"Take, oh! take those lips away,
That so sweetly were foresworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn:
But my kisses bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain."
--Shakespeare.
The longed-for night has arrived at last; so has Molly's dress, a very
marvel of art, fresh and pure as newly-fallen snow. It is white silk
with tulle, on which white water-lilies lie here and there, as though
carelessly thrown, all their broad and trailing leaves gleaming from
among the shining folds.
Miss Massereene is in her own room, dressing, her faithful Sarah on her
knees beside her. She has almost finished her toilet, and is looking
more than usually lovely in her London ball-dress.
"Our visit is nearly at an end, Sarah; how have you enjoyed it?" she
asks, in an interval, during which Sarah is at her feet, sewing on more
securely one of her white lilies.
"Very much, indeed, miss. They've all been excessive polite, though
they do ask a lot of questions. Only this evening they wanted to know
if we was estated, and I said, 'Yes,' Miss Molly, because after all,
you know, miss, it _is_ a property, however small; and I wasn't
going to let myself down. And then that young man of Captain Shadwell's
ast me if we was 'county people,' which I thought uncommon imperent.
Not but what he's a nice young man, miss, and very affable."
"Still constant, Sarah?" says Molly, who is deep in the waves of doubt,
not being able to decide some important final point about her dress.
"Oh, law! yes, miss, he is indeed. It was last night he was saying as
my accent was very sweet. Now there isn't one of them country bumpkins,
miss, as would know whether you had an accent or not. It's odd how
traveling do improve the mind."
"Sarah, you should pay no attention to those London young men,--(pin it
more to this side),--because they never mean anything."
"Law, Miss Molly, do you say so?" says her handmaid, suddenly
depressed. "Well, of course, miss, you--who are so much with London
gentlemen--ought to know. And don't they mean what they say to you,
Miss Molly?"
"I, eh?" says Molly, rather taken aback; and then she bursts out
laughing. "Sarah, only I know you to be trustworthy, I should certainly
think you sarcastic."
"What's that, miss?"
"Never mind,--something thoroughly odious. You abash me, Sarah. By all
means believe what each one tells you. It may be as honestly said to
you as to me. And now, how do I look, Sarah? Speak," says Molly,
sailing away from her up the room like a "white, white swan," and then
turning to confront her and give her a fair opportunity of judging of
her charms.
"Just lovely," says Sarah, with the most flattering sincerity of tone.
"There is no doubt, Miss Molly, but you look quite the lady."
"Do I really? Thank you, Sarah," says Molly, humbly.
"I agree with Sarah," says Cecil, who has entered unnoticed. She
affects blue, as a rule, and is now attired in palest azure, with a
faint-pink blossom in her hair, and another at her breast. "Sarah is a
person of much discrimination; you do look 'quite the lady.' You should
be grateful to me, Molly, when you remember I ordered your dress; it is
almost the prettiest I have ever seen, and with you in it the effect is
maddening."
"Let me get down-stairs, at all events, without having my head turned,"
says Molly, laughing. "Oh, Cecil, I feel so happy! To have a really
irreproachable ball-dress, and to go to a really large ball, has been
for years the dream of my life."
"I wonder, when the evening is over, how you will look on your dream?"
Cecil cannot help saying. "Come, we are late enough as it is. But first
turn round and let me see the train. So; that woman is a perfect artist
where dresses are concerned. You look charming."
"And her neck and arms, my lady!" puts in Sarah, who is almost tearful
in her admiration. "Surely Miss Massereene's cannot be equaled. They
are that white, Miss Molly, that no one could be found fault with for
comparing them to the dribbling snow."
"A truly delightful simile," exclaims Molly, merrily, and forthwith
follows Cecil to conquest.
They find the drawing-rooms still rather empty. Marcia is before them,
and Philip and Mr. Potts; also Sir Penthony. Two or three determined
ball-goers have arrived, and are dotted about, looking over albums,
asking each other how they do, and thinking how utterly low it is of
all the rest of the county to be so late. "Such beastly affectation,
you know, and such a putting on of side, and general straining after
effect."
"I hope, Miss Amherst, you have asked a lot of pretty girls," says
Plantagenet, "and only young ones. Old maids make awful havoc of my
temper."
"I don't think there are 'lots' of pretty girls anywhere; but I have
asked as many as I know. And there are among them at least two
acknowledged belles."
