“If you think it would afford me satisfaction to stand up for you to blow a hole through my chest, you’re mightily mistaken, George!” said Sherry frankly. “I’ll tell you what: if you don’t stop trying to pick quarrels with your best friends, you won’t have any left to you!”
“I think I am going mad!” said Wrotham, with a groan, and dropping his head in his hands. “I thought you was gone into Kent to steal a march on me with the Incomparable!” He raised his head again, and directed one of his fiery stares at Mr Fakenham. “It was you who told me so!” he cried accusingly. “Now, upon my soul, Ferdy — ”
“All a mistake!” said Ferdy feebly. “Never at my best before noon!”
“Well, as a matter of fact, that’s what I did do,” said Sherry, with a candour bordering, in the opinion of his friends, on the foolhardy. “Only she wouldn’t have me.”
“She refused you!” Wrotham cried, his haggard countenance suddenly radiant.
“That’s what I’m telling you. It’s my belief she’s got better game in view than either of us, George. If she can bring him up to scratch, she’ll have Severn, you mark my words!”
“Sherry!” thundered the distraught lover, springing to his feet and clenching his fists, “one word of disparagement of the loveliest, the most divine, the most perfect woman, and I call you out to answer for it!”
“Well, you won’t get me out,” responded the Viscount.
“Am I to call you a coward?” demanded Wrotham.
“No, no, George, don’t do that!” begged Ferdy, much alarmed. “Can’t call poor Sherry a coward because he don’t want to go out with you! Be reasonable, old fellow!”
“Oh, lord, let him call me what he likes!” said the Viscount, quite disgusted. “If I weren’t going to be married today, damned if I wouldn’t draw your claret, George! It’s time someone let a little of that hot blood of yours!”
“What’s more,” said Mr Ringwood severely. “Sherry never said a word you could take amiss. Suppose she does mean to marry Severn? What of it? No harm in that, is there? Dare say she’s taken a fancy to be a duchess. Anyone might!”
“I will not believe that she could be so worldly!” Wrotham said, striding over to the window, and staring out into the street.
His long-suffering friends, relieved to see that his rage had, for the moment, abated, returned to the consideration of the problem confronting Sherry. Their discussion presently attracted Lord Wrotham’s attention, and he came away from the window, and quite mildly asked the Viscount to explain how he came to be marrying a totally unknown damsel. Sherry very obligingly favoured him with a brief resume of his elopement; and Lord Wrotham, convinced at last that he had relinquished all pretensions to the hand of the Incomparable Isabella, warmly shook him by the hand, and offered him his felicitations.
“Yes, that’s all very well,” said Mr Ringwood, “but it don’t help us to find a likely bishop for this special licence.”
“It’ll have to be a Fleet marriage, Sherry,” said Mr Fakenham mournfully.
“No,” said Mr Ringwood. “Won’t do at all. Not legal.”
At this point, Lord Wrotham shocked the company into silence by saying that he was acquainted with a bishop. He explained this extraordinary lapse by adding apologetically that his mother had been as thick as thieves with the fellow any time these past ten years; and, being still under the revulsion of feeling brought about by the realization that the Viscount was no longer one of his rivals, offered to introduce him to this cleric.
The Viscount at once closed with the offer, and proceeded to enlist the services of Mr Ringwood. Mr Ringwood, learning that his task was to escort his friend’s bride on a tour of the milliners’ and mantua-makers’ shops which graced the town, and to dissuade her from purchasing garments unsuited to her station, goggled at the Viscount in dismay. His expostulations went quite unheeded. The Viscount assured him that he would deal famously with Miss Wantage; and, after appointing a rendezvous with Lord Wrotham, bore him off in his phaeton to Grillon’s Hotel.
Chapter Five
MISS WANTAGE, IN SPITE OF HER NATURAL TERROR at being left without support in such a formidable place as Grillon’s Hotel, had passed a peaceful night, the unaccustomed excitement of the previous day having made her tired enough to sink into a sleep from which not all the strange noises of a London street had the power to rouse her. The Viscount had very kindly stayed to partake of dinner in her company before leaving the hotel for his own lodging; and since he had promised to visit her betimes next morning she was able to part from him with tolerable composure. But the high-bred stares of several dowagers sojourning in the hotel, coupled with the overt curiosity of the chambermaid who waited on her, made her feel very ill-at-ease, and it took all the comfort afforded by the knowledge of being dressed in a modish new gown to sustain her spirits until the arrival, at eleven o’clock, of the Viscount, with the shrinking Mr Ringwood in tow.
Being blessed with the friendliest of natures, Miss Wantage accepted Mr Ringwood with perfect complaisance. Upon being told that Gil would take care of her while his lordship was otherwise engaged, she smiled confidingly at him, and said: “Oh yes! Thank you! How kind it is in you! Will you take me to buy a hat for the wedding, please? Sherry made me buy this one I have on, because he told everyone I was going to school in Bath, but I will not wear it for my wedding!”
“Well, you need not,” replied Sherry. “But mind, Kitten, you are not to choose what Gil don’t like!”
“Oh no, indeed I won’t.”
The horrified Mr Ringwood made an inarticulate noise in his throat. It was not attended to. Sherry instructed him to be firm with Miss Wantage, and — in an under-voice — for God’s sake not to let her buy a hat more suited to a chere-amie than to a lady of Quality! Mr Ringwood, no lady’s man, was understood to say that really — no, really! — he knew nothing about such matters, but the Viscount summarily disposed of this objection and returned to the vexed question of abigails. Miss Wantage seemed surprised, but gratified, to learn that she was to have an abigail, but since she had no notion how to set about acquiring one, she was unable to help his lordship. Mr Ringwood then had the brilliant idea of laying the matter before Chilham. This found instant favour with Sherry, who said that he would drive straight back to Stratton Street as soon as he had paid Miss Wantage’s reckoning.
“And that reminds me!” he said suddenly. “Where the deuce are we going to stay?”
“Stay?” repeated Mr Ringwood. “Dash it, Gil, we shall have to put up somewhere until I decide where we are to live!”
“But — Are you meaning to stay in town, Sherry?” asked Mr Ringwood, with ideas of honeymoons chasing one another through his head.
“Of course we’re going to stay in town! Where the devil else should we stay? But I won’t stay at this place, and so I tell you! Of all the stuffy — Besides, we couldn’t stay here. They think Kitten’s on her way to school.”
“Well, you’ve got a house, dear old boy — very fine house! Best part of the town — excellent address — Why not go there?”
“I suppose it will come to that in the end,” agreed Sherry, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “But I can’t take possession of it before I’ve told my mother I want it. We shall have to put up at an hotel in the meantime. Only thing is, which hotel?”
“There’s Limmer’s,” suggested Mr Ringwood doubtfully.
“Limmer’s!” ejaculated the Viscount. “With all the Pets of the Fancy for the chit to hobnob with! As well take her to the Castle Tavern!”
Mr Ringwood, much confused, begged pardon, and once more searched his brain. He bethought him of Ellis’s; and after the Viscount had spurned this hostelry with a loathing engendered by his having once dined there with his mother, rejected a suggestion that Graham’s was said to be comfortable, and, on the somewhat obscure grounds of having an aunt who used to stay here, refused to enter the portals of Symon’s, it was decided that the young couple should take up their temporary abode at Fenton’s in St James’s Street.