‘I do not find it a recommendation. Where, pray, did Lady Sefton encounter her?’
‘Oh, down at Melton Mowbray! You must know that the Seftons have been staying with Assheton Smith, at Quorndon House. Maria tells me that they were driving out there when they came upon Sherry and his bride. She tells me it was quite pretty to see Sherry – he was teaching her to ride, it seems – taking such pains over the child.’
‘I imagine he might, since he married her.’
‘Certainly, but I confess I am agog with curiosity to discover why he married her, since we know him to have been a pretender to Miss Milborne’s hand not a fortnight ago!’
‘It is very true. Lady Sheringham told me that he had actually offered for the Milborne girl, and had been rejected. He married the Nobody from pique. There can be no other explanation.’
‘Did she tell you that? Upon my word, she is a great fool, then, to be spreading such a story about! I declare it gives me a feeling of strong compassion for the poor little bride, and I shall certainly give her vouchers for Almack’s, if Maria Sefton has not already done so!’
‘Of course, if you are to take the girl up, there is no more to be said,’ shrugged Mrs Burrell.
Lady Jersey gave a trill of laughter. ‘What, in granting her vouchers for the club? How absurd!’
‘I wish you may not be taken in.’
‘If I am, I shall be in Maria Sefton’s company, and I am sure I do not desire to be in better.’
‘Both Lord and Lady Sefton’s good nature is too well known to occasion remark. I believe it leads them to bestow their favours indiscriminately rather frequently. Valeria Sheringham assures me the girl is quite farouche, no ton, no accomplishments, her looks no more than passable, her fortune non-existent.’
‘It will be time enough to deny her the right to come to Almack’s if we find that for once in her life Valeria Sheringham has been speaking the truth.’
‘Valeria does not advise us to relax our rules in her favour.’
Lady Jersey’s eyes sparkled. ‘What, did she say so? Of all the spiteful creatures! No, that is the outside of enough, my dear, and makes me perfectly determined to give the girl a chance to prove herself !’
Mrs Burrell was silent for a moment. She said presently:‘You are very right. We shall see how she conducts herself. It is plain, however, that Sheringham is ashamed to show her in town.’
‘Nonsense!’ replied Lady Jersey.‘Prosper Verelst says they have gone upon their honeymoon.’
‘Into Leicestershire?’ said Mrs Burrell, raising her brows.
‘So it seems. The truth is, of course, that Sherry has gone off because he doesn’t care to run the gauntlet of Valeria’s vapours. He would have done better to have stayed, but it is all of a piece! He is a charming young man, I grant, but the most selfish and careless imaginable. I am sorry for his poor little wife.’
Eight
HERO WOULD HAVE BEEN ASTONISHED, AND, INDEED, indignant, had she been aware that she was the object of Lady Jersey’s sympathy. For she had never been so happy in her life. Sherry had been quite right in thinking that his hunting-box at Melton Mowbray would be just the thing for her. She was delighted with it; and the happy-go-lucky way of life pursued by Sherry when sojourning there could not but appeal to a young lady who had been irked all her own short life by shibboleths and restrictions.
The hunting-box, which was not large,was kept by a married couple who, from having had things very much their own way under their casual master, at first looked upon Hero with suspicious hostility. But as she showed no disposition to interfere in the management of the house, and never dreamed of levelling criticisms where they would certainly be resented, it was not long before Goring and his wife accepted her in much the same spirit as they accepted Mr Ringwood, or any other of the Viscount’s cronies.
