“But what’s that on the dish before us?” continued the captain, surveying it with curious surprise. “Peaches in December! I never heard of such a thing!” And determined to investigate the phenomenon more closely, he suddenly plunged his fork into the nearest peach, and carried it off to his plate. In a moment his knife had divided the sugared cake into halves. “It’s all a sham!” he cried, pushing it from him; “no more a peach than I am!”—and then, for the first time in the experience of man, a little laugh was actually heard from Miss Mildmay, in which Clemence herself, who had seen the proceeding, could not refrain from joining. The captain laughed loudest of all, quite unconscious that anything excited mirth except the “sham” of the peaches.
“I did not know, Clemence,” he cried, “that you would have been up to such dodges!” and the exclamation set his end of the table in a roar. Such a merry party had perhaps never before assembled round the mahogany in Belgrave Square.
Notwithstanding the prognostications of Lady Selina, nothing glaringly wrong appeared in the arrangements of the banquet. Perhaps the sharp eye of malice detected here and there some token of inexperience in the mistress of the feast, but few were disposed to criticize harshly. Lord Vaughan did not regret the absence of his French cook; and Colonel Parsons and Sir William Page sat as contentedly on the same side of the table, as if they had never occupied opposite benches in “The House.” All would have proceeded in the most approved routine of formality and regularity, but for the presence of the merry old captain, who cut his jokes, and told his stories, and pledged his niece in a loud, jovial tone, to the great amusement of the guests, but the embarrassment of Mrs. Effingham.
Arabella and Louisa awaited the ladies in the drawing-room, where they were joined by Thistlewood and the other gentlemen. The stiff semicircle was again dashingly broken by the brave old captain, who chatted merrily with the laughing Louisa, proposed a country dance or a reel, and engaged her as his partner. But nothing so informally lively as an impromptu dance after dinner was to be thought of in Belgrave Square. The grand piano, indeed, was opened; but it was that a succession of ladies, after a due amount of declining and pressing, might give the company the benefit of their music.
Captain Thistlewood was extremely fond of music, and therefore at once planted himself by the piano, beating time like a conductor. The concert opened with a bravura song from Miss Praed, to which he listened with much of the feeling which Johnson expressed when asked if a lady’s performance were not wonderful: “Wonderful!—would it were impossible!” Then followed a languid “morceau” from Miss Mildmay, which the composer must have designed for a soporific; and then Arabella seated herself before the instrument. Her forte was rapid execution; hers was a hurry-skurry style of playing, hand over hand, the right suddenly plunging into the bass, then the left unexpectedly flourishing away in the treble—each seeming bent on invading the province of the other, and causing as much noise there as possible. As the performer finished with a crashing chord, the captain, who had been watching her fingers with great diversion, clapped Arabella on the shoulder. “Well done, my lass!” he exclaimed; “that’s what I should call a thunder-and-lightning piece, stunning in both senses of the word! But still, for my part, I like a little quiet tune;—did you ever hear your mother sing ‘Nelly Bly’?”
Arabella looked daggers as she withdrew from the piano. To be so treated, as if she were a child—she, an earl’s grand-daughter—before so many guests, and by him, the vulgar little brother-in-law of an apothecary; it was more than her proud spirit could endure! Mrs. Effingham should pay dearly for the insult!
Nothing further occurred to vary the monotony of the fashionable London entertainment. The evening wore on, much after the usual style of such evenings, till, one after another, the guests took leave of their young bright hostess; and there was cloaking in the ante-room, and bustle in the hall, and rolling of carriages from the door—till at length the lights in the drawing-room were darkened, silence settled down even on the servants’ hall, the grand entertainment was concluded, the laborious trifle ended, and that which had cost so much thought and anxious care, to say nothing of trouble and expense, passed quietly into the mass of nothings, once important, which Memory, when she takes inventory of her possessions, throws aside for ever as mere tarnished tinsel not worth the preserving.
“I am so glad that it is over!” thought Clemence.