CHAPTER VI.
LIKE THE MOTH TO THE FLAME.
A small dance in a bright airy country house on a balmy summer evening is about as pleasant a form of entertainment as can be offered to the youthful mind not satiated by metropolitan entertainments, by balls in Park Lane, where the flowers alone cost the price of an elderly spinster's annuity, Bachelors' balls, and Guards' balls, American balls in Carlton Gardens, patrician balls in grand old London houses, built in the days when rank was as much apart from the herd and the newly rich as royalty; when rank and royalty moved hand-in-hand on a plateau of privilege and splendour as high above the commonality as Madrid is above the sea.
Matcham, which gave itself the airs common to all village communities, pretended to make very light of Mrs. Mornington's dance; a summer dance, when everybody worth meeting was, or ought to be, in London. Happily for Mrs. Mornington, the inhabitants of Matcham were a stay-at-home race—who had neither money nor enterprise for much gadding. To go to Swanage or Budleigh Salterton for a month or so while the leaves were falling was the boldest flight that Matcham people cared about.
There was always so much to do at home—golf, tennis, shooting, hunting, falconry, fishing for the enthusiasts of rod and line, and one's garden and stable all the year round, needing the eye of master and mistress. Except for the absence of the great shipbuilder's family, at Hillerby Height, three miles on the other side of Salisbury, the circle of Matcham society was complete, and the answers to Mrs. Mornington's cards were all acceptances.
Allan went cheerfully enough to the party, but he did not go very early, and he had something of the feeling which most young men entertain, or affect, about dances, the feeling that he was sacrificing himself at the shrine of friendship. He danced well, and he did not dislike dancing—liked it, indeed, when blest with a good partner; but it is not often that a young man can escape the chances of partners that are not altogether good, and Allan felt very doubtful as to the dancing capacities of Matcham. Those healthy, out-of-door young women, who went to about half a dozen dances in a year, would hardly waltz well enough to make waltzing anything but toil and weariness.
He approached the Grove in that state of placid indifference with which a man generally goes to meet his destiny. He looks back in the after-time, and remembers that equable frame of mind, hoping nothing, expecting nothing, content with his lot in life, and in no wise eager to question or forestall fate—
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,Finem di dederint."
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,Finem di dederint."
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,Finem di dederint."
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,
Finem di dederint."
The Grove was a long, low stuccoed house, built at the beginning of the century, a house spread over a considerable extent of ground. To-night—with lights and flowers, and all the doors and windows open to the summer gloom, and lace draperies where doors had been, and white-gowned girls moving to and fro, and the sound of a Strauss waltz mixing with the voices of the idlers sitting in the hall—Mrs. Mornington's house was as pretty as a fairy palace, and as much unlike itself in its workaday guise.
Mrs. Mornington, in black lace and diamonds, with a black ostrich fan, loomed with commanding bulk on the threshold of the dancing-room. She wanted no steward, no master of the ceremonies to help her. Alone she did it! Mr. Mornington walked about and pretended to be useful; but it was Mrs. Mornington who did everything. She received the guests, she introduced the few strange young men to the many local young ladies. As for the local young men, whom she had seen grow up from sailor suits and mud-pies to pink coats which marked them members of the South Sarum Hunt, her dominion over these was absolute. She drove them about with threatening movements of her large black fan. She would not allow them rest or respite, would not let them hang together in corners to discuss the hunters they were summering, or the hunters they were thinking of buying, or the probable changes in the management of the kennels, or any other subject dear to the minds of rustic youth.
"You have come here to dance, Billy Walcott, and not to talk of those wretched old screws of yours," said Mrs. Mornington. "You can have that all out in the saddle-room to-morrow when you are smoking with your grooms. Let me look at your programme, Sidney. Not half full, I declare. Now go over to Miss Rycroft this instant, and engage her for the next waltz."
"Come now, Mrs. Mornington, that's rather too rough on me. A man mayn't marry his grandmother; and surely there's some kind of law to forbid his dancing with a woman who looks like his great-aunt."
"Sidney, love, to oblige me. The dear old thing has gone to the expense of a new frock——"
"She might have bought a little more stuff while she was about it," murmured the youth.
"On purpose for my dance, andsomebodymust give her a waltz. Come, boys, who shall it be?"