It might have been supposed that a very few days spent at Melton Mowbray at the fag-end of the summer would have sufficed to have sent his lordship hotfoot back to town, but thanks to the amusement afforded him by teaching his wife to ride her mare creditably; taking her to Six Hills, and showing her the pick of the best coverts; initiating her into the mysteries of hazard, faro, deep basset, and several other games of chance; playing picquet with Mr Ringwood; trying out his young stock; and attending a cock-fight held in the district, he contrived to while away the time very tolerably. Before these simple pursuits had palled upon him, a diversion was created by the arrival in the district of Lord Wrotham, who had come down on a visit to his encumbered estates. Since these were situated only a few miles from Melton, he naturally spent a good deal of time with his friends, and was delighted to discover in Hero a sympathetic listener. It was not long before he had confided to her his hopeless passion for the Incomparable Isabella, and although an unthinking reference to the complaint which had necessitated the Beauty’s withdrawal from the Polite World seriously endangered, for a few moments, this promising new friendship, the rift was speedily healed by Hero’s assurance that the rash had by no means disfigured Isabella. George rode with Hero to Wartnaby Stonepits, and, being a very keen rider to hounds, was able to forget his troubles in describing some classic runs to Hero, passing strictures on Assheton Smith, who hunted his own hounds, and often drew his coverts so quickly that he drew over his fox, besides failing sometimes to lift the hounds, which, if you wanted runs in Leicestershire, said George, you must do. Hero, fired with the spirit of emulation after listening to George’s heroic tales, attempted to jump what George called a regular stitcher, and came to grief. Fortunately she was only bruised by her tumble, but the mare strained a tendon, and Sherry, who had been a helpless spectator of the enterprise, no sooner ascertained that his bride was unhurt than he soundly boxed her ears, and swore he would never bring her out with him again. His two friends, though deprecating this violence, endorsed his strictures, having by this time fallen very much into the way of treating Hero as though she had been one of their own young sisters.
When Mr Fakenham joined the party, his presence was felt to be an advantage, as he was able to make a fourth at whist. Some convivial evenings were spent at the hunting-box, under the auspices of a hostess who, however little she might know of the uses of Polite Society, was learning to admiration how to become excessively popular with a party of young bloods. Formality very soon went by the board; she became Kitten to them all; and so accustomed did they grow to her presence at their sessions that they often forgot that she was in the room at all. But they usually remembered her before the party became too convivial for propriety, and then the Viscount would send her up to bed, informing her frankly that they were getting a trifle boosey. Upon one occasion, when he omitted to perform this ritual, she horrified Mr Ringwood by casting a knowledgeable eye over Mr Fakenham, and saying innocently ‘Must I go now? I think Ferdy is quite disguised, don’t you?’
The Viscount shouted with laughter, but Mr Ringwood not only begged his hostess never to use such vulgar language, but later made representations to Sherry that they really must all of them be careful what they said in front of her.
A letter from Isabella, written from London, and conveying her felicitations to her dearest Hero, had the effect of breaking up the party. George was no sooner apprised of the Beauty’s return to the haunts of men than he left the greater part of the business which had brought him into the country undone, and posted back to town with the fiercely expressed intention of thrusting a spoke in his Grace of Severn’s wheel. Ferdy and Mr Ringwood took their departure a few days later, and the hunting-box felt sadly empty. The young couple received a morning-call from kind Lord and Lady Sefton, during the course of which her ladyship promised Hero the entrée to Almack’s when she should take up her residence in London. Sherry informed his wife that this connaissance was the greatest piece of good luck that could have befallen her, since (although he himself might find such company a trifle flat) there was no doubt that the approval of Lady Sefton would be of the greatest value to a lady making her d?
?but in fashionable circles.
‘Ten to one,’ said Sherry carelessly, ‘she will have them all leaving their cards in Half Moon Street – Lady Jersey, Lady Cowper, Countess Lieven, Princess Esterhazy, and all their set, you know – and then you will be fixed all right and tight.’
By the time Mr Stoke wrote to apprise him that his new house stood ready to receive him, Sherry had had enough of the country, and not even the annoying intelligence, conveyed to him in a brief scrawl from his uncle Prosper, that his mother was still to be found in Grosvenor Square, availed to keep him longer away from the metropolis. He was under the obligation, too, of returning his watch to the Honourable Ferdy, this young gentleman having written to him from London that since this handsome timepiece was missing from his effects he would be glad if his cousin would recover it from his damned Tiger. Why Ferdy’s watch should exercise such a fascination over Jason no one knew. The Viscount was extremely incensed over his backsliding, and was not in the least mollified by Jason’s tearful explanation that to have the watch within his reach for days together was more than flesh and blood could stand. Matters would have gone ill indeed for Jason had not Hero intervened on his behalf. She had the happy thought of promising to bestow a timepiece upon him as a Christmas gift if he would but refrain, in the interim, from stealing Ferdy’s.
