Her threat would lend wings to her messenger's feet, for her service was reckoned a good one, owing to the many lavish gifts and unconsidered trifles which fell from the liberal hands of Mistress Julia's courtiers, whilst her old henchman—a burly East Anglian relict of former days in Norfolk—loved to wield a heavy stick over the backs of his younger subordinates.
If Sir John Ayloffe was at home, he could be here in ten minutes; if he had gone to the Coffee Tavern in Holborn Bars, then in twenty; but if the messenger had to push on as far as the Strand, then the full half-hour must elapse ere the arrival of Sir John.
And if he came, what should she say to him? Of all her many adorers, Sir John was the only one who had never spoken of matrimony. A distant connection of the late Squire Peyton's, he it was who had launched the young widow on her social career in London and thus enabled her to enter on her great matrimonial venture.
Sir John Ayloffe, who in his early youth had been vastly busy in dissipating the fortune left to him by a thrifty father, was chiefly occupied now that he had reached middle age in finding the means to live with outward decency, if not always with strict honesty. Among these means gambling and betting were of course in the forefront. These vices were not only avowable, they were thought gentlemanly and altogether elegant.
But how to gamble and bet without cheating is a difficult problem which Sir John Ayloffe never really succeeded in solving. So far chance had favoured him. His various little transactions at the hazard tables or betting rings had gone off with a certain amount of luck and not too much publicity.
He had managed to keep up his membership at Culpeper's and other fashionable clubs, and had not up to the present been threatened with expulsion from Newmarket. He was still a welcome guest at the Coffee Taverns where the young bloods congregated, and at the Three Bears in the Strand, the resort of the most fashionable young rakes of the day.
But one or two dark, ugly-looking clouds began to hover on his financial horizon, and there was a time—some eighteen months ago—when Sir John Ayloffe had serious thoughts of a long voyage abroad for the benefit of his health.
This was just before he received the intimation that his cousin—old Squire Peyton—had left a young and pretty widow, who was burning with the desire not to allow her many charms to be buried in oblivion in a tumble-down Norfolk manor.
Although Mistress Julia Peyton knew little if anything of spelling and other book lore, her knowledge of human—or rather masculine—nature was vast and accurate. After half an hour's conversation with her newly-found kinsman, she had gauged the use which she could make of him and of his impecuniousness to a nicety.
He was over-ready, on the other hand, to respond to her wishes. The bargain was quickly struck, with cards on the table, and the calling of a spade by its own proper appellation.