Chapter VIII (1)
Mr. Hungerford’s little dinner-party had gone the way of all dinner-parties. The Rector had pronounced it, from his point of view, a decided success. “A most enjoyable evening, my dear,” he said to Horatia, as they were driving home. “Whatever else that man Dormer of Oriel is or is not, he is a brilliant talker when he pleases. And I had a good talk with Edward Pusey afterwards in the drawing-room. The Arabic catalogue at the Bodleian is a colossal piece of work, but from what he told me I think his plans are too ambitious—not beyond his scholarship, mark you, but beyond his physical strength. He confessed to me that he sometimes almost envied the bricklayers whom he saw at work in the streets, the drudgery was so great.”
“But Mr. Pusey is a young man, and he needn’t make Arabic catalogues unless he wants to,” Horatia had responded rather unsympathetically. For she had not found the party so delightful. She had been taken in by Mr. Pusey, and though Armand de la Roche-Guyon sat on her other hand, his partner, Miss Arabella Trenchard, had talked to him a great deal, and he had seemed to like it. It was quite natural, of course; he probably liked everybody, and Miss Trenchard was very pretty, much prettier than she herself; so that it was no wonder if M. de la Roche-Guyon had been by no means as bored as he had predicted. But, at all events, he had found his way straight to her in the drawing-room afterwards, and chatted to her... till Mr. Dormer, showing a most unusual taste for her society, had come and made a third... and, to be quite just, had talked so delightfully that she almost forgave him the intrusion, at the time. Afterwards, it rankled increasingly.
But now it was Monday morning, the morning of the dance, and Horatia, in the drawing-room putting some asters into a bowl, was aware of being in a state of causeless and febrile excitement. She could not but ask herself what there was in a dance so to excite her; she was not a young girl any more; she had been to many such. Yet she was conscious that this ball was clothed in her imagination with the glamour of an untasted pleasure, and that the thought of it was like some splendid palace built on the edge of a precipice, beyond which there was nothing.
She had just carried the bowl to the mantel-shelf when, without warning, M. de la Roche-Guyon was announced to her. Horatia was startled, almost discomposed, and the vessel, which was “Wheatsheaf” Bow, narrowly escaped destruction.
“Mr. Hungerford sent me with a note,” said the young Frenchman apologetically. “That is my excuse for deranging you so early, Mademoiselle; you must forgive me. It is about to-night.”
She took the letter and read:
“My dear Horatia,—
“I am obliged to go into Oxford this evening to meet Mr. Rose, a man from Cambridge, at Dormer’s rooms, and cannot possibly return in time for the Charity Ball; in fact I shall have to spend the night in Oxford. Would you and the Rector be so kind as to consider M. de la Roche-Guyon as of your party? There is of course no need for him actually to accompany you. It is most unfortunate that this summons should have come just now, and that I must reluctantly forgo an evening to which I had looked forward with so much pleasure. I shall come to dinner, if I may, when I am at liberty, and make my apologies to you in person.—T.H.”
Miss Grenville, on reading these lines, stamped her foot.
“How tiresome, O how tiresome! Why could not Tristram have gone to Oxford any other night!”
“You are sorry that Mr. Hungerford cannot come to the dance?” inquired the Comte, who seemed already acquainted with the purport of the note.
“Why, of course!” flashed Horatia, out of her burst of indignation. “Are you, then, glad of it, Monsieur?”
“In one sense, yes,” replied M. de la Roche-Guyon coolly. “Because now I can ask for the dances of your kinsman as well as for my own.”
Miss Grenville saw fit to take no notice of this sentiment, continuing along her own line of thought.
“How like Mr. Dormer! Everything must give way to what Mr. Dormer arranges and wishes. I have no patience with it—I am sure you do not like him either!”
“Mon Dieu, I should think I did not,” replied the young man warmly, “considering that he spoilt my evening on Saturday! He might have left us that quarter of an hour in the drawing-room. I could almost believe that he did it on purpose.... No, Mr. Dormer does not amuse me.”
“You have seen a good deal of him,” said Horatia, restored to good humour, for she discerned a common feeling.
Armand made something of a grimace. “Mr. Hungerford has been kind enough to take me to see him twice. I do not like priests. They know too much.”
