Voices in the Night

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

She certainly looked her best; and had caught the sweetly feminine suggestion of the style better than any other of the score or so of women belonging to the smart set, who, by degrees, came to make up the mutiny Lancers. A fact which the men belonging to it were not slow to recognise, so that a group of stiff-stocked uniforms soon gathered round her, while Mr. Lucanaster--who looked his best, also, in the gorgeous array which Hodson of Hodson's Horse in the middle of all the strain and stress of the mutiny, evolved from his inner consciousness for his 'Ring-tailed Roarers'--could not take his eyes off her gleaming pink and white. He even risked the resentment of more important ladies by rearranging the whole set so as to secure her being next to him in it.

But that gleam of pink and white was responsible for more than the setting of Mr. Lucanaster's blood on fire. It made Chris, for the first time, fiercely jealous. Ever since he had allowed himself, for that minute on the bridge, to compare his wife with his ideal, and his ideal with the little cousin whose familiar beauty had so disturbed him, he had been far more exigeant as a husband than he had ever been before. And now, as he watched his wife's success, it was with clouded eyes that followed her wherever she went; even when, just before supper--the night being marvellously warm for the time of year--some one's suggestion that it would be infinitely jollier to have the mutiny Lancers outside in the gardens, sent the whole party of dancing feet trooping out, amid laughter and chatter, to the lawns and flower-beds which forty years ago had lain bare and bloodstained under the weary feet of those defenders of the flag.

The verdict of execrable taste given by the steward had been endorsed by many; by none more fully than by the Government House party which had come over late. But even Lesley felt bound to admit that, taste or no taste, there was a certain uncanniness in the look of these men and women who might indeed be ghosts from that gay Nushapore life of forty years back.

So, many a one might have been dressed, so they might have danced, and flirted, and chattered, on the very night when John Ellison ended that gay life and called them to death, with a brief order to close in on the Garden Mound and defend the flag that floated from its central tower. And Grace, more imaginative, more fanciful than Lesley, found her thoughts wandering more than once in a wonder whether some call to show themselves worthy of that past might not come again, come there in the midst of the lights and the laughter. There is always an atmosphere of unreality in a fancy dress ball when the masqueraders mean to enjoy themselves; but it was more marked that night than Grace Arbuthnot had ever seen it.

There was a fascination in it--in the uncertainty of it.

But there was one small soul for whom the sight had fascination, not from its unreality, but its reality. This was Jerry, who in consequence of a special invitation from the ball committee of which Jack Raymond was secretary, that the little lad might be allowed to see the show till supper-time, had been brought over for an hour or two.

'He isn't weally Hodson of Hodson's Horse, is he, mum?' he said, squeezing his mother's hand tight, as, in his little Eton suit, his wide white collar seeming to stare like his wide grey eyes, he watched the couples passing out into the garden, 'cos he was bigger. It's only pwetence, weally, isn't it?'

'Of course, it is pretence, Jerry,' she answered almost carelessly; then something in the child's expression made her stoop to smooth his hair, and look in his freckled face with a smile. 'You would like to go and see them in the garden, wouldn't you? Well, wait a bit, and Lesley, when she comes back from her dance, shall take you, and then you must be off to bed. It is getting late.'

'Let me take him, Lady Arbuthnot,' said Jack Raymond's voice. 'I am engaged to Miss Drummond for these Lancers, and I am sure she would prefer not to dance them with me, even if she hasn't forgotten the fact.'

He had come up behind her from the supper-room where he had been busy, and Grace, who had not seen him before that evening, felt a sudden pang at the sight of him. For he was dressed in the political uniform which, except on such frivolous occasions as these, had not seen the light for ten years. She told herself that he looked well in it, as he had always done; and then the reminiscence annoyed her, for she had been taking herself to task somewhat for the persistency of such recollections.