‘AL SODENLY SHE SWAPT ADOWN TO GROUND.’
The second week of January was half over, and it was the night of the
Hunt Ball. What girl of eighteen, were her breast ever so gnawed by
secret cark and care, could refrain from giving way to some excitement
upon the occasion of her first dance, and that a dance which was
to be danced by all Warwickshire’s beauty and chivalry—a dance as
distinguished, from a local standpoint, as that famous assembly in
Belgium’s capital, which was scared by the thunder of distant guns, the
prelude of instant war?
Daphne gave herself up wholly to the delight of the hour. She had been
unusually cheerful and equable in her temper since New Year’s Day.
That parental blessing, freely and ungrudgingly given, seemed to have
sweetened her whole nature. She went to church with Madoline, and
prayed with all her heart and soul, and listened without impatience to
a string of seasonable platitudes, culled from the elder divines, and
pronounced in a humdrum style of elocution by the Reverend Marmaduke
Ferrers. She had been altogether blameless in her bearing and her
conduct in this new-fledged year: so much so that Mrs. Ferrers had
deigned to concede, with chilly patronage, that Daphne was beginning to
become a reasonable being.
She had been fighting her inward battle honestly and bravely. She had
avoided as much as possible that society which was so poisonously sweet
to her. She had been less exacting to her devoted slave, Edgar. She had
given more time to improving studies. She had taken up Mendelssohn’s
Lieder, and practised them industriously, breathing, ah! too much
soul into the pathetic passages, dwelling too fondly on the deep
ground-swell of melody, which carries a passionate heart along on its
fierce tide, and, in its fervid feeling and exaltation of spirit, is
akin to the actual triumph of a happy love.
Unconscious of the danger, and resolutely bent on curing herself of a
futile foolish attachment, she yet fed her passion with the fatal food
of poetry and music, finding in every heroine she most admired, from
Juliet to Enid, a love as inevitably doomed to misery as her own. But
all the while she was earnest in her desire to forget.
‘If my namesake, in the pride of her purity, could fly from a god who
adored her, surely it cannot be hard for me to harden my heart against
a man who does not care a straw for me,’ she told herself scornfully.
The day of the Hunt Ball brought pleasure enough to thrust aside every
other thought. Miss Piper had done as well as if she had been born and
bred in Paris. Daphne’s white satin gown fitted the slim and supple
figure to perfection. It was not the ivory tint of late years, but that
exquisite pearly white, with a blackish tint in the shadows, which one
sees in old pictures. Daphne, with her wavy hair coiled at the back of
her beautifully-shaped head, and with just one spray of stephanotis
nestling in the coils, looked like a Juliet painted by Sir Joshua. It
was Juliet’s dress, as Juliet used to be dressed by actresses of an age
less given to the research of correctness and elaboration in costume.
The single string of pearls on the pearly neck, the bodice modestly
draping the lovely shoulders, the round white arms peeping from
elbow-sleeves of satin and lace, the long loose gloves, the slender
feet in white satin sandalled shoes, meant for dancing—not in those
impossible high-heeled instruments of torture which Parisian bootmakers
have inflicted on weak woman—all had something of an old-fashioned air;
but it was a very lovely old fashion, and Madoline was delighted with
the result.
‘Rather _outré_, don’t you think?’ said Mrs. Ferrers, sourly
contemplative of Daphne’s fresh young beauty, which made her own
complexion look so much yellower than usual, when she happened to
glance across the girl’s shoulder at her own face in the big cheval
glass. ‘A little too suggestive of Kate Greenaway’s Baby Books.’
She was trying to settle herself in her panoply of state, a gorgeous
arrangement in ruby velvet and cream-coloured satin, which the little
Frenchwoman in the Rue Vivienne had only sent off in time to reach Mrs.
Ferrers two hours ago, after keeping her in an agony of mind for the
last three days. It was a very splendid gown, so slashed, and draped,
and festooned, that it was a mystery how it could ever be put together.
