IN WHICH LOVEDAY DANCES
The Mayor had stepped forward, fearing lest this young person might be
annoying the heiress; the bandsmen had turned from the final survey of
their instruments to gaze; here and there various people who recognised
Loveday were pressing through the crowd, eager to see and hear.
Only Miss Le Pettit had drawn back against the protecting arm of the
gentleman who was to be her partner. Loveday still stayed, her riband
in her hands.
There came comments from the crowd.
"Loveday Strick! She'm mad! This month past she'm been like a crazy
thing about the Flora!"
"I thought all the time she must be mad to have imagined Miss Le Pettit
meant to dance along wi' she!"
"What's the maid got on? I can't rightly see."
"Old white, but a brave new sash."
At that Loveday raised her head and looked about her. A shrill voice
from the crowd answered the last speaker.
"A new sash; Ted'n possible. Us have all been laughing because she
couldn' come by one nohow." And Cherry Cotton elbowed her way through
the ring of curious folk to where Loveday stood. Suddenly Cherry gave a
scream, and pointed an accusing finger at Loveday.
"Ah, a new sash, sure enough.... Ask her where she got 'en. Ask her, I
say."
Loveday answered nothing, only turned her head a little to stare at
Cherry.
"You ask her where she took it from, Miss! You should know, seeing you
gave it!"
"I gave it to her? Nonsense."
"Not to her, but to poor Primrose Lear. 'Tes the riband that tied up
your wreath. She's robbed the dead. Loveday Strick's robbed the dead."
Then indeed, after a moment's stupefaction following on the horrid
revelation, a murmur of indignation ran from mouth to mouth.
"She's robbed the dead!"
"My soul! To rob the living's stealing, but to rob the dead's a profane
thing."
"'Tisn't man as can judge her, 'tis only God Almighty!" cried an old
minister, aghast.
"Look at the maid, how she stands.... Her own conscience judges her,
I should say!"
"She's no word to excuse herself, simmingly."
"That's because she do know nothing can excuse what she's done...."
And, indeed, Loveday stood without speech. Perhaps in all that buzz of
murmuring she heard the voice of her own conscience at last, for she
made no effort to defend herself, or, perhaps, even at that hour, she
heard nothing but the dread whisper of defeat. She stood before Flora
Le Pettit like a wilted rose whose petals hang limply, about to fall,
fronting a bloom that spreads its glowing leaves in the full flush of
noon. The one girl was triumphant in her beauty and her unassailable
position, every flounce out-curved in freshness; the other drooped at
brow and hem, her slender neck downbent, her sash-ends pendant as broken
tendrils after rain upon her heavily hanging skirts.
All she was heard to murmur, and that very low, was a halting sentence
about her white sash: "But you said--you said you'd dance with me if
I got my sash ..." or some such words, but only Miss Le Pettit caught
all the muttered syllables, and she never spoke of them, save with a
petulant reluctance to Mr. Constantine when he questioned her
afterwards.
"Girl," said the Mayor sharply, "is it true?'
"Yes," said Loveday.
"True!" cried Cherry, "I know 'tes true. I remember noticing that green
mark on the riband when the wreath was laid on the grave. Ah, she'm a
wicked piece, she is. She tormented my poor Primrose in life and she's
robbed her in death. You aren't safe in your grave from she."
Everyone was speaking against Loveday in rightful indignation by now,
and the good wives expressed the opinion that she should be well
whipped. Loveday turned suddenly to Miss Le Pettit. There were those
there--notably Mr. Constantine, that observant philosopher--who said
afterwards she seemed for one instant to be going to break into
impassioned speech. She did half hold out her hands. The ends of the
white sash, disregarded, fluttered from them as she did so. But Miss
Le Pettit, shocked in all her sensibilities by this vulgar scene,
turned away.
"Surely," said she, "there has been enough time wasted already. Can we
not begin the dance, Mr. Mayor?"
At a sign from the Mayor the band struck up into the tune that was to
echo all day through every head and, perhaps, afterwards, through a few
kindly hearts.
