In the dining-room at Maiden Holt, Jack Marden, the young lord of the Fee, sat alone at dessert. In accordance with his fancy, all traces of the evening meal had been cleared from the table, whose dark shining surface was patterned, now, only by silver bowls of fruit, a dish of nuts, coloured decanters, wine glasses, and certain pieces of fragile china acquired in an earlier century by his great-grandfather. A man not yet thirty, he sat surrounded by the small and faded remains of a substantial though never great inheritance. Beyond his private demesne was the Fee itself, comprising a numerous tenantry; commons in which he held certain manorial rights; and farmlands, of which one George Hayward was an arrogant and none too efficient bailey. Within that circle, and the dearer to his heart, was Maiden Holt Park, with its hundred or more head of red deer, its carp pond, its dovecote, its dells and spinneys. And within that again was a circle of tall pines surrounding house and garden. The room he sat in was long and low-ceiled: a room friendly and full of an enduring past. Its windows were close-shuttered and curtained in heavy damask. The fire was lively in its large hearth. The seven candles of the candelabra poured pools of light on the table as upon a dark lake, and set small shadows moving on the walls; and, sometimes, one or another of them would sputter and send a thin curl of smoke rising from a lank wick. The young man sat lost in a trance of thoughtfulness, neither eating nor drinking. His gaze, but not his thought, was held by the circle of candlelight that edged with a ring as of fire the brim of his glass.
In this mood he looks so boyish that we find it hard to believe what in fact we know: that so much as five years earlier, when in his first twenties, he had been accounted a likely source of danger to the state, and so had received, from his father’s old acquaintance, Mr Root, the Glatting magistrate, a demand that all the arms at Maiden Holt should at once be given up. With the official order came a very civil letter, a word in season, to the effect that my Lord Vernon, with two ninety-gun ships, was gone to the Downs. ‘I am sure Mr Marden needs no reminding,’ added Mr Root, being evidently sure of no such thing, ‘that as well his loyalty to King George, as the safety of his own person, requires that he act in these troubled times with all candour and discretion.’ With the Pretender occupying Carlisle, and panic hurrying hotfoot on its devious ways, Mr Root did no more than his duty, and did it, we must allow, with a certain grace. For his pains he became the temporary guardian of three bullet guns, two carabines, four shot guns, and a dozen pairs of plain screw-barrelled pistols: the which he promised to restore to their owner with a thousand times the satisfaction he had had in receiving them. The folk of Marden Fee were more nervous than Mr Root, and in the same degree less polite. Raphe Gandy, the resident priest of Maiden Holt, was hissed down the High Street and arrived home spattered with Protestant mud; and Paul Dewdney, as innocent of Jacobitism as any of them, had his head broken to the glory of King George. But, the danger past, the people repented, and good feeling between themselves and the Maiden Holt household was, by the measure of that repentance, not only restored but increased. The persuasion gained ground that the Jacobites had lost their last throw, and that papists, in consequence, could henceforward be regarded as no worse than queer. If these humble politicians could have read the mind of their young squire they would have found their new trust in him more than justified.