The velvet cuirass was laced up the back with thick gold cord, and
fitted like a strait-waistcoat; and the ruby scarf was fringed with
heavy bullion, which drooped above a stormy sea of cream-coloured
satin, that went billowing and surging round the lady’s legs till
it met a long narrow streak of ruby velvet lined with satin, which
meandered for about twelve feet along the floor. That Mrs. Ferrers must
be a nuisance to herself and everybody else in such a dress no one
in their senses could doubt; but then on the other hand the gown was
undoubtedly in the latest fashion, and was one which must evoke a pang
of envy in every female breast.
‘I don’t wonder you look disdainfully at my short petticoats, Aunt
Rhoda,’ said Daphne, smiling at the effect of her sandalled ankles as
she pirouetted before the looking-glass; ‘but I think, when it comes to
dancing, I shall be better off than you with your velvet train.’
‘I am not likely to dance much,’ answered Mrs. Ferrers, with dignity.
‘Indeed, as a clergyman’s wife, I don’t know that I shall dance at
all.’
‘Then you will have to sit with your train coiled round your feet to
prevent people walking on it, and that will be worse,’ retorted Daphne.
It was a clear cold night, with a brilliant moon—a glorious night for a
country drive—frosty, but not severe enough to make the roads slippery;
besides, Boiler and Crock were the kind of horses that nobody hesitates
to have roughed on occasion.
Sir Vernon had decided on escorting his daughters to the ball. It was
a sacrifice of his own ease and comfort, but he felt that the occasion
required it.
‘I shall stay an hour,’ he said, ‘and then Rodgers can drive me home,
and go back to fetch you later. It won’t hurt the horses going over the
ground a second time.’
‘Dear father,’ said Madoline, ‘it is so good of you to go with us.’
And now, after a reviving cup of tea, and careful wrapping in fur-lined
cloaks and Shetland shawls, the three ladies and Sir Vernon conveyed
themselves into the roomy landau, and were soon bowling along the
smooth high-road towards Stratford. What a transformed and glorified
place the little town seemed to-night—all lights, and people, and loud
and authoritative constabulary! such an array of fiery-eyed carriages,
three abreast in the wide street in front of The Red Horse! such a
block in the narrower regions about the Town Hall! so much confusion,
despite of such loud endeavours to maintain order!
It seemed to Daphne as if they were going to sit in the carriage all
night, with the humbler townsfolk peering in at them from the pavement,
and making critical remarks to each other in painfully distinct voices.
‘Ain’t the fair one pretty?’ ‘The dark one’s the handsomest.’ ‘My eye!
look at the old lady’s diamonds.’ ‘That’s Lord Willerby.’ ‘No, it
ain’t, stoopid.’ ‘I see the coronet on the kerridge.’ ‘My, what lovely
hair she’s got!’ ‘White satin, ain’t it?’ and so on, while cornets and
violins sounded in the distance with distracting melody.
‘It’ll be dreadful if we have to sit in the street quite all the
evening,’ said Daphne, listening hopelessly to the voice of authority,
with its perpetual ‘Move on, coachman.’
They waited about twenty minutes, and then slowly drove up to the
doorway, where the eager faces of the crowd made a hedge on each
side. Difficult to believe that this entrance hall, luminous with
lamps and bright flowers, was the same which gave admittance to such
prosaic beings as town-clerks and vestrymen, justices of the peace
and policemen. Edgar and Gerald were both hovering near the doorway,
waiting for the South Hill party: Edgar, at the risk of being accused
of deserting his mother, whom he had established in a comfortable
corner of the ball-room, and then incontinently left to her own
reflections, or to such conversation as she might be able to find
among sundry other dowagers arrived at the same wall-flower stage of
existence.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ said Edgar, offering Daphne his arm,
and in a manner appropriating her.
‘I thought we were going to spend the evening in the street,’ answered
Daphne.
