Jack Marden was a Catholic by force of tradition and habit, and he remained so, against his worldly interest, because he was too loyal to old memories, too stubbornly independent, to desert an unpopular cause, or (which is nearer the truth of his case) repudiate an unpopular label, no matter how little it meant to him. He had inherited his religion with the family plate and he was proud of it, as of all his possessions; but he was an Englishman first, a landed squire, with a deep dumb feeling for his home horizons, a sense of immediate duties, and a feudal bond with his servants and tenants, whom he had no wish to leave, and to neglect, in the pursuit of romantic foolishness. And, since a man’s heart will take sides with or without the authority of his considered judgement, he in fact resented Jacobitism and all its works. He was for leaving well alone, in the comfortable expectation of its becoming better—as apparently was its habit, for this new German king stood higher in general favour than ever his predecessor had done. The house of Stuart meant as much to Jack Marden, and as little, as the sentimental songs of one’s boyhood; as a child he had beglamoured it with heroic daydreams, but, so soon as he began to look on the world with a man’s eyes, whatever there was of poetry in him took another turn. The reign of God’s anointed had ended before his birth: it was a remote thing, a fairy tale, which he regarded with a rather perfunctory reverence that concealed from others, but not always from himself, a certain impatience of the political fervour that the royal name still had power to inspire in many breasts. Nor had the pervasive influence of Father Gandy, his priest and tutor and friend, tended to make an active Jacobite of him: rather it may be that it was the priest himself who, against all natural expectation, had guided him insensibly into the path of acquiescence. For Father Gandy, though neither renegade nor heretic, and though prompt in the performance of his priestly duties, cared more, it would seem, for religion than for the church that embodied it. He was lazy, virtuous, and wise; he was comfort-loving, and saintly; and if there are contradictions here, it is life that made the ravel, not we who but observe, that must resolve them.
If Jack Marden, staring at the bright brim of his wine glass, recalled for a brief instant the events and hazards of ’forty-five, it was Paul Dewdney that had prompted the recall: his manservant Paul Dewdney, who at this moment lay upstairs a-dying. Thinking of him, Squire Marden felt as he looked—a boy, and forlorn. Forlorn, and none the less so when the anger of feeling himself powerless to help the man made his mouth move and his nostrils dilate. At such times his eyes blazed, and he wanted to do murder upon the phantom that was destroying Paul. There was now but small hope of the fellow’s recovery. The little that human wit could devise had been done: the Glatting apothecary was with him now, and a great man from the remote royal village of Kensington in Middlesex had but recently left the house. Father Gandy, whose wine stood untasted, whose napkin lay in the chair where he had let it fall but five minutes ago, was at the bedside. Death is arrogant and graceless, a disturber of the peace. He affronts our dignity, interrupts us at supper, ignores our arguments, insults us with his peremptory airs. Nor does he disdain to take us at a disadvantage. He is without scruple or discrimination, and therefore is no gentleman. Marden was indignant with such manners and sore at heart; for he was losing something more than a servant and something more than a friend: one who had companioned him in boyhood, and in spite of their different stations had played the elder brother to him, teaching him to ride and fight and fish and shoot, and how to snare and skin a rabbit, and the nice points in cockfighting. That active comradeship was past these many years; but though the relationship had changed outwardly, keeping pace with the years, the old bond of affection had never been broken. Many memories pressed upward for release into his mind, where at present there was room only for anger and anxiety.