Lady Southminster's Ball.
Captain Winstanley closed with Mrs. Hawbuck for the pretty little
verandah-surrounded cottage on the slope of the hill above Beechdale.
Captain Hawbuck, a retired naval man, to whom the place had been very
dear, was in his grave, and his wife was anxious to try if she and her
hungry children could not live on less money in Belgium than they could
in England. The good old post-captain had improved and beautified the
place from a farm-labourer's cottage into a habitation which was the
quintessence of picturesque inconvenience. Ceilings which you could
touch with your hand; funny little fireplaces in angles of the rooms; a
corkscrew staircase, which a stranger ascended or descended at peril of
life or limb; no kitchen worth mentioning, and stuffy little bedrooms
under the thatch. Seen from the outside the cottage was charming; and
if the captain and his family could only have lived over the way, and
looked at it, they would have had full value for the money invested in
its improvement. Small as the rooms were, however, and despite that
dark slander which hung over the chimneys, Captain Winstanley declared
that the cottage would suit him admirably.
"I like the situation," he said, discussing his bargain in the
coffee-room at The Crown, Lyndhurst.
"I should rather think you did!" cried Mr. Bell, the local surgeon.
"Suits you down to the ground, doesn't it?"
Whereby it will be seen that there was already a certain opinion in the
neighbourhood as to the Captain's motive for planting himself at
Beechdale--so acute is a quiet little community of this kind in
divining the intentions of a stranger.
Captain Winstanley took up his quarters at Beechdale Cottage in less
than a week after Mrs. Tempest's dinner-party. He sent for his horses,
and began the business of hunting in real earnest. His two hunters were
unanimously pronounced screws; but it is astonishing how well a good
rider can get across country on a horse which other people call a screw.
Nobody could deny Captain Winstanley's merits as a horseman. His costume
and appointments had all the finish of Melton Mowbray, and he was always
in the first flight.
Before he had occupied Captain Hawbuck's cottage a month the new-comer
had made friends for himself in all directions. He was as much at home
in the Forest as if he had been native and to the manner born. His
straight riding, his good looks, and agreeable manners won him
everybody's approval. There was nothing dissipated or Bohemian about
him. His clothes never smelt of stale tobacco. He was as punctual at
church every Sunday morning as if he had been a family man, bound to
set a good example. He subscribed liberally to the hounds, and was
always ready with those stray florins and half-crowns by which a man
purchases a cheap popularity among the horse-holding and
ragged-follower class.
Having distinctly asserted her intention of remaining a widow to
Violet, Mrs. Tempest allowed herself the privilege of being civil to
Captain Winstanley. He dropped in at afternoon tea at least twice a
week; he dined at the Abbey House whenever the Scobels or any other
intimate friends were there "in a quiet way." He generally escorted
Mrs. Tempest and her daughter from church on Sunday morning, Violet
persistently loitering twenty yards or so behind them on the narrow
woodland path that led from Beechdale to the Abbey House.
After walking home from church with Mrs. Tempest, it was only natural
that the Captain should stop to luncheon, and after luncheon--the
Sabbath afternoon being, in a manner, a legitimate occasion for
dawdling--it was equally natural for him to linger, looking at the
gardens and greenhouses, or talking beside the drawing-room fire, till
the appearance of the spitfire Queen Anne tea-kettle and Mrs. Tempest's
infusion of orange pekoe.
Sometimes the Scobels were present at these Sunday luncheons, sometimes
not. Violet was with her mother, of course, on these occasions; but,
while bodily present, she contrived to maintain an attitude of
aloofness which would have driven a less resolute man than Conrad
Winstanley to absent himself. A man more sensitive to the opinions of
others could hardly have existed in such an atmosphere of dislike; but
Captain Winstanley meant to live down Miss Tempest's aversion, or to
give her double cause for hating him.
"Why have you given up hunting, Miss Tempest?" he asked one Sunday
afternoon, when they had gone the round of the stables, and Arion had
been fondled and admired--a horse as gentle as an Italian greyhound in
his stable, as fiery as a wild-cat out of it.