"Let's go into the garden and toss up," said Sidney Heathfield; but the other youths protested that they were engaged for every dance, and Sidney, who had come late, and whose programme was only half full, had to submit.
"I'll do it, Mrs. Mornington," he said, with serio-comic resignation, "on condition you get me a dance with Miss Vincent afterwards."
"If I do, she will have to cheat somebody else. Her programme was full a quarter of an hour after she came into the room. My niece is a success."
Young Heathfield made his way to a distant bench, where an elderly young lady of expansive figure, set off by a pink-gauze frock, had been sitting for an hour and a half, smiling blandly upon her friends and acquaintance, with a growing sense of despair.
What had come over the young men of the present generation, when good dancers were allowed to sit partnerless and forlorn? It all came of the absence of men of standing and mature age at evening parties. Sensible men were so disgusted by the slang and boldness of chits just escaped from the schoolroom that they held themselves aloof, and ball-rooms were given over to boys and girls, and to romping galops and kitchen lancers.
Here was one sensible boy at least, thought poor Miss Rycroft, as Sidney Heathfield, tall, slim, studiously correct, stood looking solemnly down upon her, asking for the next waltz. Little did Miss Rycroft dream of the pressure which had been put upon the youth by yonder matron, whose voice was now heard loud and lively on the other side of the lace curtains.
Mrs. Mornington was talking to Allan.
"How horribly late you are, Mr. Carew. You don't deserve to find one nice girl disengaged."
"Even if I don't, I know one nice woman with whom I would as soon sit and talk common sense as dance with the prettiest girl in Matcham."
"If you mean me," said Mrs. Mornington, "there will be no commonsense talk for you and me to-night. I have all these young men to keep in order. Now, Billy," suddenly attacking Mr. Walcott, who was talking mysteriously to a bosom friend about some one or something that was seven off, with capped hocks, but a splendid lepper, "Billy, haven't I told you that you were here to dance, not to talk stables? There's Miss Forlander, the girl from Torquay, who plays golf so well, sitting like a statue next Mrs. Paddington Brown."
"Oh, Mrs. Mornington," groaned the youth, as he strolled off, "what a life you lead us! I hope you don't call this hospitality."
"Am I not at least to be introduced to Miss Vincent, the heroine of the evening?" asked Allan.
"The heroine of the evening is behaving very badly," said Mrs. Mornington. "I don't think I'll ever give a summer dance again. I wish it had rained cats and dogs. Look at the dancing-room, half empty. Those young people are all meandering about the garden, picking my finest roses, I dare say, just to tear them to pieces in the game of 'he loves me, loves me not.'"
"What better use could be made of a garden and roses? As long as you have only the true lovers, and no Mephistopheles or Martha, your garden is another Eden. But I must insist upon being introduced to Miss Vincent before the evening is over."
"I will do my best," said Mrs. Mornington, and then in a lower voice she told him that she had ordered her niece to keep a late number open for his name. "She is a very nice girl, and I think you are a nice young man, and I should like you to know each other," concluded the lady with her bluff straightforwardness.
Mr. Mornington and an elderly stranger, with iron-grey hair and iron-grey moustache, came across the hall at this moment.
"Ah, here is my brother!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "Robert, I want to introduce Mr. Carew to you. He is a new neighbour, but a great favourite of mine."
Allan stopped in the hall for about a quarter of an hour talking to General Vincent and Mr. Mornington, and then he, too, was called to order by his hostess, and was marched into the dancing-room to be introduced to a Dresden-china young lady, pink and white and blue-eyed, like Saxony porcelain, who had been brought by somebody, and who was a stranger in the land.
He waltzed with this young creature, who was pretty and daintily dressed, and who asked him various questions about Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, evidently with the idea that she was adapting her conversation to the locality. When the dance was over, she refused his offer of an ice, and suggested a turn in the garden; so Allan found himself among the meanderers under the moonlit sky; but there was no plucking of roses or murmuring of "Loves me not, loves me, loves me not," no thought of Gretchen's impassioned love-dream as the Dresden-china young lady and he promenaded solemnly up and down the broad gravel terrace in front of the open windows, still conversing sagely about Salisbury Cathedral and the decoration of the Chapter House.
