Rupert Kestyon, Earl of Stowmaries and Riveaulx, had been brought up in the hard school of colonial life; in his boyhood he had been denied every kind of pleasure and luxury in which the sense of youth revels, through what he called an unjust Fate; then suddenly he had seen himself thrown in the very lap of Fortune, his every desire satisfied and his every whim made law. The change was sudden enough to throw off its balance a more firm character than that of the son of Captain Kestyon—spendthrift, profligate, a rogue from temperament. Like his father's, Rupert's was essentially a weak nature. He had never attempted to fight Fate, when Fate was against him. When Fortune smiled, he took everything she offered him without attempt at restraint;—and the jade had become very lavish with her gifts to the young outcast who awhile ago had often enough been obliged to tighten his belt against the gnawing pangs of hunger.
He had found friends, followers, sycophants; had been favoured by royalty and smiled on by beauty, but Mistress Peyton was the first passion in his life. He had flirted with her for months, made easy love to her for weeks, but he had not realised that he loved her until twenty-four hours ago when he knew that she was lost to him.
The knowledge that here was the chief desire of his heart, and that this desire he could not gratify, despite his position, his personality and his wealth, almost unhinged his mind. It was two years now since he had exercised any self-denial. He had lost all knowledge of that useful art, and was determined not to learn it again.
The day on which he heard that through an appalling catastrophe, which had swept his kindred into the sea and broken the heart of an old man, he, Rupert Kestyon, the penniless son of a spendthrift father, had become rich, influential, one of the greatest gentlemen in the kingdom, he had said with a sigh of genuine satisfaction: "Now I mean to live!" and with him living meant solely the gratification of his every wish. Now he saw his greatest wish in all the world born only to be thwarted.
It was monstrous, unthinkable! But from that wholesome fear of ecclesiastical authority peculiar in those days to men of his creed, he would have rebelled. Respect for the Church to which he belonged, dread of a scandal which might tarnish the great name he bore, and undermine his pleasant position alone caused him to be submissive.
He was not clever enough to find out a means of freeing himself from irksome bonds, and had drained the cup of despair to its bitter dregs without thinking or even hoping for an issue out of his misery.
But now a man spoke—a man whom in his saner moments he heartily despised, whom he knew to be shiftless, unscrupulous, a born gambler—but yet a man who showed him a way out of the quagmire of despair into a possible haven of hope.
He had not been long in catching Ayloffe's meaning. Whilst the others doubted he had already seen the possibilities of success. His bride had never seen him since consciousness grew into her brain; her parents' only recollections of himself dated back eighteen years! Why indeed should not some other man impersonate the bridegroom, carry the bride away and thus forever after leave on her fair maiden name a stain which would render her unfit to be acknowledged as the wife of any honourable gentleman?
How simple it all seemed!