"Because I have no one I care to hunt with, now papa is gone."
"But here in the Forest, where everybody knows you, where you might
have as many fathers as the Daughter of the Regiment----"
"Yes, I have many kind friends. But there is not one who could fill my
father's place--for an hour."
"It is a pity," said the Captain sympathetically. "You were so fond of
hunting, were you not?"
"Passionately."
"Then it is a shame you should forego the pleasure. And you must find
it very dull, I should think, riding alone in the forest."
"Alone! I have my horse."
"Surely he does not count as a companion."
"Indeed he does. I wish for no better company than Arion, now papa is
gone."
"Violet is so eccentric!" Mrs. Tempest murmured gently.
Captain Winstanley had taken Mrs. Hawbuck's cottage till the first of
May. The end of April would see the last of the hunting, so this
arrangement seemed natural enough. He hunted in good earnest. There was
no pretence about him. It was only the extra knowing ones, the little
knot of choice spirits at The Crown, who saw some deeper motive than a
mere love of sport for his residence at Beechdale. These advanced minds
had contrived to find out all about Captain Winstanley by this
time--the date of his selling out, his ostensible and hidden reasons
for leaving the army, the amount of his income, and the general
complexion of his character. There was not much to be advanced against
him. No dark stories; only a leading notion that he was a man who
wanted to improve his fortunes, and would not be over-scrupulous as to
the means. But as your over-scrupulous man is one in a thousand, this
was ranking Captain Winstanley with the majority.
The winter was over; there were primroses peeping out of the moss and
brambles, and a shy little dog-violet shining like a blue eye here and
there. The flaunting daffodils were yellow in every glade, and the
gummy chestnut buds were beginning to swell. It was mid-March, and as
yet there had been no announcement of home-coming from Roderick Vawdrey
or the Dovedales. The Duke was said to have taken a fancy to the Roman
style of fox-hunting; Lady Mabel was studying art; the Duchess was
suspected of a leaning to Romanism; and Roderick was dancing attendance
upon the family generally.
"Why should he not stay there with them?" said Mr. Scobel, sipping his
pekoe in a comfortable little circle of gossipers round Mrs. Tempest's
gipsy table. "He has very little else to do with his life. He is a
young man utterly without views or purpose. He is one of our many
Gallios. You could not rouse him to an interest in those stirring
questions that are agitating the Catholic Church to her very
foundation. He has no mission. I have sounded him, and found him full
of a shallow good-nature. He would build a church if people asked him,
and hardly know, when it was finished, whether he meant it for Jews or
Gentiles."
Vixen sat in her corner and said nothing. It amused her--rather with a
half-bitter sense of amusement--to hear them talk about Roderick. He
had quite gone out of her life. It interested her to know what people
thought of him in his new world.
"If the Duke doesn't bring them all home very soon the Duchess will go
over to Rome," said Mrs. Scobel, with conviction. "She has been
drifting that way for ever so long. Ignatius isn't high enough for her."
The Reverend Ignatius sighed. He hardly saw his way to ascending any
higher. He had already, acting always in perfect good faith and
conscientious desire for the right, made his pretty little church
obnoxious to many of the simple old Foresters, to whom a pair of brazen
candlesticks on an altar were among the abominations of Baal, and a
crucifix as hateful as the image of Ashtaroth; obstinate old people of
limited vision, who wanted Mr. Scobel to stick to what they called the
old ways, and read the Liturgy as they had heard it when they were
children. In the minds of these people, Mr. Scobel's self-devotion and
hard service were as nothing, while he cut off the ten commandments
from the Sunday morning service, and lighted his altar candles at the
early celebration.
