“Indeed I wish I knew! I wish too that she had come to me, but no doubt she would not think to cast herself upon Anthony’s relations.”
Lady Sefton, having reduced the unfortunate Viscount to the condition of speechless endurance to which she could, upon rare occasions, reduce her eldest born, my Lord Molyneux, relented towards him sufficiently to permit him a glimpse of two rays of sunlight. She thought it probable that Hero would presently return to Half Moon Street; and she engaged herself to smooth over any unpleasantness that might have arisen in influential quarters from the projected race.
The Viscount posted back to London. The house in Half Moon Street seemed desolate, almost as though someone had died there, he thought. He would have liked to have left it; but when he had made all his plans for shutting it up, and returning to his old lodgings, he changed his mind, and determined to stay there. To shut the house would give rise to much gossip and speculation; and if Hero came back to him it would be a shocking thing, he thought, for her to find the shutters up, and the knocker off the door.
Mr Ringwood was back in town again, saying, with perfect truth, that he saw no reason why his rich uncle should not survive for another ten years. Mr Ringwood said also that he was devilish sorry to hear from George that Lady Sherry was so indisposed as to have been obliged to retire into the country for a space.
Sherry, who had schooled himself to answer such remarks with mechanical civility, found a certain measure of relief in being able to throw off his mask before the friend whom he most trusted. He said abruptly: “It’s not true. Only the tale I’ve put about. She’s left me.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Ringwood.
Sherry gave a short laugh. “You heard me, Gil! She ran away, because I said she was to go down to my mother, at Sheringham Place. She took some absurd notion into her head — all nonsense, of course! — and she was gone before I’d time to explain why I — For naturally I meant to make it all clear to her, and there was no question of — But that’s a female all over!”
Mr Ringwood, helping himself, with extreme deliberation, to a pinch of snuff, said: “Don’t play off your tricks on me, Sherry! The truth is, I take it, that you quarrelled with her over that race?”
“Quarrelled! Gil, do you know what she meant to do? If it had been your wife — ! I was very angry! dash it, any man would have been! But there was not the least occasion for her to have run away from me, as though I had been some deuced brute, or — or — I know it was as much my fault as hers, and, what’s more, I said so. That was not why she ran away! I said she should go to my mother and she did not choose to. Talked some fustian about my mother’s thinking she had ruined my life — fiddle!”
“No wish to say a word against your mother, Sherry, dear boy, but that’s what she has been saying.”