As if the loss of ducal favour and filial obedience were not enough for the distraught lady, her husband one morning threw a business letter upon the table, and with petulant curses on the heads of outside brokers, incoherently explained that he was ruined. They were liars and knaves and thieves, he sputtered. He would drag them all into the police court, he would write to the “Times,” he would go and horsewhip the blackguards. Damme if he would n't!
“I wish the blackguards could horsewhip you,” remarked his wife, grimly. “Have you sufficient brains to realise what an unutterable fool you have been?”
If he did not realise it by the end of the week, it was not Mrs. Hardacre's fault. She reduced the unhappy man to craven submission and surreptitious nipping of old brandy in order to keep up the feeble spirit that remained in him, and took the direction of affairs into her own hands. They were not ruined, but a considerable sum of money had been lost through semi-idiotic speculation, and for a time strict economy was necessary. By Christmas the establishment in the country was broken up, a tenant luckily found for Heddon Court, and a small furnished house taken in Devonshire Place. These arrangements gave Mrs. Hardacre much occupation, but they did not tend to soften her character. When Norma came home, sympathetically inclined and honestly desirous to smooth down asperities--for she appreciated the aggravating folly of her father--she found her advances coldly repulsed.
“What is the good of saying you are sorry for me,” Mrs. Hardacre asked snappishly, “when you refuse to do the one thing that can mend matters?”
Then followed the old, old story which Norma had heard so often in days past, but now barbed with a new moral and adorned with new realism. Norma listened wearily, surprised at her own lack of retort. When the familiar homily came to an end, her reply was almost meek:
“Give me a little longer time to think over it.”
“You had better cut it as short as possible,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “or you may find yourself too late. As it is, you are going off. What have you been doing to yourself? You look thirty.”
“You had better go and have your face massaged, or you'll soon not be fit to be seen.”