Of Robert I saw very little; the host and hostess in a big house never have a moment to spare. To prepare the ball-room an extra staff of servants was employed incessantly for three days, at the end of which time it was pronounced ready for the occasion.
I can find no words to convey to others the singular way in which the altered room impressed me. Though stripped of all its massive, gloomy furniture, brilliantly illuminated with many jets of incandescent gas (Robert had a strange aversion to electricity) and adorned with festoons of Oriental flowers, banners, and the gayest coloured bunting, it still retained an air of sadness, and an indescribable something, that nothing, nothing short of total annihilation, could ever eradicate or modify.
Her ladyship clad in a snowy dress of the most costly material trimmed with the rarest lace, her fair arms and bosom glittering with the Wentworth diamonds, looked like a fairy queen standing on the threshold of an enchanted castle.
I looked closely at her but could see no remnant of apprehension either in her eyes or gestures, she was perfectly at ease and sublimely unconscious of aught but the enjoyment of those around her and the importance attached to herself, the well-dressed handsome hostess.
With Robert it was otherwise; in spite of his smiles, his bows, his many pretty actions of old-world gallantry, I could see that the wan, grey spirit of unrest stalking at his elbow never left him. He would have staked his soul to glance occasionally at the spot before the fireplace, but fear lest some one might see him effectually held him back. This continual mental struggle, unsuspected even by his wife, was only too obviously apparent to me, and I seemed to hear a sigh of relief—of deep and earnest relief—issue from his lips when the orchestra began.
And now all was symphony and movement. There was much glare and glitter and piquancy; snake-like evolutions, spasmodic convergences, dexterous extrications, all performed and repeated with mathematical precision and untiring repetition.
The music changed—the waltz gave place to a novel and somewhat wildly executed fandango. It was her ladyship’s whim to include in her programme exotic dances; a resuscitation of long-forgotten Terpsichore, they were undoubtedly the distinguishing and characteristic features of her entertainments, raising them far above the commonplace, and gaining for miladi a world-wide and much-coveted reputation. She hated anything merely popular and vulgar.
In this dance that now commenced and which I beheld for the first time, there was much of the beautiful, the wanton, the bizarre, and just a suspicion of “something” which might have shocked a very exacting “Grundy.”
As the greater number of the guests, like myself, were unacquainted with it, the floor was left comparatively free for the performers, the onlookers lining the walls, the doorway, and the big bay window.
Never had I witnessed such enthusiasm; the dancers, throwing their very heart and soul into their antics, gyrated and pirouetted in such lively fashion as evoked spontaneous outbursts of applause from the delighted, albeit bewildered and somewhat puzzled spectators.