CHAPTER III.
“FAIRIES!”
Nearly three years had gone by since that fatal night in Venice. It was mid-winter, only a few days after Christmas, and Mrs. Vansittart and her son were spending their Christmas holidays within twenty miles of Merewood.
Maud Vansittart had become Maud Hartley, but before bestowing herself upon her adoring lover she had insisted that he should buy a place within reasonable distance of the house in which she had been born and reared, the home in which she could so vividly recall the image of a beloved father, and where all her happy years of girlhood had been spent with the mother she fondly loved. Sir Hubert had a fine place in the wild Yorkshire hills, half an hour’s journey from Sheffield, a solid red-brick manor house in the Georgianstyle, built by his great-grandfather; but to that house as a home Maud would not consent to go. Her lover being rich enough to buy a second country seat as easily as some men buy a second horse, there had only remained the trouble of choosing a home that Maud could approve.
A house was found, neither too old nor too new, upon the side of Blackdown, in that rich and picturesque country between Petworth and Haslemere—Redwold Towers, a roomy, well-built mansion, with just land enough to satisfy Hubert Hartley’s idea of a home-farm, with out diverting his capital from that wider domain of Hartley Manor, where he had fields and pastures of a hundred acres each, and where he grew prize oxen and cart-horses worth their weight in gold, as it seemed to Maud, when she heard of six or seven hundred pounds being given for one of these creatures.
Merewood, John Vansittart’s patrimonial estate, was near Liss, in Hampshire, a long, low, capacious house, on a ridge of pineclad hill, and fronting a wild valley, which grew very little of a profitable nature for man or beast, but where the perfume of the pine woods and the gold and purple of gorse and heather were worth all that the fattest soils can produce. Fertile pastures and spacious cornfields were not wanting to the estate, but those lay behind the crest of the hill.
Maud had been married nearly two years, and there was a short-coated baby in the nursery at Redwold, albeit Sir Hubert would rather the eyes of his firstborn had opened upon the light that shone into the family bed-chamber at Hartley Manor, the patriarchal bed-chamber with its patriarchal bed, birth chamber and death chamber, room in which the good old great-grandsire’s eyes had closed peacefully, verily “falling on sleep,” after a life of ninety years, and after having enriched the world with many useful inventions, and established a wealthy progeny. Unhappily, Maud hated Hartley Manor House, and only went there for a month in the shooting season as a concession to the best of husbands.
“Of course, I always meant to marry him,” she told her brother, “and he is the only man for whom I ever cared a straw; but I wanted to have my fling in London; and I liked being talked about as the pretty Miss Vansittart. I was, you know, Jack. You needn’t laugh at me. And I liked making other young men miserable, by leading them on a little, meaning nothing all the time.”
“Had you many victims? Were there any suicides?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You know how little young men care nowadays. There were some of them who would have liked to marry me, had everything been made easy, settlements, and all that. And,” with sudden solemnity, “I might have had a coronet if I had made the most of my chances.”
“A hard-up coronet, do you mean? A coronet that wanted regilding.”
“No, sir. All those go to America. My coronet was well provided for—but it was not to be,” with a faint sigh. “I could not throw Hubert over. He was so ridiculously fond of me.”
“Was? Is, I hope,” said Jack, this retrospective survey of a girl’s career being made one afternoon in the snowy Christmas week, as Jack and his sister tramped home with the shooters, after a day on the hills.
“Yes, he still adores me, poor fellow, though he has found me out ever so long ago.”
“Found you out—how?”
“Oh, he has found that I am frivolous and selfish, and utterly worthless, from the socialist’s point of view. He has found out that although I am fond of pretty cottages and cottage gardens, I don’t care much about the cottagers, and that I never know what to say to them. He has found out that I haven’t the interests of the poor really at heart. In short, he has found that I am a thorough-bred Tory instead of a hot-headed Radical, as he is. I’m afraid we ought never to have married. It is like trying to join fire and water.”
“Oh, but I think you manage to get on capitally together, in spite of any difference in your political views. Indeed, I did not think you knew much about politics.”
“I don’t. I know hardly anything. I never read the debates, and my mind always wanders when people are talking politics; but my Conservatism and Hubert’s Radicalism enter into everything—into our way with servants, into our treatment of our friends, into our ideas about dress, manners, church. I cannot even shake hands with a cottager as he does. I have tried to imitate him, but I can’t achieve that unconscious air of equality which comes so natural to him. And do what I will I can’t help feeling ashamed of that great-grandfather of his who began life in Sheffield as a poor lad, and who invented something—some quite small thing, it seems to me—and so laid the foundations of the Hartley wealth. That is a little bit of family history which I should so like everybody to forget, while poor Hubert is quite proud of it. At Hartley Manor he loves to show strangers the great-grandfather’s portrait in his working clothes—just as he looked when he invented the thing, whatever it was.”
“You would not have him ashamed of the founder of his fortune. I have heard of a house in which the portrait of the good man who made the family wealth has a looking-glass in front of it, so that the will which ordained that that portrait should hang on one particular panel in the dining-room as long as the family mansion stood may be kept to the letter, while it is broken in the spirit. But this was a particularly irksome case, for the good man had made his moneyout of tallow, and had been painted with a pound of mould candles in each hand. Think of that, Maud! Fustian and corduroy are paintable enough; but not even Herkomer could make anything out of two bunches of tallow candles.”
