THE STATE BALL.
“I have hidden my soul out of sight and said
Let none take pity upon thee. None
Comfort thy crying--for lo! thou art dead.
Lie still now, safe out of the sight of the sun;
Have I not built thee a grave, and wrought
Thy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought?”
The June sun is full of pranks to-day. There it is, scorching up the
leaves in the square, broiling the toilers on the white pavements,
shining down on everything with a lurid glare that makes one wink and
blink, and generally uncomfortable, and now it is peering into the
windows of Baby’s schoolroom, showing up the short-comings of the faded
carpet, the ink stains on the old table, and streaming full on to a
corner where, before her easel, Zai stands, palette and brush in hand,
but idle.
“Oh, it is hot! hot!” she cries impatiently, throwing down her painting
apparatus and pushing her hair back from her forehead.
“Here’s something to cool you!” Gabrielle says, throwing across the
_Morning Post_, and then she has the good feeling to pick up a book and
pretend to be buried in its contents, while Zai reads what she considers
her death warrant.
“A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Miss
Meredyth, daughter of John Meredyth, Esq., of Eaton Place, and Carlton
Conway, Esq.”
Three times Zai reads the announcement over--mechanically spelling each
word--then she drops the paper on the floor, and going up to the open
window, looks out.
She does not find the sun hot now, although it is dancing on her
chesnut hair, and turning each tress to fire. Her heart lies so
dreadfully cold within her breast that it seems to ice her whole frame,
and though her eyes face the strong yellow beams, they do not shrink
from them.
Since she read the words in to-day’s _Post_, she seems to be blind and
deaf to everything, save the fact that Miss Meredyth has won from her
that which she valued most in life.
“Well, Zai?”
Zai has been standing at the window perfectly motionless for half an
hour, her slight figure almost rigid, her head a little thrown back, her
face white as marble and almost as impassive, her two little hands
clasped behind her as in a vice, and Gabrielle thinks it high time to
recall her to a sense of everyday life with all its ills.
“Well, Gabrielle!”
The girl turns and faces her step-sister; her eyes look as if she were
stunned, but her lips smile.
Gabrielle stares at her for a moment, then she bends over her volume
again.
“There, child, don’t act with only me for an audience!” she says
quietly, “You have had enough of acting and actors, goodness knows. What
a brute the man has been!”
“Why?” Zai asks defiantly.
“Why?--because he pretended to love you, and he _knew_ you loved him,
and yet he has quietly bowled you over for that doll of a thing.”
“He cannot help himself, Gabrielle!”
“Why cannot he help himself, pray?”
“Because Carl is so poor. Oh, Gabrielle! Gabrielle!” and, the tension
passed, Zai throws herself down on Baby’s favourite hearth-rug and sobs
as if her heart would burst. “What an awful, _awful_ thing money is!”
“The _want_ of it, you mean! But that man Conway knew he was poor
always. Why did he ever spoon you as he has done?”
“He loved me so--he could not help it!” Zai says tenderly, “And we love
each other dreadfully--_dreadfully_--still, but he thinks I should
suffer so if I did not have the luxury I have been accustomed to all my
life!”
“And he does not think about himself, poor dear unselfish fellow!”
Gabrielle says with a little sneer. “Zai, take my advice, and don’t
waste another thought on him. He is going to marry Miss Meredyth for her
money, let him, and don’t let Miss Meredyth have the pleasure of seeing
that you envy her her husband!”
“I must try and forget Carl,” Zai murmurs feebly. “It would be a sin to
love him when he is married, but I don’t know how to begin. He seems to
run in my head and my heart so!”
“Let some other _genus homo_ turn him out of them. There’s heaps of
eligibles about. Lord Walsingham, for instance, he is young,
good-looking and tolerably well off.”
“Why he squints, Gabrielle! and has red hair!” Zai protests mildly.
