These various ideas floated through the brain of Sir Everard without,
however, producing any determined conclusion.
He examined the tree of his genealogy, which, emblazoned with many an
emblematic mark of honour and heroic achievement, hung upon the
well-varnished wainscot of his hall. The nearest descendants of Sir
Hildebrand Waverley, failing those of his eldest son Wilfred, of whom Sir
Everard and his brother were the only representatives, were, as this
honoured register informed him (and, indeed, as he himself well knew),
the Waverleys of Highley Park, com. Hants; with whom the main branch,
or rather stock, of the house had renounced all connection since the
great law-suit in 1670.
This degenerate scion had committed a farther offence against the head
and source of their gentility, by the intermarriage of their
representative with Judith, heiress of Oliver Bradshawe, of Highley Park,
whose arms, the same with those of Bradshawe the regicide, they had
quartered with the ancient coat of Waverley. These offences, however, had
vanished from Sir Everard's recollection in the heat of his resentment;
and had Lawyer Clippurse, for whom his groom was despatched express,
arrived but an hour earlier, he might have had the benefit of drawing a
new settlement of the lordship and manor of Waverley-Honour, with all its
dependencies.
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