“I wish Hubert would let me hang a fine Venetian glass in front of his worthy great-grandfather. However, since he himself is a gentleman, I suppose I ought to be satisfied,” said Maud; “I don’t believe there is a finer gentleman in England than my husband, Radical as he is.”
Vansittart’s sister was perfectly happy in her married life. She had a husband who petted and indulged her, with inexhaustible good humour, and who thought her the most enchanting of women, with infinite capacities for soaring to a higher level than she had yet attained. She had as much money as ever she cared to spend, and a house in which she was allowed to do what she liked, so long as she did not trample on the rights and privileges of the old servants from Hartley Manor, who had been dominant there since Hubert’s infancy; servants whose proud boast it was to have been associated with every circumstance of their master’s life, from the cutting of his first tooth to the bringing home of his bride. It is strange what Conservative ways these Radicals sometimes have in the bosoms of their families.
Sir Hubert Hartley was not like David, ruddy and fair to see. He was a small, dark man, who looked as if some of the original Sheffield smoke, the smoke inhaled by the inventor day after day for half a century, had given its hue to his complexion. He was wiry, and well built, active, energetic, a good shot, a good horseman, a lover of field sports and wild animals, loving, after the sportsman’s fashion, even the creatures he destroyed, curious about their habits, keen in his admiration of their strength and beauty. For the rest, he was a man of widest beneficence, charitable, hospitable, and he was a man whom the better-born Jack Vansittart loved and honoured.
They were about the same age, and had been at Eton and Oxford together, and Jack knew his friend by heart. He could have chosen no better husband for his sister; he could have chosen no man he would have preferred to call his brother-in-law. It seemed to him sometimes that he could have hardly liked a brother better than he liked Hubert Hartley.
Vansittart was still a gentleman at leisure. He had coquetted with politics, and had allowed himself to be spoken of as a young man who might prove an acquisition to the Conservative party, but he had not allowed himself to be nominated for any constituency. “The party is strong enough to get on without me,” he said; “I’ll wait till the General Election, and then I’ll go in for all I know, and try to gain them a seat from the enemy. I should like to trymy luck in Yorkshire, and win an election against Hubert and all his merry men. I might stand for Burtborough—attack Hartley in his own stronghold.”
Burtborough was the small market town that supplied the necessities of Hartley Manor House. The Hartleys had represented Burtborough for two generations, but Hubert had withdrawn from the political arena, disgusted at the turn of events, and finding more pleasure in turnips and prize cattle than in the art of legislation. He had never been brilliant either as an orator or debater, and he thought he had done his duty by country and party when he had secured the election of a conscientious Liberal for Burtborough. Marriage had helped to make him lazy. He loved his home; stable and gardens; farm and woods; his pretty wife and cooing baby. His brother-in-law thought him the most enviable among men.
“He has all the desires of his heart,” thought Vansittart. “He has not an unsatisfied ambition. He has a clear conscience, can look his fellow-men straight in the face and say, ‘I have injured no man:’ as I cannot, God help me: as I never can so long as I live. At every turn of the road I expect to meet some one whom I have injured—a mother who may have loved that man as my mother loves me—a sister whose life has been made desolate by his death, reprobate though he was. No man stands alone in the world. Whoever he may be, when he falls, he will drag down some one.”
And then he thought of Fiordelisa, with her sunny Italian eyes, and her light-hearted acceptance of such good things as Fate threw in her way—the lodgings on the Rialto, the mandoline lessons, the fine dress and good food. She had taken these things as if they were manna from heaven; and assuredly no rigid principle, no adherence to her Church Catechism, would restrain her from seeking manna from new sources. What had she become, he wondered, in the years that had made his crime an old memory? An artist’s model, or something worse? In these days of photography that beautiful face of hers would have less value than in the golden age of Tintoret and Veronese.
He had done his best to forget that scene at Florian’s; but the image of Fiordelisa returned to his memory very often, harden himself as he might against the pangs of remorse, and the thought of her always saddened him. He had the same kind of sorrow for having spoilt her life as he might have felt had he been cruel to a child. Her ignorance, her friendlessness appealed so strongly to his pity—and even the old aunt, who so placidly accepted the situation, did not appear to him as odious as a hard-headed Englishwoman would have appeared under the same conditions.
Nearly three years had passed, and he knew no more about theman he stabbed than he had known when the dagger dropped from his hand warm with the stranger’s life-blood. The most watchful attention to the newspapers had resulted in no further knowledge. There had been an occasional paragraph about the fatal brawl in Venice. He was thankful to observe that no one had written of his crime as murder. The fact that the dagger had been bought within an hour of its fatal use—the accidental nature of the encounter—and the brutality of the unknown’s attack had been discussed at length, and there had been a good deal of speculation as to his own character and social status. Had the event happened a few years later some keen-witted special correspondent would doubtless have contrived to interview Fiordelisa; and the girl’s artless prattle and her Venetian environment would have furnished material for a spirited article.
The interest in the death of a nameless Englishman soon died out, and the newspapers found no more to say about the fatal brawl in the Piazza, and as the years went by Vansittart told himself that this dark chapter in his life was closed for ever, that the mother who loved him would never know that his conscience was burdened with the death of a fellow-creature.
