A strangely corroborative sequel to the story remains to be told. Shortly
after the death of Sir John Horseleigh, a soldier of fortune returned
from the Continent, called on Dame Horseleigh the fictitious, living in
widowed state at Clyfton Horseleigh, and, after a singularly brief
courtship, married her. The tradition at Havenpool and elsewhere has
ever been that this man was already her husband, Decimus Strong, who
remarried her for appearance' sake only.
The illegitimate son of this lady by Sir John succeeded to the estates
and honours, and his son after him, there being nobody on the alert to
investigate their pretensions. Little difference would it have made to
the present generation, however, had there been such a one, for the
family in all its branches, lawful and unlawful, has been extinct these
many score years, the last representative but one being killed at the
siege of Sherton Castle, while attacking in the service of the
Parliament, and the other being outlawed later in the same century for a
debt of ten pounds, and dying in the county jail. The mansion house and
its appurtenances were, as I have previously stated, destroyed, excepting
one small wing, which now forms part of a farmhouse, and is visible as
you pass along the railway from Casterbridge to Ivel. The outline of the
old bowling-green is also distinctly to be seen.
This, then, is the reason why the only lawful marriage of Sir John, as
recorded in the obscure register at Havenpool, does not appear in the
pedigree of the house of Horseleigh.
Spring 1893.
THE DUKE'S REAPPEARANCE--A FAMILY TRADITION
According to the kinsman who told me the story, Christopher Swetman's
house, on the outskirts of King's-Hintock village, was in those days
larger and better kept than when, many years later, it was sold to the
lord of the manor adjoining; after having been in the Swetman family, as
one may say, since the Conquest.
Some people would have it to be that the thing happened at the house
opposite, belonging to one Childs, with whose family the Swetmans
afterwards intermarried. But that it was at the original homestead of
the Swetmans can be shown in various ways; chiefly by the unbroken
traditions of the family, and indirectly by the evidence of the walls
themselves, which are the only ones thereabout with windows mullioned in
the Elizabethan manner, and plainly of a date anterior to the event;
while those of the other house might well have been erected fifty or
eighty years later, and probably were; since the choice of Swetman's
house by the fugitive was doubtless dictated by no other circumstance
than its then suitable loneliness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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