"You don't say so!" exclaims Sir Penthony. "Miss Amherst, if you wish
to make me eternally grateful you will point them out to me. There is
nothing so distressing as not to know. And once I was introduced to a
beauty, and didn't discover my luck until it was too late. I never even
asked her to dance! Could you fancy anything more humiliating? Give you
my honor I spoke to her for ten minutes and never so much as paid her a
compliment. It was too cruel,--and she the queen of the evening, as I
was told afterward."
"You didn't admire her?" asks Cecil, interested. "Never saw her
beauty?"
"No. She was tall and had arched brows,--two things I detest."
The ball is at its height. Marcia, dressed in pale maize silk,--which
suits her dark and glowing beauty,--is still receiving a few late
guests in her usual stately but rather impassive manner. Old Mr.
Amherst, standing beside her, gives her an air of importance. Beyond
all doubt she will be heavily dowered,--a wealthy heiress, if not
exactly the heir.
Philip, as the supposed successor to the house and lands of Herst,
receives even more attention; while Molly, except for her beauty, which
outshines all that the room contains, is in no way noticeable. Though,
when one holds the ace of trumps, one feels almost independent of the
other honors.
The chief guest--a marquis, with an aristocratic limp and only one
eye--has begged of her a square dance. Two lords--one very young, the
other distressingly old--have also solicited her hand in the "mazy
dance." She is the reigning belle; and she knows it.
Beautiful, sparkling, brilliant, she moves through the rooms. A great
delight, a joyous excitement, born of her youth, the music, her own
success, fills her. She has a smile, a kindly look, for every one. Even
Mr. Buscarlet, in the blackest of black clothes and rather indifferent
linen, venturing to address her as she goes by him, receives a gracious
answer in return. So does Mrs. Buscarlet, who is radiant in pink satin
and a bird-of-paradise as a crown.
"Ain't she beautiful?" says that substantial matron, with a beaming air
of approbation, as though Molly was her bosom friend, addressing the
partner of her joys. "Such a lovely-turned jaw! She has quite a look of
my sister Mary Anne when a girl. I wish, my dear, she was to be heiress
of Herst, instead of that stuck-up girl in yellow."
"So do I; so do I," replies Buscarlet, following the movements of
Beauty as she glides away, smiling, dimpling on my lord's arm.
"And--ahem!"--with a meaning and consequential cough--"perhaps she may.
Who knows? There is a certain person who has often a hold of her
grandfather's ear! Ahem!"
Meantime the band is playing its newest, sweetest strains; the air is
heavy with the scent of flowers. The low ripple of conversation and
merry laughter rises above everything. The hours are flying all too
swiftly.
"May I have the pleasure of this waltz with you?" Sir Penthony is
saying, bending over Lady Stafford, as she sits in one of the
numberless small, dimly-lit apartments that branch off the hall.
"Dear Sir Penthony, do you think I will test your good-nature so far?
You are kind to a fault, and I will not repay you so poorly as to avail
myself of your offer. Fancy condemning you to waste a whole dance on
your--wife!"
The first of the small hours has long since sounded, and she is a
little piqued that not until now has he asked her to dance.
Nevertheless, she addresses him with her most charming smile.
"I, for my part, should not consider it a dance wasted," replies he,
stiffly.
"Is he not self-denying?" she says, turning languidly toward Lowry,
who, as usual, stands beside her.
"You cannot expect me to see it in that light," replies he, politely.
"May I hope for this waltz?" Sir Penthony asks again, this time very
coldly.
"Not this one; perhaps a little later on."
"As you please, of course," returns he, as, with a frown and an inward
determination never to ask her again, he walks away.
In the ball-room he meets Luttrell, evidently on the lookout for a
missing partner.
"Have you seen Miss Massereene?" he asks instantly. "I am engaged to
her, and can see her nowhere."
"Try one of those nests for flirtation," replies Stafford, bitterly,
turning abruptly away, and pointing toward the room he has just
quitted.
But Luttrell goes in a contrary direction. Through one conservatory
after another, through ball-room, supper-room, tea-room, he searches
without success. There is no Molly to be seen anywhere.
"She has forgotten our engagement," he thinks, and feels a certain pang
of disappointment that it should be so. As he walks, rather dejectedly,
into a last conservatory, he is startled to find Marcia there alone,
gazing with silent intentness out of the window into the garden
beneath.
As he approaches she turns to meet his gaze. She is as pale as death,
and her dark eyes are full of fire. The fingers of her hand twitch
convulsively.
