“And it won’t suit me to waste my money on the girl! Next you’ll be telling me it’s my duty to buy her an annuity!”

“No, I shan’t. It isn’t to be expected that you should, nor that you should pay her an allowance, for who’s to say when you might find it inconvenient to be obliged to shell out the ready—pay the allowance, I mean? I don’t hold with allowances: it makes anyone fidgety to have a thing like that coming due every quarter. No, I’ve got a better notion in my noddle—better for the girl too! What she wants, poor little thing, is a home, and that’s what you can give her, and without being purse-pinched. So why don’t you write to her, and offer to take her into the family? I’ll see to it she don’t worrit you, and she won’t worrit me either. In fact, the more I think of it the more I feel I should like to have her. She’ll be company for me.”

“Take Wilfred’s brat into the family?” he repeated, almost stunned.

She patted his hand. “Well, my lord here is in the right of it when he says it ain’t her fault she’s Wilfred’s brat. I declare I feel downright sorry for her! And if it’s expense you’re thinking of, Nettle, I shouldn’t wonder at it if she turned out to be an economy, because it wouldn’t be an extra mouth to feed, for you know I paid off Betty before we left London, thinking it was a sinful waste of money to keep a girl just to mend the linen, and wash the chandeliers, and the best china, and lend old Lattiford a hand with the silver, and that. Mind you, it’s a bigger waste of money keeping a butler that’s as old and infirm as what he is, but you’d have to pension him off if you sent him packing, so while he can work it’s best for us to keep him.”

Nettlecombe, who had listened to her in gathering exasperation, said explosively: “No, I tell you! I won’t have her in my house!”

“Allow me to set your mind at rest!” said Desford. “You will most certainly not have her in your house, sir! I didn’t help her to escape from one slavery only to pitchfork her into another!”

He strode towards the door, ignoring a plea from my lady to wait. She followed him into the corridor, begging him not to take her lord’s tetchiness amiss, and assuring him that he might rely on her to bring him round. “The thing is,” she said earnestly, “that he’s out of sorts, poor dear gentleman, and no wonder, with all the kick-up there’s been, thinking he was going to lose me, because that shabster, Jonas, had the impudence to set it about that I was setting my cap at him, which I never did, nor thought of! All I thought of was to make him comfortable, which I promise you I did! What’s more, I was the most saving housekeeper he’d ever had! But when that Jonas took to saying I was a man-trap, and warning his pa against me—well! I was obliged to tell his lordship I must leave at the term, because I’ve got my good name to think about, haven’t I? So his lordship made me an Offer, which is all the good Master Jonas got out of trying to be rid of me!” She ended on a triumphant note, but as the Viscount was wholly unresponsive, tightened her hold on his sleeve, and said ingratiatingly: “And as for making his granddaughter a slave, you quite mistook my meaning, my lord! I’m sure I wouldn’t ask her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself—yes, and have done, times out of mind! Not that I was born to it, mind you! Oh, dear me, no! I often think my poor father would have turned in his grave if he’d lived to see the straits I was reduced to, him having been cheated out of his inheritance, like he was, and my First losing his fortune, and leaving me without a souse, which is why I was forced to earn my own bread as best I could. No one knows better than me what it means to step down from one’s rightful station, so if you was thinking Miss Steane would be a servant in her grandpa’s house you’re quite beside the bridge, my lord! She’ll have a good home, and not be asked to do anything any genteel girl wouldn’t be expected to do to help her ma!”

“You are wasting your breath, ma’am,” he replied, inexorably removing her hand from his sleeve, and continuing his progress towards the stairs.

Baffled, she delivered a Parthian shot. “At any hand,” she said shrilly, “you can’t say it was me that wouldn’t offer the girl a home!”

Chapter 10

For several minutes after he left Lord Nettlecombe’s lodging the Viscount seethed with anger, but by the time he was half-way to the High town this had diminished, and the comical side of the late interview struck him, so forcibly that the sparkling look of wrath in his eyes vanished, and the hardened lines about his mouth relaxed. As he recalled some of the things which had been said he began to chuckle; and when he pictured the scenes which must have goaded Nettlecombe to marry the most economical housekeeper he had ever employed he found that he was within ames-ace of positively liking the vulgar creature.

