—Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Mistress Julia Peyton felt a trifle worried. Matters had not turned out exactly as she had anticipated; it is a way peculiar to matters over which we have no control.
She had been quite aware of the fact that my lord of Stowmaries, with Sir John Ayloffe and Lord Rochester, had made the journey over to Paris in order to be present at the marriage of Michael Kestyon with the tailor's daughter, and it had been with the intention of frustrating my lord's desire to pay his final debt of seventy thousand pounds to Michael that she had sent old Daniel Pye over in the gentlemen's company, armed with the letters writ in scholarly French by the exiled Huguenot clerk and intended for good M. Legros' personal perusal.
Mistress Peyton had no special wish to save the susceptibilities of a tailor's wench, and cared little whether the fraud was discovered by her before she had left her father's home or afterwards, but—she had argued this out in her own mind over and over again—if the girl never actually left her father's house, my lord would not in honour be bound to pay Michael the additional seventy thousand pounds, since the latter would not have accomplished his own share of the bargain to the full. On the other hand there would be quite enough public scandal and gossip round the girl, as it was, to enable my lord of Stowmaries to justify his repudiation of the matrimonial bonds, contracted eighteen years ago, on the grounds that the future Countess of Stowmaries no longer bore a spotless reputation.
That had been Mistress Peyton's subtle argument, and on the basis of this unanswerable logic she had laid her plans. Caring nothing for the girl, she cared everything for the money, and above all for the power that so vast a sum would place in Michael's hand for the furtherance of his own case.
Daniel Pye had returned to England about a week after the wedding at St. Gervais. He was an unblushing liar, both by habit and by temperament. Therefore, when he presented himself before his mistress, he assured her that he had handed her letter over to the master tailor even while the wedding festivities were in progress in the back shop, and long before the coach bore the bridal pair away.
When Mistress Peyton heard the circumstantial narrative of how her faithful henchman had fought his way into the tailor's house at peril of his life, and had given the letter into M. Legros' own hands, the while his own poor shoulders were bruised and well-nigh broken with the blows dealt to him by cruel miscreants who strove to hinder him from performing his duty—when the fair Julia heard all this, I say, she was vastly pleased and commended Master Pye very highly for his faithfulness, and I believe even rewarded him by giving him five shillings.
The wedding it seems had been the talk of Paris, ladies and gentlemen from the Court had been present thereat, and Mme. de Montespan had loudly praised the handsome presence of the bridegroom. All this was passing satisfactory, and Mistress Julia was quite content to think that the tailor and his family would—after such an esclandre—be only too willing to hide their humble heads out of the ken of society wherein they had become a laughing stock.
On legal grounds my lord of Stowmaries could readily command the nullity of the child-marriage now; as for the religious grounds which had been the chief stumbling-block hitherto—"Bah!" argued the fair Julia naïvely to herself, "His Holiness the Pope of Rome is a gentleman; he will not expect an English grand seigneur to acknowledge as his countess the cast-off plaything of an adventurer."
The disappointment came some three or four days later when Cousin John in his turn presented himself at the little house in Holborn Row. Of course he had known nothing of his fair cousin's treacherous little scheme, and although he had greatly wondered at Master Pye's presence in Paris at the time of the wedding, yet he had been far from suspecting the truth with regard to its purport. All that good Sir John knew was that the bridal pair did leave the house of M. Legros in a somewhat unconventional style, for this he had been told by the gaffers of the neighbourhood.