CHAPTER XVIII. THE BALL.
The evening of the day following was that of the ball. Chris was in the lowest of low spirits, and would have shut herself up in her room but for Mr. Bradfield, who had insisted on her reserving a square dance for him. The strange communications made by Stelfox, and her own conviction that Mr. Richard was being unfairly treated, made her shy and depressed in the society of the master of the house, whose sharp eyes detected a change in her manner towards him. The girl was troubled also on her mother’s account. Mrs. Abercarne had been worried and exasperated, not only by the airs which Mrs. Graham-Shute gave herself, which she could have put up with, but by the orders she gave the servants on matters concerning the ball. Knowing her relationship to their master, and being somewhat impressed also by her pretensions, the servants did not dare to disobey her; so that in the attempt to serve two mistresses they wasted their time and fell to grumbling. A consciousness of the battle between the wills of the two ladies pervaded the entire household by the time the dancing began, and the ball opened in general depression.
“So good of you to give this dance for my girls!” cried Mrs. Graham-Shute’s loud voice in Mr. Bradfield’s ear, as he stood surveying the dancers, and looking about for Chris. “I’ve just been telling Mrs. Ethandene so,” she added, glancing at a middle-aged lady by her side, who was one of the great people of the place, and with whom, therefore, Mrs. Graham-Shute thought it advisable to strike up a friendship.
“H’m! Not much in my line—balls!” said Mr. Bradfield, grumpily, as he watched enviously the young fellow who was at that moment leading Chris out for a waltz.
“Who is that very distinguished-looking girl?” asked Mrs. Ethandene, who, having no daughters to marry, could afford a little admiration for those of other women.
“That one in the white nun’s veiling, with the marguerites in her bodice?” said Mrs. Graham-Shute, looking in the wrong direction either on purpose or by accident; “that is my daughter Lilith. She is hardly out yet, dear girl; but for my cousin John’s ball I couldn’t refuse her permission, you know.”
“No, no! I don’t mean her,” went on Mrs. Ethandene, a homely person, incapable of taking a hint of any kind. “I mean that tall girl with the good figure—the one in grey silk, with the flat gold necklace?”
“That,” answered Mr. Bradfield, in stentorian tones, frowning a little, and stepping forward so that the lady should not misunderstand, “is Miss Christina Abercarne.”
Mrs. Graham-Shute, whose face had in a moment become flaccid and expressionless, drew her head well back, and murmured a postscript in Mrs. Ethandene’s ear:
“The housekeeper’s little girl. I didn’t know you meant her. So good of my cousin to let her come, wasn’t it?”
Now Mrs. Graham-Shute did not wish her cousin to hear these words; but being one of those uncomfortable persons who are always more interested in what is not intended for their ears than in what is, he did hear them. And he utterly confounded and exasperated his dear cousin by saying, in the same loud voice as before:
“There wasn’t any goodness about it; there’s no goodness in being kind to a pretty girl. I gave the ball just because she likes dancing. Nothing else would have induced me to turn my house upside down like this.”
Mrs. Graham-Shute could only affect to laugh at this speech as if it had been some charming pleasantry. But she did it with such an ill grace, being, indeed, extremely mortified, that it was plain she was on the verge of tears.
Meanwhile Chris was not enjoying herself so much as Mr. Bradfield had wished her to do. Her partner was a local production, being, indeed, no other than one of the famous Brownes, without an assortment of whom no Wyngham gaiety could be considered complete. He was the younger partner in the principal firm of solicitors of the town, and was, as she afterwards learnt, looked upon as “a great catch.” No Wyngham lady, however, had as yet caught him, and young Mr. Browne, modestly conscious of the interest he excited in the feminine breasts of the neighbourhood, conceived it as more his duty than his pleasure to distribute his attentions as equally as he could among the maidens of the place. In the course of his philanthropic wanderings, therefore, he had fallen temporarily to the lot of Chris, who was, perhaps, not yet sufficiently acclimatised to appreciate the honour as it deserved.
For young Mr. Browne’s attractions did not include the gift of conversational brilliancy, and Chris found the tête-à-tête hard work.
“You go in a great deal for theatricals, don’t you?” she said, thinking, from what she had heard, that this was a safe shot.
But he shook his head with a smile, which had in it not more than the minimum of the contempt the average Englishman always shows for any form of recreation in which he is not proficient.
“No, I don’t, but my brothers and sisters do. Amy, the second one, acts awfully well. They did the Vicar of Wakefield last year for the Blind School, and her Olivia was ever so much better than Ellen Terry’s. Everybody said so. She’d make her fortune on the stage, that girl would. Of course, my father would never let her go on; but lots of people would say it’s a pity.”
