This year knows nothing of last year
To-morrow has no more to say
To yesterday.
--SWINBURNE.
That same afternoon, and at about the same time as Rupert Kestyon's
coach swung out of the gates of the Bell yard, Sir John Ayloffe
presented himself at his kinswoman's house in Holborn Row.
He had come in answer to an urgent and peremptory summons, and had made
all haste, seeing that he had just heard the news that it was Michael
Kestyon who had been arrested for treason, and not the fair Julia's
erstwhile faithful adorer, Rupert. Visions of that exceedingly pleasant
£12,000 which he had thought were lost to him for ever when Michael
obtained the peerage of Stowmaries, once more rose before his mind's
eye, surrounded with the golden halo of anticipatory hope.
Of a truth, if Michael was condemned and executed for treason--and
there was but little doubt of that, taking the temper of Parliament and
people on the subject of the hellish Popish plots--then young Rupert
would come into his own again very quickly and there was no reason why
the pleasing scheme of the fair Julia's marriage with her faithful
admirer should not reach success after all.
To Cousin John's supreme astonishment, however, instead of finding
his beautiful cousin in gleeful excitement at the good news, he saw
her lying on a sofa in her tiny boudoir with her fair head buried in
billows of lace cushions, and on the verge of hysterics.
She was clutching a letter in her hand, and when Cousin John approached
her, with that diffidence peculiar to the male creature in face of
feminine tears, she held out the paper mutely towards him.
It was a letter signed Rupert Kestyon. Cousin John quickly ran his
eye over its contents. In flowery and elegant language and with many
reproaches directed at the cruel beauty who that very morning had
struck him to the heart at a moment when she believed him to be in the
most dire distress, the writer explained that Fate would now part him
from his beautiful Julia for ever:
"I go to France this night," he added, "with the wife whom God gave me
eighteen years ago, and to whom I now see that 'tis my duty to cleave.
You, I feel, did never love me, else you had not sent me that cruel
message this morning."
He was his Julia's adoring and ever-faithful servant, but there was no
mistaking the tone of the letter: he was leaving her for good and all.
Silently Cousin John folded up the letter and handed it back to his
cousin. There was nothing more to be said. He could only console and
even in this he was unsuccessful, for his own heart was heavy at
thought of that £12,000 which now could never be his.
Mistress Peyton had by the selfishness of her own ambition allowed
the trump card in the great gamble of life to slip through her dainty
fingers. The incident was closed; the tailor's wench had won the stakes
in the end.
No wonder that Julia fell into hysterics; indeed, indeed, Fate's irony
had been over-cruel. It seemed as if every one of her schemes turned
wantonly to a weapon against her most cherished desires.
Cousin John was vastly puzzled. He could not understand what had
induced Rupert to make amends to the wife in order to repudiate whom he
had spent a fortune, and lost his all. But when, anon, he heard through
public news-criers that Michael had confessed to the charge preferred
against him, and when his keen mind began to think over in detail the
various events in connection with the arrest, he arrived at a pretty
shrewd guess as to what had occurred between the cousins. Remembering
the incidents of that memorable evening at St. Denis and Michael's
offer to Stowmaries then, he bethought himself that men who are great
blackguards are capable of strange things when they love a woman.
Whereupon good Sir John shook his head and ceased his wanderings in the
realms of conjecture, for he had come across a psychological problem
which passed his understanding.