L'homme qui rit. English

  CHAPTER II.

  LORD DAVID DIRRY-MOIR.

  I.

  Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie had not always been old and proscribed; he hadhad his phase of youth and passion. We know from Harrison and Pride thatCromwell, when young, loved women and pleasure, a taste which, at times(another reading of the text "Woman"), betrays a seditious man. Distrustthe loosely-clasped girdle. _Male proecinctam juvenem cavete_. LordClancharlie, like Cromwell, had had his wild hours and hisirregularities. He was known to have had a natural child, a son. Thisson was born in England in the last days of the republic, just as hisfather was going into exile. Hence he had never seen his father. Thisbastard of Lord Clancharlie had grown up as page at the court of CharlesII. He was styled Lord David Dirry-Moir: he was a lord by courtesy, hismother being a woman of quality. The mother, while Lord Clancharlie wasbecoming an owl in Switzerland, made up her mind, being a beauty, togive over sulking, and was forgiven that Goth, her first lover, by oneundeniably polished and at the same time a royalist, for it was the kinghimself.

  She had been but a short time the mistress of Charles II., sufficientlylong however to have made his Majesty--who was delighted to have won sopretty a woman from the republic--bestow on the little Lord David, theson of his conquest, the office of keeper of the stick, which made thatbastard officer, boarded at the king's expense, by a natural revulsionof feeling, an ardent adherent of the Stuarts. Lord David was for sometime one of the hundred and seventy wearing the great sword, whileafterwards, entering the corps of pensioners, he became one of the fortywho bear the gilded halberd. He had, besides being one of the noblecompany instituted by Henry VIII. as a bodyguard, the privilege oflaying the dishes on the king's table. Thus it was that whilst hisfather was growing gray in exile, Lord David prospered under Charles II.

  After which he prospered under James II.

  The king is dead. Long live the king! It is the _non deficit alter,aureus_.

  It was on the accession of the Duke of York that he obtained permissionto call himself Lord David Dirry-Moir, from an estate which his mother,who had just died, had left him, in that great forest of Scotland, whereis found the krag, a bird which scoops out a nest with its beak in thetrunk of the oak.