Gerald gave his arm to Madoline; Sir Vernon followed with his sister,
whose high-heeled Louis Quinze shoes matched her gown to perfection,
but were not adapted for locomotion. Happily she was a light and
active figure, and managed to trip up the broad oak stairs somehow;
though she felt as if her feet had been replaced by the primitive
style of wooden leg, the mere dot-and-go-one drumstick, with which the
Chelsea pensioner used to be accommodated before the days of elaborate
mechanical arrangements in cork and metal.
The ball-room was already crowded, the South Hill party having arrived
late, by special desire of Aunt Rhoda, who strongly objected to be
among those early comers who roam about empty halls dejectedly, taking
the chill off the atmosphere for the late arrivals. Dancing was in full
swing, and the assembly in the big ball-room made a blaze of colour
against the delicate French-gray walls; the pink of the fox-hunters,
and the uniforms of the officers from Warwick and Coventry, showing
vividly amongst the pale and airy drapery of their partners. There were
more than two hundred in the room already, Edgar told Daphne, as he
pointed out the more striking features of the scene.
‘I daresay there’ll be nearer three hundred before midnight,’ he said.
‘It’s going to be a grand affair. Only once in two years, you see:
people save themselves up for it. A lot of fellows in pink, aren’t
they?’
‘Yes. Why didn’t you wear a scarlet coat? It’s much prettier than
black.’
‘Do you really think so? If I’d known—’ faltered Edgar. ‘But I felt
sure you would have laughed at me if I’d sported the swallow-tail I
wear at hunt dinners sometimes.’
‘I daresay I should,’ Daphne answered coolly; ‘but you’d have looked
ever so much nicer all the same.’
Edgar felt regretful. He had debated with himself that question of pink
or no pink; and the thought of Daphne’s possible ridicule had turned
the scale in favour of sober black; and now she told him he would have
looked better in the more distinctive garb. And there were fellows who
could hardly jump a drain-pipe showing off in their Poole or Smallpage
coats, and giving themselves Nimrod airs which imposed upon the sweet
simplicity of their partners.
The room was a noble room, long and lofty, divided from a spacious
antechamber by a wide square doorway, supported by classic pillars.
Over this doorway was the open gallery for the band. The ball-room
was lighted by a large central chandelier, and two sun-burners in the
ceiling; while from lyre-shaped medallions on the walls projected
modern gas brackets in imitation of old-fashioned girandoles of the
wax-candle period.
There were four full length portraits on the walls: the Duke of Dorset,
by Romney; a portrait of Queen Anne, as uninteresting as that harmless
lady was in the flesh. The remaining two pictures had to do with the
local divinity. One was Gainsborough’s portrait of Garrick, leaning
against the bust of Shakespeare; the other was the poet seated, in his
habit as he lived, by Wilson.
‘You see,’ said Gerald, close behind Daphne, ‘there is the Warwickshire
idol. One can’t get away from him. Why can these bucolics worship
nothing but the intellectual emanation of their soil? Why not a little
homage to muscular Christianity, in the person of Guy, Earl of Warwick,
a paladin of the first water, a man who rescued damsels, and fought
with giants and dun cows, and was strong and brave, and faithful,
pious, self-sacrificing, devoted in every act of his life? There is a
hero worthy of worship. Yet you all ignore him, and bow down before
this golden calf of a dramatist, who sued his friend for a twopenny
loan, and left the wife of his bosom a second-best bedstead—a paltry
fellow beside Guy, the hero-hermit, living on bread and water, and only
revealing himself at his death to the wife he adored.’
‘Guy was a very nice person, if one could quite believe in the giant
and the dun cow,’ said Daphne.
‘I believe implicitly in Colbrand the giant,’ answered Gerald, ‘but I
own I have never been able to swallow the monster cow; and I am all
the more inclined to repudiate her because her bones were on view at
Warwick in Shakespeare’s time.’