‘Or anything else!’ said Sherry sternly.
Jason sniffed, wiped his nose on his coat sleeve, and promised to behave impeccably. He further pronounced his guv’nor’s lady to be bang-up, which piece of elegant language, Sherry assured her, masked a compliment of no mean order.
When the Sheringhams were set down at dusk one evening in Half Moon Street, they found that Mr Stoke had done his work well. Nothing could have been more charming or more tasteful than the disposition of the furniture in the little house. Hero was enchanted and ran from room to room, exclaiming how well the writing-table looked, how pretty was the wallpaper in the drawing-room, how glad she was she had chosen the blue brocade instead of the green, and did not Sherry think that Ferdy had selected precisely the right furniture for his library? Both Ferdy and Mr Ringwood had called in Half Moon Street earlier in the day, Ferdy to leave a bouquet of flowers with the butler, and Mr Ringwood a canary in a gilded cage. Hero was so touched by this piece of thoughtfulness that she sat down at the tambour-top writing-table before she had even removed her hat, and dashed off her first note, on the very elegant, gilt-edged paper provided by the competent Mr Stoke, and had it carried round immediately to Stratton Street by the page-boy.
No such agreeable surprise awaited the master of the house. The imposing knee-hole desk in the room which his wife insisted on calling his library, bore a collection of staggering bills. The Viscount was a trifle startled, not so much by his own expenditure as by Hero’s. He could not for the life of him see how she could have contrived to squander such sums merely upon furniture, but he handsomely made up his mind to level no reproach at her. Sundry accounts presented by milliners and mantua-makers made him whistle thoughtfully, but his previous experiences of such establishments precluded his feeling any extraordinary astonishment at the cost of a simple gown, or of a wisp of net and feathers fashioned into the semblance of a hat. He stuffed all the bills into a drawer, resolving to hand them over presently to his man of business for settlement. Anyone having an intimate knowledge of the Viscount’s career would have recognised at once that the sobering influence of marriage was already making itself felt, since a month ago he would have consigned them to the fire.
The young couple dined tête-à-tête at the fashionable late hour of eight o’clock on their first evening in their new home, sitting opposite one another in their smart dining-room, and waited on by a butler whose spare frame and pallid countenance seemed to indicate that he was of a suitably abstemious character. The dinner, which consisted of a broiled fowl with mushrooms, preceded by a dressed lobster and a delicacy of cockscombs served in wine-sauce, and followed by a pupton of pears, in the old style, and a trifle, was excellently cooked, and earned the Viscount’s praise. Hero, who had already been obliged to receive a stately visit from the superior being who presided over the kitchen, said in a very housewifely way that she was glad they had decided to take away the old fireplace from the kitchen, and to install a closed stove in its place.
The Viscount rather spoiled the effect of this utterance by grinning across the table at her, and demanding what the devil she knew about kitchen stoves. Hero twinkled merrily back at him, and replied:‘Well, not very much, but Mrs Groombridge says that they are excellent contrivances, and there is a great saving of coal.’
‘Well, that’s something, at all events,’ said Sherry, putting up his glass to inspect the bottle the butler was exhibiting at his elbow.‘No, not that. Bring up a bottle of sparkling champagne. You’ll like that, Kitten.’
As the Viscount liked his wine to be very dry, Hero had to school her features to an expression of appreciation she was some way from feeling. That made his lordship laugh, but he told her that he could not permit her to be everlastingly maudling her inside with such stuff as ratafia, and bade her drink it up like a good girl. ‘A glass of wine with you, my lady!’ he said, raising his glass.‘Damme,we must drink to our first home, so we must!’
