"What hath all that to do with our love, dear heart?"
"Everything," she said, angry with him for being so obtuse, not liking yet to show him her hand, the cruel hand which would dismiss him without compunction, were his fortunes on the wane. "You forget that by disgracing the tailor's wench, you have made Michael Kestyon, the claimant to your title, passing rich."
"Bah! He hath spent half that substance already, so 'tis said. The king soon tires of his friends, and his affections are an expensive luxury to keep."
"Rumour goes on to say that Michael Kestyon hath paid the Attorney-General one hundred thousand pounds that he may send a favourable report of his case to the king," asserted Mistress Peyton, relentlessly, almost spitefully.
Lord Stowmaries made no direct reply. Truth to tell, he thought his fair Julia's anxieties futile, but at the same time, with unvarying optimism and self-sufficiency, he had attributed these anxieties on his behalf to her great love for him. Everything so far had gone well with him; for years now his every wish in life had been gratified; even the child-marriage, that great obstacle to the desires of his heart, had been swept away from before his path, leaving it clear and broad, to lead him straight to gratification and to happiness.
With characteristic vanity he would not see that Julia, who had been all eagerness and ardour awhile ago, had suddenly become cold and well-nigh hostile. In every word which she uttered, in every inflection of her voice—even when it became petulant and spiteful—he heard but the echo of the overmastering emotions of a tender heart, whose sole object, himself, was in imaginary peril.
He loved her all the better for her fears, though he felt none himself. He knew quite well that a wave of fanatical hatred against the Roman Catholics was passing over Puritan England; that the nation tired of a king's treachery had turned in deadly bitterness against those whom it held responsible for the constitutional faithlessness of a Stuart.
But Titus Oates had not yet come forward with his lies, and Lord Stowmaries and his co-religionists were the last to foresee that the abject terror and malignant intolerance of the whole nation were already being directed against them, and that these would anon culminate in those shameful accusations, mock trials and scandalous verdicts which have remained to this day a dark and ineradicable blot on England's integrity and on her sense of justice.
We must not suppose for a moment that Mistress Peyton foresaw the ugly black cloud which was looming on the not very distant horizon. Her intuition in political matters only went so far as these affected her own prospects. But no one who lived in London in this year of grace could help but see that Papists were held in abhorrence and in fear. The terms of the treaty of Dover had, despite strenuous efforts on the part of my lords Clifford and Arlington, become public property. England, with eyes rendered unseeing by abject fear, saw herself the minion of France, the slave of the Papacy. It only needed the tiny spark to kindle these smouldering ashes into raging flames.
Mistress Peyton, keenly alive to her own interests, did not wish to tie her future irrevocably to a man who within the next few months might find himself divested of title and wealth and mayhap in the dock for treason. Therefore, all Stowmaries' ardent entreaties received but little response.