While parading slowly up and down, Allan found his attention wandering every now and then from the young lady at his side to another young lady who passed and repassed with an elderly cavalier. A tall, slim young lady, with black hair and eyes, a pale brunette complexion, and an elegant simplicity of dress andchevelurewhich Allan at once recognized as Parisian. No English girl, he thought, ever had that air of being more plainly dressed than other girls, and yet more distinguished and fashionable. He had seen no frock like this girl's frock, but he felt assured that she was dressed in that Parisian fashion which is said to antedate London fashion by a twelvemonth.
She was in white from head to foot, and her gown was made of some dead-white fabric which combined the solidity of satin with the soft suppleness of gauze. The bodice was rather short-waisted, and the young lady wore a broad satin belt clasped with a diamond buckle, which flashed with many coloured gleams in the moonlight, as she passed to and fro; and whereas most young women at that time displayed a prodigious length of arm broken only by a narrow shoulder-strap, this young lady wore large puffed sleeves which recalled the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The large puffed sleeves became common enough a year later, but they were unknown in Wiltshire when Mrs. Mornington gave her dance. The damsel's silky black hair was coiled with artistic simplicity at the back of the prettily shaped head, while a cloud of little careless curls clustered above the broad, intelligent forehead.
She was talking gaily with her companion, Colonel Fordingbridge, a retired engineer, settled for some fifteen years in the outskirts of Matcham, and an intimate friend of Mr. Mornington's. He was telling her about the neighbourhood, holding it up to contempt and ridicule in a good-natured way which implied that, after all, it was the best neighbourhood in the world.
"It suits an old fellow like me," Allan heard him say; "plenty of sport of a mildish order. Huntin', fishin', shootin', hawkin', and golf."
"Hawking!" cried the young lady. "Do you really mean that? I thought there were no more hawks left in the world. Why, it sounds like the Middle Ages."
"Yes, and I'm afraid you'll say it looks like the Middle Ages when you see a flight on the hills near Matcham. The members of the Falconry Club in this neighbourhood are not all boys."
"But the hawks!" exclaimed she. "Where—where can one see them?"
"Have you really hawks?" inquired Allan's young lady, who had exhausted the Chapter House, and who caught eagerly at another local subject. "How utterly delightful! Do you go out with them very often?"
"I blush to admit that I have not even seen them, though I know there are such birds kept in the neighbourhood. I have even been invited to become a member of the society, and am seriously thinking about offering myself for election."
Seriously thinking since two minutes ago, be it understood, for until he caught that speech from the unknown young lady he had hardly given falconry a thought.
She and her companion had disappeared when he and his porcelain lady turned at the end of the terrace.
"Do you know that girl who was talking about the hawks?" he asked.
"Yes, I have been introduced to her. She is the girl of the house."
"I am afraid you are missing a dance," said Allan, with grave concern. "We had better go in, had we not?"
"Yes, I fear I am behaving badly to somebody; but it is so much nicer here than in those hot rooms."
"Infinitely preferable; but one has a duty to one's neighbour."
They met a youth in quest of the porcelain girl.
"Oh, Miss Mercer, how could you desert me so long? Our waltz is half over!"
Allan breathed more freely, having handed over Miss Mercer. He made his way quickly to the hall where Mrs. Mornington was still on guard, receiving the latest comers, sending the first batch into the supper-room, and dictating to everybody.
"I shall not leave your elbow till you have introduced me to Miss Vincent," he said, planting himself near his hostess.
"If you don't take care, you will have to give me some supper," replied she, "I am beginning to feel sinking. And I think it would be a good plan for me to sup early in order to see that things are as they should be."
Allan's heart also began to sink. He knew what it meant to take a matron in to supper; the leisurely discussion of salmon and cutlets, the half-bottle of champagne, the gossip, lasting half an hour at the least. And while he was ministering to Mrs. Mornington what chance would he have of becoming acquainted with Mrs. Mornington's niece?
"I should be proud to be so honoured; but think how many persons of greater age and dignity you will offend. Colonel Fordingbridge, for instance, such an old friend."
"Colonel Fordingbridge has just gone in with my niece."
"Oh, in that case, let me have the honour," exclaimed Allan eagerly, almost dragging Mrs. Mornington towards the supper-room. "I should not like to have offended dear old Fordingbridge."
