VII
Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.
We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men—Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.
The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion—though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty—I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other—till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."
The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.
"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."
"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.
"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."
Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they begged for mercy and sat out.
"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get——I say, Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"
"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen. Not out yet."
"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights. I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."
And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a touring-car drew up outside the digs., and a slim figure in dust-coat and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an elaborate but still unstable coiffure.
"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and I met her at the stair-head.
"You needn't call me Lord Loring even if your hair is up," he answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."
"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"
"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and dress."
I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.
"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."
"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."
I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in—white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change in her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.
As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,—"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "So long, with sapphires here and here, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."
At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.
"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph—a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.
"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.
"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.
"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a friend of his, aren't you?"
She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men to inspire.
"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she asked.
"Little bits," I said.
"He told me everything," she answered proudly.
"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young——"
"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."
"And I'm sure a good part of the language was—unparliamentary, Miss Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man——"
"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.
"He's a man; he's little—compared with Jim Loring or myself, for example——"
"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"
"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.
"There's nothing he can't do!"
"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.
"It's nothing to what he will do. After Oxford he's going to set out to seek his fortune,"—Sonia had dropped into the very language of a fairy-story. "And when he comes back——"
"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.
"Yes."
"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.
She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."
"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.
"I don't care if he did," she answered.
"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."
There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time. The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.
"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.
O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.
"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.
"Is it time? I've been telling George——"
He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.
"What's the good of telling him? What's the good of telling anyone? They don't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting Lady Amy?"
I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.
"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."
Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.
"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"
"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in defiance.
The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.
"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much more than a boy himself."
"Time will work wonders," I said.
"But will he have anything to marry on?"
"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."
Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.
"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love with him. But——" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."
"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."
"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.
"Yes."
"Or till it's broken off?"
"Raney's not likely to break it off!"
"She may. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."
The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than naturally helpless.