The Noble Rogue. Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

      Gradually as his pockets grew more and more empty, as constant rebuffs took the edge off his optimism, Michael carried on the fight with less and less hope if with unabated doggedness.

      In the intervals he had sold his sword and his skin to the highest bidder, to Italy or Flanders, to the Emperor or to the King of France. He had led the life of the adventurer, who knows not from day to day whence will come the rations for the morrow, of the soldier of fortune who has neither kindred nor home.

      His mother whom he adored—in his own turbulent passionate way—spent a life of humble penury in a remote Kentish village. To this lowly abode of peace Michael returned from time to time from his far-off wanderings in Sicily or Spain; here he would spend some few days in worshipping his mother, until the agony of seeing her patient and serene within measurable sight of starvation drove him frantic from out her doors.

      Then he would rush back to London and once more haunt the Courts and the purlieus of Whitehall, swallowing his outbursts of pride in vain supplications for a fresh hearing, in a mad desire to see the King, in licking the dust before the feet of those who might help him to further his cause.

      At those times self-deprecation would render him moody; his pleasure-loving nature was swamped beneath the heavy pall of a mother's want, a mother's sorrow and misery. He despised himself for being unable to lift her out of such humiliating penury. She who should be Countess of Stowmaries, one of the greatest ladies in the land, scrubbed her own floors and oft lacked a meal, the while her son, the able-bodied and reckless adventurer, was eating out his heart with the shame of his own impotence.

      But what he could not accomplish whilst the scanty means left to him by his father were still at his command, he was totally unable to obtain now that he had not one stiver to offer to those who might have helped him but whose palms seemed forever to be in want of grease.

      Blood-money abroad had also become more meagre. The King of France and the Emperor had their own standing armies now, and had less need of mercenary troops than of yore. Michael who in battle sought wounds as another would seek cheap glory, was given but twenty crowns for a sword thrust which he received at Fehrbellin whilst fighting for the Elector of Brandenburg.

      He nearly died of the thrust, and afterwards of starvation, for he sent the twenty crowns to his mother, and being considered too enfeebled for active service, he could not immediately obtain further enlistment.

      This was but one of the many episodes which had helped to make Michael Kestyon what he now was. A bitter sense of wrong gnawed at his heartstrings, the while he strove to hide his better nature beneath the mask of boisterous gaiety, of a licentious life and reckless gambling.

      The buffetings of law officials, the corrupt practises of second rate attorneys, the constant demands on his scanty purse now made up the sum total of his dealings with humanity, when he was not actually in the company of adventurers more profligate, more dissolute than himself.

      He saw the better world—that world which was composed of his own kindred—turned, as if in arms against him. Not a friend to give him help save at a price which he could not afford to pay. It was money and always money: money which he could not get, and without which he saw the last chance of getting a hearing for his case vanishing beyond his reach.

      The descent from those early boyish days full of idealism and of hope, down to the lowest rung of the social ladder, to the companionship of gamesters and of drunkards, had been overcertain and none too slow. Accustomed to the revelries of camp life, to that light-hearted gaiety so full of exuberance to-day and oft the precursor of a bloody death on the morrow, Michael found the England of the Restoration a mercenary and inhospitable spot.

      Among his own kind, mockery of his vain endeavours; among the others—the wastrels—a life of boisterous merrimaking which at any rate made for forgetfulness.