CHAPTER XXXIII
'At Charing Cross, hard by the way
Where we, thou know'st, do sell our hay,
There is a house with stairs;
And there did I see coming down
Such folk as are not in our town;
Forty at least in pairs.'
On the night of the 15th of September a great many more than forty pairs of feet were passing up and down the stairs of that magnificent specimen of Jackson's domestic architecture, the Hartleys' new palace in – shire. Amateur theatricals are, strange as it may appear, since going to see them is almost invariably the triumph of hope over experience, always an attractive bait to hold out to a country neighbourhood. Apart from the pleasure of thinking how much better than do the actors, one could have played their parts one's self; and that opposite and more good-natured, if not quite so acute pleasure, of wondering with Miss Snevellici's patroness, 'How they ever learnt to act as they do, laughing in one piece, and crying in the next, and so natural in both,' there is, in the present case, an element of curiosity which adds an additional poignancy to the expectation of enjoyment usual in such cases.
It is the Hartley coup d'essai in hospitality in the county, and there is a widespread interest manifested as to how they will do it. Almost as widespread is the comfortable conviction that they will do it well.
An old-established squire who has been seated on his modest acres for a couple of hundred years may venture to invite his friends to dance on a sticky floor to the sound of a piano, and to wash away their fatigue in libations of 50-shilling champagne; but the millionaire, who has only within the last year set an uncertain foot upon the land, is not likely to try any such experiments upon the county's patience. It is, then, with a confident hope of Gunter and Coote and Tinney that the occupants of most of the carriages step out on the red cloth – a hope that the first glimpse of the banks of orchids that line the entrance-hall goes far to make a certainty.
From the minds of the occupants of one carriage, to whose turn, after long waiting in the endless string, it at length comes to set free its load, Gunter, Coote and Tinney, and orchids are equally distant. Milady's head is still running on her Patience, which, by the aid of a carriage-lamp and a pack of tiny cards, she has been playing contentedly during the whole of the long ten miles. The little portion of Peggy's heart that is not filled with an aching compassion and anxiety for her sister is pierced by the fear of the extreme likelihood, in so promiscuous a gathering of three-fourths of the county, of her finding herself face to face with the one woman whom she would compass sea and land to avoid, and with the man whom that woman habitually carries in her train.
And Prue?
'I think he is sure to be at the door to receive us, do not you?' she has whispered to her sister, under cover of milady's absorption in her solitary game, while they are still waiting in the string; 'not that I shall be so silly as to attach any importance to it if he is not; but after a whole week!' stifling a sigh. 'Oh dear!' letting down the glass and craning her neck impatiently out, 'shall we never get there? I see carriage-lamps for half a mile ahead of us still!'
A whole week! It is true. For a whole week the Red House has been favoured with no glimpse of Mr. Ducane. How should it, indeed, since he has been compelled by the exigencies of his situation to take up his abode entirely at the scene of his labours? Of what use to waste upon the long ride there and back time so precious in a last week? the time of one upon whose inexhaustible stock of ability and good-nature every one thinks him or herself entitled to draw.
But though he has been unable to present himself in person to his betrothed, he has had time to scribble her a tiny pencil-note, just a word – but then how little can the value of a letter be measured by its length! – praying her to keep a place for him by her side at the theatricals.
'If my Prue refuses, it will be all over with my pleasure,' he ends simply.
The carriage, after many tantalising halts opposite dark laurels, draws up finally before a blaze of electric light, a crowd of powdered footmen, an arching of palm-boughs; and milady steps deliberately out in her fur boots and her diamond 'fender,' followed by her two protégées. Freddy is not at the door to receive them; and the moment that she has discovered this fact, Prue sees the irrationality of the hope that had led her ever to expect that he would be. He is naturally not in the cloak-room, where milady seems, to the girl's passionate impatience, to loiter unconscionably long, tugging at the strings of her sortie de bal, which have got into a knot, and talking to the numerous friends she meets there. To do her justice, it is not any care for her toilette that detains her. She would quite as soon have the famous tiara – her 'fender,' as she always calls it – which the county has admired for fifty years, on crooked as straight. The county expects to see it on great occasions, and so she puts it on; but if Mrs. Mason were to dispose it behind before, the circumstance would disturb but very slightly her lady's equanimity. Mr. Ducane is not, as far as can be made out by a first glance, in the magnificent music-room, to-night arranged as a theatre, and at whose door Mrs. Hartley stands, smiling and splendid, to receive her guests. But though Prue's eye has as yet to fast from the sight of her betrothed, her ear at least is gladdened by his praises.
