The dance at length ceased; beaux bowed, ladies courtesied, and the throng broke into couples, and promenaded the apartment. Exhausted belles sunk into seats, whilst attentive youths fanned and persiflaged, laughed at nothing, and studied “the agreeable.” Such was the posture of affairs, when the head of the establishment, a lady of about five-and-forty, of pleasing appearance and address, seeing we were strangers, approached, and kindly bade us welcome. There was an amiability, and at the same time a firmness and decision in her manner, a happy admixture of the suaviter and fortiter, which showed that she was peculiarly well qualified for the arduous task she had to perform of presiding over this establishment—a sort of nunnery travestied, in which perpetual celibacy formed no part of the vows, and the vigils differed widely from those which “pale-eyed virgins keep” in the gloomy seclusion of the convent.
“Would you like to dance, sir?” said the lady, addressing herself to Captain Marpeet.
“No, I thank you, ma’am,” said my blunt companion; “I am a little too stiff in the joints, and my dancing days are all over.”
The fact was, that Marpeet had passed five consecutive years of his life in the jungles, where, as it frequently happens in India, he had acquired what, for want of a better term, I will call a gynophobia, or woman-horror, which the occasional appearance of a spinster in those deserts wild rather tended to confirm than allay. A short residence in England had, it is true, in some degree, moderated this dread of the respectable portion of the softer sex; but still much of it remained, and he shunned with morbid aversion all situations imposing the painful necessity of whispering soft nothings and “doing the agreeable” with the ladies. The good dame of the school smiled expressively on receiving Captain Marpeet’s answer; it was a smile which said, as plain as smile could speak, “You are an odd fish, I see, and one on whom pressing would be quite thrown away.”
“Perhaps,” said she, turning to me, “you will allow me to introduce you to a partner, and if so, I shall have great pleasure in presenting you to one of our young ladies?”
I had none of Marpeet’s scruples, expressed my acknowledgments, accepted her offer, and was led full clank across the ball-room, and presented in due form to Miss Rosa Mussaleh, as an aspirant for her fair hand in the ensuing dance. Miss Rosa Mussaleh was a fine bouncing girl of eighteen, still in high blow from the effects of her recent exertions. Form unexceptionable: complexion rather tending to a delicate saffron, bespeaking plainly her Asiatic maternity.
“If not engaged, Miss Rosa,” said the school-mistress, presenting me, “Ensign Gernon” (I had previously communicated my name and rank, though there was not much danger of mistaking me for a major-general) “will be happy to dance with you.”
“I shall be ver happie; I am not engaged,” said Miss Rosa, in a singular variety of the Anglo-Saxon tongue called the Cheechee language (Hindustanee idiom Englished), then new to me—a dialect which constitutes a distinguishing mark of those born and bred in India, and the leading peculiarity of which consists in laying a false emphasis, particularly on such small words as to, me, and, &c. The lady of the establishment having performed her devoir, as mistress of the ceremonies, made a courteous inclination, and withdrew, leaving us to ourselves.
As a rather precocious juvenile, I had danced with some of the fair and well-born damsels of my own land at Bath, Clifton, and elsewhere, and was, therefore, not to be daunted with the mahogany charms of Miss R. M.; so, sans cérémonie, I dashed into conversation.
“You have a great many charming young ladies here,” said I.