“I beg you will say no more, ma’am!” he interrupted, with a look so stern that she quailed. “Mine is the blame — all of it! I have come by my deserts, and I know it, if you do not! My folly — my neglect of her, my damnable brutality have led her into this flight! Lady Saltash must have compelled her to consent to my visiting her tonight, and rather than meet me — ”
He broke off, his lip quivering. “But she must not — I cannot let her run off with this man before I’ve — before I’ve arranged to set her free! I must find them — explain the circumstances to Tarleton — bring her back to the protection of Lady Saltash!”
Ferdy, who had been lost in profound meditation, looked at him earnestly. “Sherry, dear old boy, you know what I think? All a mistake! Ten to one that fellow of yours don’t know what he’s talking about! Might have taken Kitten to a masquerade. Mask, you know.”
“Ferdy, I was to have dined with her!” Sherry said in a voice which cracked.
“Must have forgotten that. Dash it, deuced easy to forget a dinner engagement! Done it myself. Mind you, quite right to go after her! Not the thing to be driving about with a fellow in a mask: ought to have warned her! But no getting into a miff, Sherry, and frightening the poor little soul half out of her wits!”
“No, no! Though how I am to keep from choking the life out of that Tarleton fellow — But I shall do it, never fear!”
Ferdy took a noble reserve. “Tell you what, Sherry: I’ll come with you,” he said. “Dash it all! not one to leave my friends in the lurch!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
HERO, FLUNG UP INTO THE POST-CHAISE WITH so little ceremony and jolted and bounced over the streets of Bath, had not the smallest notion whither she was bound, or why Sherry had not entered the chaise with her. She pulled a rug, which she found on the seat, over her knees; settled herself in a corner of the vehicle, holding on to one of the straps which served as arm-rests; and awaited eventualities in a state of pleasurable expectation. Had she but known it, her abductor, not so far gone in romance that he had lost quite all his common sense, had had a very fair picture of what would be the result of trying to make love in a form of vehicle nicknamed, not without good reason, a bounder. The road from Bath to Wells, particularly at this season of the year, was pitted with holes: Mr Tarleton thought that romance would have a better chance of surviving if he postponed his love-making until Wells was reached.
This cathedral town lay rather more than eighteen miles from Bath, across the Mendip Hills. Mr Tarleton had booked a room for his prospective bride at the Christopher, and another for himself at the Swan, for although his anxiety to bring adventure into Hero’s drab life might have led him to an act which he did not like to think about very closely, his naturally staid disposition made him paradoxically careful not to incur any more scandal than might be necessary. Indeed, he had prudently hired his chaise and pair from a hostelry where he was unknown, and was sometimes conscious of a craven hope that the truth about his marriage might never be made public property.