'Oh, Lady Roupell, I do not know how we ever can thank Mr. Ducane enough!' she hears Mrs. Hartley exclaim. 'My girls say they do not know what they should have done without him – so kind, so clever, and unselfish is not the word!'
Milady grunts.
'No, I do not think it is,' she says, half sotto voce, as she passes on.
At the first look, the room, superb as are its proportions, seems already full; but a closer inspection reveals at the upper end several still vacant rows of arm-chairs, reserved by the host and hostess for those among their guests whom they most delight to honour. To this favoured category belongs milady, and she is presently installed with her two young friends by a sémillant papa Hartley, in the very middle of the front rank. For the present, nothing can be easier than for Prue to keep the chair at her side vacant. She has already anxiously and surreptitiously spread her white frock over it. Each of earth's glories has probably its attendant disadvantages; a warm and consoling doctrine for those to whose share not much of life's gilding falls; nor is a seat in the front row of synagogue or playhouse any exception to this rule. It has the inevitable drawback, that except by an uncomfortable contortion of the neck-muscles, it is impossible for its occupants to see what is going on in the body of the room; and the view of foot-lights and a drop-scene is one that after a while is apt to pall.
Prue's head is continually turning over her shoulder, as, from the body of the long hall, all blazing with pink-shaded electric lamps, comes the noise of gowns rustling, of steps and voices, as people settle into their seats. At first she had had no cause for uneasiness. The people, as they tide in, conscious of no particular claim to chief places, pack themselves, with laughs and greetings to acquaintances, into the unreserved seats. But presently Mr. Hartley is seen convoying a party of ladies and men to the top of the room with the same evidences of deferential tenderness as he had shown to milady; and no sooner are they disposed of, according to their merits, than he reappears with the same smile, and a new batch. This continues to happen until the human tide, like its prototype in its inexorable march over swallowed sands and drunk rocks, has advanced, despite the piteous protest in Prue's eyes, to within three chairs of her. Yes, including that one so imperfectly veiled by the poor child's skirt, there are only three vacant seats remaining.
'Oh, I wish he would come! Oh, I wish he would come!' she repeats, with something that grows ever nearer and nearer to a sob in her voice. 'Oh, Peggy, do you think he will not come after all? You are longer-sighted than I am; do look if you can see him anywhere! Oh, I wish he would come! I shall not be able to keep this chair for him much longer, and then – '
Her words are prophetic. Scarcely are they out of her mouth before the vision of the radiant host is again seen nearing them, with a fresh freight – a freight that rustles and jingles and chatters louder than any of the previous ones.
'Oh yes, do put me in a good place!' a high and apparently extravagantly cheerful voice is heard exclaiming; 'I always like the best places if I can get them – do not you? and I mean to applaud more loudly than anybody. I have been engaged by Freddy Ducane as a claque; and I assure you I mean to keep my word.'
Although she has been expecting it – although she has told herself that to hear it is among the most probable of the evening's chances, yet, at the sound of that clear thin voice, Peggy turns extremely cold. It has come then. In a second she will certainly be called upon to hear another voice. Let her then brace herself to bear it decently. Her hands clasp themselves involuntarily, and she draws in her breath; but she cannot lift her eyes. She sits looking straight before her, waiting. But instead of the tones that with such sick dread she is expecting, she hears only milady's voice – milady's voice not in its suavest key.
'Oh! it is you, is it? How many of you are there? – because we are pretty full here; and I suppose you do not mean to sit upon our knees.'
'There is nothing I should like better!' cries Lady Betty friskily. 'You are looking perfectly delightful to-night; all the more so because your fender is quite on one side. Come now, do not be ill-natured, but make room for me; you know I am not very – '
Peggy hears the voice break off abruptly; and involuntarily her eyes, hitherto glued to the back of the chair in front of her, snatch a hasty glance in Lady Betty's direction. She has turned away, and is addressing Mr. Hartley in an altered and hurried key.