Looking backward he remembered an occasion in his boyhood when a sudden impulse of fury had brought disgrace upon him, and had caused his mother much distress of mind. It was at a time when he was reading hard at home with a private tutor, shortly before he went to Oxford. A groom had ill-used one of his horses, or Vansittart believed he had, and the young man had attacked and belaboured him severely. The lad had been able to defend himself, and the two had been fairly matched as to weight and size, but Vansittart had all the science on his side, and he felt afterwards that he had disgraced himself by the encounter. His mother’s distress grieved him deeply; and he went so far as to apologize to the vanquished hireling, which apology raised him to the pinnacle of honour in the opinion of the stable generally.
“There’s plenty of young masters as would chuck a sovereign to a lad he’d whacked, but it’s only a thoroughbred one that would say, ‘I beg your pardon, Bates; I ought to have known better,’” said the old family coachman, who had driven Master Jack to be christened.
The burden upon his conscience was an old burden by this time, and he was able to carry his load so that no one suspected evil under that pleasant, open-hearted aspect of a man who fulfilled all the social duties. He was a good son, a kind and affectionate brother, a generous landlord and master. As the world saw his life there was no flaw in it. He had troops of friends, an honourable status, plenty of money, everything that this world can give of good,in that moderate measure which the poet-philosopher has taught us to esteem as life’s best.
“I suppose the sword is hanging by a hair somewhere, and will drop when I least expect it,” he said to himself, in the hour of dark memories.
A chance allusion—some loving word of praise from his mother, the turn of a conversation, the plot of a play or a novel—would sometimes stir the dark waters of memory; but he did his best to forget, since there was nothing that he could do to atone; and he tried to convince himself that it was all the better for humanity at large that there was one reprobate less in the world.
This had been his temper for the last year or so, as memory lost something of its vivid colouring; and he had come to take that act of his in Venice as part and parcel of his life and character.
He bore himself gaily enough in this Christmas holiday at Redwold Towers, and Lady Hartley declared that he was the life and soul of her house-party.
“You have not such a passion for field-sports as the rest of the men,” she said. “One may hope to be favoured with your society for an occasional hour between breakfast and dinner, while those other wretches troop off in their horrid thick boots before I come downstairs in the morning, and I hear no more of them till dinner, unless I go with the luncheon cart.”
“I’m afraid my superiority must be put down to advancing years and growing laziness. I never was so good a shot as Hubert, and I have never been as keen a sportsman.”
“Perhaps that is because you have spent so much of your holiday life on the Continent. Hubert would be miserable if he were asked to spend a winter out of the British Isles, unless he were pig-sticking in India, or fishing in Canada, or hunting lions in Africa. He cannot get on without killing things. You are not like that. You have no thirst for blood.”
“No,” answered Jack, with a laugh; “I am not great at killing things, though I am just English enough to think poorly of the straightest run if it doesn’t end in blood.”
“Oh, of course, I know you can ride, and that you have a proper English love of hunting and shooting, but you don’t give your life up to sport and farming as Hubert does. You have only to look at his boots, and you can understand his life. Such an array of bluchers, tops, brogues, waterproof fishing boots and dreadful hobnailed, broad-toed things, that look like instruments of torture—as if they had been modelled upon the boot that one reads of under the Plantagenets and Tudors. People talk of writing as an index of character. I would rather see a man’s boots than his penmanship if I wanted to know what kind of man he was.”
“And you put me down as a single-soled, effeminate person?” said Jack; whereat there was a laugh from the house-party, sitting cosily round the morning-room fire, with the exception of one industrious matron who sat by the window, toiling at an early English counterpane which required to be worked upon a frame.
“No, no. I don’t consider you womanish. You would never sink into the useful family friend, or the tame cat, even if you were to remain a bachelor all your life. But your boots are more human than Hubert’s; and you are fond of art, and books, and music, for which I fear he cares very little.”
“He cares for something much better,” said Vansittart. “He cares for humanity, and is always thinking how he can improve the condition of the people who are dependent upon him. His cottages at Hartley are models of all that cottages should be, and there is not a good point about them that he has not thought out for himself.”
“Yes, he is always his own architect, and he has really some very good notions, though he is not as picturesque as I should like him to be in his ideas. The cottages about here may not be as commodious as ours in Yorkshire, but they are ever so much prettier—dear old cottages, more than half roof, and with the quaintest casements.”
“And very little light or air inside, I dare say; capital cottages for the landscape, but not so agreeable for the folks inside.”
The party in the morning-room consisted of the three Miss Champernownes, daughters of a Cornish baronet, all three handsome, stylish, accomplished, everything in short that Mrs. Vansittart would have approved in a daughter-in-law; Mrs. Baddington, the lady of the counterpane, who was so completely absorbed in her needlework that she might as well have stopped at her own fireside; but as her husband, Major Baddington, was a good shot and a pleasant companion, the lady’s inoffensive dulness was tolerated in country houses.
The other ladies present were Mrs. Vansittart and a Miss Green, a young lady who gave herself airs on the strength of her people beingtheGreens—the Greens of Peddlington—in whose particular case the name of Green was supposed to rank with Guelph or Ghibelline. Miss Green was plain, but clever, and was as boastful of her plainness as of her good old name. Her people were rich, and she had inherited an independent fortune from a bachelor uncle, who had bequeathed his wealth to her with an embargo against marriage with any man—less than a Peer—who should refuse to assume the name of Green. And even in the case of her marriage with a Peer, it was ordained that her second son should be called Green—by letters patent—and should inherit the Green wealth, strictly tied up in the case of the heiress.
