The Shuttle Part 51

The Ladies Jane and Mary Lithcom, who had been ordered about by her from their infancy, obeyed with polite smiles. They were not particularly pretty girls, and were of the indigent n.o.ble. Jane, who had almost overlarge blue eyes, sighed as she reseated herself a few chairs lower down.

"It does seem beastly unfair," she said in a low voice to her sister, "that a girl such as that should be so awfully good-looking. She ought to have a turned-up nose."

"Thank you," said Mary, "I have a turned-up nose myself, and I've got nothing to balance it."

"Oh, I didn't mean a nice turned-up nose like yours," said Jane; "I meant an ugly one. Of course Lady Alanby wants her for Tommy." And her manner was not resigned.

"What she, or anyone else for that matter," disdainfully, "could want with Tommy, I don't know," replied Mary.

"I do," answered Jane obstinately. "I played cricket with him when I was eight, and I've liked him ever since. It is AWFUL," in a smothered outburst, "what girls like us have to suffer."

Lady Mary turned to look at her curiously.

"Jane," she said, "are you SUFFERING about Tommy?"

"Yes, I am. Oh, what a question to ask in a ballroom! Do you want me to burst out crying?"

"No," sharply, "look at the Prince. Stare at that fat woman curtsying to him. Stare and then wink your eyes."

Lady Alanby was talking about Mount Dunstan.

"Lord Dunholm has given us a lead. He is an old friend of mine, and he has been talking to me about it. It appears that he has been looking into things seriously. Modern as he is, he rather tilts at injustices, in a quiet way. He has satisfactorily convinced himself that Lord Mount Dunstan has been suffering for the sins of the fathers--which must be annoying."

"Is Lord Dunholm quite sure of that?" put in Sir Nigel, with a suggestively civil air.

Old Lady Alanby gave him an unencouraging look.

"Quite," she said. "He would be likely to be before he took any steps."

"Ah," remarked Nigel. "I knew Lord Tenham, you see."

Lady Alanby's look was more unencouraging still. She quietly and openly put up her gla.s.s and stared. There were times when she had not the remotest objection to being rude to certain people.

"I am sorry to hear that," she observed. "There never was any room for mistake about Tenham. He is not usually mentioned."

"I do not think this man would be usually mentioned, if everything were known," said Nigel.

Then an appalling thing happened. Lady Alanby gazed at him a few seconds, and made no reply whatever. She dropped her gla.s.s, and turned again to talk to Betty. It was as if she had turned her back on him, and Sir Nigel, still wearing an amiable exterior, used internally some bad language.

"But I was a fool to speak of Tenham," he thought. "A great fool."

A little later Miss Vanderpoel made her curtsy to the exalted guest, and was commented upon again by those who looked on. It was not at all unnatural that one should find ones eyes following a girl who, representing a sort of royal power, should have the good fortune of possessing such looks and bearing.

Remembering his child bete noir of the long legs and square, audacious little face, Nigel Anstruthers found himself restraining a slight grin as he looked on at her dancing. Partners flocked about her like bees, and Lady Alanby of Dole, and other very grand old or middle-aged ladies all found the evening more interesting because they could watch her.

"She is full of spirit," said Lady Alanby, "and she enjoys herself as a girl should. It is a pleasure to look at her. I like a girl who gets a magnificent colour and stars in her eyes when she dances. It looks healthy and young."

It was Tommy Miss Vanderpoel was dancing with when her ladyship said this. Tommy was her grandson and a young man of greater rank than fortune. He was a nice, frank, heavy youth, who loved a simple county life spent in tramping about with guns, and in friendly hobn.o.bbing with the neighbours, and eating great afternoon teas with people whose jokes were easy to understand, and who were ready to laugh if you tried a joke yourself. He liked girls, and especially he liked Jane Lithcom, but that was a weakness his grandmother did not at all encourage, and, as he danced with Betty Vanderpoel, he looked over her shoulder more than once at a pair of big, unhappy blue eyes, whose owner sat against the wall.

Betty Vanderpoel herself was not thinking of Tommy. In fact, during this brilliant evening she faced still further developments of her own strange case. Certain new things were happening to her. When she had entered the ballroom she had known at once who the man was who stood before the royal guest--she had known before he bowed low and withdrew.