Under his instruction, Hero very correctly left him at the end of dinner, and withdrew to the drawing-room above-stairs, while he drank his port in solitary state. Since this was dull work, he soon joined her, dropping into one of the straw-coloured chairs, and stretching out his long legs towards the grate, where a small fire had been kindled, and saying, with a yawn, that there was a deal to be said for a fellow’s getting married after all.
‘At least,’ he added,‘there would be, if you hadn’t bought such an uncomfortable set of chairs! What the deuce was Ferdy about to countenance it?’
‘Oh, don’t you remember, Sherry? We bought these together, on that first day, when you went with me to choose our furniture.’
‘Good God, I must have been foxed!’
‘Well, perhaps you are sitting in the wrong one,’ said Hero. ‘I wish you will try this one instead: indeed, it is very comfortable!’
The Viscount made no objection to changing places with her, and as he pronounced this second chair to be tolerably easy, she was perfectly satisfied.
Before the Viscount had had time to find an evening spent at his own fireside very flat, a knock sounded on the street door, and in a few minutes Sir Montagu Revesby’s card was brought up to Sherry. He commanded Groombridge to beg this late caller to step upstairs, and himself went out on to the landing to welcome him.
Sir Montagu came in, full of graceful apologies for intruding upon her ladyship so soon after her arrival in town. He had been imperfectly informed:would have left his card at the house that morning: trusted she would forgive such informality: he had come only to discover if Sherry liked to accompany him to a little meeting of a few friends in a house near-by.
‘Brockenhurst begged I would prevail upon you to join us, if you should have returned to London, my dear Sherry, but I fear’ – with a bow, and one of his ironic smiles in Hero’s direction – ‘I have come on a fruitless errand.’
‘Oh, lord, no, nothing of the sort!’ Sherry said. ‘You won’t mind my leaving you, will you, Kitten?’
Mindful of his warning that once they were settled in London they would not interfere with each other’s pursuits, Hero swallowed her disappointment, and assured him that she was on the point of retiring to bed.
‘That’s right,’ said his lordship. ‘I knew you would be tired after the journey.’ He picked up one of her hands, dropped a kiss on her wrist, and took himself off with Sir Montagu.
Hero lifted her wrist to her cheek, and held it there for some moments after he had gone. She felt a strong inclination to cry, and concluded that she must indeed be tired, since she knew very well that she had nothing whatsoever to cry about,but, on the contrary, everything in the world to make her happy. On this elevatin
g thought she retired to her bed-chamber, and talked in a very cheerful way to her abigail while she was undressed and put to bed.
Sherry, who did not return to the house until the small hours, put in no appearance at the breakfast-table. When he did emerge from his bedchamber, it was past eleven o’clock, and not only was he clad in a dressing-gown, but he still looked remarkably heavy eyed. He said simply that they had had a pretty batch of it at Brockenhurst’s, and also that he was dipped a little at hazard. Altogether, Hero did not think that it would be wise to remind him that they had planned to wait upon his mother at noon. He retired again to his room, irritably demanding why the devil Bootle had not brought up the water for his shave; and Hero was just deciding that it would be pleasant to go for an airing in Hyde Park in her barouche, when the first of her morning callers knocked on the door.
It was Mrs Bagshot, bringing her two elder daughters in her train. She came sailing into the drawing-room, almost before Groombridge had had time to announce her, paused in the middle of the floor, and, after throwing an appraising glance round, uttered the one word:‘Well!’
Hero rose from her chair in some confusion, and came forward, blushing faintly, and stammering: ‘C-cousin J-Jane! C-Cassy! Eudora! How do you do?’
‘I wonder you can look me in the face!’ said Mrs Bagshot. Her eyes ran over Hero’s high-necked gown of worked French muslin, with its double flounce and rows of tucks. ‘Upon my word!’ she said. ‘I dare say you have never worn such a dress in your life!’
This was an unfortunate observation, since it gave Hero the opportunity to retort:‘You must know that I have not, cousin!’