“Ha,” interrupted the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting. “Now lift up your head, my love. ’Tis all a vile plot. An anonymous letter, say you? Why, now all is plain. ’Tis some base, envious creature—Heaven knows who!” said Kitty. “Some old flame, some wretch who wants to break the marriage for abominable designs of her own. Psha! Was there ever a grosser scheme? ’Twould not take in a mouse!”
“Sir Jasper will not listen to a word of reason,” complained the bride-elect, now unveiling the fury of her eyes. “He declares that there was guilt on my face; that he had long had suspicions of me. He vows I have been cold to him, dearest Lady Kilcroney, and that matters must have gone very far between me and my lover—oh, is it not monstrous of him?—before anyone would have dared address me in such familiar words.”
“You need not repeat his raving to me,” cried my Lady Kilcroney decidedly. “Dry your eyes now, and hasten to your duty. Sir Jasper in his present mood may very well not come to the ball, but he shall render an account of his folly in this very room to-morrow morning, and if the marriage does not take place from my house next Monday as arranged, I am a Dutchwoman, as complete a Dutchwoman as Mrs. Schwellenberg. I can say no more. And I trust,” said Kitty, soliloquising as the door slammed on the Maid-of-Honour’s exit, “and I trust you will pay Sir Jasper back for this evening’s work in good ringing coin, child, once you’re Lady Selina Standish. As I have no doubt you will, my love—cold-hearted, capricious?—aye, he’s not so far out there—and fiery tempered to boot! It will give me a vast of pleasure to see such a buck as he proper punished and tamed!”
She herself began the process with considerable conscientiousness next morning in that interview which Sir Jasper was ready enough to grant. My Lady was tired; for to be in attendance on Royalty was to make of a ball more of a fatigue than a diversion. She was anxious, too; for the Queen had heard that it was Lady Selina’s visit to Lady Kilcroney which had resulted in the Princess Augusta actually being kept waiting; and had shown displeasure at so extraordinary a breach of etiquette.
Kitty had no explanation to offer. She would have died rather than hint at the threatening scandal. So considerable peevishness had accumulated to fall upon the devoted head of Sir Jasper.
But at first that individual was beyond feeling anything save his own anguish. He roared like a wounded bull; hit his brow till the powder flew; thumped his chest till his vocal chords reverberated; paced the room, declaiming in one breath that he was infamously betrayed, and in the next that ’twas a just retribution for perjury to the best of wives. He swore that his heart was broken; never had he loved, never could he love woman as he loved the false, intriguing Selina. Then he declared that the organ in question had never been mended, but lay in fragments under the tombstone sacred to Julia.
It was only when his passion had expended itself in exhaustion that my Lady was able to make herself heard. Then she dissected the value of the evidence upon which he proposed to take so outrageous a step. She exposed the folly of his jealousy, she mocked the absurdity of the figure he cut.
“You have now,” she said, “lost the finest young lady in the kingdom. You were about to contract a marriage altogether beyond what a man of your position and birth could hope for. You a middle-aged widower, of no particular title—what’s a baronet?—of no such remarkable fortune, with certainly no good looks to commend you—you were about to espouse the loveliest little creature in all the world, the Queen’s favourite, scarce eighteen—a beauty, sir, of the first family! And on some kind of monstrous whimsy, arising from your own bad past—oh, of that I am quite certain, Sir Jasper—you have cast away this flower, and you have cast away with it your good name, your good fame, your own claim to be a gentleman! Never will that cake be eaten for your wedding with Lady Selina Vereker, I can promise you that! Oh, she’s out of conceit with you, poor child! ‘Only one thing I beg of you!’ she says to me. ‘Do not ask me to look at him again, for I never, never can!’ ‘Then you shall not,’ says I. I uphold her, sir, in her determination. ‘You’ve come out of this business with flying colours, my love,’ I says, ‘and the Queen shall hear the whole story.’ Fie, Sir Jasper, how you bellow! I have one last word to speak to you, sir, aye, indeed, the very last you shall ever hear from these lips, and that is that I scarce think there’s a gentleman of your friends, when it gets about the clubs, who would deem it worth his honour to cross swords with such as you.”
She made a great flounce of silk skirts as if to withdraw, but he was down on his knees clutching at them; to do him justice, less affected by her threats and the picture she had drawn of his awful position than by the realisation that he had lost his bride. Never had Lady Selina appeared to his eyes in a light so entrancing; never did he so clearly perceive the worthlessness of his existence without her, as in this moment, when he believed he had lost her. His distress was so genuine, his supplications were so heartrending, that Kitty Kilcroney could not but let herself be mollified. She exacted every possible pledge of future good conduct, she obtained the completest retractation, the most abject and repeated apologies before sending for Selina.
When this young lady appeared Sir Jasper was put to another half-hour of torture ere he was re-admitted to favour; and even then the bride remained cold and unresponsive, and looked with a hard glitter in her eyes from one to the other, as if she had by no means forgiven her betrothed, and was scarce grateful to my Lady Kilcroney for her share in the reconciliation.