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CHAPTER II.
LORD DAVID DIRRY-MOIR.
I.
Lord Linnæus Clancharlie had not always been old and proscribed; he had
had his phase of youth and passion. We know from Harrison and Pride that
Cromwell, when young, loved women and pleasure, a taste which, at times
(another reading of the text "Woman"), betrays a seditious man. Distrust
the loosely-clasped girdle. Male proecinctam juvenem cavete. Lord
Clancharlie, like Cromwell, had had his wild hours and his
irregularities. He was known to have had a natural child, a son. This
son was born in England in the last days of the republic, just as his
father was going into exile. Hence he had never seen his father. This
bastard of Lord Clancharlie had grown up as page at the court of Charles
II. He was styled Lord David Dirry-Moir: he was a lord by courtesy, his
mother being a woman of quality. The mother, while Lord Clancharlie was
becoming an owl in Switzerland, made up her mind, being a beauty, to
give over sulking, and was forgiven that Goth, her first lover, by one
undeniably polished and at the same time a royalist, for it was the king
himself.
She had been but a short time the mistress of Charles II., sufficiently
long however to have made his Majesty--who was delighted to have won so
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