‘And it was very sweet of him to end his days so quietly in the
hermit’s cave at Guy’s Cliff,’ pursued Daphne, who was well versed in
all Warwickshire lore, chiefly by oral instruction from Edgar, ‘and
to take alms from his own wife every morning, as one of the thirteen
beggars she was in the habit of relieving; though I have never quite
understood why he did it. But in spite of all these grand acts of Guy’s
we know nothing of the man himself, while Shakespeare is like one’s
brother. He has sounded the deep of every mind, and has given us the
treasures of his own.’
‘I suspect he would rather have given anything than his money,’
retorted Gerald.
They had penetrated to Mrs. Turchill’s corner by this time. That matron
was looking the picture of disconsolate solitude—the dowager with whom
she had been talking about her servants and her tradespeople having
left her to look after a brace of somewhat go-ahead daughters, who
in pale blue silk jerseys, and tight cream-coloured cashmere skirts,
looked very much as if they were attired for some acrobatic performance.
‘I am so glad you have come,’ exclaimed poor Mrs. Turchill, brightening
at the sight of Madoline. ‘The room is dreadfully crowded, and there
are so many strangers.’ This was said resentfully, no stranger having
any more right to be present, from Mrs. Turchill’s point of view, than
Pentheus at his mother’s party. ‘I feel as if I hardly knew a creature
here.’
‘Oh, mother, when there are the Hilldrops, and the Westerns, and the
Hilliers, and the Perkinses,’ remonstrated Edgar, running over a string
of names.
‘All I can say is that if there are any of my friends in the room no
one has taken the trouble to bring them to me,’ retorted Mrs. Turchill.
‘And for any enjoyment I have had from the society of my friends I
might as well be at that horrid Academy conversazione for which you
took so much trouble to get tickets the year before last, and where I
was jammed into a corner of the sculpture room half the evening, with
rude young women sitting upon me.’
Here Sir Vernon and Mrs. Ferrers approached, and Mrs. Turchill resumed
her company smile in honour of people of such importance. Aunt Rhoda
had been exchanging greetings with the cream of the county people
during her leisurely progress through the rooms, and felt that her gown
was a success, and that the little woman in the Rue Vivienne was worthy
of her hire. Everybody was looking at Daphne. Her youth and freshness,
her vivid smiles and natural girlish animation, as she conversed
now with Edgar, and anon with Gerald, fascinated everyone; it was a
manner entirely without reserve, yet with no taint of forwardness or
coquetry—the manner of a happy child, whose sum of life was bounded
by the delight of the moment, rather than of a woman conscious of her
loveliness, and knowing herself admired.
‘Who is that pretty girl in the white satin frock—the girl like an
old picture?’ people were asking, somewhat to the annoyance of older
stagers in the beauty-trade, who felt that here was a new business
opened, which threatened competition, stock-in-trade of the best
quality, and perfectly fresh.
One young lady, whose charms had suffered the wear and tear of seven
seasons, contemplated Daphne languidly through her eye-glass, and
summed her up with scornful brevity as ‘the little Gainsborough girl!’
‘Quite too lovely, for the next six months,’ said another, ‘but her
beauty depends entirely on her complexion. A year hence she will have
lost all that brightness, and will be a very wishy-washy little person.’
‘And then I suppose she’ll paint, as the others do, don’t you know,’
drawled her partner; ‘carmine her lips, and all that sort of thing.’
The lady looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of a carefully
darkened eyelid.
‘Let us hope she won’t sink quite so low as that,’ she said with
dignity.
There was no doubt as to Daphne’s triumph. Before she had been an hour
in the room, she was the acknowledged belle of the ball. People went
out of their way to look at her. She walked once round the rooms on
her father’s arm, and in that slow and languid progress held, as it
were, her first court. It was her first public appearance; her father’s
friends clustered round him, eager to be presented to the _débutante_.