It was in this month of March that an event impended which caused a
considerable flutter among the dancing population of the Forest. Lord
Southminster's eldest daughter, Lady Almira Ringwood, was to marry Sir
Ponto Jones, the rich ironmaster--an alliance of ancient aristocracy
and modern wealth which was considered one of the grandest achievements
of the age, like the discovery of steam or the electric telegraph; and
after the marriage, which was to be quietly performed in the presence
of about a hundred and fifty blood relations, there was to be a ball,
to which all the county families were bidden, with very little more
distinction or favouritism than in the good old fairy-tale times, when
the king's herald went through the streets of the city to invite
everybody, and only some stray Cinderella, cleaning boots and knives in
a back kitchen, found herself unintentionally excluded. Lady
Southminster drew the line at county families, naturally, but her
kindly feelings allowed a wide margin for parsons, doctors, and
military men--and among these last Captain Winstanley received a card.
Mrs. Scobel declared that this ball would be a grand thing for Violet.
"You have never properly come out, you know, dear," she said; "but at
Southminster you will be seen by everybody; and, as I daresay Lady
Ellangowan will take you under her wing, you'll be seen to the best
advantage."
"Do you think Lady Ellangowan's wing will make any difference--in me?"
inquired Vixen.
"It will make a great deal of difference in the Southminster set,"
replied Mrs. Scobel, who considered herself an authority upon all
social matters.
She was a busy good-natured little woman, the chosen confidante of all
her female friends. People were always appealing to her on small social
questions, what they ought to do or to wear on such and such an
occasion. She knew the wardrobes of her friends as well as she knew her
own. "I suppose you'll wear that lovely pink," she would say when
discussing an impending dinner-party. She gave judicious assistance in
the composition of a _menu_. "My love, everyone has pheasants at this
time of year. Ask your poulterer to send you guinea-fowls, they are
more _distingué_," she would suggest. Or: "If you have dessert ices,
let me recommend you coffee-cream. We had it last week at Ellangowan
Park."
Vixen made no objection to the Southminster ball. She was young, and
fond of waltzing. Whirling easily round to the swing of some German
melody, in a great room garlanded with flowers, was a temporary
cessation of all earthly care, the idea of which was in no wise
unpleasant to her. She had enjoyed her waltzes even at that
charity-ball at the Pavilion, to which she had gone so unwillingly.
The March night was fine, but blustery, when Mrs. Tempest and her
daughter started for the Southminster ball. The stars were shining in a
windy sky, the tall forest trees were tossing their heads, the brambles
were shivering, and a shrill shriek came up out of the woodland every
now and then like a human cry for help.
Mrs Tempest had offered to take Mrs. Scobel and Captain Winstanley in
her roomy carriage. Mr. Scobel was not going to the ball. All such
entertainments were an abhorrence to him; but this particular ball,
being given in Lent, was more especially abhorrent.
"I shouldn't think of going for my own amusement," Mrs. Scobel told her
husband, "but I want to see Violet Tempest at her first local ball
dance. I want to see the impression she makes. I believe she will be
the belle of the ball."
"That would mean the belle of South Hants," said the parson. "She has a
beautiful face for a painted window--there is such a glow of colour."
"She is absolutely lovely, when she likes," replied his wife; "but she
has a curious temper; and there is something very repellent about her
when she does not like people. Strange, is it not, that she should not
like Captain Winstanley?"
"She would be a very noble girl under more spiritual influences,"
sighed the Reverend Ignatius. "Her present surroundings are appallingly
earthly. Horses, dogs, a table loaded with meat in Lent and Advent, a
total ignoring of daily matins and even-song. It is sad to see those we
like treading the broad path so blindly. I feel sorry, my dear, that
you should go to this ball."
"It is only on Violet's account," repeated Mrs. Scobel. "Mrs. Tempest
will be thinking of nothing but her dress; there will be nobody
interested in that poor girl."
Urged thus, on purely benevolent grounds, Mr. Scobel could not withhold
his consent; more especially as he had acquired the habit of letting
his wife do what she liked on most occasions--a marital custom not
easily broken through. So Mrs. Scobel, who was an economical little
woman, "did up" her silver-gray silk dinner-dress with ten shillings'
worth of black tulle and pink rosebuds, and felt she had made a success
that Madame Elise might have approved. Her faith in the silver-gray and
the rosebuds was just a little shaken by her first view of Mrs. Tempest
and Violet; the widow in black velvet, rose-point, and scarlet--Spanish
as a portrait by Velasquez; Violet in black and gold, with white
stephanotis in her hair.