'After all, I hope you will not think me very changeable, but I believe I should like to sit a little farther back; one sees better, and hears better, and gets a better general idea.'
'She is going away!' whispers Prue, with a long quivering sigh of relief. 'Oh, I was so frightened! I thought she was going to take my chair. Why did she go? She could not have seen us!'
But this is not quite the conclusion arrived at by Peggy, as her eyes follow Betty's retreating figure – Betty, with her that go to bed in a box – Betty, with the docile Harborough and a couple of Guardsmen at her heels; and – without John Talbot! That for one chance evening she should happen to lack his attendance is, after all, but small evidence against his being still riveted with her fetters; but Peggy's heart swells with a disproportionate elation at the discovery. There is, alas! not much likelihood of poor Prue's feeling a like expansion; for scarcely has she finished drawing the long breath caused her by Betty's retreat, than the seat which the latter had spared is approached, settled upon, and irrevocably occupied – poor Prue's barriers politely but ruthlessly swept away.
'Little head
Sunning with curls'
She has attempted a hurried protest, but it has not been even heard; and now it is too late, for a bell has rung. The curtain has swept aloft, with less of hesitation and dubiousness as to the result than is generally the case with amateur curtains, and discloses to view the second Miss Hartley seated under the rustic berceau of a wayside Italian wine-shop, in peasant's cap and bodice, soliloquising rather nervously and at some length. What is the drift of that soliloquy; or of the dialogue that follows with a person of a bandit nature, whom it takes some moments for his acquaintance to decipher into a young man Hartley; or of the jiggy catchy songs with which the piece is freely interspersed, Peggy will never know to her last day.
Before her eyes, indeed, there is a phantasmagoria of people going and coming in a blaze of light – of more be-peasanted Misses Hartley, with more banditted brothers; in her ears a brisk dialogue that must be funny, judging from the roars of laughter coming from behind her; of smart galloping quartettes and trios that must be humorous and musical, from the storm of applause and encores that greet them. But to her brain penetrate none of the gay and smiling images conveyed by her senses. Her brain is wholly occupied by the painful and impossible effort to calm Prue, whose agitation, rendered more unmanageable by the weakness of her state of health and the lack of any habit of self-government, threatens to become uncontrollable.
'Oh, Peggy, why has not he come? What has become of him? Where can he be?' she keeps moaningly whispering.
Peggy has taken hold of one of her sister's feverish hands, whose dry fire is felt even through her glove, and presses it now and again.
'He will be here directly,' she answers soothingly; 'no doubt he could not get away. You heard how useful he has been! Probably he is helping them behind the scenes. Do not you think that you could try to look a little less miserable? I am so afraid that people will remark it.'
'If he is behind the scenes,' moans Prue, not paying any heed to, evidently hardly hearing, this gentle admonition, 'he is with her. You see that she is not acting either! Wherever they are, they are together! Oh, Peggy, I think I shall die of misery!'
The close of her sentence is drowned in a tempest of riotous applause, and Peggy's eyes involuntarily turn to the stage, to learn the cause. One of the performers, who has been throughout pre-eminently the funny man of the piece, is singing a solo, accompanied by many facetious gestures. The drift of the song is the excessive happiness of the singer – a theme which is enlarged upon through half a dozen successive verses:
'The lark is blithe,
And the summer fly;
Blithe is the cricket,
And blithe am I.
None so blithe, so blithe as I!'
Peggy happens to have some acquaintance with the singer off the stage; knows him to be sickly, melancholy, poor; to-night racked with neuralgia, yet obliged to do his little tricks, and go through his small antics, on penalty of banishment from that society, his sole raison d'être in which is his gift of making people laugh.
'La Comédie Humaine!' she says to herself – 'La Comédie Humaine!'
CHAPTER XXXIV
'We men may say more, swear more; but indeed,
Our shows are more than will, for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.'
