Doctor Cupid Part 51

'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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.ses my understanding,' continues her interlocutor, pelican-like, as she speaks, forcing some nougat for her offspring surrept.i.tiously into a little bag under cover of the table-edge; 'not but what they will do it in all possible luxury, of course--cheval gla.s.ses, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sionate 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 _protegees_ 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.

Peggy loves dancing. To-night she has a partner worthy of her, in her ears brave music beyond praise, under her light feet a Vienna parquet of slippery perfection; and she is no more conscious of these advantages than if she were dancing in clogs on a brick floor. Whenever she pauses--and, long-winded as she is, she must pause now and again, in whatever part of the pink-light-flooded room her partner lands her, whether by the great bank of hothouse flowers at the lower end, or near the blaring Grenadiers at the top, or beneath one of the portraits of famous musicians that line the side walls--it seems to her that absolutely nothing meets her eyes but that one tiny burning face, stretched always forward in the same att.i.tude, with its lips moving, and its eyes turning hither and thither in forlorn and desperate search.

Prue is not dancing.

As Peggy, answering absently and _a batons rompus_, the civil speeches of her companion, watches, in a pained perplexity, the features whose misery has so effectually poisoned her own evening, she sees a fresh expression settle upon them, an expression no longer of deferred and piteous expectation, but of acute and intolerable wretchedness. She is not long in learning the cause. Following the direction of Prue's glance, her own alights upon a couple that have but just joined the dance. It is needless to name them.

Peggy's partner catches himself wondering whether it can be any of his own harmless remarks that has brought the frown that is so indubitably lowering there to her smooth forehead, or that has made her red lips close in so tight and thin. He wonders a little, too, at the request that immediately follows these phenomena.

'Would you mind taking me to Miss Hartley and her partner? I want to speak to them; we might dance there.'

A minute of smooth whirling lands her at Freddy's side, and fortunately for her, at the same moment some one addressing the daughter of the house from behind takes off her attention.

'Are not you going to dance with Prue?' she asks in a stern breathless whisper. 'Have you forgotten that you are engaged to Prue?'

He looks at her with a gentle astonishment.

'What are you talking about, dear? Is it a thing that I am likely to forget? Of course I must get through my duty-dances first. Dear Prue is the last person not to understand that. You are looking _splendid_ to-night, Peg! perhaps because you are so ill-tempered--evil pa.s.sions always become you. You have not a dance to spare me, I suppose? What a floor! Tra la la!'

Away he scampers with Miss Hartley, and Peggy, curtly resisting all her ill-used swain's entreaties to take another turn, insists upon being led back there and then to her chaperon. Prue shall not, through her fault, have one second's more suspense to endure.

'It is all right!' she says eagerly, under her breath, into the young girl's ear; 'he is getting through his duty-dances first. It is all right.'

CHAPTER x.x.xV

But the execution of Mr. Ducane's duty-dances is apparently no short task, nor one lightly or quickly accomplished. But few of them, as it turns out, are danced in the ball-room in the eye of the world, and of the electric light. A far larger number are danced on sofas, in obscure corners of little-frequented boudoirs, on steps of the stairs, and under the palm-fans and tree-ferns of the conservatory.

And meanwhile the night swings on. Dance has followed dance. The feet fall pat to the perfect time of the soldiers' music: valse, galop, polka, mazurka, Lancers--Peggy dances them all.

In the Lancers chance brings her close to Lady Betty, who is romping through them with a staid County Member, whom to the petrifaction of his wife, watching horror-struck from afar, she makes romp flagrantly too.

Her voice throughout the evening is heard, penetratingly high, above the band; her laugh seems to be ringing from every corner of the room, accompanying her extraordinary antics. For Lady Betty is by no means on her best behaviour to-night, and permits herself such innocent and humorous playfulnesses as putting a spoonful of ice down the back of one of the young Hartleys, popping a fool's-cap out of a cracker on the head of a bald old gentleman perfectly unknown to her, etc. She is evidently not fretting very badly at Talbot's absence. So Margaret thinks, as with a sort of unwilling fascination she watches her.

Lady Betty is evidently in precisely the same mood as she was on that evening when she had favoured milady's guests at the Manor with her remarkable song. It would take uncommonly little persuasion to-night to induce her to sing--

'Oh! who will press that lily hand?'

'I think she is _drunk_!' says Mrs. Evans charitably. 'I am sure she acts as if she were. If _I_ were to behave like that, I should expect men to take any kind of liberty with me. I should not feel that I had any right to complain if they did.'

Peggy laughs. The idea of Mrs. Evans dancing the can-can, and getting kissed for her pains, is so irresistibly comic that for a minute or two she cannot help herself.

Lady Roupell has grown tired of scolding Prue for her obstinate refusal of all invitations to dance. Milady has happily fallen in with an old friend, whose path hers had not crossed for thirty years. With him she fights o'er again the battles of her youth, and forgets her 'blessed bed.' She goes in to supper a second time, and has more _pate de foie gras_. Peggy sees it in the guilt of her eye when she comes out.

And meanwhile Peggy herself dances on indefatigably, returning, however, rigorously at the end of each dance to her chaperon, in order to a.s.sure herself that there is no change for the better in the position of Prue.

None! none! none! Always standing on precisely the same spot; the poor little figure rigidly upright; the flushed cheekbones; the straining eyes. Always? No, thank G.o.d, not always! At last it is gone! At last she finds its place vacant.

'Where is Prue?' she asks eagerly, forgetting her usual gentle good manners so far as to break with her question into milady's _tete-a-tete_.

'Prue!' repeats the other, looking round rather tartly from her interrupted conversation; 'G.o.d bless my soul, child! how can I tell?'

and so resumes her talk.

But though this is not a very lucid explanation of her sister's absence, Peggy returns from it with a considerably lightened heart. Since it is a matter of certainty that Prue would never have consented to dance with any one but Freddy, he must have come at last. They are nowhere in sight, therefore he must have carried her off to some retired corner, where he is persuading her--so easy of persuasion, poor soul--of how much he has been suffering all evening, and how extremely loftily he has behaved. Of whatever he is persuading her, her long agony is for this evening at least probably at an end.

Peggy draws a deep breath at the thought, and for the first time becomes aware how good the floor is, and how pleasant the long swallow-swoop from end to end of the ball-room. The crowd is growing much thinner.

People who have a long distance to drive are already gone. Mrs. Evans, bulging at every point with the result of her thefts, and driving the reluctant Vicar before her, takes herself off, having indulged herself in one parting whisper to Peggy, to the effect that she 'shall not bow to Lady Betty, even if she looks as if she expected it.' For Betty is still here, and having run up the whole gamut of her schoolboy follies, having grown tired of throwing tarts at her admirers, and pelting them with lobster claws, has settled down into a steady audacious open flirtation with a Rural Dean, the sight of whose good lady's jealous writhings seems to afford her a great deal of innocent joy.

Lady Roupell's old friend has been reluctantly reft away from her by his party, and she is beginning to show signs of uneasiness, as Peggy can see from a distance. But since Prue's place beside her is still vacant, the elder sister is resolved that no action of hers--however apparently called for by the ordinary rules of politeness--shall tend to shorten the few brief moments of happiness that have come, however tardily, to sweeten her evening's long bitterness. She has deliberately dodged milady's messengers sent in pursuit of her, has evaded them behind doors, and has slipped past them in pa.s.sages; and it is not until she catches a distant glimpse of Prue returning to her chaperon on Mr.