“Never mind. What does it matter whether one’s husband has red hair and
a squint? All one wants is a nice house, and fine carriages and horses,
plenty of diamonds etc. Is there no other man you know who could make
you forget that actor fellow?”
“No one!”
Zai blushes crimson. There is meaning lurking in Gabrielle’s manner and
eyes, although her words are simple enough, and she remembers that this
step-sister of hers has resolved to win Lord Delaval for herself.
Let her, Zai thinks; she has never felt so much distaste to accepting
Lord Delaval’s offer as she does at this moment, when her heart is so
sore and her spirit so humiliated.
“I won’t cry any more!” she exclaims, feigning to be indifferent, but in
reality anxious to change the subject. “I must look well before the
Royalties to-night, you know! The Prince was very nice to me at Caryllon
House, and said I was the belle of the room! What are you going to wear,
Gabrielle?”
“Black lace--and you, I suppose, are going to wear sackcloth and ashes!”
“No I am not!” Zai answers lightly. “Mamma coaxed Swaebe out of another
six months’ credit, and so Trixy and Baby and I have loves of pale blue
faille and white illusion, and water lilies trailing all over us. I want
to look beautiful to-night for a reason.
“What reason?” Gabrielle asks, suspiciously.
“Only because---- But no; it’s a secret for the present.” And Zai,
running out hastily, rushes up to her bedroom, and, double locking her
door, cries to her heart’s content.
They are about the last tears dedicated to the memory of Carlton Conway;
but, by-and-by, she bathes her eyes in cold water and smoothes her hair,
and putting on her hat, goes out into the Square. But the Square is
associated in her mind indelibly with that evening when she stole out
from Lady Beranger’s ball to meet her faithless lover, and rising
hastily from the bench, she walks home again.
“Go and lie down, Zai, and rest yourself; you look like a ghost!” Lady
Beranger says harshly, meeting her on the stairs. “Or better still, put
on your white chip hat with the pink roses, and come with me to the
Park. The air will beautify you, perhaps.”
And Zai--who has learned by this time that Lady Beranger’s suggestions
are really fiats--goes up and adorns herself, and is quite bewitching in
the chip and roses by the time the Victoria is at the door.
Lady Beranger leans back, a trifle pale, and with the _soupçon_ of a
frown on her brow, and the carriage is just at Hyde Park Gate before she
volunteers a remark.
“You have seen the _Post_ to-day?” she says, carelessly.
“Yes, Mamma, and I am so glad to see Mr. Conway is going to be married;
Crystal Meredyth is very nice, and awfully rich, you know.”
Lady Beranger turns round slowly and fixes her keen searching eyes on
her daughter.
But Zai has not been born and bred in Belgravia for nothing.
Not a lash quivers--not a change of colour comes--under the scrutiny.
“I always said Carlton Conway was a cad!” her ladyship observes coldly;
“and I am very glad you have found it out too.”
“But I haven’t, Mamma, not the least in the world. I think quite as well
of Mr. Conway as ever.”
Zai’s self-possession amazes and almost annoys Lady Beranger. She is
positively out-Heroding Herod! But she only says, in a cold, hard voice:
“Think as well of him as you like, Zai, so long as you keep it to
yourself. His sort of people are all very nice in their proper places,
but I have never advocated their being in Society. There _is_ the
individual in question!”
Zai looks eagerly round, and her cheeks glow crimson and then wax pale,
and she bites her lips to stay their trembling, as the Meredyths’ high
Barouche with stepping roans dashes by, having for its freight only Miss
Meredyth and her _fiancé_! (Mrs. Meredyth, not so scrupulous as Lady
Beranger about the _bienséances_, thinks there is no harm in an engaged
couple being seen alone in the Park.)
Miss Meredyth, dressed in rose colour, with a sailor’s hat perched
coquettishly on her fair hair, looks uncommonly pretty, and so Carlton
Conway seems to think, for he is so engrossed in regarding her that the
Berangers’ Victoria is passed unnoticed.