Miss Green was economical to meanness—perhaps with some dim idea of enriching that hypothetical scion of nobility—and was proud of her economy. Her chief delight in the metropolis was to go long distances—generally in an omnibus—in quest of cheapness; and she was a scourge to all the young matrons of her acquaintance by her keen interest in their housekeeping, her knowledge of prices, and her outspoken condemnation of their extravagance. She had one original idea which had achieved a kind of distinction for her from the housekeeping point of view, and that was her non-belief in the Co-operative Stores.
Such was the feminine portion of the house-party at Redwold Towers, and it was to this party that John Vansittart had succeeded in making himself eminently agreeable. He had admired the artistic shading and Tudoresque scroll-work of Mrs. Baddington’s counterpane, and had surprised that lady by what seemed a profound knowledge of early Florentine needlework. He had tramped Blackdown in the wind and the weather with the Miss Champernownes, turn and turn about, and was no nearer falling in love with any of the three than when he began these rambles; he had discussed the art of dressing well upon fifty pounds a year with Miss Green, and had allowed her to convince him that the Greens of Peddlington were a purer race than the Plantagenets; and to-day he had given himself up to idleness in the gynæceum, otherwise morning-room, and had offered himself for two round dances apiece to the four young ladies, at the hunt ball in the little rustic town, to which they were all going that evening.
“It will be an awful drive,” said Maud Hartley; “think what the hills will be like in this weather.”
There had been an “old-fashioned Christmas,” and the world outside the windows was for the most part a white world.
“The horses have been roughed, and your coachman tells me he has no fear of the hills,” said Vansittart. “He is going to take four horses.”
“I’m sure they’ll be wanted, poor things, with that big omnibus and a herd of us to drag up those terrible hills,” said his sister.
“If you have any feeling for the brute creation you can get out and walk up the hills,” said Jack.
“What, in our satin slippers? How very delightful!”
There was no one heroic enough to propose walking up the hills at ten o’clock that evening, when the omnibus from Redwold went bowling merrily over the frost-bound roads, uphill and downhill, at a splendid even pace, and with a rhythmical jingle of bars and chains, as the four upstanding browns laid themselves out for their work, going as if it was a pleasure to go through the steel-blue night, with the quiet fields and pastures stretching round them,silvery in the moonshine, while in every dip and hollow the oak and chestnut copses lay wrapped in shadow, darkly mysterious.
They skirted Bexley Hill, they passed by sleeping villages and wind-swept commons.
“Are we nearly there?” asked Hilda Champernowne.
“Hardly halfway,” answered Lady Hartley. “I told you it was a long drive.”
There was a bright lamp inside the omnibus, a lamp which lit up the three Miss Champernownes in a cloud of gauze and satin, white as the snow-drifts in the valleys, a lamp which shone on three heads of glittering gold-brown hair, and three pairs of fine eyes, and three cherry mouths, and three swanlike throats rising out of ostrich plumage. It shone on Maud Hartley’s cloak of scarlet and gold and blue-fox fur, and sparkled on the diamond solitaires in her ears, clear and white as dewdrops on a sunny morning.
They were a very merry party. Major Baddington and Sir Hubert were outside, wrapped to the ears in fur coats and caps, and enjoying their smoke in the frosty air. Vansittart and two other young men rode inside with the feminine contingent, who were glad of this leaven of masculine society, though they pretended to be in alarm at the crushing of their draperies.
“I feel a dark foreboding that all the dancing men will have engaged themselves for the evening before we arrive,” said Claudia Champernowne.
“Not if they know the Miss Champernownes are going to be there,” said Mr. Tivett, a young man with a small voice and a reputation for all the social talents.
“Who cares anything about us?” cried Claudia. “We are strangers in the land.”
“I think that some of the dancing men will wait for my party,” said Maud. “I am famous for taking pretty girls to our local dances.”
They were steadily ascending the worst hill they had to climb; the omnibus was on an inclined plane, and Hilda Champernowne in her place at the back of the vehicle looked down upon Jack Vansittart seated in a hollow by the door. They were near the top, when the brake was put on suddenly, and the horses were pulled up. A ripple of silvery laughter rang out upon the frosty air.
“Fairies!” cried Vansittart.
“Who can it be, and why are we stopping?” asked Miss Champernowne, “when we are so late, too!”
There were voices, two or three feminine voices, all talking at once, and then Hubert was heard answering. Anon more laughter. Sir Hubert and a groom got off the ’bus, and the former came to the door.
“Can you make room for three girls?” he asked.
“Not for a mouse,” replied his wife. “We are hideously crushed already. I believe all our gowns are spoilt.”
“Then a little more squeezing won’t hurt,” said Sir Hubert. “Look here, you three men can come outside. It’ll be a tight pack, but we’ll manage it, and the three ladies can have your places. It’s a lovely night. You’re none of you bronchial, I hope.”
“A chronic sufferer, from my cradle,” said Mr. Tivett, in a meek, little voice.
“Oh, Tivett can stay inside. He is the nearest approach I know to Euclid’s definition of a line—length without breadth.”
Jack Vansittart was out by this time, and Reggie Hudson, a soldierly young man, slipped out after him. The women drew themselves together discontentedly. Each would have had an omnibus to herself if she could.
