St. George and St. Michael. Volume II

In the castle things went on much the same, nor did the gathering / tumult without wake more than an echo within. Yet a cloud slowly / deepened upon the brow of the marquis, and a look of disquiet, to be / explained neither by the more frequent returns of his gout, nor by / the more lengthened absences of his favourite son. In his judgment / the king was losing ground, not only in England but in the deeper / England of its men. Lady Margaret also, for all her natural good / spirits and light-heartedness, showed a more continuous anxiety / than was to be accounted for by her lord's absences and the dangers / he had to encounter: little Molly, the treasure of her heart next to / her lord, had never been other than a delicate child, but now had / begun to show signs of worse than weakness of constitution, and the / heart of the mother was perpetually brooding over the ever-present / idea of her sickly darling.

But she always did her endeavour to clear the sky of her countenance / before sitting down with her father-in-law at the dinner-table, / where still the marquis had his jest almost as regularly as his / claret, although varying more in quality and quantity both -- now / teasing his son Charles about the holes in his pasteboard, as he / styled the castle walls; now his daughter Anne about a design, he / and no one else attributed to her, of turning protestant and / marrying Dr. Bayly; now Dr. Bayly about his having been discovered / blowing the organ in the chapel at high mass, as he said; for when / no new joke was at hand he was fain to content himself with falling / back upon old ones. The first of these mentioned was founded on the / fact, as undeniable as deplorable, of the weakness of many portions / of the defences, to remedy which, as far as might be, was for the / present lord Charles's chief endeavour, wherein he had the best / possible adviser, engineer, superintendent, and workman, all in the / person of Caspar Kaltoff. The second jest of the marquis was a pure / invention upon the liking of lady Anne for the company and / conversation of the worthy chaplain. The last mentioned was but an / exaggeration of the following fact.