And her recognition had brought with it a shock of joy. For a few moments her throat felt hot and pulsing. It was true--the things which concerned him concerned her. All that happened to him suddenly became her affair, as if in some way they were of the same blood. Nigel's slighting of him had infuriated her; that Lord Dunholm had offered him friendship and hospitality was a thing which seemed done to herself, and filled her with grat.i.tude and affection; that he should be at this place, on this special occasion, swept away dark things from his path.

It was as if it were stated without words that a conservative man of the world, who knew things as they were, having means of reaching truths, vouched for him and placed his dignity and firmness at his side.

And there was the gladness at the sight of him. It was an overpoweringly strong thing. She had never known anything like it. She had not seen him since Nigel's return, and here he was, and she knew that her life quickened in her because they were together in the same room. He had come to them and said a few courteous words, but he had soon gone away.

At first she wondered if it was because of Nigel, who at the time was making himself rather ostentatiously amiable to her. Afterwards she saw him dancing, talking, being presented to people, being, with a tactful easiness, taken care of by his host and hostess, and Lord Westholt. She was struck by the graceful magic with which this tactful ease surrounded him without any obviousness. The Dunholms had given a lead, as Lady Alanby had said, and the rest were following it and ignoring intervals with reposeful readiness. It was wonderfully well done. Apparently there had been no past at all. All began with this large young man, who, despite his Viking type, really looked particularly well in evening dress. Lady Alanby held him by her chair for some time, openly enjoying her talk with him, and calling up Tommy, that they might make friends.

After a while, Betty said to herself, he would come and ask for a dance.

But he did not come, and she danced with one man after another. Westholt came to her several times and had more dances than one. Why did the other not come? Several times they whirled past each other, and when it occurred they looked--both feeling it an accident--into each other's eyes.

The strong and strange thing--that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun--had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing, but an ancient and common one--as common and ancient as death and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are. As it comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their mere pa.s.sing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens, and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.

"I wish," Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening, "that her eyes had some fault in their expression--that they drew one less--that they drew ME less. I am losing my head."

"It would be better," Betty thought, "if I did not wish so much that he would come and ask me to dance with him--that he would not keep away so.

He is keeping away for a reason. Why is he doing it?"

The music swung on in lovely measures, and the dancers swung with it.

Sir Nigel walked dutifully through the Lancers once with his wife, and once with his beautiful sister-in-law. Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners, who discovered that she was a childishly light creature who danced extremely well. Everyone was kind to her, and the very grand old ladies, who admired Betty, were absolutely benign in their manner. Betty's partners paid ingenuous court to her, and Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.

Rosy, standing for a moment looking out on the brilliancy and state about her, meeting Betty's eyes, laughed quiveringly.

"I am in a dream," she said.

"You have awakened from a dream," Betty answered.

From the opposite side of the room someone was coming towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.

"I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with him,"

she said. "Why have you not danced with him before, Betty?"

"He has not asked me," Betty answered. "That is the only reason."

"Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a few days after they met him at Stornham," Rosalie explained in an undertone. "They wanted to know him. Then it seems they found they liked each other. Lady Dunholm has been telling me about it. She says Lord Dunholm thanks you, because you said something illuminating. That was the word she used--'illuminating.' I believe you are always illuminating, Betty."

Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them. How broad his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his eyes! Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction. One does not call it domineering, but it is so. This special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her single share of force. Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this "other one" came to her. He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to her. He said in rather a low voice:

"Will you dance with me?"

"Yes," she answered.

Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom. Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same interested curiosity. Some onlookers thought it singular that they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and circ.u.mstance. No one attempted to deny that they were an extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes followed them in spite of one's self.

"Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing,"

old Lady Alanby commented. "He is a magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently built girl. Everybody should look like that.

My impression would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of them had any particular character. That affair of the apple was so silly. Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband. That wonderful black head of Miss Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near Mount Dunstan's dark red one."

"I am glad to be dancing with him," Betty was thinking. "I am glad to be near him."

"Will you dance this with me to the very end," asked Mount Dunstan--"to the very late note?"