“I thought it was the Meredyth girl’s money the man was after, but he
seems to be _énormément épris_,” Lady Beranger remarks indifferently,
hoping the shaft will fly straight home and cure all remaining nonsense
in her daughter’s head, or heart, or wherever it may be.
Zai answers nothing. With a sharp pang of misery and jealousy, she, too,
has noticed how devoted Carl seems. _Après cela le Déluge._
She is thankful when her mother orders “Home.” She is sick of bowing and
smiling when she would like to lie down and die; but nevertheless she
trips airily down to the dining-room, eats more dinner than is her
habit, and after this goes into the conservatory and plucks a couple of
the reddest roses she can find.
“Fanchette, make me awfully pretty to-night!” she coaxes, and the _femme
de chambre_ is nothing loth. Zai has every “possibility,” as she calls
it, of being _belle comme un ange_, and more than satisfies her
exquisite Parisian taste when her toilette is complete.
“She wants but two little wings to make her a veritable angel,”
Fanchette says to the English maid who assists her in her duties. “Mees
Zai is the flower of the house!”
“Flower of the _flock_, you mean,” Jane corrects.
“No, I do not,” Fanchette replies, offended. “I have _never_ heard of
flowers in a flock. I have heard of a flock of goose--and _you_ are one
of them.”
Meanwhile, Zai stands before her mirror. Her eyes are so sad--so sad,
that they look too large for her small white face.
“Oh, Carl! Carl!” she says, half aloud, “you have forgotten me quite!
And I love you--love you so much that my heart is broken, Carl!”
“Zai, the carriage is ready,” cries Baby, drumming her knuckles on the
closed door.
Zai starts guiltily. What right has she to be murmuring love words to a
man who will soon be another woman’s husband!
She clasps a pearl necklace round her throat, fastens a pearl star into
her bonnie brown hair, then pauses one moment.
It is the first time in her life that she has ever had recourse to the
foreign aid of ornament, and it seems quite an awful thing to her. But
no one must guess at her feelings from her wan face to-night. She had
not been proud with Carl because she loved him so, but she must be proud
with the world, and not wear her poor desolate heart on her sleeve for
daws to peck at.
She takes the two roses she plucked, pulls off their petals mercilessly,
then rubs them on her cheeks, and flinging on her cloak she runs
downstairs.
Lady Beranger is putting the finishing touches to her elaborate dress of
primrose satin and _point de Flandre_, in which she looks like an
empress, and only the three girls are assembled in the hall when Zai
appears.
“How do I look?” she asks, throwing off her wrap. “Fanchette says I look
_belle comme un ange_, and I want to be especially beautiful to-night!”
“What for?” three voices ask at once. “It’s only a State Ball, on the
pattern of all the others we have been to. The Queen won’t be there to
make anything different. So what on earth does it signify how you look?”
“I’ll tell you!” Zai says slowly and deliberately and unflinchingly. The
rose petals hide the pallor on her cheeks, and the smile on her lips
does away with the sadness in her eyes. “But, girls, you must keep it a
secret from the Governor and Mamma. I want to look my very best
to-night, because I intend to make my bow before the Princess as a
future _Peeress_!”
Lady Beranger enters at this moment.
The State Ball is worth seeing after all, though the Beranger girls had
said that it was exactly on the same pattern as its predecessors, and
that Her Gracious Majesty was not going to shed the light of her august
presence to make it any different.
Seldom within four walls has more beauty been gathered than to-night. Of
course everyone admires the Princess most, but of feminine loveliness
there is every possible variety to suit every possible taste.
There is also a good deal of the feminine element which is not lovely.
But, as if to atone for Dame Nature’s shortcomings, it is generally
expensively dressed.
Zai soon has cause to forget or despise Fanchette’s soothing doctrine of
the fitness of things, and to feel that her pale blue _faille_ and white
illusion, garnished with water lilies, are chiefly remarkable for their
fresh simplicity, as she views the superb silks and satins and laces
that do honour to Royalty.