After this, as his interest in the stage evidently languished, Chris tried Art. Did he sketch? No, young Mr. Browne didn’t sketch himself, but his brother Algernon did; awfully well, too, so that everybody said it was simply disgraceful laziness, and nothing else, which kept him from exhibiting at the Academy. And this was the limit of young Mr. Browne’s interest in Art.
“No doubt, living down here so close to the sea, you take more interest in yachting and boating than anything else?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m much of a sailor myself,” answered Mr. Browne, modestly. “But Guy—that’s my eldest brother—can sail a yacht better than any of those men who get their living by it. My father keeps a little yacht, and I assure you that when they’re out in dirty weather the captain gives the boat over to Guy.”
“Indeed!” said Chris, with as little incredulity as possible. And at last, tired of fishing about in these unpromising waters, she came straight to the point with, “And what is your favourite recreation? Or are you too studious to have one?”
“Oh, no! Walter’s the studious one of the family. He’ll make a name for himself some day, for he’s got the real stuff in him, that chap.”
“So that you’re the idle one, who looks on and does nothing?”
“I’m afraid I am; but they’re all so clever that there’s nothing left for me. And I think even they are cut out by my cousins at Colchester. It’s an odd thing, but there are three distinct branches of the Browne family, one at Colchester, one here, and one as far north as Caithness, though we haven’t the remotest idea how they got up there.”
“In the Wars of the Roses, perhaps,” suggested Chris, wildly, feeling that she must say something, and that it didn’t much matter what it was.
Young Mr. Browne quite caught at the notion.
“Very likely,” said he, waking up into vivid interest. “Any national convulsion like that causes the great families to shift from their old places, and distribute themselves over the country. I daresay such disturbances do some hidden good in that way; don’t you think so?”
“Oh, no doubt,” answered Chris, feebly, wishing that she were on the arm of the brother who could waltz better than anybody else.
The next partner she had was a little man, nearly a head shorter than herself, as dark as young Mr. Browne was fair. He was of a different type, too—the type that goes up to town now and then, and thinks it the proper thing to speak of the place it lives in as “this hole.” In essentials, however, there was a stronger resemblance between young Mr. Cullingworth’s way of looking at life and young Mr. Browne’s than the former would have been ready to admit.
“Do you like this place?” was his first, almost contemptuous question.
“Yes, I like it better than any place I have ever lived in,” answered Chris, exuberantly. “I don’t seem ever to have known before what fresh air was.”
“Oh, fresh air—yes,” replied young Mr. Cullingworth, his tone betraying several degrees more of disdain than before. “One gets a little too much of that; but of most of the other things which help to make life endurable one gets next to nothing down here. It really is the slowest hole you ever were in, and I shall be obliged to think much worse of you than I should like to do if you don’t heartily wish yourself out of it before very long.”
“I’m horribly afraid I shall have, then, to reconcile myself to that fall in your estimation,” said Chris, smiling. “I like this place much, much better than London. London is only pleasant when you’re rich enough to get out of it whenever you like. Now we were not rich enough—my mother and I—so we were very glad to come down here.”
“Awfully lucky for us down here,” said Mr. Cullingworth, without enthusiasm. For he was not so deeply buried in the provinces as to fall in love with every pretty face he met. “Wonder what on earth made this Bradfield take it into his head to settle down here, don’t you?”
“I suppose he had heard of it as a nice place, and a healthy place,” suggested Chris.
“He’s been awfully lucky in being taken up by all the best people in the place, hasn’t he?”
Now Chris had nothing to say to this, for she thought the “best people” were very lucky in being taken up by Mr. Bradfield. They were mostly poor and proud, which is not a nice combination, and they showed their poverty in their eagerness to avail themselves of Mr. Bradfield’s invitations, and their pride in their unanimity in not inviting him back.
Mr. Cullingworth, luckily, did not wait for an answer, but resumed, with admiration:
“Why, there’s all the very best society of Wyngham here to-night, there is, indeed. I suppose you know them all, don’t you?”
Chris, who thought the assembly decidedly unprepossessing, regretted her ignorance, and said she supposed they would rather look down upon her than seek her society. But Mr. Cullingworth, as representing the “best society” of Wyngham, was magnanimous.
He didn’t think there was any feeling of that sort, “’pon his word he didn’t.” There might have been, of course, if some little bird had not happily whispered about that Mrs. Abercarne was the widow of an officer in the army, and a cousin of Lord Llanfyllin’s. As it was, Mr. Cullingworth felt sure that the “best people” were ready to receive her and her mother as equals.
“If you want to know who anybody is, you know, why, I’ll tell you,” said he, obligingly.
Chris, obliging too, asked the name of a tall, bald-headed man, who, although not particularly interesting in appearance, looked like a gentleman. Mr. Cullingworth’s face fell a little, but he answered at once:
“Oh, that Sir George Brandram. Don’t know much about him, he’s a Wosham man.”
