‘Thank God, she knows that already—that is, the death. But I suspect this box will open old wounds.’
‘Poor woman! Tell her Mr. Fitzroy sent this by a trusted friend. I destroyed her letters. For her sake, I wish I were not in the secret, but unhappily, by accident, I learnt it long before I found the poor fellow dying in a Swiss châlet.’
‘Ah,’ muttered the priest, and felt for his pipe. ‘It’s unfortunate. Not a soul but myself has known it for years—not even the earl, and such a secret has cost me many an uncomfortable moment.’
Luffington cast a strange glance upon him. His words were inexplicable. Known it for years! Secret unshared by the earl! Was the ground solid beneath his feet, that a virtuous priest should contemplate the likelihood of such a secret being shared with the earl?
‘It’s not to be feared I should betray a lady. God knows, I am no saint myself, to blame anybody.’
‘I don’t blame her much myself. I deplore the need for duplicity, but it was not her doing. They placed her in a false position. But while I cannot but admire the tenacity of her affections and her loyalty to a natural claim, I have ever been urging her to make a clean breast of it to her husband. It was not her business to expiate the wrong of others, but confession would have placed her and the unfortunate man now in his grave upon a proper footing, and lent the dignity of candour to their relations.’
Luffington felt mercilessly mystified. Even suppose the lovers not altogether criminal, how could the earl’s recognition of their irregular situation lend dignity to it? He spoke his perplexity, and cast the good priest into a panic.
‘What did you mean by telling me you knew everything?’ he cried, wrathfully. ‘Malcolm Fitzroy her ladyship’s lover! Poor woman, poor woman! I thought you knew, and now I must break confidence, to clear her, and tell you the wretched story.’
He drew Fred into his study, carefully closed the door, and there laid bare a situation as odd as the personality of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. A titled lady in Northumberland lost a new-born infant, and was herself pronounced in danger unless a child could be found to take its place. A gypsy outcast was discovered to have given birth to twins on the same day, and was glad enough to resign the baby girl to the bereaved aristocrat. The twins were the result of an intrigue between an English gentleman and a handsome gypsy. The little girl blossomed into youth, as English and refined as could be, and her foster-mother, whose life she had saved, could not bring herself to part with her. As no other children came, she grew up the daughter of the house, adored by her self-made parents. The boy was his mother’s son, an intractable vagrant, incapable of control, with the saving grace of a passionate attachment to his sister.
When the Earl of Harborough came forward as a suitor, the old lord and his wife debated long upon their duty to him and to his house, and their desire for their darling’s advancement. The latter instinct prevailed, and the earl believed himself the husband of a well-born English maiden. The adopted parents were both dead, and the countess, unhappy in her marriage, had nobody to turn to in her troubles but her gypsy brother. To make good his dubious footing at the Hall, Fitzroy had cast himself in the way of the earl, and secured an extraordinary popularity in the village and upon the estate. The earl thought him a droll fellow, unbent patronisingly to him, and enjoyed his odd vagabond habits.