days of sketching in the open air in an environment of natural beauty; peaceful evenings spent with his simple-minded hosts and friends; and, happiest of all, the hours in which he basked in the smiles and blushes of pretty Sarah Hoggins, carrying home her pails of milk, helping her to churn the b.u.t.ter, or telling to her wondering ears stories of the great world outside her ken, while the sunset steeped the orchard trees above their heads in glory.

To Sarah he was known as ”Mr Jones”; and to her innocent mind it never occurred that he could be other than the painter he professed to be.

The villagers, however, were sceptical. True, the stranger was a pleasant man who always gave them a cheery ”good-day,” and gossiped with them in the friendliest manner. But that there was some mystery connected with him, all agreed. ”Painter chaps” were notoriously poor, and this man always seemed to have plenty of money to fling about. Then, he would disappear periodically, and always returned with more money.

Where did he go, and how did he get his gold? There could be little doubt about it. This handsome, mysterious, pleasant-tongued stranger must be a highwayman; for it was a fact that every time he was absent, a coach or a chaise was held up in the neighbourhood and its occupants relieved of their valuables.

Suspicion became certainty when Mr Jones bought a piece of land in their village and began to build the finest house in the whole district, a house which must cost, in their bucolic view, a ”mint o' money.” But Mr Jones simply smiled at their suspicions, and made himself more agreeable than ever. He loved the farmer's daughter, and she made no concealment of her love for him, and nothing else mattered. He had won his ”beggar-maid,” and happiness was at last within his grasp.

When he asked his hosts for the hand of their daughter in marriage, the good lady was indignant. ”Marry Sarah!” she exclaimed. ”What, to a fine gentleman? No, indeed; no happiness can come from such a marriage!”

But the farmer for once put his foot down. ”Yes,” he said, ”he shall marry her. The la.s.s loves him dearly; and has he not house and land, too, and plenty of money to keep her?” And thus it came to pa.s.s that one October day the church-bells of Bolas rang a merry peal; the villagers put on their gala clothes; and, amid general rejoicing, qualified by not a few dark hints and forebodings, Sarah Hoggins was led to the rustic altar by her ”highwayman” bridegroom.

For two ideally happy years Mr Jones lived with his humble bride in the fine new house which he had built for her, and which he called Burleigh Villa. He had lived down his character of highwayman, and was regarded, and respected, as the most important man in the village. He was even appointed to the honourable offices of churchwarden and overseer; while under his tuition his peasant-wife was becoming, in the words of the village gossips, ”quite the lady.”

One day towards the end of December, 1793, after two years of this idyllic life, Mr Jones chanced to read in a country paper news which he had dreaded, for it meant a revolution in his life, the return to the world he had so gladly forsaken. His dream of the simple life, of peaceful days, was at an end. His uncle, the old Earl, was dead, and the coronet and large estates had devolved on him. Should he refuse to take them, and end his days in this idyllic obscurity, or should he claim the ”baubles,” and return to the hollow splendour of a life on which he had turned his back?

The struggle between duty and inclination was long and bitter; but in the end duty carried the day. He would go to ”Burghley House by Stamford Town,” and fill his place on the roll of the Earls of Exeter. To his wife he merely said: ”To-morrow we must start on a journey to Lincolns.h.i.+re. Business calls me there, and we will go together,” a proposal to which she gladly consented, for it meant that she would see something of the great outside world with the husband she loved.

At daybreak next morning ”Mr Jones” said good-bye to his kind hosts and relatives and to the scene of so much peaceful happiness, and, mounting his wife behind him on a pillion, started on the journey to distant Lincolns.h.i.+re. Through Cannock Chase, by Lichfield and Leicester, they rode, finding hospitality at many a great house on the way, rather to the dismay of Sarah, who would have preferred the accommodation of some modest inn, and who marvelled not a little that her husband, the obscure artist, should be known to and welcomed by such great folk. But was he not her hero, one of ”Nature's gentlemen,” and as such the equal of any man in the land?