“I haven’t the faintest idea whom we are making room for,” grumbled Maud.
“I know we shall be dreadfully late,” sighed Claudia.
“I say, you good folks out there, hurry up, please,” cried the gallant Tivett. “It’s getting on for eleven, and this isn’t a picnic-party.”
He was talking to the empty air. A ripple of that elfin laughter from the top of the hill was all that answered him. Sir Hubert, Vansittart, and Major Baddington were all standing round a most melancholy specimen of the genus fly, the very oldest and mouldiest of one-horse landaus, which had broken down hopelessly on the top of the hill.
“We knew that the springs were weak,” said a silver-clear voice out of a swansdown hood. “They’ve been getting weaker and weaker ever since we’ve had anything to do with the fly; but we had no idea the shafts were all wrong.”
“The shafts were right enough when we started, miss,” growled a voice that was half muffled in a red comforter, such a comforter as denotes the rustic fly-man. “It was your weight coming up the hill as did it.”
“My weight!” cried Swansdownhood, lifting herself up on her springy feet like a feminine Mercury. “Do I look such a Daniel Lambert?”
Her hood fell off with that arch toss of the head, and looking at her in the vivid moonlight it seemed to Jack Vansittart as if that jocular exclamation of his had been well founded, and that the woman who stood before him on the crest of the hill, her beauty and her whiteness shining out against the steel-blue sky—“like a finer light in light”—was enchanting enough to have stood for Titania.
She was very tall, but so slim and willowy of form that her height made her no less sylph-like—a queen of sylphs, perhaps, but assuredly of that aerial family. She was dazzlingly fair, and her small head was crowned with a nimbus of pale gold hair, in which there sparkled a galaxy of diamond starlets. Her small nose was tip-tilted, but with a tilt so archly delicate as to be more beautiful than the purest Grecian, or so Vansittart thought, seeing her thus for the first time in the glamour of night and moonshine, and with all the piquancy of the unexpected.
“The horse fell down, and the shafts went crash,” said another young person, who presented to view only a nose and narrow slip of face between the folds of a red plaid shawl, just such a shawl as a well-to-do farmer’s wife might have worn driving to market. “I thought we should all be killed.”
“And so you would have been, if I hadn’t put the brake on sharp, and got down and sat on ’is ’ed,” said the fly-man. “That horse didn’t ought to have been sent out on such roads as this, and if I’d been master he wouldn’t have been.”
“We won’t trouble you for your opinions, my friend,” said Sir Hubert, throwing a florin lightly into the man’s hand. “You’d better take your beast home, and give yourself a hot drink. I’ll take care of Miss Marchant and her sisters.”
“Oh, but really,” said Swansdownhood, “it is immensely good of you—only they had better send a fly for us after the dance. We can’t encroach upon you for the home journey.”
“Why not? Of course we shall take you home. Come along; I’m afraid you’re catching cold while we’re talking.”
He marched the three girls—the spokeswoman and tallest all in white from top to toe, the second with a black lace frock showing below her Stuart shawl, the third muffled in a blue opera cloak and a blue Shetland scarf, commonly called a cloud.
“Here are the Miss Marchants, come to claim your hospitality,” said Sir Hubert to his wife; whereupon Maud replied, graciously—
“Oh, how do you do, you poor things? Pray come in. How cold you must be! Did your carriage break down? How dreadful! I’m afraid there’s not much heat left in our foot-warmers, but it is tolerably warm here still”—the atmosphere inside the ’bus was tropical—“and I hope you’ll be able to make yourselves comfortable.”
“Such a dreadful intrusion!”
“Such a herd of us!”
“How you must all detest us!” cried three fresh young voices all at once.
The three Champernownes and the Green maintained a stolid silence. Those four pairs of eyes were coldly appraising the intruders—theirfaces, their dress, their social status, everything about them.
The fair tall girl in the swansdown hood was very pretty. That fact the most unfriendly observer could not deny. Whether that dazzling fairness was in some part artificial remained to be proved under a more searching light than the omnibus lamp; but even if that alabaster complexion were due to blanc de something the girl’s eyes were real—lovely dancing blue-grey eyes, softened by dark brown lashes. Her nose was the prettiest thing in that unrecognized order of noses; mouth and chin were in perfect harmony; and she looked round at the strange faces with the sweetest smile, as if she had never suffered from prejudice or undeserved disdain.
The other two girls were of the same type, but not so pretty. The blue girl was freckled and weather-beaten; the Stuart plaid girl was too pale. Titania had taken the lion’s share of the family beauty.
But their dress—that at least afforded widest scope for the scorner. The swansdown hood was of the year one, or perhaps might have been fashionable in the historic winter of the Crimean war; the blue cloud and tawdry blue opera cloak suggested all that is commonest in cheap finery; and what manner of surroundings could a girl have whose people allowed her to go to a hunt ball with her head and shoulders skewered in a tartan shawl with a blanket pin?
“We are taking no chaperon,” said Titania, brightly. “Mrs. Ponto is to chaperon us.”
Mrs. Ponto was the wife of a solicitor at Mandelford, the little town where the ball was being given. It was the first hunt ball there had been at Mandelford within the memory of Sussex, and the fact that this ball was taking place at Mandelford was due to the enterprise of a local cabinet-maker, who had built a public hall or assembly room at the back of his shop, and had thus provided a place for festivity or culture; music, amateur theatricals, Oxford or Cambridge lectures, conjuring or Christy Minstrels.
