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.