At last, after days of happy journeying through the cold December days, they came within view of a stately mansion placed in a lordly park, at sight of which Sarah exclaimed, with sparkling eyes, ”Oh, what a beautiful house!” ”Yes,” answered her husband, reining in his horse to enjoy the view; ”it is a lovely place. How would you like, my dear Sally, to be its mistress?” Sally broke into a merry peal of laughter.

”Only fancy _me_,” she said, ”mistress of such a n.o.ble house! It's too funny for words. But how I should love it if we were only rich enough to live in it!” ”I am so glad you like it, darling,” answered her husband, as he turned in the saddle and placed an arm around her waist; ”for it is yours. I am the Earl of Exeter, its owner, and you--well, you are my Countess--and my Queen.”

”'Now welcome, Lady!' exclaimed the Earl-- 'This Castle is thine, and these dark woods all.'

She believed him wild, but his words were truth, For Ellen is Lady of Rosenthal.”

He did not, like the hero of Moore's ballad, ”blow his horn with a lordly air”; but with his Countess he presented himself at the door of Burleigh to receive the homage and welcome due to its lord.

”Many a gallant gay domestic Bow before him at the door; And they speak in gentle murmur When they answer to his call, While he treads with footsteps firmer Leading on from hall to hall.

And while now she wanders blindly, Nor the meaning can divine, Proudly turns he round and kindly, 'All of that is mine and thine.'”

Thus did Sarah Hoggins, the peasant-girl, blossom into a Countess, chatelaine of three lordly pleasure-houses, and Lady Bountiful to an army of dependents. The news of the romantic story flashed through the county, indeed through the whole of England; and great lords and ladies by the score flocked to Burleigh to welcome and pay homage to its heroine.

For a few too brief years Countess Sarah was happy in her new and splendid environment, though it is said she often sighed for the dear dead days when her husband was a landscape painter, and she his humble bride in their village home. The modest primrose did not bear well the transplanting to the lordly hot-house. Her cheeks began to lose their roses. She bore to her husband three children; and then, ”like a lily drooping, she bowed down her head and died,” tenderly and lovingly nursed to the last breath by the husband whose heart, it is said, died with her.

Of her two sons, the elder succeeded to his father's Earldom, and was promoted to a Marquisate. The younger, Lord Thomas Cecil, married a daughter of the fourth Duke of Richmond--thus mingling the peasant blood of Hoggins with the Royal strain of the ”Merrie Monarch,”--and survived until the year 1873. Her daughter had for husband the Right Honourable Henry Manvers Pierrepoint, and became grandmother to the present Duke of Wellington, who thus has for great-grandmother Sarah Hoggins, the rustic beauty who milked cows and was wooed in the Shrops.h.i.+re orchard by ”Mr Jones, the highwayman,” when George the Third was King.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FAVOURITE OF A QUEEN

When Robert Dudley was cradled in the year 1532 the ball of Fortune was already at his feet, awaiting the necessary vigour and enterprise to kick it. He had, it is true, no great lineage to boast of. Cecil spoke contemptuously of him in later and envious years as grandson of a mere squire and son of a knight; but the so-called squire was none other than Edmond Dudley, the shrewd financier and crafty-tongued minion of Henry VII., who, with Empson for ally, filled his sovereign's purse with ill-gotten gold, and paid for his enterprise with his head when the eighth Henry set himself to the paying off of old scores. His father, the knight, was that John Dudley, King Henry's trusted friend and executor of his will, Admiral and Earl Marshal of England, whose splendid gifts and boundless ambition won a dukedom for him, and made him for a time more powerful than his King.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER]

Such was the parentage of Robert Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland's fifth son, who inherited, with his grandfather's scheming brain and plausible tongue, the ambition and love of splendour which made his father the most brilliant subject of two kings. And this great, if dangerous heritage was not long in manifesting itself in the young lordling, who was destined to add to his family's story a chapter more romantic and dazzling than that of which his father was the hero.

As a boy in the schoolroom he was quick to show gifts of mind almost phenomenal in one so young. Latin and Italian, mathematics and abstruse sciences came as easily to this scion of the Dudleys as reading and arithmetic to less-dowered boys. And with this precocity of mind he developed physical graces and skill no less remarkable until, by the time he was well in his 'teens, few grown men could ride a horse, couch a lance, or speed an arrow with such skill as he.