The drive was a long one, well over ten miles, along one of those
splendid straight roads which distinguish the New Forest. Mrs. Tempest
and Mrs. Scobel were in high spirits, and prattled agreeably all the
way, only giving Captain Winstanley time to get a word in edgeways now
and then. Violet looked out of the window and held her peace. There was
always a charm for her in that dark silent forest, those waving
branches and flitting clouds, stars gleaming like lights on a stormy
sea. She was not much elated at the idea of the ball, and "that small,
small, imperceptibly small talk" of her mother's and Mrs. Scobel's was
beyond measure wearisome to her.
"I hope we shall get there after the Ellangowans," said Mrs. Scobel,
when they had driven through the little town of Ringwood, and were
entering a land of level pastures and fertilising streams, which seemed
wonderfully tame after the undulating forest; "it would be so much
nicer for Violet to be in the Ellangowan set from the first."
"I beg to state that Miss Tempest has promised me the first waltz,"
said Captain Winstanley. "I am not going to be ousted by any offshoot
of nobility in Lady Ellangowan's set."
"Oh, of course, if Violet has promised---- What a lot of carriages! I
am afraid there'll be a block presently."
There was every prospect of such a calamity. A confluence of vehicles
had poured into a narrow lane bounded on one side by a treacherous
water-meadow, on the other by a garden-wall. They all came to a
standstill, as Mrs. Scobel had prophesied. For a quarter of an hour
there was no progress whatever, and a good deal of recrimination among
coachmen, and then the rest of the journey had to be done at a walking
pace.
The reward was worth the labour when, at the end of a long winding
drive, the carriage drew up before the Italian front of Southminster
House; a white marble portico, long rows of tall windows brilliantly
lighted, a vista of flowers, and statues, and lamps, and pictures, and
velvet hangings, seen through the open doorway.
"Oh, it is too lovely!" cried Violet, fresh as a schoolgirl in this new
delight; "first the dark forest and then a house like this--it is like
Fairyland."
"And you are to be the queen of it--my queen," said Conrad Winstanley
in a low voice. "I am to have the first waltz, remember that. If the
Prince of Wales were my rival I would not give way."
He detained her hand in his as she alighted from the carriage. She
snatched it from him angrily.
"I have a good mind not to dance at all," she said.
"Why not?"
"It is paying too dearly for the pleasure to be obliged to dance with
you."
"In what school did you learn politeness, Miss Tempest?"
"If politeness means civility to people I despise, I have never learned
it," answered Vixen.
There was no time for further skirmishing. He had taken her cloak from
her, and handed it to the attendant nymph, and received a ticket; and
now they were drifting into the tea-room, where a row of ministering
footmen were looking at the guests across a barricade of urns and
teapots, with countenances that seemed to say, "If you want anything,
you must ask for it. We are here under protest, and we very much wonder
how our people could ever have invited such rabble!"
"I always feel small in a tea-room when there are only men in
attendance," whispered Mr. Scobel, "they are so haughty. I would sooner
ask Gladstone or Disraeli to pour me out a cup of tea than one of those
supercilious creatures."
Lady Southminster was stationed in the Teniers room--a small apartment
at the beginning of the suite which ended in the picture-gallery or
ball-room. She was what Joe Gargery called a "fine figure of a woman,"
in ruby velvet and diamonds, and received her guests with an
indiscriminating cordiality which went far to heal the gaping wounds
of county politics.
The Ellangowans had arrived, and Lady Ellangowan, who was full of
good-nature, was quite ready to take Violet under her wing when Mrs.
Scobel suggested that operation.
"I can find her any number of partners," she said. "Oh, there she
goes--off--already with Captain Winstanley."
The Captain had lost no time in exacting his waltz. It was the third on
the programme, and the band were beginning to warm to their work. They
were playing a waltz by Offenbach--"_Les Traîneaux_"--with an
accompaniment of jingling sleigh-bells--music that had an almost
maddening effect on spirits already exhilarated.