[Illustration: Music]
played the band, and, still whispering together with excitement, the
dancers fell into place.
"_John the beau was walking home_,
_When he met with Sally Dover_,
_He kissed her once, he kissed her twice_,
_And he kissed her three times over_."
It seemed to Loveday that the whole world was dancing. The faces of the
crowd, the bobbing ringlets, swelling skirts, the bright eyes and bright
instruments, the houses that peered at her with their polished panes,
all danced in a mad haze of mingled light and blackness. Sun, moon and
stars joined in, heads and feet whirled so madly that none could have
said which was upper-most. Creation was a-dancing, and she alone stood
to be mocked at in a reeling world. This was the merry measure she had
striven to join! She must have been mad indeed!
Turning blindly, she ran through the crowd that gave at her approach,
and all day the dancing went on without her. The flutter of her
blasphemous sash did not profane the sunlight in the streets of
Bugletown, nor pollute with its passing the houses of the good wives.
Like a swallow's wing, it had but flashed across the ordered ways and
was gone.
Yet Loveday's ambition was, after all, fulfilled that day. For she
danced--and danced a measure she could not have trod without the white
satin sash.... Good folk in Bugletown footed it down the cobbled
streets, and through paved kitchens; Loveday danced a finer step on
insubstantial ether, into realms more vast. Were those realms dark for
her, thus violated by her enforced entry of them? Who can say, save
those folk of Bugletown who knew that to her first crime she had added
a second even greater?
They found her next day in the wood; the wind had risen, and blew
against her skirts, so that her feet moved gently as though yet tracing
their phantom paces upon the airy floors. Her head, like a snapped lily,
lay forwards and a little to one side, so that her pale cheek rested
against the taut white satin of the riband from which she hung. The wind
blew the languid meshes of her hair softly, kissing her once, kissing
her twice, and kissing her three times over.
EPILOGUE
Epilogue
Such is the shocking tale of Loveday Strick, a girl who gave her life
for a piece of finery. Is it not small wonder that Miss Le Pettit
lamented the sad lack of proportion in the affair?
All for a length of white satin riband....
And yet, there were two people who thought a little differently from the
rest of Loveday's world on the subject. They were an odd couple to think
alike in anything--it seemed as though even after her death Loveday's
violent unsuitability must persist as a legacy. They were the refined
and polished Mr. Constantine and old Madgy the midwife, a person whom,
naturally, he had never met till the day after the Flora, when his
philosophic curiosity drew him to search for the lost girl in company
with a band of villagers. It was Madgy who led them to the wood, sure
that there was what they sought. Mr. Constantine and Madgy stood looking
at the pale girl when she had been laid upon last year's leaves at their
feet. One of the men would have taken the riband from her, with some
vague notion of returning it, though whether to the graveyard or to the
Manor he could not have told. Mr. Constantine and Madgy put out each a
hand to check him.
"Leave it her," said Mr. Constantine curtly.
"Ay," answered Madgy, speaking freely as was her wont, for she was,
alas, no respecter of persons, "it was more than a white riband to the
maid, for all that the fools say."
Mr. Constantine nodded. He too saw in that length of satin, now soiled
and crumpled, more than a white riband. He saw passion in it--passion
of hope, of ambition, of love, of adoration, of despair. Not a piece
of finery had ended Loveday's stormy course, but a symbol of life
itself, with more in its stained warp and woof than many lives hold
in three-score years and ten. Like religion, this riband held every
experience. Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and
content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering
life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen
enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pettit would know
decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented
her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying
and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading
blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the
short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as
much as she had felt--the whole pageant of passion symbolised by this
insensate strip of satin. She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad
dance across their sylvan stage.
Madgy folded the riband across the half-open eyes and wound the ends
about the discoloured throat. And thus it was when Loveday was buried in
unconsecrated ground, but with the thing she had desired most in life,
striven for, sinned for, and finally attained, still with her. Of whom,
after all, could a richer epitaph be written?
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's The White Riband, by Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse