. Whom did I mean to serve in bringing him? Was it
the prince, was it Henry Esmond? Had I not best have joined the manly
creed of Addison yonder, that scouts the old doctrine of right divine,
that boldly declares that Parliament and people consecrate the sovereign,
not bishops, nor genealogies, nor oils, nor coronations." The eager gaze
of the young prince, watching every movement of Beatrix, haunted Esmond
and pursued him. The prince's figure appeared before him in his feverish
dreams many times that night. He wished the deed undone, for which he had
laboured so. He was not the first that has regretted his own act, or
brought about his own undoing. Undoing? Should he write that word in his
late years? No, on his knees before Heaven, rather be thankful for what
then he deemed his misfortune, and which hath caused the whole subsequent
happiness of his life.

Esmond's man, honest John Lockwood, had served his master and the family
all his life, and the colonel knew that he could answer for John's
fidelity as for his own. John returned with the horses from Rochester
betimes the next morning, and the colonel gave him to understand that on
going to Kensington, where he was free of the servants' hall, and indeed
courting Mrs. Beatrix's maid, he was to ask no questions, and betray no
surprise, but to vouch stoutly that the young gentleman he should see in a
red coat there was my Lord Viscount Castlewood, and that his attendant in
grey was Monsieur Baptiste the Frenchman. He was to tell his friends in
the kitchen such stories as he remembered of my lord viscount's youth at
Castlewood; what a wild boy he was; how he used to drill Jack and cane
him, before ever he was a soldier; everything, in fine, he knew respecting
my lord viscount's early days. Jack's ideas of painting had not been much
cultivated during his residence in Flanders with his master; and, before
my young lord's return, he had been easily got to believe that the picture
brought over from Paris, and now hanging in Lady Castlewood's
drawing-room, was a perfect likeness of her son, the young lord. And the
domestics having all seen the picture many times, and catching but a
momentary imperfect glimpse of the two strangers on the night of their
arrival, never had a reason to doubt the fidelity of the portrait; and
next day, when they saw the original of the piece habited exactly as he
was represented in the painting, with the same periwig, ribbon, and
uniform of the Gua