The woman looked up, noted the mute appeal in voice and eyes, and, drawing the girl down next her on the couch, took her hand and held it as she chatted.
"Where had I got to? Oh, yes—Bunter said: 'Mother, there's something tickling my red lane.' 'Your red lane, Bunter?' 'Oh, mother,' said Patch, 'he's such a baby. He means his froat.' Now wasn't that sweet. Miss Barbour? Fahncy! And only three years old, both of them. I'm so proud, I simply bore all my friends. But you love children, don't you, Miss Barbour? How can any one not?"
VII
A DRESS REHEARSAL
Her own interests? Not many days had passed before she had a chance to value them anew. The evening of the dance came and went. She was a little surprised at the size of the gathering it called together. There must have been eighty people in the hall, neighbors mostly, jovial, temperately enthusiastic, in after-dinner mood, and with the additional prospect of a first meet to hounds next day after the long frost. She noticed, however, that Bryan seemed to be introducing a good many strangers. She had danced amid a buzz of whispers, exclamations, and frequently a loud "Bravo!" taken up and echoed wherever a white shirt-front glimmered in the darkened hall. None of them knew how well it was done, but every one could appreciate a graceful child in a white satin Watteau dress with a great pointed frill, black sausage curls falling upon her shoulders under a quaint glazed hat, whose bones seemed to be of whalebone, whose feet never were still, and whose face, through all her changing gestures of appeal, hesitancy, curiosity, disdain, cunning, and weariness never altered from the grave set expression with which she faced the first round of applause. Or an odalisque, in a long striped tunic of the thinnest, softest silk and baggy Turkish trousers that sagged in great wide folds over her bare slippered feet, who swayed in time to sleepy traumerei music almost like a top—rousing every now and then with a braying jar of the little cymbals that were fastened on her hands, to straighten and poise and twirl herself anew—sinking on the floor with the last faint chords, a soft limp heap of silk and dishevelled black hair.
Already, as she sat by her bedroom fire in night-dress and wrapper, her hair plaited on each side of her head, and cuddling her knee, she was paying for her brief hour of triumph. She had the indefinable feeling of having "gone too far" that makes one dread the coming day like the face of an enemy. She thought people had looked strangely at her when she returned dressed, collected, and a little paler, to the hall. It was not because here and there she had caught a false note in the tempest of congratulation that overwhelmed her. It seemed set altogether in a key that was strange and new; she could judge, for, after all, it was not the first time she had danced in public. Even the impulse which had made her at the end of her second dance run forward and kiss Lady Warrener (at the piano) seemed to be misunderstood. The gentle peeress, so kind before, had shrunk from her palpably. And yet it was so natural; for she had never danced to music played like that before. How she longed for her public, her real public, obtuse and leather-lunged if you will, but whom a smile can conquer and whose loyalty, once gained, is gained forever!
Then she had her own private motives for misgiving. Her cousin's manner had been strange for days. Leslie avoided her plainly, but followed her with her eyes. When forced to speak she seemed, not harsh, but confused, shocked, and anxious for escape. Jack had gone back to his regiment in Ireland the day after the dinner, grumbling, and feeling the iron of disinheritance in his soul as only the younger son of a great house can. He would have told her everything. But she must have an explanation from Leslie to-morrow. On no other prospect could she face the night.
The fire was burning low. The little Sheraton clock on the mantelpiece shrilled two. She threw off her slippers and wrapper, opened the window, and, drawing a screen across the sinking fire, crept between the smooth linen sheets. But, once in bed, her excitement returned on her. Three o'clock—four o'clock—struck, and she was awake, the pulse of the music still in her relaxed body, listening to the fire shifting in the grate, watching the red dusk turn slowly to black.
Suddenly she heard the handle of the door move, very gently and very steadily. The bed-curtains hid it from view; but she remembered that she had forgotten to lock it, and when it closed again as gently she knew that some one was in the room. But there was something else she had not forgotten. She felt under her pillow and closed her hand upon it. The very day she saw him last her lover had given her a little steel repeating pistol. She remembered his words: "I've never had occasion to use it, Nelly, but I should be giving you a false impression of the world, as I know it, if I didn't tell you there's ten times as much chance you'll have to defend your honor some day as there is I'll ever have to defend my property."
She lay still, her heart beating to suffocation, but she did not quite close her eyes, and the next moment a fear that was never to be named went out of her heart. It was only her cousin Leslie. She recognized her plainly—long and emaciated, with tawny, lifeless hair about her shoulders. She was carrying a night-light in a cone-shaped glass.