into her snares, she aimed for higher game. A golden eagle was what she wanted to bring down.
And was not the young Earl of Stowmaries the veritable prince of golden eagles?
He came and saw and she conquered in a trice. Her beauty, which was unquestionable, and an inexhaustible fund of verve and high-spirited chatter which easily passed for wit were attractive to most men, and Lord Stowmaries, somewhat blasé already by the more simpering advances of the Court damsels, found a certain freshness in this young widow who had not yet shaken off the breezy vulgarity of her East Anglian home, and whose artless conversation, wholly innocent of elegance, was more amusing than the stilted "Ohs!" and "Luds!" of the high-born ladies of his own rank.
The golden eagle seemed overwilling to allow the matrimonial snare set by the fair Julia to close in around him: she was already over-sure of him, and though she did not frequent the assemblies and salons where congregated his lordship's many friends, she was fully aware that her name was being constantly coupled with that of the Earl of Stowmaries.
But now she saw that she had missed her aim, that the glorious bird no longer flew within her reach, but was a prisoner in some one else's cage, fettered beyond her powers of liberation.
But still Mistress Julia with persistence worthy a better cause refused to give up all hope.
"Tell me all about it, my lord," she said as quietly as she could. "It had been better had you spoken before."
"I have been a fool, Mistress," he replied dully, "yet more sinned against than sinning."
"You'll not tell me that you are actually married?" she insisted.
"Alas!"
"And did not tell me so," she retorted hotly, "but came here, courting me, speaking of love to me—of marriage—God help you! when the very word was a sacrilege since you were not free—Oh! the perfidy of it all!—and you speak of being more sinned against than sinning. 'Tis the pillory you deserve, my lord, for thus shaming a woman first and then breaking her heart."
She was quite sincere in her vehemence, for self-control had now quite deserted her, and the wrong and humiliation which she had been made to endure, rose up before her like cruel monsters that mocked and jeered at her annihilated hopes and her vanished dreams. Her voice rose in a crescendo of shrill tones, only to sink again under the strength of choking sobs. Despair, shame and bitter reproach rang through every word which she uttered.
"As you rightly say, Mistress," murmured the young man, "God help me!"
"But the details, man—the details—" she rejoined impatiently; "cannot you see that I am consumed with anxiety—the woman?—who is she?—"
"Her name is Rose Marie," he replied in the same dull, even tones, like a schoolboy reciting a lesson which he hath learned, but does not understand; "she is the daughter of a certain M. Legros, who is tailor to His Majesty the King of France."
"A tailor!" she gasped, incredulous now, hopeful once more that the young man was mayhap suffering from megrims and had seen unpleasant visions, which had no life or reality in them.
"A tailor's daughter?" she repeated. "Impossible!"
"Only too true," he rejoined. "I had no choice in the matter."
"Who had?"
"My parents."
"Tush!" she retorted scornfully, "and you a man!"
"Nay! I was not a man then."
"Evidently."
"I was in my seventh year!" he exclaimed pathetically.
There was a slight pause, during which the swiftly-risen hope a few moments ago once more died away. Then she said drily:
"And she?—this—this Rose or Mary—daughter of a tailor—how old was she when you married her?"
"In her second year, I think," he replied meekly. "I just remember quite vaguely that after the ceremony she was carried screaming and kicking out of the church. That was the last I saw of my wife from that day to this—"
"Bah!"
"My great-uncle, the late Lord Stowmaries, shipped my father, mother and myself off to Virginia soon after that. My father had been something of a wastrel all his life and a thorn in the flesh of the old miser. The second time that he was locked up in a debtor's prison, Lord Stowmaries paid up for him on the condition that he went off to Virginia at once with my mother and myself, and never showed his face in England again."
"Hm! I remember hearing something of this when you, my lord, came into your title. But these—these—tailor people—who were they?"
"Madame Legros was a distant connection of my mother's who, I suppose, married the tailor for the same reason that I—an unfortunate lad without a will of my own—was made to marry the tailor's daughter."
"She is rich—of course?"
"Legros, the tailor, owns millions, I believe, and Rose Marie is his only child. It was the first time that my poor father, Captain Kestyon, found himself actually in prison and unable to pay his debts. The Earl of Stowmaries—a wicked old miser, if ever there was one—refused to come to his rescue. My mother was practically penniless then; she had no one to whom she could turn for succour except the cousin over in Paris, who had always been kind to her, who was passing rich, burning with social ambition, and glad enough to have the high-born English lady beneath her bourgeois roof."
"And that same burning social ambition caused the worthy tailor to consent to a marriage between his baby daughter and the scion of one of the grandest families in England," commented Mistress Julia calmly. "It were all so simple—if only you had had the manhood to tell me all this ere now."
"I thought that miserable marriage forever forgotten."
"Pshaw!" she retorted, "was it likely?"
"I had heard nothing of the Legros for many years," he said dejectedly. "My father had died out in the Colony: my mother and I continued to live there on a meagre pittance which that miserly old reprobate—my great-uncle—grudgingly bestowed upon us. This was scarce sufficient for our wants, let alone for enabling us to save enough money to pay our passage home. At first my mother was in the habit of asking for and obtaining help from the Legros!—you understand? she never would have consented to the connection," added the young man with naïve cynicism, "had she not intended to derive profit therefrom, so whenever an English or a French ship touched the coast my poor mother would contrive to send a pathetic letter to be delivered in Paris, at the house of the king's tailor. But after a while answers to these missives became more and more rare, soon they ceased altogether, and it is now eight years since the last remittance came—"
"The worthy tailor and his wife were getting tired of the aristocratic connection," commented Mistress Julia drily; "no doubt they too had intended to derive profit therefrom and none came."
"Was I not right, Mistress, in thinking that ill-considered marriage forgotten?" quoth Lord Stowmaries with more vehemence than he had displayed in the actual recital of the sordid tale; "was I not justified in thinking that the Legros had by now bitterly regretted the union of their only child to the penniless son of a spendthrift father? Tell me," he reiterated hotly, "was I not justified?—I thought that they had forgotten—that they had regretted—that Rose Marie had found a husband more fitted to her lowly station and to her upbringing—and that her parents would only be too glad to think that I too had forgotten—or that I was dead."
There was a slight pause. Mistress Julia's white brow was puckered into a deep frown of thought.
"Well, my lord," she said at last, "ye've told me the past—and though the history be not pretty, it is past and done with, and I take it that your concern now is rather with the present."
"Alas!"
"Nay! sigh me not such doleful sighs, man!" she exclaimed with angry impatience, "but in the name of all the saints get on with your tale.