"You are looking for Eleanor?" she says, intuitively, her voice low,
but vibrating with some hidden emotion. "See, you will find her there."
She points down toward the garden through the window where she has been
standing, and moves away. Impelled by the strangeness of her manner,
Luttrell follows her direction, and, going over to the window, gazes
out into the night.
It is a brilliant moonlight night; the very stars shine with redoubled
glory; the chaste Diana, riding high in the heavens, casts over "tower
and stream" and spreading parks "a flood of silver sheen;" the whole
earth seems bright as gaudy day.
Beneath, in the shrubberies, pacing to and fro, are Molly and Philip
Shadwell, evidently in earnest conversation. Philip at least seems
painfully intent and eager. They have stopped, as if by one impulse,
and now he has taken her hand. She hardly rebukes him; her hand lies
passive within his; and now,--_now_, with a sudden movement, he
has placed his arm around her waist.
"Honor or no honor," says Luttrell, fiercely, "I will see it out with
her now."
Drawing a deep breath, he folds his arms and leans against the window,
full of an agonized determination to know the worst.
Molly has put up her hand and laid it on Philip's chest, as though
expostulating, but makes no vehement effort to escape from his embrace.
Philip, his face lit up with passionate admiration, is gazing down into
the lovely one so near him, that scarcely seems to shrink from his open
homage. The merciless, cruel moon, betrays them all too surely.
Luttrell's pulses are throbbing wildly, while his heart has almost
ceased to beat. Half a minute--that is a long hour--passes thus; a few
more words from Philip, an answer from Molly. Oh, that he could hear!
And then Shadwell stoops until, from where Luttrell stands, his face
seems to grow to hers.
Tedcastle's teeth meet in his lip as he gazes spell-bound. A cold
shiver runs through him, as when one learns that all one's dearest,
most cherished hopes are trampled in the dust. A faint moisture stands
on his brow. It is the bitterness of death!
Presently a drop of blood trickling slowly down--the sickly flavor of
it in his mouth--rouses him. Instinctively he closes his eyes, as
though too late to strive to shut out the torturing sight, and, with a
deep curse, he presses his handkerchief to his lips and moves away as
one suddenly awakened from a ghastly dream.
In the doorway he meets Marcia; she, too, has been a witness of the
garden scene, and as he passes her she glances up at him with a curious
smile.
"If you wish to keep her you should look after her," she whispers, with
white lips.
"If she needs looking after, I do _not_ wish for her," he answers,
bitterly, and the next moment could kill himself, in that he has been
so far wanting in loyalty to his most disloyal love.
With his mind quite made up, he waits through two dances silently,
almost motionless, with his back against a friendly wall, hardly taking
note of anything that is going on around him, until such time as he can
claim another dance from Molly.
It comes at last: and, making his way through the throng of dancers, he
reaches the spot where, breathless, smiling, she sits fanning herself,
an adoring partner dropping little honeyed phrases into her willing
ear.
"This is our dance," Luttrell says, in a hard tone, standing before
her, with compressed lips and a pale face.
"Is it?" with a glance at her card.
"Never mind your card. I know it is ours," he says, and, offering her
his arm, leads her, not to the ball-room, but on to a balcony, from
which the garden can be reached by means of steps.
Before descending he says,--always in the same uncompromising tone:
"Are you cold? Shall I fetch you a shawl?"
And she answers:
"No, thank you. I think the night warm," being, for the moment, carried
away by the strangeness and determination of his manner.
When they are in the garden, and still he has not spoken, she breaks
the silence.
"What is it, Teddy?" she asks, lightly. "I am all curiosity. I never
before saw you look so angry."
"'Angry'?--no,--I hardly think there is room for anger. I have brought
you here to tell you--I will not keep to my engagement with you--an
hour longer."
Silence follows this declaration,--a dead silence, broken only by the
voices of the night and the faint, sweet, dreamy sound of one of
Gungl's waltzes as it steals through the air to where they stand.
They have ceased to move, and are facing each other in the narrow
pathway. A few beams from the illumined house fall across their feet;
one, more adventurous than the rest, has lit on Molly's face, and
lingers there, regardless of the envious moonbeams.
How changed it is! All the soft sweetness, the gladness of it, that
characterized it a moment since, is gone. All the girlish happiness and
excitement of a first ball have vanished. She is cold, rigid, as one
turned to stone. Indignation lies within her lovely eyes.
