“Hush, you mustn’t say those things,” she said. “Ah, there is the band beginning, and it is our dance. But let us just walk through the shrubbery before we go back. The dusk and quiet are such a relief after the glare. Lyndhurst—ah, dear me. Cousin Lyndhurst I ought to say—you really must not go home till my little dance is quite finished. You make things go so well. Dear Wilfred is quite useless to me. Does he not look an old darling as Timon of Athens? A sort of mixture between George the Fourth in tights and a lion-tamer.”
Mrs. Evans was feeling more actively alive to-night than she had felt for years. Her tongue, which was generally a rather halting adjutant to her glances and little sinuous movements, was almost vivified to wit. Certainly her description of her husband had acuteness and a sense of the ludicrous to inspire it. Through the boughs of laburnums in the shrubbery they could see him now, escorting the tallest and oldest Cleopatra, who was Mrs. Brooks, to the end of the garden. Dimly, through the curtain of intervening gloom, they saw the populous wooden floor that had been laid down on the grass; Mrs. Ames—the dance was a polka—was frankly pirouetting in the arms of a redoubtable Falstaff. Mrs. Altham was wrestling with the Apothecary, and Elsie Evans, one of the few young people present, was vainly trying to galvanize General Fortescue, thinly disguised as Henry VII, into some semblance of activity.
Mrs. Evans gave another sigh, a sigh of curious calibre.
“It all seems so distant,” she said. “All the lights and dancing are less real than the shadows and the stillness.”
That was not quite extemporaneous; she had thought over something of the sort. It had the effect of making Major Ames feel suddenly hot with an anxious kind of heat. He was beginning to perceive the truth of that which he had foppishly imagined in his own self-communings, namely, that this “poor little lady” was very, very much attached to him. He had often dwelt on the thought before with odious self-centred satisfaction; now the thought was less satisfactory; it was disquieting and mildly alarming. Like the fly on the fly-paper, with one leg already englued, he put down a second to get leverage with which to free the first, and found that it was adhering also.
Mrs. Evans spoke again.
“I took such pleasure in all the preparations,” she said. “You were so much interested in it all. Tell me, Cousin Lyndhurst, that you are not disappointed.”
It was hardly possible for him to do less than what he did. What he did was little enough. He pressed the arm that lay in his rather close to his white toga, and an unwonted romanticism of speech rose to his lips.
“You have enchanted me,” he said. “Me, us, all of us.”
She gave a little laugh; in the dusk it sounded no louder than a breeze stirring.