She dances away with half-a-dozen of the Household Brigade, with the
Duke of Shortland, Lord Walsingham, and several Belgravian _habitués_,
and then she walks through the room with Percy Rayne.
He is quite as good as a catalogue in a ball-room. Ever since he was a
small boy Fate has hung him about the Court of St. James’. He has the
names of the upper current, and all the social celebrities, on the tips
of his well-shaped nails, and faces he never forgets. Added to these, he
has all the fashionable gossip on his tongue, for in the interludes of
“business” at the F.O., as well as at the other “O’s,” they enjoy a dish
of scandal as much as the softer sex do.
He points out the Beauties now to Zai, who, in spite of her
heart-broken condition, regards them with admiring interest.
“There!” he says, “is an American, Mrs. Washington Ulysses Trotter,
called the Destroying Angel, because she kills everyone dead, from
Princes downward, by a glance of her beautiful eyes; but, unfortunately
for her, her triumphal car will be probably stopped in its career. The
Yankees are going out of fashion, you know. Royalty has decreed it. For
Royalty, like common flesh, is liable to get bothered with being run
after and accosted as if it were Jack or Tom or Harry. But Mrs.
Washington Ulysses Trotter does not mind much. She knows her little
outing at Buckingham Palace is quite enough to get her the _entrée_ into
all the Fifth Avenue houses. She will talk about the Prince--
“Oh my, isn’t he elegant, and so chatty! I felt just like talking to
Cyrus Hercules Hopkins--that’s my cousin down Chicago way, you know. And
the Princess! well, certainly, _she_ isn’t proud! It was just like being
at home in our English basement brown stone house, Maddison Avenue--at
Buckingham Palace!”
Zai laughs, and he rattles on.
“That’s one of our big financier’s daughters. Ugly, isn’t she? I hate
the type. The _parure_ of brilliants isn’t bad, and those yards of
lace--_point D’ Alençon_, isn’t it--that trail about her are worth more
than my year’s salary. But they are so devilish stingy in the Offices.
We work like slaves, and get neither tin nor _kudös_. And you would not
believe it, Zai, but the Foreign Secretary hasn’t more responsibility on
his back than I have on mine! See! there’s the famous wife of one of
the Ministers--Count Schoen. She has been a celebrated beauty in her
day, and cannot forget it. And they say she enamels and bakes her face
in an oven. What do you think a cousin of mine--an _ingénue_ from the
country--did, at the Caledonian Ball? She went up to the end of the
room, and after intently examining Count and Countess Schoen, said
aloud,
“‘How funny that they have Madame Tussaud’s figures here.’
“Imagine the horror of her partner!”
Zai laughs again. But this time the laugh is forced, and she catches her
breath hard.
Through the swaying crowd she espies Gabrielle among the bevy of
beauties.
Gabrielle holds her own to-night. Her black lace dress becomes her white
creamy skin admirably. Scarlet japonicas burn and gleam in her
coal-black hair and on her bosom. On her cheeks, the bright pink flush
lends increased lustre to her large dark eyes. As she sweeps along she
has that supreme unconsciousness of manner which is never seen save in a
woman who feels she is well dressed and able to defy the criticism of
her own sex.
Gabrielle does not see Zai or Percy Rayne looking at her, for her eyes
are mostly cast down on the fan she carries, neither does Lord Delaval,
on whose arm she leans, observe them, for he is bending and speaking
very low under the sweep of his long fair moustache, while his glance
rests on the undeniably very handsome face near his shoulder.
“Don’t they make a good looking couple?” asks Rayne. “What a pity they
don’t arrange to walk through life together--they look so well doing it
through a ball-room.”
“They are both handsome,” Zai answers indifferently, but she is, spite
of her, a little piqued.
This man--to whom her answer has to be given to-night--has not even
deemed it worth his while to ask for it, though the evening is wearing
on. His neglect hurts her more, sore and suffering so lately from
Carlton Conway’s behaviour, and poor little Zai feels that she would
like to hide her diminished head for ever.