"We may get seats at their table, perhaps. I told Suzette to go to one of the cosy little tables at the end of the room."
Suzette! what a coquettish, enchanting name! He pushed past the long table where two rows of people were talking, laughing, gobbling, as if they never dined and had hardly tasted food for a week. He pushed on to the end of the room where, on each side of the fireplace, now a mass of golden lilies and palms, Mrs. Mornington had found space for a small round table—a table which just held four people snugly, if not commodiously.
One of these tables had been made to accommodate six; the other had just been left by the first batch of supper-eaters. Miss Vincent and Colonel Fordingbridge were standing near while a servant re-arranged the table.
"That's lucky," said Mrs. Mornington. "Suzette, I want to introduce my friend Mr. Carew to you—Mr. Carew—Miss Vincent. And after supper he can take you to your father, whom I haven't seen for the last hour."
"I am afraid he has gone home," replied the young lady, after smilingly accepting the introduction. "I heard him ask Mrs. Fordingbridge to take care of me if he should feel tired and be obliged to go home. He can't bear being up late at night."
"No wonder, when he is out and about at daybreak!"
"The mornings are so nice," said Suzette.
"Yes, for people like you, who can do without sleep; people who have quicksilver in their veins."
"One learns to be fond of the early morning in India," explained Suzette.
"Because every other part of the day is intolerable," said Colonel Fordingbridge.
They were seated by this time, and Mrs. Mornington was sipping her first glass of champagne with an air of supreme content, while Allan helped her to lobster mayonnaise. Suzette was on his other side; and even while ministering to the elder lady his looks and his thoughts were on the younger.
How pretty she was, and how interesting. It seemed to him that he had never cared for English beauty; the commonplace pinkness and whiteness, chubby cheeks, blunt noses, cherry lips. Those delicate features, that pale dark skin, those brilliant dark eyes and small white teeth flashing upon him now and then as she smiled, with the most bewitching mouth—a mouth that could express volumes in a smile, or by a pouting movement of the flexible lips.
Allan and she were good friends in about five minutes. He was questioning and she answering. Surely, surely she did not like India as well as England—a life of exile—a life under torrid skies? Surely, surely, yes. There were a hundred things that she loved in India; those three years of her life in the North-West Provinces had been years in fairyland.
"It must have been because you were worshipped," he said. "You lived upon adulation. I'm afraid when a young lady is happy in India, it means that she is not altogether innocent of vanity."
"It is very unkind of you to say that. How sorry you must feel when I tell you that the happiest half-year I spent in India was when father was road-making, and the only other officer in camp was a fat, married major—an immense major, as big as this table."
"And you were happy! How?"
"In all manner of ways; riding, rambling, botanizing, sketching, and looking after father."
"My niece is a Miss Crichton. She has all the accomplishments," said Mrs. Mornington.
"Oh, aunt! that is a dreadful character to give me. It means that I do nothing well!"
Allan had asked her for a dance, and there had been an examination of her programme, which showed only one blank.
"Auntie told me to keep that waltz," she said. "I don't know why."
"I do. It was kept for me. I am the favoured one."
"But why?" she asked naïvely. "Why you more than any one else?"
"Who can say? Will you call me vain if I tell you that I think I am a favourite with your aunt?"
She looked at him laughingly, with a glance that asked a question.
"You don't see any reason why I should be preferred," said Allan, interpreting her look; "but remember there never is any reason for such preferences. Clever women are full of prejudices."
He could imagine a reason which he would not have had Suzette suspect for worlds. Perhaps among the available young men in Mrs. Mornington's circle he was the best placed, with an ample income in the present, and an estate that must be his in the future, the best placed of all except the young master of Discombe Manor; and the Lord of Discombe was away, while he, Allan, was on the spot.
The thought of Geoffrey Wornock suggested a question. They had left the little table to Mrs. Mornington and Colonel Fordingbridge, who were able to take care of each other. Allan and Miss Vincent were going to the dancing-room, not by the nearest way, but through a French window into the garden.
"Shall we take a little turn before we go back to the house?"
"I should like it of all things."
"And you are not afraid of catching cold?"
"On such a night as this? Why, in the hills I lived out-of-doors!"
"You have been at Matcham before, I suppose!"
"Yes, father and I stayed here with auntie once upon a time."
"Long ago?"