His tone was so cold, and his manner intimated such strong disapproval, that Chris did not like to ask more about Sir George, fearing that he might be the hero of some terrible scandal. It was only later that she learnt that the sting of Mr. Cullingworth’s account of him lay in the words, “He’s a Wosham man.” For Wosham, four miles off along the coast, was the deadly rival of Wyngham; and it was a point of honour among their respective inhabitants to acknowledge no good in the dwellers of the rival town.
Meanwhile, the giver of the ball was enjoying himself very little better than the young lady in whose honour it was given. Mr. Bradfield loved to see his house full of guests, having to the full the pleasure of the self-made man in ostentatious hospitality. He took a cynical delight in the knowledge that these people who were civil to him for what he had, and not for what he was, considered themselves his superiors, and would have disdained to shake hands with him while he was still a poor man.
But to-night his enjoyment of his new position was spoilt for him by a chance word, uttered in all good faith by Lilith Shute, who was ashamed of her mother’s behaviour towards Chris, with whom she had struck up a friendship, which would have been a warm one if she could have had her will.
Lilith was dancing the Lancers with her host, whose constant glances in the direction of Chris Abercarne she could not fail to notice.
“How nice she looks to-night,” said Lilith, who looked pretty enough herself to afford a word of praise to a rival beauty, and who did not believe in her friend’s supposed designs upon the rich cousin’s heart.
“She always does look nice,” said Mr. Bradfield, gruffly. “And she knows it, too—a little too well, I expect, like all you girls who think yourself beauties.”
He was jealous, entirely without reason, of the men younger than himself, with one or other of whom she was dancing or talking whenever he glanced in her direction.
“I don’t see how a girl is to help knowing it, when it makes such a difference in the amount of attention she gets,” giggled Lilith. “Not,” she went on laughingly, “that the attention of anyone here would be likely to turn her head.” Then a malicious thought crossed her mind, taking the place of her magnanimity. “Chris Abercarne’s thoughts are too much occupied with somebody else for her to derive much entertainment from her partners,” she said, demurely.
Mr. Bradfield looked at her scrutinisingly; he dared to hope that Lilith was going to say something encouraging to himself.
“Somebody else?” he asked abruptly. “Who is it?”
Lilith shrugged her shoulders, and laughed mischievously.
“Ah, that’s more than I can tell you. All the information I can give you is that he is very, very good-looking, that he met her to-day in the park, and walked a little way with her as she came back from the town, and that she looked very much confused when she met me in the garden, and would have liked, I’m sure, to think I hadn’t seen her.”
Now there was a little mischief in this speech, for Lilith did not think Chris had behaved quite well in pretending not to know whom she meant when she described the stranger present at the tableaux. But, to do her justice, she had not the least intention of rousing the real anger she instantly saw in Mr. Bradfield’s face. Not only in his face either, for Lilith felt, when his hand next touched hers in the dance, that he was trembling with rage.
“Oh, ho!” said he, with an exclamation which was meant to sound like a laugh, but which was, in truth, anything but mirthful; “so she meets a sweetheart on the quiet, does she?”
Lilith, rather frightened, and seeing that she had made more serious mischief than she had intended hastened to answer:
“Oh, no, no; I didn’t mean that. I daresay it was only an accidental meeting. I—I——”
Mr. Bradfield interrupted her sternly.
“Have you ever seen him before, this fellow whom she met?”
“Only once,” answered Lilith, quickly.
“Where was that? Was she with him?”
“N—no, she wasn’t with him. It was the day of the tableaux. He was sitting on one of the back seats, and nobody seemed to know who he was. Not even Chris, for I asked her.”
Mr. Bradfield was evidently much puzzled. All the golden youth of Wyngham and the neighbourhood were dancing in his drawing-rooms that night, and who the fortunate young man could be who was considered good-looking by such a connoisseur as Lilith, and whom Chris condescended to meet on the sly, he had not the remotest notion. Certainly a man’s ideas of another man’s good looks differed considerably from those of a girl; but he could not, running over in his mind the eligible young men of the neighbourhood, conceive that any one of them should find favour in the very particular eyes of both the beauties.
With his usual directness, he set about solving the mystery at once. Taking Lilith back to her mother as soon as the dance was over, he went in search of Chris, whom he found sitting in the dining-room, eating an ice, and looking bored by young Cullingworth’s conversation.
“Miss Christina, I want to speak to you,” said he, shortly.
Chris, upon whom a hazy dread began to fall, as to the subject upon which he wished to interrogate her, followed him with reluctance into the embrasure of the window, which had been kept free from refreshment tables on purpose for tête-à-têtes of a more or less interesting sort.