“Yes, sir. It is nothing, and I am ashamed to have put you to so much trouble. I beg you will not neglect your other guests for my sake. Your absence will be remarked. If Mrs. Scattergood could be sent for—”
“Certainly, if you wish it—immediately!” he said. “Though she is playing cards, you know, and I daresay it would cause a little talk, which you would not like.”
“Oh no! You are very right, sir,” she answered submissively. “Lord Worth will know what is best to be done.”
The Earl came back into the room at that moment, with a glass in his hand. “I see you are better, Miss Taverner. May I suggest, sir, that it would be advisable for you to return to the Saloon? You need not scruple to leave Miss Taverner in my charge.”
The Regent was perfectly ready to follow this piece of advice, even though he might resent the manner in which it was given. He begged Miss Taverner not to think of leaving the drawing-room until she felt herself to be quite recovered; assured her that he did not at all regard the trouble she had made; and went out by the door into the Chinese Gallery, which Worth was holding open for him.
The Earl shut the door, and came back to Miss Taverner’s side. He obliged her to drink some of the wine he had brought. The relief she had felt on first seeing him had by now given place to mortification at being found in so compromising a situation. She said with difficulty: “I did not know you were in the Pavilion. You must wonder at finding me in this room, I daresay, but—”
“Miss Taverner, how came you to do such a thing?” he interrupted. “I entered the Saloon to be met by the intelligence, conveyed to me by Brummell, that you had slipped away with the Regent. I came immediately to put an end to so improper a tête-à-tête, and I found you fainting in the Regent’s arms. You will tell me at once, if you please, what this means! What has happened in this room?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, upon my honour!” she said wretchedly. “It was the heat, only the heat!”
“Why are you here?” he demanded. “What purpose can you have had in going apart with the Regent? Careless of your reputation I know you to be, but I had not thought it possible that you could behave with such imprudence!”
She was stung into replying: “How could I help going with him when he pressed me to as he did? What was I to say? Mrs. Scattergood was in the card-room; you were not present How could I know what I should do or say when no less a person than the Prince-Regent requested my company? These reproaches might have been spared! You cannot know the circumstances. Say no more! You may think me what you please: I am sure I do not care!”
“No,” said the Earl with strong feeling, “I am well aware of that at least! But while I have authority over you I must and will censure such conduct.”
She managed to get up, though her knees still shook. “It does not signify talking. You are determined to despise me.”
There was a moment’s silence. “I determined to despise you?” said the Earl in an altered tone. “What nonsense is this?”
“I have not forgotten what you said to me that day at Cuckfield.”
“Do you imagine that I have forgotten that day?” said the Earl sternly. “Your opinion of me, which you so freely expressed, is not likely to be soon wiped from my memory, I assure you.”
She found to her dismay that tears were rolling down her cheeks. She averted her face, and said in a broken whisper: “My carriage—Mrs. Scattergood—I must go home!”
“A message shall be conveyed to Mrs. Scattergood when she leaves the card-room,” he said. “I will take you home as soon as you are sufficiently recovered.” He paused, and added: “You must not cry, Clorinda. That is a worse reproach to me than any I have bestowed on you.”
“I am not crying,” replied Miss Taverner, groping in her reticule for her handkerchief. “It is just that I have the headache.”
“I see,” said the Earl.
Miss Taverner dried her eyes, and said huskily: “I am sorry you should have the troublesome office of taking me home. I am quite ready. But if only Mrs. Scattergood could be fetched—”
“To summon Mrs. Scattergood from the card-table would give rise to the sort of public curiosity I am endeavouring to avoid,” he replied. “Come! Your mistrust of me surely cannot be so great that you will not allow me to convey you a few hundred yards in your own carriage.”
She raised her head at that. “If I did indeed say that on that hateful day I beg your pardon,” she said. “You have never given me—would never give me, I am persuaded—the least cause for mistrusting you.” She saw the frown in his eyes, and wondered at it. “You are still angry. You don’t believe me when I say that I am sorry.”
He put out his hand quickly. “My dear child! Of course I believe you. If I looked angry you must blame circumstance, which has forced me to—” He broke off, and smiled at her.
“Shall we put the memory of that day at Cuckfield out of mind?”
“If you please,” whispered Miss Taverner. “I am aware—have been aware almost from the start—that I ought not to have driven myself from London as I did.”
“Miss Taverner,” he said, “I am seriously alarmed. Are you sure that you are yourself?”
She smiled, but shook her head. “I am not sufficiently myself to quarrel with you to-night, provoke me how you may.”
“Poor Clorinda! I won’t provoke you any more, I promise,” he said, and drawing her hand through his arm, led her to the door into the Chinese Gallery and so out to her carriage.
Chapter XXI
Mr. Brummell, who had elected to stroll across from his lodgings on the Steyne to the Earl of Worth’s house on the morning after the party at the Pavilion, set the red Pekin sweetmeat-box of carved lacquer down on the table with tender care, and sighed. “Yes,” he said. “I am inclined to hazard the opinion that it is quite genuine. Ch’ien Lung. Pray remove it from my sight.”
The Earl restored the box to its place in the cabinet. “I found it in Lewes, of all unlikely places. Charles will not allow it to be worth a guinea.”
“Charles’s opinions on old lac leave me supremely indifferent,” said Brummell. He crossed one leg, beautifully sheathed in a pale biscuit-coloured pantaloon, over the other, and leaned his head against the back of the chair to look lazily up at Worth. “Well, I have seen the Great Man,” he said. “You are quite out of favour, you know.”
The Earl gave a short laugh. “Yes, until he wants my judgment on a horse or a brand of snuff. Did you come to tell me that?”
“Not at all. I came to tell you that he has taken a chill for which he apparently holds you responsible.”
“I can only say that I hope it may prove fatal,” replied the Earl.
“He seems to think that probable,” said Brummell. “I left him on the point of being cupped. I am not unreasonable; if he likes to make being cupped a hobby it is quite his own affair; but he had the deplorable bad taste to tell me how much blood he had had taken from him these thirty years. It will come to this, you know, that I shall be obliged to drop him. I begin to think that I made a great mistake to bring him into fashion at all.”
“He doesn’t do you much credit, certainly,” remarked the Earl with the glimmer of a smile.
“On the contrary, he does me considerable credit,” said Brummell. “You must have forgotten what he was like before I took him up. He was used to flaunt abroad in green velvet and spangles. Which reminds me, you will like to know that I punished him for you after you had left last night. He actually asked my opinion of that coat he was wearing.” He inhaled a pinch of snuff, and delicately dusted his fingers. “I thought he was going to burst into tears,” he said reflectively.