"I admit you have taken me by surprise," she says, slowly. "It is
customary--is it not?--for the one who breaks an engagement to assign
some reason for so doing?"
"It is. You shall have my reason. Half an hour ago I stood at that
window,"--pointing to it,--"and saw you in the shrubberies--with--Shadwell!"
"Yes? And then?"
"Then--then!" With a movement full of passion he lays his hands upon
her shoulders and turns her slightly, so that the ray which has
wandered once more rests upon her face. "Let me look at you," he says;
"let me see how bravely you can carry out your deception to its end.
Its _end_, mark you; for you shall never again deceive me. I have
had enough of it. It is over. My love for you has died."
"Beyond all doubt it had an easy death," replies she, calmly. "There
could never have been much life in it. But all this is beside the
question. I have yet to learn my crime. I have yet to learn what awful
iniquity lies in the fact of my being with Philip Shadwell."
"You are wonderfully innocent," with a sneer. "Do you think then that
my sight failed me?"
"Still I do not understand," she says, drawing herself up, with a
little proud gesture. "What is it to me whether you or all the world
saw me with Philip? Explain yourself."
"I will." In a low voice, almost choked with passion and despair. "You
will understand when I tell you I saw him with his arms around you--you
submitting--you---- And then--I saw him--kiss you. That I should live
to say it of you!"
"_Did_ you see him kiss me?" still calmly. "Your eyesight is
invaluable."
"Ah! you no longer deny it? In your inmost heart no doubt you are
laughing at me, poor fool that I have been. How many other times have
you kissed him, I wonder, when I was not by to see?"
"Whatever faults you may have had, I acquitted you of brutality," says
she, in a low, carefully suppressed tone.
"You never loved me. In that one matter at least you were honest; you
never professed affection. And yet I was mad enough to think that after
a time I should gain the love of a flirt,--a coquette."
"You were mad to _care_ for the love of 'a flirt,--a coquette.'"
"I have been blind all these past weeks," goes on he, unheeding,
"determined not to see (what all the rest of the world, no doubt, too
plainly saw) what there was between you and Shadwell. But I am blind no
longer. I am glad,--yes, thankful," cries the young man, throwing out
one hand, as though desirous of proving by action the truth of his sad
falsehood,--"thankful I have found you out at last,--before it was too
late."
"I am thankful too; but for another reason. I feel grateful that your
suspicions have caused you to break off our engagement. And now that it
is broken,--irremediably so,--let me tell you that for once your
priceless sight has played you false. I admit that Philip placed his
arm around me (but not unrebuked, as you would have it); I admit he
stooped to kiss me; but," cries Molly, with sudden passion that leaves
her pale as an early snow-drop, "I do _not_ admit he kissed me.
Deceitful, worthless, flirt, coquette, as you think me, I have not yet
fallen so low as to let one man kiss me while professing to keep faith
with another."
"You say this--after----"
"I do. And who is there shall dare give me the lie? Beware, Tedcastle;
you have gone far enough already. Do not go too far. You have chosen to
insult me. Be it so. I forgive you. But, for the future, let me see,
and hear, and know as little of you as may be possible."
"Molly, if what you now----"
"Stand back, sir," cries she, with an air of majesty and with an
imperious gesture, raising one white arm, that gleams like snow in the
dark night, to wave him to one side.
"From henceforth remember, I am deaf when you address me!"
She sweeps past him into the house, without further glance or word,
leaving him, half mad with doubt and self-reproach, to pace the gardens
until far into the morning.
When he does re-enter the ball-room he finds it almost deserted. Nearly
all the guests have taken their departure. Dancing is growing
half-hearted; conversation is having greater sway with those that still
remain.
The first person he sees--with Philip beside her--is Molly, radiant,
sparkling, even more than usually gay. Two crimson spots burn upon
either cheek, making her large eyes seem larger, and bright as gleaming
stars.
Even as Luttrell, with concentrated bitterness, stands transfixed at
some little distance from her, realizing how small a thing to her is
this rupture between them, that is threatening to break his heart, she,
looking up, sees him.
Turning to her companion, she whispers something to him in a low tone,
and then she laughs,--a soft, rippling laugh, full of mirth and music.
"There go the chimes again," says Mr. Potts, who has just come up,
alluding to Molly's little cruel outburst of merriment. "I never saw
Miss Massereene in such good form as she is in to-night. Oh!"--with a
suppressed yawn--"'what a day we're 'aving!' I wish it were all to come
over again."