The Hartleys are wise enough to avoid the error so common amongst amateur actors and managers, of prolonging their treat until pleasure is turned into weariness. They are obviously mindful of the fact that among their audience are a number of dancing feet, whose owners not even the acting of Rachel or Mrs. Siddons would indemnify, in their own opinion, for having the fair proportions of their dancing hours thrown away. The operetta has only three acts, and is followed by no farce or afterpiece. In point of fact, it is contained within the limits of a couple of hours. Yet to two of its auditors it appears practically interminable. To two amongst them it seems as if there never would be an end to its songs, its facetious misunderstandings, and jocose makings up; and when at length the curtain falls amid a hurricane of applause, only to be instantly drawn up again in order that the whole of the final quartette may be repeated, it appears as if they must have sat watching it for nights. At last the curtain drops finally. At last there is an end to the endless encores. The performers, in answer to the shouts which demand them, have appeared in turn before the curtain, and made their bows, and picked up their bouquets, with such differing degrees of grace and aplomb as their native gifts, or more or less familiarity with the situation, allow.
The sad little merryman has cut his final caper, and made a grimace of so surpassing a ludicrousness as will allow him to be peacefully melancholy for the rest of the evening.
And now all eyes are turned away from the stage; all tongues are loosed. The doors at the end of the hall are opened, and a stream of people is beginning rapidly to issue through them. Every one has risen and is looking about, glad to shift their position, say 'how do you do' to their friends, and exchange comments on play and actors.
There is a general stir and buzz; a seeking out of expected friends, and delighted greeting of unexpected ones; a reciprocal examination of gowns, now first possible; and a universal aspiration for supper.
Milady and her girls have risen with the others. Prue, indeed, has been the first person in the room on her legs. She is looking round, like the rest of the world; at least, so to a casual observer it might appear. But, alas! what is there in common between the smiling careless glances, lighting with easy amusement on indifferent objects, and the tragic searching – terrible in its one-ideaed intentness – of those despairing blue eyes? Peggy has firm hold of one burning hand, and is murmuring broken sentences of comfort into her inattentive ear.
'Yes, dear, yes! I will go with you wherever you like; but you know we cannot quite leave milady; and he is more likely to find us here. I dare say he has been looking at us all the while from behind the scenes, trying to see how you were enjoying yourself.' She leaves off hopelessly, since Prue is not listening to her. Snatches of talk, disjointed and mixed, reach her ear.
'Jackson was the architect; built the new schools at Oxford; they always strike one as rather like a splendid country house.'
'Thoroughly well built; made all his own bricks; sent them up to London to be tested; best that ever were made!'
'Really nearly as good as professionals; better than some professionals; might easily be that. They say that the one who acts best of all did not act to-night – the eldest.'
'Why did not she, I wonder?'
'Better employed perhaps – ha! ha!'
At the same moment Peggy feels a convulsive pressure on her arm, and hears Prue's passionately excited voice:
'There he is! at the far end of the room; he is looking for us! Oh, how can we make him see us?'
She has raised herself on tiptoe, and is sending a look of such agonised entreaty down the hall as, one would think, must penetrate even the mass of shifting, buzzing humanity that intervenes between her and its object. Perhaps it does. Perhaps the magnet that Freddy once prettily suggested to be in the hearts of all good people drawing them together is exercising its influence on his. At all events, in a few minutes they see him smilingly pushing his way, stopped at every step by greetings and compliments – for it has somehow become generally diffused through the room that to him is to be ascribed most of the glory of the entertainment – through the crowd. In a moment more he is before them.
'Here you are, you dear things!' he says, taking a hand of each, looking flushed and handsome, and speaking in an excited voice. 'Did not it go off wonderfully well? – not a hitch anywhere. Did you hear the prompter once? No? Neither of you? I thought not; and yet if you had seen us half an hour before the curtain drew up, you would have said that the whole thing was going to be a fiasco.'
He stops to draw a long breath of self-congratulation.
'I kept the chair beside me as long as I could,' says Prue, in a faltering voice; 'I did my best.'
His eye rests on her for a moment with a puzzled air – on her small face, flushed like his own; but, alas! how differently! It is evident that for the first second he does not comprehend her, having entirely forgotten his own request. Then recollecting:
'How good of you, dear!' he says affectionately. 'Of course, it was a bitter disappointment to me, too; but on occasions of this kind,' with a slight resigned shrug, 'one must, of course, give up all idea of individual enjoyment.'
