“How could you, Julia! Oh, how could you!” said Nelly, as she leaned over her and tried to look reproachful.
“If you mean, how could I help quizzing him, I can understand you; but I could not—no, Nelly, I could not help it! It is my habit to seize on the absurd side of any embarrassment; and you may be sure there is always one if you only look for it; and you 've no idea how much pleasanter—ay, and easier, too—it is to laugh oneself out of difficulties than to grieve over them. You 'll see George, now, will be spirited up, out of pure fright, to do what he ought; to tell this man that his proposal is an absurdity, and that young women, even as destitute of fortune as myself, do not marry as nursetenders. There! I declare that is Sir Marcus driving away already. Only think with what equanimity I can see wealth and title taking leave of me. Never say after that that I have not courage.”
CHAPTER XLVII. “A TELEGRAM”
“This is a very eventful day for me, George,” said Augustus, as they strolled through the garden after breakfast. “The trial was fixed for the 13th, and to-day is the 14th; I suppose the verdict will be given to-day.”
“But you have really no doubt of the result? I mean, no more than anxiety on so momentous a matter must suggest?”
“Pardon me. I have grave doubts. There was such a marriage, as is alleged, formed by my grandfather; a marriage in every respect legal. They may not have the same means of proving that which we have; but we know it. There was a son born to that marriage. We have the letter of old Lami, asking my grandfather to come over to Bruges for the christening, and we have the receipt of Hodges and Smart, the jewellers, for a silver gilt ewer and cup which were engraved with the Bramleigh crest and cypher, and despatched to Belgium as a present; for my grandfather did not go himself, pretexting something or other, which evidently gave offence; for Lami's next letter declares that the present has been returned, and expresses a haughty indignation at my grandfather's conduct I can vouch for all this. It was a sad morning when I first saw those papers; but I did see them, George, and they exist still. That son of my grandfather's they declare to have married, and his son is this Pracontal. There is the whole story, and if the latter part of the narrative be only as truthful as I believe the first to be, he, and not I, is the rightful owner of Castello.”
L'Estrange made no reply; he was slowly going over in his mind the chain of connection, and examining, link by link, how it held together.
“But why,” asked he at length, “was not this claim preferred before? Why did a whole generation suffer it to lie dormant?”
“That is easily—too easily explained. Lami was compromised in almost every country in Europe; and his son succeeded him in his love of plot and conspiracy. Letters occasionally reached my father from this latter; some of them demanding money in a tone of actual menace. A confidential clerk, who knew all my father's secrets, and whom he trusted most implicitly, became one day a defaulter, and absconded, carrying with him a quantity of private papers, some of which were letters written by my father, and containing remittances which Montague Lami,—or Louis Langrange, or whatever other name he bore,—of course, never received, and indignantly declared he believed had never been despatched. This clerk, whose name was Hesketh, made Lami's acquaintance in South America, and evidently encouraged him to prefer his claim with greater assurance, and led him to suppose that any terms he preferred must certainly be complied with! But I cannot go on, George; the thought of my poor father struggling through life in this dark conflict rises up before me, and now I estimate the terrible alternation of hope and fear in which he must have lived, and how despairingly he must have thought of a future, when this deep game should be left to such weak hands as mine. I thought they were cruel words once, in which he spoke of my unfitness to meet a great emergency—but now I read them very differently.”