The painting represented a monkey.
All the others roared with laughter, attracting general attention.
Soon after the dancing had recommenced the Royal party took their leave. The same ceremony was observed as at their arrival; the guests in two ranks on each side of the room, the Royal march played by the orchestra, and the master of the house in attendance to the carriage door.
CHAPTER XII.
AN UNWELCOME GUEST.
CLEMENTINA gave a sigh of relief. Walking slowly, with the delightful sense of a difficult task happily accomplished, she made her way through the rooms, smiling right and left, and shedding amiable speeches on every friend she met. This splendid ball, the most magnificent perhaps ever given in Madrid by a private individual, was almost exclusively her work. Her father had provided the money, but the motive power, the taste and planning, had been hers. She received the congratulations which hailed her from all sides with a pleasing intoxication of flattered vanity. Happiness stirred a craving for love, its inseparable associate. She was possessed by a vehement wish to have a brief meeting, tête-à-tête, with Raimundo, to speak and hear a few fond words, to exchange a brief caress. She looked round for him among the crowd.
He had been wandering about the rooms all the evening, generally alone. He had looked forward to this ball with puerile anticipations of delirious and unknown pleasures, for he had never been present at any of these high festivals of wealth and fashion. The reality had not come up to his hopes, as must always be the case. All this ostentation, all the scandalous luxury displayed to his eyes, instead of exciting his pride, wounded it deeply. Never had he felt so completely a stranger in the world he had now for some months lived in. His thoughts, with their natural tendency to melancholy, reverted to his modest home, where, by his fault, necessaries would ere long be lacking; to his humble-minded mother, who had never hesitated to fulfil the most menial tasks; to his innocent sister, who had learned from her to be thrifty and hard-working. Remorse gnawed at his heart. Then, too, he observed that the young men of his acquaintance treated him here with covert hostility. Many of them he had begun to regard as friends; they welcomed him pleasantly, he played cards with them and sometimes joined in their expeditions, but he clearly understood at last that he was no one, nothing to them, but as Clementina's lover; and he could detect, or his exaggerated sensitiveness made him fancy that he detected, in their demeanour to him, a touch of scorn, which humiliated him bitterly. The passionate devotion which Clementina professed for him compensated no doubt for these miseries, and enabled him often to forget them, but this evening his adored mistress, though she did not ignore him, was necessarily out of his range. He endured the phase of feeling which a mystic goes through when, as he expresses it, God has withdrawn His guiding hand—intense weariness and the darkest gloom of spirit. He danced dutiously two or three times, and talked a little to one and another. Tired of it all, at last he withdrew into the quietest corner of one of the rooms, sat down on a sofa and remained sunk in extreme dejection.
Clementina sought him for some few minutes, and was beginning to be out of patience. She went into the card-room, and he started up to meet her with a beaming countenance. All his melancholy had vanished on seeing that she was in search of him.
"If you would like two minutes' chat, come to the Duke's study," she said, in rapid but tender accents. "It is on the right-hand side, at the end of the corridor." She went thither, and Raimundo, to save appearances, lingered for a few moments by one of the tables, watching the game.
Clementina made her way in and out of the rooms till she reached the corridor, and hurried to the study, a handsome room, so called for mere form, since the Duke always sat upstairs. It was a blaze of light, as all the other rooms were. As she went in, she fancied she heard a smothered sob, which filled her with surprise and apprehension. Looking about her, she discovered, in a deep recess, a woman lying in a heap on a divan, hiding her face in her handkerchief, and weeping violently. She went up to her, and recognised her by her dress. It was Irenita.
"Irene, my child, what is the matter?" she exclaimed, bending anxiously over her.