Sternhold went to London, got a special licence, and the pair were married in Sternhold’s private apartments at his hotel in the presence of three people only, one of whom was the astounded Dodd. They left by the next train for London, where the bride went to Regent Street to choose her trousseau, with her husband at her side.
Not a bell was rung in Stirmingham. The news spread like wildfire, and confounded the city. People gathered at the corners of the streets.
“He is certainly mad,” they said. Most of them were in some way disappointed.
“He may be,” said a keener one than the rest; “he may be—but she is not.”
Chapter Seven.
Lucia Marese, now Mrs Sternhold Baskette, was the daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, and had a tolerably accurate acquaintance with Leicester Square and Soho. She was not an absolutely bad woman in the coarsest sense of the term—at least not at that time, she had far too much ambition to destroy her chance so early in life. Physiologists may here discuss the question as to whether any latent trace of the old gipsy blood of the Baskettes had in any way influenced Sternhold in his choice. Ambitious as she was, and possessed of that species of beauty which always takes with the multitude, Lucia had hitherto been a failure. Just as in literature and in art, the greatest genius has to wait till opportunity offers, and often eats its own heart in the misery of waiting, so she had striven and fought to get to the front, and yet was still a stroller when Sternhold saw her. She knew that if only once she could have made her appearance on the London boards, with her gorgeous beauty fully displayed, and assisted by dress and music, that she should certainly triumph. But she could not get there.
Other girls less favoured by Nature, but more by circumstance, and by the fickle and unaccountable tastes of certain wealthy individuals, had forestalled her, and she stored up in her mind bitter hatred of several of these who had snubbed and sneered at her.
The fairy prince of her dream, however, came at last in the person of an old man of three score years and ten, and she snapped him up in a trice. No doubt, like all Stirmingham, she entertained the most fabulous ideas of Sternhold’s wealth.
These dreams were destined to be rudely shattered. She seems to have had pretty much her own way at first. Doubtless the old man was as wax in her hands, till his former habits began to pull at him. She had one good trait at all events, if it could be called good—the first use she made of her new position was to provide for her family, or rather for the only member of it in England.