Stately dowagers begged that she might be made known to them. All the
best people in the room knew Sir Vernon, and all professed a friendly
desire to know his younger daughter. Her card was full before she knew
what she was doing.
‘Our little Daphne is a success!’ said Gerald to his betrothed, as they
glided round the room in a languorous troistemps. ‘All the Apollos are
running after her.’
‘I am so glad. Dear child! It is such a pleasure to see her happy,’
answered Madoline softly.
‘I hope her head won’t be turned by all this adulation. It is such a
poor little puff-ball of a head. I sometimes fancy she has thistledown
inside it instead of brains.’
‘Indeed, dear, she has plenty of sense and serious feeling,’
remonstrated Madoline, wounded by this allegation. ‘But she is
painfully sensitive. She needs very tender treatment.’
‘Poor butterfly!’
‘Do you like her dress?’
‘It is simply perfect. Your taste, of course.’
‘Yes; she let me have my own way in the matter.’
‘And as a reward she is looking her loveliest. It is not the calm
beauty of a princess, like my Lina’s; but for a spoiled-child kind of
prettiness, capricious, mutinous, variable, there could be nothing
better.’
Later he was at Daphne’s side, as she sat in a corner by her aunt, with
half-a-dozen young men hovering near, Edgar nearest of all, holding her
fan.
‘I suppose you have saved at least one dance for me, Empress,’ he said,
taking her programme from her hand.
‘I don’t know. All sorts of people have been writing down their names.’
‘All sorts of people,’ echoed Gerald, examining the card. ‘You will be
a little more respectful about your partners in your seventh or eighth
season. Why, here, under various hieroglyphics, are the very topmost
strawberries in the social basket—masters of fox-hounds, eldest sons of
every degree, majors and colonels—and not one little waltz left for
me! I claim you for the first extra.’
‘I—I’m rather afraid I’m engaged for the extras.’
‘No matter. You were solemnly engaged to me for one particular waltz
when first this ball was spoken of at South Hill. You don’t remember,
perhaps; but I do. I claim my bond. I will be a very Shylock in the
exaction of my due.’
‘If you were a better Shakespearian it would occur to you that Shylock
got nothing,’ retorted Daphne, smiling up at him.
‘He was an old idiot. Remember, the first extra valse. We shall meet at
Philippi.’
He was off to claim Lina for the Lancers. It was the last dance before
supper. Sir Vernon had disappeared ever so long ago. Mrs. Ferrers was
standing up with a major of dragoons, in all the splendour of his
uniform, and felt that she and her partner made an imposing picture.
Edgar and Daphne were sitting out this square dance on the stairs,
the girl somewhat exhausted by much waltzing, the man exalted to the
seventh heaven of bliss at being permitted to bear her company.
‘May I take you down to supper?’ he asked.
‘Thanks; no. My last partner—the man in the red coat——’
‘Clinton Chetwynd, master of the Harrowby Harriers?’ interjected Edgar.
‘Told me that the best dancing will be when two-thirds of the people
are gormandising downstairs. You can get me an ice, if you like.’
Edgar obeyed; but when he came back with the ice Daphne had vanished
from the landing, and he got himself entangled in a block of people
struggling down to supper.
The rooms below—those solemn halls in which on ordinary occasions
the local offender stood at the bar of justice to answer for his
misdeeds—were now a scene of glitter and gaiety; flower-wreathed
épergnes, barley-sugar pagodas, and all the tinselly splendour of a
ball-supper. Bar, and bench, and magisterial chairs had vanished as
if by magic. The magistrate’s private apartment and the justice hall
had been thrown into one spacious banqueting-chamber, where even the
proverbial greediness of the best society—the people who tread upon
each other’s toes and rush for the grapes and peaches at Buckingham
Palace—might be satisfied without undue scrambling. But though there
would have been room for him at the banquet, and although there were
any number of eligible young ladies waiting to be taken down, Edgar
scorned the idea of a supper which Daphne did not care for. To have
sat by her, squeezed into some impossible corner of a rout-seat, to
have fought for lobster-salad for her, and guarded her frock from the
ravages of awkward people, and pulled cracker bon-bons with her, would
have been bliss; but the festal board without her would be every whit
as funereal a banquet as the famous sable feast at which that cheerful
practical joker Domitian entertained his courtiers.