“But Mr. Dormer is not a priest,” returned Horatia, half amused.
“Well, perhaps not, mais il en a l’air, and he needs only the... what is it, la soutane?—the cassock, yes, and the sash that the delusion should be complete. Besides, he has the book.”
“What book?” asked Horatia, mystified.
“The priest’s book, the breviary. It was lying open on his table when we went in to see him at the college of Oriel. Almost I fancied myself chez Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, my cousin.”
“Oh, I understand!” said Horatia. “He is translating some of the hymns from the Paris Breviary—why, I don’t know. I think I remember Tristram telling me about it in the spring. Mr. Dormer and several of the other Fellows at Oriel are what is known as High Church, and they are always doing queer things.”
“High Church?” queried the young Frenchman, “what is that? And what queer things is it that they do?”
“Oh, it’s so boring,” said Miss Grenville wearily. “They think the Church of England is in danger; I don’t know why, for it has gone on comfortably enough all these years without them. So they meet and talk a great deal about it—in fact, that is no doubt why Tristram has so tiresomely to go into Oxford this evening—fresh alarums and excursions, I expect... Papa was very much shocked when he heard Mr. Froude say that the Reformation was a mistake, but when I told him afterwards that I thought they had better all turn Papists, and have done with it, he didn’t like that either... O forgive me! What have I said!” The colour rushed over her face. “I had forgotten for the moment; of course you are a Catholic yourself.”
“But I had rather that you forgot it,” exclaimed the young Frenchman, with an expressive gesture. “I am a Catholic, it is true, because—well, because one has to be. Royalism and the Church stand together; but I am not devout—pray do not think so!”
Horatia hastened to assure him that she had never suspected him of this, and they both laughed.
When he had gone she went upstairs and looked at the gown that she was to wear that night to dance in the palace which would crumble to ruins at daybreak.
(2)
The aching elbows of the fiddlers had several times been eased by surreptitious potations; the candles were beginning to gutter, chaperons’ heads to nod sleepily. A light dust hung in the air from the action of so many pairs of twinkling feet upon the beeswax, and the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville was distinctly conscious of a desire for his bed. Nor did the converse in which he was entangled with an elderly entomologist staying in the neighbourhood really reconcile him to sitting through so many quadrilles and country dances—to hearing selections from La Gazza Ladra give place to Basque Roads, Der Freischütz to Drops of Brandy. The Rector had no enthusiasm for lepidoptera, and he could by no means get the collector of beetles to listen to his own views on monoliths. Not inappropriately did the entomologist discourse of the butterflies of Berkshire, its obscurer moths, in this big room cleared for the Charity Ball and full of a throng as bright and moving, but the scientific mind does not unbend to these analogies, and it might have been conjectured that he did not even see the fair guests had he not, during a waltz, suddenly inquired:
“Who is that extremely attractive young lady dancing with the French count—there, in yellow—a prodigious fine dancer?”
Probably one of the Trenchard girls, thought the Rector, and looked. But no! He pursed his lips. “That is my daughter,” quoth he.
“Dear, dear,” observed the entomologist, human after all, and he put on his glasses the better to observe the phenomenon. “My dear Mr. Grenville, I congratulate you, I do indeed. A most charming girl.”
Flushed and smiling, Horatia whirled slowly past. No need to ask if she found her partner congenial. The Rector’s eyes followed the couple, and it began to dawn upon him that he had been thus following them, unconsciously, a good many times that evening. Was this really so? Even as the question occurred to him, the Squire, beaming in his blue, gilt-buttoned evening coat, appeared on his other side.
“Hallo, Rector,” he said cheerfully. “Going well, ain’t it? That young French spark seems to be enjoying himself. They make a fine couple, eh?”
“Who do?” asked Mr. Grenville rather unwisely, as the golden dress came past again.
“Why, your girl and he, of course,” said the Squire, with all the effect of a wink. “There they go. How would you like her as Madame de—what’s the fellow’s name?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mainwaring,” said the Rector rather tartly. “We have had to be civil to the young man because he is Hungerford’s friend, and no doubt he finds my girl, who speaks French well, is easy to get on with——”
“Yes, especially as his own English is so bad,” retorted the Squire grinning. “Well, well, we’re only young once. I remember when I first met my wife.... You’re not thinking of going before it’s over, Rector?”