He is such an embodiment of radiant joy as he speaks, that Margaret cannot help darting an indignant look at him – a bolt aimed so full and true, that it hits him right in his laughing eyes.
'Of course,' he says, reddening under it, 'I do not mean to say that there has not been a good deal of incidental enjoyment; but you, dear,' turning to Prue, with lowered voice – 'you who always see things intuitively – you will understand what a distinction there is between pleasure and happiness —Innigkeit!'
She has lifted her eyes, cleared for the moment of their agonised seeking, to his, and is beginning a little trembling eager speech to assure him of her complete comprehension; but his own mind having meanwhile flown off at a tangent, he breaks in upon it:
'Was not that song excellent —
"The lark is blithe,
And the summer fly"?
Quite as good as anything of Grossmith's – do not you think so! Did not it make you laugh tremendously? Oh, I hope, dear,' with an accent of rather pained reproach, 'that it made you laugh!'
Prue hesitates. In point of fact she had not heard one word of the jocose ditty alluded to; as, during the whole of it, she had been keeping up a conversation in heart-broken whispers with Peggy.
'Oh yes; of course,' she answers nervously; 'it was very funny – excessively funny! I – I – should like to hear it again. I – I – am sure that it is one of those things that one would think much funnier the second time than the first.'
'It is as good as anything of Grossmith's,' repeats Freddy confidently. Then, beginning to hum a valse, 'You can have no idea what a floor this is! Be sure, dear, that you keep quantities of dances for me!'
'Oh yes; of course – of course,' replies she, with tremulous ecstasy. 'Which – which would you like?'
But before Mr. Ducane has time to signify his preferences, a third person intervenes. Poor Prue has often expressed a wish to see the eldest Miss Hartley; but the mode in which our wishes are granted is not always quite that which we should have chosen.
'Oh, Mr. Ducane,' she says, hurrying up, 'I am so sorry to interrupt you; but it is the old story,' laughing, and with an apologetic bow to Prue – 'we cannot get on without you. We are so puzzled to know who it is that papa ought to take in to supper! Is it Lady Manson, or Lady Chester? We thought you could tell us which is the oldest creation.'
Freddy has not an idea, but instantly volunteers to go off in search of a 'Peerage' to decide this knotty point; and Miss Hartley, having civilly lingered a moment to excuse herself to the Miss Lambtons, and to remark in almost the same words as her mother had used upon the extraordinary unselfishness of Mr. Ducane, flits away after him.
'It was too bad of her,' says Prue, with a trembling lip. 'She might at least have let him tell me how many dances he wanted; but' – brightening up – 'he said "quantities," did not he? You heard him?'
Peggy's rejoinder is prevented by her attention being at the same moment claimed by milady, and by a general forward movement of the company, which has been requested by Mrs. Hartley to vacate the hall in order that it may be got ready for dancing.
In the slight confusion and pushing that follows, Peggy finds herself separated from her sister and her chaperon; and a few minutes afterwards, the joyful tidings having spread abroad that the supper-room doors are open, an acquaintance offers her his arm to lead her thither. She looks around anxiously once again in search of Prue; but not being able to catch a glimpse of either her or Lady Roupell, can only hope that both have reached the goal of supper before her.
The room is of course thronged – when was a just-opened supper-room not crowded? – and it is some little while before Peggy's partner is able to elbow a way for her to the table, which, when she reaches it, is already robbed of its virgin glory. She looks down the long rows of moving jaws; catches milady's eye – milady eating pâté de foie gras, which always makes her ill; snatches a far glimpse of Mr. Evans setting down a champagne-glass, with the beatific smile of one who, drinking, remembers the Vicarage small-beer; and has a nearer, fuller view of Lady Betty, rosy and naked as Aphrodite, laughing at the top of her voice, and pulling a chicken's merry-thought with one of her Guardsmen to see which will be married first.
Peggy quickly averts her eyes; and, bringing them home, they alight upon Mrs. Evans, whom, by a singular accident, she finds next door to her.
Mrs. Evans, as we know, cannot come under the condemnation of those who 'have not on a wedding-garment,' since she never wears anything else. Despite her old dyed gown, however, she is obviously enjoying herself with the best.