After that little apologetic remark about the chaperon, there followed a silence, the Champernownes and Miss Green remaining figures of stone, and Maud Hartley feeling that she had done her duty as hostess. The carriage rolled merrily over the frost-bound road, and the hoofs of the four horses sounded like an advance of cavalry in the winter stillness. Perhaps the silence inside the omnibus would have lasted all the way to Mandelford had it not been for little Mr. Tivett, who sat between two Miss Champernownes, half hidden among billows of snowy gauze, peeping out at the three pretty faces on the other side of the ’bus, with bright, inquisitive eyes, like a squirrel out of his nest.
“I don’t know what I have done to offend you, Lady Hartley,that you should not think me worthy to be introduced to these young ladies,” said the good little man at last.
“My dear Mr. Tivett, it was an oversight on my part. I forgot that you and the Miss Marchants had not met before. Of course, you are dying to know them.—Miss Marchant, allow me to introduce Mr. Tivett, a devoted admirer of your sex—a gentleman who knows more about a lady’s dress, and a lady’s accomplishments and amusements, than one woman in a hundred.”
“My dear Lady Hartley,” remonstrated Tivett, in his piping voice, “Miss Marchant will run away with the idea that I am a horrible effeminate little person.”
“She will very soon discover that you are the most obliging little person, and I dare say she will end by being as fond of you as I am.”
“Dearest Lady Hartley, how delightful of you to say that!” exclaimed Mr. Tivett, with a coquettish giggle, darting out his little suède glove to give his hostess an affectionate pat on the shoulder; “and now you have heard my character, Miss Marchant, please will you give me a dance?”
“With pleasure,” replied Eve, wondering whether she would look very ridiculous spinning round a public ball-room with this funny little man, who was small enough to be almost hidden in the Champernowne draperies; “which shall it be?”
“Oh, the first waltz after our arrival, and I hope your sisters will each give me one of the extras.”
“I shall be very glad,” said the girl in the tartan shawl. “I don’t suppose I shall have too many partners.”
Mr. Tivett looked at the three faces critically. The eldest girl was much the prettiest, but there was a family likeness. The faces were all of one type, and they were all pretty. It smote Mr. Tivett’s gentle heart to think these nice girls should be so badly dressed, while the Champernownes, who always snubbed him, and whom he hated, were glorious in frocks fresh from Bond Street. Lady Hartley had not exaggerated Mr. Tivett’s devotion to the fair sex. He loved the society of young matrons and girls in their teens, was never happier than when making himself useful to the ladies of the family, and especially rejoiced when consulted upon any question of etiquette or costume. He was reputed to have faultless taste in dress, and an exquisite tact in all social matters; and when two matrons of his acquaintance happened to quarrel, each was apt to impart the story of her wrongs to Mr. Tivett, whose only difficulty was to be the adviser of both, without seeming unfaithful to either. He was not a sportsman, and he pleaded a weak chest as a reason for loving easy-chairs, and cosy corners in boudoirs and morning-rooms, and a seat in a carriage when other men were walking. His Christian name was Augustus; but he was always known as Gus, or Gussie.
Having been introduced to the eldest sister, Mr. Tivett was on easy terms with the three girls in about five minutes, and for the rest of the journey the four were prattling gaily, Lady Hartley chiming in now and then, just for civility’s sake, while the other women maintained their unfriendly silence.
“I knew we should be late,” Claudia Champernowne exclaimed at last, as the omnibus drew up at a lighted door, and she saw the long line of carriages filling the rustic street from end to end.
Miss Green and the Champernownes marched at once to the cloak-room, an upper room over the shop, whither Lady Hartley followed. The Marchant girls fell back, and lingered in the vestibule—said vestibule being neither more nor less than the cabinet-maker’s empty shop, transformed by scarlet and white draperies and evergreens in pots. The Marchants felt that Lady Hartley’s hospitality came to an end at the door of the ball-room, and that they would do ill to attach themselves to her party.
“I think we had better wait here for our chaperon,” said Eve, as Maud looked back at her from the stairs. “I’m sure we can never be too grateful to you for bringing us, Lady Hartley.”
“Please don’t speak of such a trifle. I am to take you home, remember. You must look out for us at three o’clock.”
“At three o’clock,” thought Jenny, of the tartan shawl; “that’s as much as to say, ‘In the mean time we don’t know you.’”
They waited in a little group near the stairs, and saw the three Champernownes come sweeping down, swanlike, beautiful, “in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,” and Miss Green in a very severe, tight-fitting yellow silk frock, with a shortish skirt, and round her homely-complexioned throat a collet necklace of emeralds without flaw or feather; and Lady Hartley in a fuss and flutter of palest blue, which seemed just the most telling background for her diamonds. She had diamonds everywhere, butterflies, stars, true lovers’ knots, hearts, and horseshoes, dotted about bust and shoulders amongst the soft fluffiness of azure gauze; diamonds in her hair, in her ears, on her arms. And yet she did not look vulgarly fine. The slender elegance of her form, the delicate colouring of her face and neck harmonized the jewels.