"Plantagenet, you grow daily more dissipated," says Cecil Stafford,
severely. "A little boy like you should be in your bed hours ago;
instead of which you have been allowed to sit up until half-past four,
and----"
"And still I am not 'appy?' How could I be when you did me out of that
solitary dance you promised me? I really believed, when I asked you
with such pathos in the early part of the evening to keep that one
green spot in your memory for me, you would have done so."
"Did I forget you?" remorsefully. "Well, don't blame me. Mr. Lowry
_would_ keep my card for me, and, as a natural consequence, it was
lost. After that, how was it possible for me to keep to my
engagements?"
"I think it was a delightful ball," Molly says, with perhaps a shade
too much _empressement_. "I never in all my life enjoyed myself so
well."
"Lucky you," says Cecil. "Had I been allowed I should perhaps have been
happy too; but"--with a glance at Stafford, who is looking the very
personification of languid indifference--"when people allow their
tempers to get the better of them----" Here she pauses with an eloquent
sigh.
"I hope you are not alluding to me," says Lowry, who is at her elbow,
with a smile that awakes in Stafford a mild longing to strangle him.
"Oh, no!"--sweetly. "How could you think it? I am not ungrateful; and I
know how carefully you tried to make my evening a pleasant one."
"If I succeeded it is more than I dare hope for," returns he, in a low
tone, intended for her ears alone.
She smiles at him, and holds out her arm, that he may refasten the
eighth button of her glove that has mysteriously come undone. He rather
lingers over the doing of it. He is, indeed, strangely awkward, and
finds an unaccountable difficulty in inducing the refractory button to
go into its proper place.
"Shall we bivouac here for the remainder of the night, or seek our
beds?" asks Sir Penthony, impatiently. "I honestly confess the charms
of that eldest Miss Millbanks have completely used me up. Too much of a
good thing is good for nothing; and she _is_ tall. Do none of the
rest of you feel fatigue? I know women's passion for conquest is not
easily satiated,"--with a slight sneer--"but at five o'clock in the
morning one might surely call a truce."
They agree with him, and separate, even the tardiest guest having
disappeared by this time, with a last assurance of how intensely they
have enjoyed their evening; though when they reach their chambers a few
of them give way to such despair and disappointment as rather gives the
lie to their expressions of pleasure.
Poor Molly, in spite of her false gayety,--put on to mask the wounded
pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with
dismay,--flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining
hours that rest between her and her maid's morning visit.
"Alas! how easily things go wrong:
A sigh too much or a kiss too long."
For how much less--for the mere suspicion of a kiss--have things gone
wrong with her? How meagre is the harvest she has gathered in from all
her anticipated pleasure, how poor a fruition has been hers!
Now that she and her lover are irrevocably separated, she remembers,
with many pangs of self-reproach, how tender and true and honest he has
proved himself in all his dealings with her; and, though she cannot
accuse herself of actual active disloyalty toward him, a hidden voice
reminds her how lightly and with what persistent carelessness she
accepted all his love, and how indifferently she made return.
With the desire to ease the heartache she is enduring, she tries--in
vain--to encourage a wrathful feeling toward him, calling to mind how
ready he was to believe her false, how easily he flung her off, for
what, after all, was but a fancied offense. But the very agony of his
face as he did so disarms her, recollecting as she does every change
and all the passionate disappointment of it.
Oh that she had repulsed Philip on the instant when first he took her
hand, as it had been in her heart to do!--but for the misery he showed
that for the moment softened her. Mercy on such occasions is only cruel
kindness, so she now thinks,--and has been her own undoing. And
besides, what is his misery to hers?
An intense bitterness, a positive hatred toward Shadwell, who has
brought all this discord into her hitherto happy life, grows within
her, filling her with a most unjust longing to see him as wretched as
he has unwittingly made her; while yet she shrinks with ever-increasing
reluctance from the thought that soon she must bring herself to look
again upon his dark but handsome face.
Luttrell, too,--she must meet him; and, with such swollen eyes and
pallid cheeks, the bare idea brings a little color into her white face.
As eight o'clock strikes, she rises languidly from her bed, dressed as
she is, disrobing hurriedly, lest even her woman should guess how
wakeful she had been, throws open her window, and lets the pure cold
air beat upon her features.
But when Sarah comes she is not deceived. So distressed is she at her
young mistress's appearance that she almost weeps aloud, and gives it
as her opinion that balls and all such nocturnal entertainments are the
invention of the enemy.