Mr. Grenville put back his watch. “It is a good deal later than I thought. I told Dawes to be here at twelve o’clock.”
No consciousness of eyes paternal, entomological or matronly was on Horatia during that last intoxicating waltz. She loved dancing, and she had danced a good deal, but never with a partner like this.
The music stopped (a little out of tune).
“Are you giddy?” asked Armand tenderly.
“A little,” said Horatia, with truth. “It is so hot...”
He drew her hand a little further through his arm. “Here is a doorway. Where does it lead to? Voyons... ah, the library, and empty. Quelle chance! On est bien ici, n’est-ce pas? See, here is a chair; give me your fan.”
But she would not sit down.
“I must go back to Papa.”
“Not yet. He will have you all the days, and I have only these so few moments more of you.”
“You are really leaving to-morrow?” asked Horatia in a conventional tone.
“Si fait. I return to Lulworth, and thence to Paris. And you will never think of me again.”
Horatia did not answer this time, for she found she could not.
Armand stopped fanning. “I shall have only this to remember you by, for I mean to keep it,” he said, looking down at the painted ivory in his hand. “Mais il suffira. Yes, I hear them, the violins; il faut s’en aller: il faut se dire adieu.... Nous ne danserons plus ensemble... Adieu, adieu, toute belle, adieu pour jamais!”
He crushed her hands fiercely to his lips. Her head whirled a second; then she tore them away.
“Please go... ask Papa to come and fetch me here... I will not go back into the room....”
He looked at her strangely, almost wildly, but she would not meet his eyes. “Please go,” she reiterated faintly, and Armand, suddenly dropping on one knee, put his lips to the hem of her dress—and was gone.
And loud through the strains of The New-Rigged Ship, now pouring under the archway, she heard the heartless marching beat of Joli Tambour.
“Dans mon pays, y’en a de plus jolies,
Dans mon pays, y’en a de plus jolies,
Et ran, tan, plan!”
Mr. Grenville hurried in almost immediately, his daughter’s cloak on his arm. Horatia was lying back in a big leather chair. She looked curiously white, but roused at once.
“Is that my cloak? Thank you, Papa, very much. It is time to go, is it not, though it is not quite over.”
“That is what I was thinking, my dear,” said the Rector, putting the swansdown over her. “I believe we have been keeping Dawes waiting. Have you got everything—your gloves, your fan?”
“Everything I want, thank you, Papa.”
The old fat horses and the careful Dawes did not devour the five miles that lay between them and home. After a few desultory remarks, both father and daughter relapsed into silence, each in a corner of the barouche. But Horatia had drawn off her gloves, and in the darkness was pulling and twisting them into a rope, endeavouring to keep down the sobs which rose chokingly in her throat. Had anything in the world ever hurt like this? All the while the horses’ hoofs beat out the refrain, relentless, and so horribly gay. “Et ran, tan, plan. Et ran, tan, plan!” With all her desperate fight for composure she only succeeded in keeping back the main violence of the storm; the smaller rain-clouds broke despite herself, and, quietly as she wept, the Rector was aware of it.
“My darling, what is it?” he said, putting out a hand to her.
“Nothing,” replied Horatia, swallowing the tears. “I am tired... and stupid... I danced too much...”
(“Dans mon pays y’en a de plus jolies,
Dans mon pays y’en a de plus jolies!”)
“I thought you looked tired, my love,” replied Mr. Grenville, exceedingly alarmed but (he hoped) tactful. “I heard one or two people saying that the floor was not good. Come, child, put your head here; perhaps you will be more comfortable; and we shall soon be home.”
Whether or no he knew why she wept, Horatia could not resist the kind voice, and all the rest of the way her elaborately dressed head lay against her father’s shoulder.
She kissed him silently when they got in. No, she did not want her maid. Again she repeated that she was only tired; she would be all right in the morning, and so went to her room.
Fool, fool, that he had been! But what had happened? At any rate they had not come to an understanding; that was obvious. And, thank God, the young man was going away to-morrow. But he could not bear to see her suffer. Twice he went and listened shame-facedly at her door; she was sobbing, sobbing as if her heart would break—she who never cried! At dawn, when the birds were twittering, he went again; she was quiet. He prayed God she slept. It was more than he could do.