While the Hartley party were composing themselves for their entrance to the dancing-room, a stout matron in red satin and black lace came sailing in, wrapped to the eyes in a white Shetland shawl, and at once made for the Marchants, whom she deliberately kissed, one after the other.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long, dears,” she said, in a fat, good-natured voice. “Ponto had a business appointment at Haslemere, and didn’t get back to his dinner till nine o’clock.”
Mr. Ponto was grinning in the background, very red and puffy,as from a hurried toilet, and with a scarlet camelia in his button-hole; scarlet out of compliment to the hunt.
“Oh no, we have only just come,” answered Eve, troubled by the supercilious stare of the youngest Miss Champernowne, who was looking back from the threshold of the ball-room while the others went in, looking at Mrs. Ponto as at some natural curiosity; and indeed to a young lady whose evening frock had been produced new and immaculate from a Bond Street carton Mrs. Ponto’s crimson satin, lately “done up” with Nottingham lace, and obviously “let out” to accommodate Mrs. Ponto’s increasing bulk, was a thing to wonder at.
The three Marchants and their chaperon entered the ball-room in a cluster. The Redwold Towers party was absorbed in the brilliant throng, had gone straight into the zenith, where the two local peeresses were holding a kind of court, a court splendid with family diamonds and hereditarypoint d’Alençon. Mrs. Ponto made a dash for a corner of the raised bench that went round the room, and established herself and her charges in this coign of vantage.
“If we don’t get seats at once we mightn’t have a chance of sitting down for an hour,” said Mrs. Ponto. “Ain’t the room full? Now, dears, I shall stay here till some one takes me in to supper, so you can leave your fans with me, and feel you’ve got some one to come to between your dances. I had my cup of tea before I came, so I shan’t trouble about the tea-room. It’s a pretty sight, ain’t it?”
A waltz was just ending. The room was very full, but there was the usual surplus of nice-looking girls sitting down, with the usual sprinkling of men who wouldn’t dance, and who were quite satisfied to stand about and get in the way of the dancers.
The peeresses and their court were on the opposite side of the room, in a central position, which commanded dancers, band, and the festooned archway leading to the tea-room. Lady Hartley had seated herself next old Lady Mandelford, a dowager with white hair, whose son was the well-known Lord Mandelford, a man of prodigious wealth and local importance, a rustic Royalty.
Eve had shaken out her well-worn white frock. It was made of some soft woollen stuff, which her old servant Nancy had washed, so it had at least the merit of purity. On that tall and perfectly balanced figure the cheap, simple gown looked exquisite, and the fair fluffy head, with its glitter of starlets, could not have looked more enchanting had the starlets been old Brazilian diamonds, like Lady Mandelford’s, instead of cut glass mounted at Birmingham. The younger sisters had aimed higher than Eve. One in blue, the other in red, straining after Parisian fashion, in cheap silk and satin, had only achieved tawdriness. Eve, in her white frock, might challenge criticism.
There was some one on the other side of the room who thought her lovely as a dream, the same man whose eyes had gazed on her beauty in the moonlight an hour ago, and who had told himself that such a face belonged to fairyland rather than to this dull, everyday earth. He stood looking at her now, across the dancers and the crowd, as she sat demurely in her corner, her alabaster fairness set off by the scarlet background. He put his arm through Sir Hubert’s. “When you’ve done talking to Miss Champernowne I want you to introduce me to Miss Marchant,” he said.
“With all my heart. But there are three Miss Marchants. Which of the three are you dying to know?”
“The fair girl, in white.”
“Oh, she’s the eldest. They are all fair, but I suppose she’s the fairest. Come along, then. I’m to dance the Lancers, Maud tells me,” he added, lowering his voice, “and with Lady Mandelford. I’m to steer the dowager through that complicated performance.”
Sir Hubert wore the hunt colours, a scarlet coat with black velvet collar and white satin facings, and he felt that it behoved him to make some sacrifice in honour of a dance that was called the hunt ball.
“Don’t forget that you have engaged yourself to us, Mr. Vansittart,” said Miss Green, severely. “You are bespoken for eight dances out of eighteen. Three of the eighteen are gone already. You will have to make the most of the seven that remain to you after you have done your duty to us.”
He had forgotten all about those pledges given in the morning-room. Eight dances with young women for whom he cared not a straw, about whom familiarity had bred something not very far from contempt. Eight dances, a veritable bondage; while Eve Marchant was sitting meekly in her corner, partnerless. No, not partnerless; even as he looked little Mr. Tivett marched up to her with an all-conquering air, and led her in among the dancers, just beginning a waltz.
Vansittart took Miss Green’s programme out of her hand with a desperate air.
“Let’s begin at once—if you are disengaged,” he said.
“That makes one off,” she answered, laughing, as she rose and took his arm. “How dreadfully sorry for yourself you look!”
“Then my looks belie me. I was never gladder for myself. I see you have ever so many engagements already. Shall I put myself down for number eighteen?”
“Certainly. You are sure we shall have left before that number arrives.”
They were moving slowly among the dancers by this time, and a minute later they spun off with a fine rhythmical swing. Miss Greenwas what the hunting men called a splendid mover. She had taken trouble to excel in her paces, knowing that her appearance was against ball-room triumphs. Men liked to dance with her—for three reasons. She was rich; she waltzed well; and she had a malevolent tongue, which amused her partners.
It was her delight to criticize her fairer sisters—the flaws in their beauty; the tricks which helped them to be beautiful; their affectations; their vanities; their bad taste.
