I gave a little gasp and began to wonder whether this was not all a wild dream. Lord Langerdale remained silent, whilst I recovered myself in some measure.
“Will you tell me about it?” I asked slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“I will tell you everything,” Lord Langerdale said kindly. “This is a great surprise to you, of course, and quite as great a one to me. Here is the story—or, rather, as much as I know of it.”
He cleared his throat and took a chair by my side. Everything else in the room except his face was blurred and indistinct, and his voice seemed to come to me from a long distance. But every word he uttered sank into my heart.
“Your grandfather was a very poor and very proud English baronet—Sir Arthur Montavon. My wife Elsie and your mother were his only children, and they were twins. They were presented at Court together, created an equal sensation, and were at once allowed to be the beauties of the season. This was the time when I first knew them, so it is here that I begin my tale.
“Six months after their appearance in Society, Elsie was engaged to be married to me. But your mother seemed to be more difficult to please. She refused several very good offers, and at the end of her first season she was still free.
“I don’t know exactly how or where she first met him,” Lord Langerdale continued slowly; “but before the following spring your mother was betrothed to the Count de Cartienne. At that time he was one of the richest, the best-looking, and most popular men about town. There seemed to be nothing which he could not do, no art in which he was not proficient, and he was passionately in love with your mother. Whether she ever really cared for him I cannot tell; but if she did, it could only have been a very transitory feeling.
“The marriage-day was fixed and was a general topic of conversation. I even believe that your mother had begun to prepare her trousseau, when something happened. Count de Cartienne was deposed from his post of chief favourite in Society, which he at one time held, by a younger and more extraordinary man. That man was——”
“Mr. Ravenor!” I exclaimed.
Lord Langerdale nodded.