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One poet had been made a Peer. One man of science had been made a Privy Councillor, and another a Peer; two painters had been made baronets; and the humble distinction of Knight Bachelor, which had been tossed contemptuously to city sheriffs, provincial mayors, and undistinguished persons who used back-stairs influence to get the title, was now brought into better consideration by being shared by a few musicians, engineers, physicians, and others.
He had no suspicion of Merton having any mischievous intentions, and lay down again to rest. He afterwards heard him pass out of his room, and go slowly up the back-stairs leading to the upper story. Shortly after this he had fallen asleep, and did not hear or see him return.
As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life, on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year, as certain as ever the Sunday-night came, to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands: And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of, he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.
The guards in silver and the footmen in gold would not allow it. But don't cry! You shall get in all right. My sweetheart knows a little back-stairs which leads to the sleeping-room, and she knows where to find the key. They went into the garden, and when the lights in the palace were put out one after the other, the crow led Gerda to a back-door.
"I'll go," she called to Kate; "it's a man I sent here on an errand, and I shall have to see him." "Very well, miss," said Kate, and went singing down the back-stairs with her broom. "This way," said Gypsy, opening the door. She led the way to her room, and the man who followed her shouldered her trunk with one hand, and carried it out to a carriage which stood at the door.
He proceeded to handle the subjects of the English rose-noble; put in circulation by Leicester's finance or back-stairs council at two florins above its value, to the manifest detriment of the Provinces, to the detestable embargo which had prevented them from using the means bestowed upon them by God himself to defend their country, to the squandering and embezzlement of the large sums contributed by the Province; and entrusted to the Earl's administration; to the starving condition of the soldiers; maltreated by government, and thus compelled to prey upon the inhabitants so that troops in the States' service had never been so abused during the whole war, although the States had never before voted such large contributions nor paid them so promptly to the placing in posts of high honour and trust men of notoriously bad character and even Spanish spies; to the taking away the public authority from those to whom it legitimately belonged, and conferring it on incompetent and unqualified persons; to the illegal banishment of respectable citizens, to the violation of time-honoured laws and privileges, to the shameful attempts to repudiate the ancient authority of the States, and to usurp a control over the communities and nobles by them represented, and to the perpetual efforts to foster dissension, disunion, and rebellion among the inhabitants.
"Good-night!" came back in many voices. Grannie came in muffled up to the throat. "However am I to get back to Sulby, and your father gone these two hours?" she said. "Not him," said Pete, coming behind with one eye screwed up and a finger to his nose. "The ould man's been on the back-stairs all night, listening and watching wonderful. His bark's tremenjous, but his bite isn't worth mentioning."
" 'The Aigress, said others, 'sure that's an animal we haven't seen, and the throng began to pour down the back-stairs only to find that the 'Aigress was the elephant, and that the elephant was all out o' doors, or so much of it as began with Ann Street. Meanwhile, I began to accommodate those who had long been waiting with their money at the Broadway entrance."
How this inscrutable man procured his pardon, and what sum he paid for it, in cash or service, is among the mysteries of the medieval "back-stairs." He had to be forgiven for more than Custance knew.
Just hear this, and he drew a large document from what Polly called 'a back-stairs pocket.
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