CHAPTER XX
BEGGAR-MY-NEIGHBOUR
The wind that rose during the night brought with it a change in the weather. When the day broke and a round red sun rose from among the mountains, it showed the whole world white—the land deep under snow and the sea all foam.
Slyne's first sensation when he woke and saw the storm, from behind the double windows of his comfortable rooms in the Warder's Tower, was one of relief, since it would surely serve to stave off inconvenient visitors. He had been afraid that the news the beacon had blazoned the night before would travel altogether too fast and too far to suit his plans; it would have been awkward in the extreme to be inundated with curious callers in a position practically carried by assault, only tenable by stealth and while no one in active authority should challenge it.
The coming of Herries, the factor, had opened his eyes to that. For the old fellow, ill as he was, had shown a most annoying inclination to cross-question Slyne about various dry legal details; and Slyne had only been able to put him off temporarily by promising that her ladyship's own man of law would go into all such matters with him in the morning.
Now, fortunately for Slyne and his friends, the factor need not be further considered for some little time to come, if indeed at all. The fever in him had refused to yield to any of Mrs. M'Kissock's simple medicaments, and he was delirious. He seemed very likely, indeed, to die unless he were very lucky. Slyne did not fail to congratulate himself on that score also, as he sat up in bed to reach for a cigarette after his late breakfast and contemplate the cuffs of his expensive pink silk pajamas.
The rest of the company in the castle he thought he could find means to control, for the present, at any rate, although he did not under-estimate the chances of trouble with his two disaffected associates, who had already displayed such a lamentable tendency toward open mutiny. But, on the whole, he felt satisfied that, if he could only keep matters running smoothly during the days that must still elapse before the Court of Chancery should resume its usual routine and finally settle the Jura succession on Sallie, he would by then have managed to make his own footing there absolutely secure.
He snuggled back between the blankets again, with an inexpressible sensation of comfort, and, watching the blue spirals of smoke curl upwards from under his moustache, forgot all the anxious uncertainties and the ever more painful pinch of the present in contemplative anticipations of that fair future which he had so carefully planned for himself. Not even the fact that he had almost exhausted his cash resources could worry him when he thought of the wealth that was to be his as soon as he should be safely married to Sallie; and until then he could command unlimited local credit, on her behalf.
She was Lady Josceline Justice already. She would be Countess of Jura in her own right as soon as the Court of Chancery should admit her identity. She would have ten millions of dollars in ready money for him to spend and a quarter of a million for annual income. He had been a poor man all his life, but now—he looked luxuriously out at the snow and the storm.
"Mr. Jasper Slyne and the Countess of Jura," he said aloud, and smiled and curled his moustache.