The long lofty picture-gallery made a magnificent ball-room--a polished
floor of dark wood--a narrow line of light under the projecting
cornice, the famous Paul Veronese, the world-renowned Rubens, the
adorable Titian--ideal beauty looking down with art's eternal
tranquillity upon the whisk and whirl of actual life--here a calm
Madonna, contemplating, with deep unfathomable eyes, these brief
ephemera of a night--there Judith with a white muscular arm holding the
tyrant's head aloft above the dancers--yonder Philip of Spain frowning
on this Lenten festival.
Violet and Captain Winstanley waltzed in a stern silence. She was vexed
with herself for her loss of temper just now. In his breast there was a
deeper anger. "When would my day come?" he asked himself. "When shall I
be able to bow this proud head, to bend this stubborn will?" It must be
soon--he was tired of playing his submissive part--tired of holding his
cards hidden.
They held on to the end of the waltz--the last clash of the
sleigh-bells.
"Who's that girl in black and gold?" asked a Guardsman of Lady
Ellangowan; "those two are the best dancers in the room--it's a
thousand to nothing on them."
That final clash of the bells brought the Captain and his partner to
anchor at the end of the gallery, which opened through an archway into
a spacious palm-house with a lofty dome. In the middle of this archway,
looking at the dancers, stood a figure at sight of which Violet
Tempest's heart gave a great leap, and then stood still.
It was Roderick Vawdrey. He was standing alone, listlessly
contemplating the ball-room, with much less life and expression in his
face than there was in the pictured faces on the walls.
"That was a very nice waltz thanks," said Vixen, giving the captain a
little curtsey.
"Shall I take you back to Mrs. Tempest?"
Roderick had seen her by this time, and was coming towards her with a
singularly grave and distant countenance, she thought; not at all like
the Rorie of old times. But of course that was over and done with. She
must never call him Rorie any more, not even in her own thoughts. A
sharp sudden memory thrilled her, as they stood face to face in that
brilliant gallery--the memory of their last meeting in the darkened
room on the day of her father's funeral.
"How do you do?" said Roderick, with a gush of originality. "Your mamma
is here, I suppose."
"Haven't you seen her?"
"No; we've only just come."
"We," no doubt, meant the Dovedale party, of which Mr. Vawdrey was
henceforth a part.
"I did not know you were to be here," said Vixen, "or then that you
were in England."
"We only came home yesterday, or I should have called at the Abbey
House. We have been coming home, or talking about it, for the last
three weeks. A few days ago the Duchess took it into her head that she
ought to be at Lady Almira's wedding--there's some kind of
relationship, you know, between the Ashbournes and the
Southminsters--so we put on a spurt, and here we are."
"I am very glad," said Vixen, not knowing very well what to say; and
then seeing Captain Winstanley standing stiffly at her side, with an
aggrieved expression of countenance, she faltered: "I beg your pardon;
I don't think you have ever met Mr. Vawdrey. Captain Winstanley--Mr.
Vawdrey."
Both gentlemen acknowledged the introduction with the stiffest and
chilliest of bows; and then the Captain offered Violet his arm, and
she, having no excuse for refusing it, submitted quietly to be taken
away from her old friend. Roderick made no attempt to detain her.
The change in him could hardly have been more marked, Vixen thought.
Yes, the old Rorie--playfellow, scapegoat, friend of the dear old
childish days--was verily dead and gone.
"Shall we go and look at the presents?" asked Captain Winstanley.
"What presents?"
"Lady Almira's wedding presents. They are all laid out in the library.
I hear they are very splendid. Everybody is crowding to see them."
"I daresay mamma would like to go, and Mrs. Scobel," suggested Vixen.
"Then we will all go together."
They found the two matrons side by side on a settee, under a lovely
girlish head by Greuze. They were both delighted at the idea of seeing
the presents. It was something to do. Mrs. Tempest had made up her mind
to abjure even square dances this evening. There was something
incongruous in widowhood and the Lancers; especially in one's own
neighbourhood.