He wished very much that there was someone with him to share the joke: Hetta, for instance, whose sense of the ridiculous was as lively as his own. He would tell her all about it, of course, but recounting an absurd experience was not the same as sharing it. It was to be hoped she didn’t make the mistake of marrying that prosy fellow whom he had found dangling after her at Inglehurst, for he wouldn’t suit her at all: he was just the kind of slow-top to ask her in a puzzled voice what she meant when she made a joke. Come to think of it, none of Hetta’s suitors—and, lord, how many of them there had been!—had ever seemed to him worthy of her: queer that such an intelligent girl should be unable to recognize at a glance men who were quite beneath her touch! Recalling her numerous suitors he could not bring to mind one whom he had liked. There had been several dead bores amongst them; at least two bladders, who never stopped gabbing; and any number of men who were, in his opinion, very poor sticks indeed.

These reflections had led his mind away from the immediate problem confronting him, but the recollection of it soon recurred, and put an end to any desire in him to laugh at the failure of his mission, or to speculate on the strange vagaries of females. A less determined man might have felt that he had been tipped a settler, and have thrown his towel into the ring, but the Viscount had a streak of strong determination running through his easy-going nature, and he had no intention of being beaten on this, or any other, suit. He had certainly suffered a set-back, so what he must now do was to think of some other way of providing for Cherry’s future well-being. None immediately occurred to him. He wondered what she was doing, whether she was happy at Inglehurst, or whether she was too anxious to be happy; and realized with a slight sense of shock that it was now nine days since he had left her there.

Had he but known it, Cherry was blissfully happy, and only now and then thought about her future. She had fitted into her surroundings as though she had lived at Inglehurst all her life; and she seemed to take as much pleasure in making herself useful to her hostesses as in the small parties Lady Silverdale gave to her neighbours. Indeed, Henrietta thought that she took more, for her disposition was retiring, and her shyness tied her tongue, so that when she was seated at the dinner-table beside a stranger her conversation was inclined to be monosyllabic. Henrietta ascribed this to Lady Bugle’s treatment. She had relegated the poor child to the background, and had so systematically impressed upon her that she was far less important than her cousins, and must never put herself forward as though she thought herself their equal, that it had become second nature to her. Henrietta hoped that she would overcome her almost morbid shrinking from strangers for such excessive shyness was, in her view, a handicap to any penniless female obliged to make her own way in the world. It was unfortunate, too, that she was noticeably more ill-at-ease with the various young gentlemen who visited the house than with their fathers. However, once she became acquainted with them she grew less self-conscious, and chatted to them quite naturally. With Sir Charles, and young Mr Beckenham, she was soon on friendly terms; but she treated Tom Ellerdine, who showed a disposition to make her the object of his youthful gallantry, with marked reserve. Henrietta could not help feeling that it was a pity.

Lady Silverdale did not agree.. “For my part,” she said, “I think her a very pretty-behaved girl. I own, my love, it quite astonishes me that she is not in the least pert, or coming, as so many girls are nowadays, for one never expected a Steane to be so well-conducted, and her mama was not at all the thing. Not that I ever knew her, because she eloped with Wilfred Steane out of the schoolroom, you know, which shows the most shocking want of delicacy, and just what one would expect in any sister of that Bugle woman!”

“Dear Mama, I am perfectly ready to join you in abusing Lady Bugle, but that is going too far!” expostulated Henrietta laughingly. “She is a horrid creature, but I’m persuaded that she is quite boringly respectable!”

“Good gracious, Hetta, how you do take one up!” Lady Silverdale complained. “You know very well what I mean! She’s an excessively underbred woman, and that, you will allow, dear little Cherry is not! I think it remarkable that she shouldn’t be, for we all know what the Steanes are like, and although I never heard anything said against the Wissets they did not move in the first circles. I believe old Mr Wisset was an attorney, or something of the sort. And when you consider that Cherry has had no other home than her aunt’s house it has me in a puzzle to know how she came by her pretty, modest manners. She certainly cannot have learnt them from Amelia Bugle!”