'This is not the sort of thing that one sees every day,' cries she, in a voice of elated wonder, surveying the ocean of delicacies around her. 'I only wish I could get hold of a menu to take home with me! I am so glad we came. I was not at all anxious to come, on account of the distance; in fact, I yielded entirely on Mr. Evans's account. He is in one of his low ways; you know what that means! He wants change; we all want change. Did you hear the mistake he made last Sunday in the Psalms? He said, "In the midst were the damsels playing with the minstrels."'
Peggy laughs absently.
'It sounds rather frisky.'
'I only hope that nobody noticed it,' pursues the Vicaress; 'he always makes those kind of mistakes when he wants change. Dear me!' casting a look and a long sigh of envy round the room; 'if I had a house like this, I should never want change for my part; and to think that it is to be shut up for the whole of the winter – for a whole year, in fact!'
The Hartleys' house has not, so far, afforded Peggy such a large harvest of pleasure that she is able very cordially to echo this lamentation.
'What can possess any one to go round the world passes my understanding,' continues her interlocutor, pelican-like, as she speaks, forcing some nougat for her offspring surreptitiously into a little bag under cover of the table-edge; 'not but what they will do it in all possible luxury, of course – cheval glasses, and oil-paintings, and Indian carpets, just as one has in one's own drawing-room.'
At this last clause, sad and inattentive as she is, Peggy cannot forbear a smile of amusement, as the image of the Vicarage Kidder rises before her mind's eye; but it is very soon dissipated by her neighbour's next remark.
'By the bye, some one was telling me to-night that Freddy Ducane is to be of the party. I assured her, looking wise, that I knew better; but she persisted that she had had it upon the best authority – one of the family, as far as I could understand.'
She may continue her speech to the ambient air; for, when next she looks up from her larceny of bonbons, Peggy is gone. The hall, meanwhile, has been cleared of its innumerable chairs, and its theatrical properties generally, and converted into a back-room, with that surprising rapidity that unlimited money, with practically unlimited labour at its beck and call, can always command.
No sooner have the guests well supped, than, with no tiresome interregnum, no waiting and wondering, they may, if they list, begin to dance. A smooth sea of Vienna parquet spreads before them, and established on the stage, the British Grenadiers themselves – no mere piano and fiddle – are striking up the initial quadrille. It is some little time before Peggy is able to make her way between the forming sets to where milady sits, her coronet more hopelessly askew than ever, and an expression of good-humoured resignation on her face.
'My mind is braced for the worst,' she says good-naturedly; 'get along both of you and dance. Not that there can be much dancing in this silly child,' pointing to Prue; 'she must be as empty as a drum. She has not eaten a mouthful.'
She shrugs her shoulders, since it is evident that Prue does not hear. In a state of preoccupation so intense as that of the young girl's, it would be difficult for anything presented by the senses to make its way into the brain. She is standing stiffly upright, her head and chin slightly advanced, as one looking with passionate eagerness ahead. Her lips are moving, as if she were saying some one thing over and over to herself. Whatever of her face is not lividly white is burning; and her eyes —
As she so stands, an acquaintance comes up, and asks her for the dance, now well begun. She does not understand him at first; but, on his repeating his request, she refuses it curtly.
'Thank you, I am engaged.'
'If you are neither of you going to dance,' says milady, seeing both her protégées remaining standing beside her, and speaking with a slight and certainly pardonable irritation, 'I may as well go home to my blessed bed.'
Go home! Prue has caught the words, and cast a glance of agony at her sister. Go home!
'Do not be impatient, dear milady,' says Margaret, trying to speak lightly and look gay; 'you will be crying out in quite another key just now. I am engaged for nearly all the programme. Ah, here comes my partner!'
For by this time the quadrille has come to an end, and a valse has struck up. To join it, Margaret walks off reluctantly, looking behind her. She is profoundly unwilling to leave her sister in her present state; but, since to dance is the only means of averting milady's fulfilment of her threat of going home, there is no alternative.
To most girls of Peggy's age the joy in dancing for dancing's sake is a thing of the past; but to her, from the innocency of her nature, and her little contact with the world, which has preserved in her a freshness of sensation that usually does not survive eighteen, the pleasure in the mere movement of her sound young limbs, in the lilt of the measure and the wind of her own fleetness, is as keen as ever.