Mr. Turchill found a good-natured fox-hunter to take his mother down,
and having seen that lady’s silver-gray satin—newly done up with violet
velvet by Miss Piper for the occasion—making its deliberate way down
the broad staircase, on the sportsman’s sturdy scarlet arm, Edgar went
back to the almost empty ball-room, where about fifteen or twenty
couples were revolving to the last sugary-sweet German waltz, ‘_Glaubst
du nicht_?’
Daphne and Gerald were amongst these; Madoline was sitting with some
girl-friends in the entrance of one of the windows, and to this point
Edgar made his way.
‘You’ve not been down to supper,’ he remarked, by way of saying
something original.
‘Do you know, I don’t much care about going down. If Gerald
particularly wishes it I shall go after this dance; but I think I
should enjoy a sandwich and a cup of tea when I get home better than
the scramble downstairs.’
The waltzers were dropping off by degrees; but Gerald and Daphne still
went on revolving with gliding languid steps to the dreamy melody. They
moved in exquisite harmony, although this was the first time they had
ever waltzed together. Never in the twilight dances at South Hill had
Mr. Goring asked Daphne to be his partner. He had been content to stand
outside in the porch, smoking his cigarette, and looking on, while she
and Edgar waltzed, or to take a few lazy turns afterwards with Madoline
to Daphne’s music. To-night for the first time his arm encircled her;
her sunlit head rested against his shoulder. It seemed to him that his
hand had never clasped hers since that summer day at Fontainebleau,
just a year and a half ago; when they had stood by the golden water,
with the hungry-eyed carp watching them, and a sky of molten gold above
their heads. They had been far apart since that day; dissevered by
an impalpable abyss; and now for the moment they were one, united by
that love-sick melody, their pulses stirred by the same current. Was
it strange that in such a moment Gerald Goring forgot all the world
except this perfect flower of youth and girlhood which he held in his
arms—forgot his betrothed wife, and all her grace and beauty; lived
for the moment, and in the moment only, as butterflies live—with a
past not worth remembering, and annihilation for their only future? As
the dancers dropped off the band played slower and slower, meaning to
expire in a _rallentando_, and those two waltzers gliding round drifted
unawares into the outer and smaller room, where there was no one.
‘_Glaubst du nicht_?’ sighed the band, ‘_Glaubst du nicht_? _Ach
Liebchen, glaubst du nicht_?’ and with the last sigh of the melody,
Gerald bent his lips over Daphne’s golden hair and breathed a word into
her ear—only one word, wrung from him in despite of himself. But that
one word so breathed from such lips was all the history of a passionate
love which had been fought against in vain. The last sigh of the music
faded as the word was spoken, and Daphne was standing by her partner’s
side white as ashes.
‘Take me back to my sister, please.’
He gave her his arm without a word, and they walked slowly across to
the group by the window; but before Madoline could make room for Daphne
to sit by her side the girl tottered, and would have fallen, if Edgar
had not caught her in his arms.
‘She is fainting!’ he cried, alarmed. ‘Some water—brandy—something!’
He wrenched open the window, still holding Daphne on his left arm.
The frosty night-air blew in upon them, keen and cold. Daphne’s white
lips trembled, and the dark gray eyes opened and looked round with
a bewildered expression, as she sank slowly into the seat beside
Madoline, whose arms were supporting and embracing her.
‘My darling, you have danced too much. You have overexcited yourself,’
said Lina tenderly; while three or four smelling-bottles came to the
rescue.