“Did you ever see three young women ‘fagotées’ like those Marchant girls?” she murmured, in a low, clear voice, which she had cultivated for speaking evil of people near at hand. “That blue girl—that red girl! I don’t know which is worse! The blue frock is an inch and a half shorter on one side than on the other—an advantage, as it shows off the blue slipper, which doesn’t match the frock, and the blue stocking, which doesn’t match the slipper. But the red girl! Please notice the lacing of the red bodice. I assure you the girl isn’t humpbacked, though that bodice certainly suggests deformity.”
“How observant you are, Miss Green; and with what a keen eye for the infinitesimal!”
“I am looking at their chaperon now—the enormous person in dyed crimson satin. It must have been her wedding-gown ages ago—a sweet silver-grey. You don’t call that lady infinitesimal, I hope?”
“Physically large, perhaps—but, from your mental standpoint, microscopic. Now, confess, Miss Green, don’t you think these people infinitely insignificant, simply because they happen not to be rich?”
“I think them immensely amusing. One sees such people only at public balls in the heart of the country. That is why public balls are such fun. Do look at the glass stars in the tallest Miss Marchant’s hair! Did you ever see anything so absurd?”
“What does it matter whether they are glass or diamonds of the purest water? All the gems that were ever ground at Amsterdam could not make her more like a beautiful sylph—Undine—Titania—what you will.”
“Your comparisons are not flattering to the young lady’s intellect. Undine was mindless and soulless; Titania—if Shakespeare knew anything about her—was a silly little person who fell desperately in love with a donkey.”
Their waltz was over, but Miss Green wanted tea, or an ice, or a change of atmosphere—anything which would retain Vansittart in attendance upon her as long as possible. She kept him sitting by her side while she sipped her tea, and ridiculed the people who came in and out of the tea-room. She kept him in bondage whileMr. Tivett conducted Eve Marchant to the buffet, and talked and laughed with her gaily as she ate her ice. How prettily she ate that pink ice—with such a graceful turn of the delicate wrist! Vansittart had leisure to study every line of head and figure, while Miss Green prattled in his ear. He gave a little automatic laugh now and then, feeling that the lady meant him to be amused. Miss Marchant was a long time eating her ice, and was evidently interested in Mr. Tivett’s conversation. Vansittart watched her dreamily, not more jealous of Tivett than if he had seen her a few years earlier, playing with her doll; but just as she had resigned the empty ice-plate, and was moving towards the door, a man in a hunt coat met and stopped her with a semi-authoritative air that made Vansittart’s blood rush angrily to his brow, almost as if the man had insulted him.
“You are saving some dances for me, I hope, Miss Marchant?” said the unknown, with an easy, off-hand manner.
“I don’t know,” faltered Eve. “I mean I think I am engaged for a good many waltzes—as many as I shall care to dance.”
“Let me see,” taking her programme out of her hand. “Oh, you fair deceiver! Why, you might answer about this programme as Olivia did about her history—‘A blank, my Lord.’ I shall write myself against number seven—the dear old Manola—and eleven—a Waldteufel waltz—and, let me see, shall we say fifteen?”
The man was good-looking, dark-haired and dark-eyed, well set up, showing to advantage in the hunt coat—a man likely to be in request at a dance; yet it was evident that Eve Marchant wanted to avoid him. She looked pained and even angry at his persistence.
“My engagements are not upon that card,” she said; “and I am sure you must have a great many people with whom you ought to dance—sooner than with me.”
“That’s my business. I have set my heart upon at least three dances with you.”
“Then I am sorry to disappoint you; I am engaged for all those numbers.”
“But you are free for others? Tell me which.”
“That is Mr. Sefton, of Chadleigh,” said Miss Green, confidentially. “Rather handsome, ain’t he? But not good form. He is not a favourite in his own neighbourhood; but he and Miss Marchant are evidently upon very friendly terms.”
Eve had left the tea-room with Mr. Tivett, closely followed by Mr. Sefton, and Vansittart sat looking after the three retreating figures till they were absorbed in the crowd that filled the dancing-room.
“Did you think so?” he said coldly. “It seemed to me that the gentleman was not a favourite with the young lady.”
“If you had seen them on Christmas Eve on the ice you would have a very different opinion. He was teaching her the outside edge. He was devoted, and she seemed delighted. He would be a great catch for her; but I’m afraid he’s too much a man of the world to be trapped by a pretty face. He will look higher than Miss Marchant.”
“What and who is he?”
“Oh, he belongs to an old Sussex family, and has a fine place on the other side of Blackdown. I am told he is clever; but he is not nice, somehow. People don’t seem to trust him. And there are ugly stories about him, I believe, stories that are not told to ladies, but which have made him unpopular in his own neighbourhood, especially among his own tenant-farmers and cottagers. There are the Lancers, and I am engaged to a callow youth who came with the Mandelford party.”
She rose hurriedly, relinquishing her teacup, which Vansittart had been wearily waiting for, with an air of having been detained by his assiduity. The callow youth, looking very fair and pretty in his brand-new pink coat, appeared in the doorway.
“Oh, Mith Gween, I have been looking for you evewywha’,” he murmured; and they went off to take their places.
Their vis-à-vis were Mr. Sefton and Miss Marchant.
“So she is dancing with him, after all,” thought Vansittart, curiously vexed. “Varium et mutabile semper femina!”