“I am very tired,” she says to her partner; “Do you think I could get a
seat somewhere?”
“Yes; but come out of this crowd. It’s awfully hot, and you look like
the whitest lily, Zai--we’ll find a seat somewhere.”
So they go out, and he finds a chair for her in a vestibule, where a
little cool air revives her.
“I _must_ go. I have to dance this with Lady Vernon. Do you mind sitting
here quietly till I come back?” he asks kindly, seeing how weary and wan
she looks.
“I should like to stay quiet here very much,” Zai answers gratefully;
“and don’t hurry back for me.”
She half closes her eyes, and fans herself slowly, and feels
desolate--so desolate.
Her womanly triumph over Miss Meredyth has evidently fallen to the
ground; Lord Delaval has either changed his mind, or else he was only
laughing at her at Caryllon House--and as she thinks thus, Zai shivers
with mortification and shame, and leaning her head against the wall,
grows lost to external things.
She does not know how long she has sat here, and she does not care--all
she yearns for is the solitude of her own room; but the ball is not half
over, and hours--dreary hours--lie before her.
“Zai! is it to be--Yes?”
She starts up, flushing red as a rose--her heart beating wildly, her
eyes with a dumb wonder in them.
She is but a bit of a girl, she has been cruelly jilted by the man she
loves, and she craves for a little incense to her _amour propre_, even
though it be dearly bought.
“It is--yes,” she almost whispers; then in a sort of mist she sees Lord
Delaval’s face light up, and the colour creeps warmly over his blond
skin.
“Thank you, my darling!” he says very low, bending over her, and she
feels his lips touch her bare shoulder. Then she puts her hand on his
arm, and without another word they walk back into the ball-room, and up
to Lady Beranger.
“Let me present to you the future Lady Delaval!” he says quietly, and
Zai slips her ice-cold fingers into her mother’s clasp, and for the
first time her mother looks at her with positive affection in her
glance.
“Is it true, Zai!” she asks, eagerly.
“Quite true, Mamma,” Zai answers without a falter.
A little later the news has been told to the Royalties, and with kindly
smiles and words they give their congratulations on her future
happiness.
But though the Royalties know of the match in prospective, Zai pleads
that it may be kept a secret from her sisters for the present. It may be
that the death and burial of her first love is too recent to permit of
matrimonial rejoicings just now, or it may be that she wants to realise
what has come to pass, and to resign herself to the future before the
others touch upon the subject, and probe not too quietly the still open
wound made by Carlton Conway. Lord and Lady Beranger are too well
pleased that matters have turned out so satisfactorily to refuse her
request.
And, as for Lord Delaval himself, perhaps he feels a little
uncomfortable at appearing on the scene as a devoted lover before
Gabrielle--Gabrielle, who has told him, in the passionate words that
rush unchecked to her scarlet lips, that the day of his marriage to any
other woman will be the day of her death.
She is not one to kill herself; she is not romantic enough for folly of
that kind; what she means is probably a social and moral death; but Lord
Delaval--with the innate vanity of his sex--believes that Gabrielle’s
handsome face and superb figure will be found floating on the turbid
bosom of old Father Thames, and he shrinks more from the scandal of the
thing than from the remorse likely to rise up in his breast. Zai’s
desire, then, that the engagement shall be kept quiet for a while, meets
with his approval. After all, he can find chances to gather honey (if
not all the day) from his betrothed’s sweet lips--and stolen sweets have
always been nicer to his thinking than any others.
When they say good-night, he contents himself by squeezing five very
cold fingers, and slipping a magnificent brilliant on to the third one,
which pledge of her bondage Zai does not even glance at before she drops
it into her pocket.
“Did you like the ball, Zai?” Trixy asks, as they brush their hair
before going to bed.
“I hated it,” Zai answers, giving her chesnut tresses an impatient pull.
“I wish I had never gone to it!”
[Illustration: text decoration]