"Ages ago, when I wore short petticoats and wasn't allowed late dinner."
"Heartless tyranny!"
"Wasn't it? I didn't know what to do with myself in the long summer evenings. I used to roam about this garden till I was tired, and then I would go and look in at the dining-room window where they were all sitting at dessert, and auntie would wave me away, 'Go and play, child.' Play, indeed! Even the gardeners had gone home, and the dogs were shut up for the night. I was actually glad when it was nine o'clock and bedtime."
"Poor victim of middle-aged egotism."
"Dear auntie! She is so good! But people don't understand children. They forget what their own feelings were when they were little."
"Alas, yes! A child is as great a mystery to me to-day as if I had been born at one and twenty. I can't even understand or interest myself in a lad of fifteen. He seems such an incongruous, unnecessary creature, stupid, lumbering, in everybody's way. I can't realize the fact that he will ever get any better. He is there, complete in himself, a being of a race apart. I should feel insulted if any one were to tell me I had ever been like him."
"How true that is!" assented Suzette, gaily. "I have felt just the same about girls. I only began to wear my hair in a knot three years ago, and yet there seems hardly one point of union between me and a girl with her hair down her back. I have got beyond her, as somebody says. How sad that one should always be getting beyond things! Father detests India—talks only of the climate—while to me it was all enchantment. Perhaps if I were to go back to the East, a few years hence, I should hate it."
"Very likely. Going back is always a mistake."
There was nothing exalted or out of the common in their talk, but at least there was sympathy in it all, and they were telling each other their thoughts as freely as if they had been friends of long years. It was very different from being obliged to talk of Salisbury Cathedral, and theorize on the history of Stonehenge. And then there was the glamour of the garden and the moonlight; the mysterious light and shade of shrubbery walks; the blackness of the cedars that spread a deeper dark across the lawn. Mrs. Mornington had taken care to choose a night when the midsummer moon should be at the full, and she had abstained from cockneyfying the garden with artificial light, from those fairy lamps or Chinese lanterns which are well enough within the narrow limits of a suburban garden, but which could only vulgarize grounds that had something of forestial beauty.
"I am glad you are almost a stranger to Matcham, Miss Vincent," said Allan, after the first brief pause in their talk.
"Why?"
"Because it is such a pleasure to meet some one who does not know Geoffrey Wornock."
"And pray who is Geoffrey Wornock?"
"Ah, how delightful, how refreshing it is to hear that question! Miss Vincent, I am your devoted friend from this moment. Your friend, did I say? I am your slave—command my allegiance in everything."
"Please be tranquil. What does it all mean?"
"Oh, forgive me! Know then that hitherto everybody I have met in this place has greeted me by an expression of surprise at my resemblance to one Geoffrey Wornock—happily now absent with his regiment in the East. Nobody has taken any interest in me except on the score of this likeness to the absent Wornock. My face has been criticized, my features descanted upon one by one in my hearing. I have been informed that it is in this or that feature, in this or that expression, the likeness consists, while I naturally don't care twopence about the likeness, or about Wornock. And to meet some one who doesn't know my double, who will accept me for what I am individually!—oh, Miss Vincent, we ought to be friends. Say that we may be friends."
"Please don't rush on in such a headlong fashion. You talk like the girls at the convent, who wanted me to swear eternal friendship in the first half-hour; and perhaps turned out to be very disagreeable girls when one came to know them."
"I hope I shall not turn out disagreeable."
"I did not mean to be rude; but friendship is a serious thing. At present I have no friend except father, and two girls with whom I have kept up a correspondence since I left the Sacré Cœur. One lives at Bournemouth and the other in Paris, so our friendship is dependent on the post. I think we ought to go back to the dancing-room now. I have to report myself to Mrs. Fordingbridge, and not to keep her later than she may wish to stay."
Allan felt that he had been talking like a fool; that he had presumed on the young lady's unconventional manner. She had talked to him brightly and unrestrainedly; and he had been pushing and impertinent. The moonlight, the garden, the pleasure of talking to a bright vivacious girl had made him forget the respect due to the acquaintance of an hour.
He was silent on the way back to the ballroom, silent and abashed; but five minutes afterwards he was waltzing with Suzette, who was assuredly the best waltzer of all that evening's partners, and he felt that he was treading on air.