‘Yes; that last dance was too much,’ faltered Daphne, cold and
trembling in her sister’s arms. ‘But I’m quite well now, Lina. It was
nothing. The heat of the room.’
‘And you are tired. We’ll go home directly we can find Aunt Rhoda.’
‘I’ll go and hunt for her,’ said Gerald, who had been standing vacantly
looking on, his brain on fire, his heart beating tumultuously, the
vulture conscience gnawing his vitals already.
He had been thinking of Rousseau’s Julie, and that first kiss given in
the bosquet—the fatal first kiss—the beginning of all evil.
‘My sweeter Julie—so much more lovely—so much more innocent,’ he
thought, as he went slowly downstairs in quest of the ruby velvet
arrangement which contained Mrs. Ferrers. ‘God give me grace to respect
your purity!’
The winter wind rushed into the heated ball-room with a sharp chill
breath that was suggestive of another and a colder world, like the
deadly air from a vault, and soon steadied Daphne’s reeling brain.
‘You see I am not such a good waltzer as I thought I was,’ she said,
looking up at Edgar with a sickly smile. ‘I did not think anything
could make me giddy.’
‘You would rather go home now, would you not, dear?’ asked Madoline.
‘You have had enough of the ball.’
‘More than enough.’
‘Let me fetch your wraps from the cloak-room,’ said Edgar. ‘It will
save you a good deal of trouble.’
‘If you would be so very kind.’
‘Delighted. Give me your ticket. Seventy-nine. All under one number, I
suppose.’
He ran off, and this time had to stem the tide setting in towards the
ball-room; the young men and maidens who had eaten their supper and
were eager for more dancing. Coming back with a pile of cloaks and
shawls on his arm, he joined Gerald and Mrs. Ferrers, her red-coated
major still in attendance.
‘What can Daphne mean by making a spectacle of herself at her first
ball?’ asked Aunt Rhoda, not a little aggrieved at being ruthlessly
dragged away from a knot of the very best people, a little group of
privileged ones, which included a countess and two baronets’ wives.
‘But it is just like her.’
‘There was no affectation in the matter, I can assure you,’ said Edgar
indignantly; ‘she looked as white as death.’
‘Then she should have danced less. I detest any exhibition of that
kind. I am very glad my brother was not here to see it.’
‘I think Sir Vernon has had so much reason to be proud of his daughter
this evening that he would readily have forgiven her iniquity in
fainting,’ retorted Edgar, his blood at boiling-point from honest
indignation.
Daphne, wrapped in a long white cashmere cloak lined with white fur,
looked very pale and ghostlike as she went slowly through the rooms on
Edgar’s arm, attacked on her way by the reproaches of the partners with
whom she was breaking faith by this untimely departure.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, with a faint touch of her natural
gaiety, ‘but I’ll pay my debts this time two years. The engagements can
stand over.’
When the bi-annual Hunt Ball comes round at Stratford-on-Avon there are
some, perhaps, who will remember her promise, and the pale, pathetic
face, and white-robed figure.
Five minutes later the three ladies were seated in their carriage, Mrs.
Ferrers still grumbling, while Edgar lingered at the door adjusting
Daphne’s wraps.
Just as he was going to shut the door, having no excuse for further
delay, Daphne took his hand and clasped it with friendly warmth.
‘How good you are!’ she said softly, looking up at him with eyes that
to his mind seemed lovelier than all the lights of the firmament,
infinitely glorious on this frosty night in the steel-blue sky. ‘How
good you are! how staunch and true!’
It was only well-merited praise, but it moved him so deeply that
he had no power to answer, even by the smallest word. He could only
grasp the slender little hand fervently in his own, and then shut the
carriage-door with a bang, as if to drown the tumult of his own heart.
‘Home, coachman,’ he called, in a choking voice; an entirely
superfluous mandate, neither coachman, nor footman, nor horses, having
the least idea of going anywhere else.