The Percival ladies and their guests from the surrounding houses made elaborate toilettes for the occasion. The villagers were resplendent in Sunday blacks, “best frocks” and bead chains, the small girls and boys appearing respectively in white muslins and velveteen Lord Fauntleroy suits; the Squire opened proceedings with expressions of good wishes, interspersed with nervous coughs, and Noreen and Ida led off the musical proceedings with a lengthy classical duet, to which the audience listened with politely concealed boredom.
To Darsie’s mind, the entire programme as supplied by “the families” was dull to extinction, but to one possessing even her own slight knowledge of the village, the contributions of its worthies were brimful of interest and surprise.
The red-faced butcher, who, on ordinary occasions, appeared to have no mind above chops and steaks, was discovered to possess a tenor voice infinitely superior in tone to that of his patron, the Hon. Ivor Bruce, while his wife achieved a tricky accompaniment with a minimum of mistakes; the sandy-haired assistant at the grocer’s shop supplied a flute obbligato, and the fishmonger and the young lady from the stationer’s repository assured each other ardently that their true loves owned their hearts; two school-children with corkscrew curls held a heated argument—in rhyme—on the benefits of temperance; and, most surprising and thrilling of all, Mr Jevons, the butler from The Manor, so far descended from his pedestal as to volunteer “a comic item” in the shape of a recitation, bearing chiefly, it would appear, on the execution of a pig. The last remnant of stiffness vanished before this inspiring theme, and the audience roared applause as one man, whereupon Mr Jevons bashfully hid his face, and skipped—literally skipped—from the platform.
“Who’d have thought it! Butlers are human beings, after all!” gasped Darsie, wiping tears of merriment from her eyes. “Ralph, do you suppose Jevons will dance with me to-night? I should be proud!”
“Certainly not. He has one square dance with the mater, and that finishes it. You must dance with me instead. It’s ages since we’ve had a hop together—or a talk. I’m longing to have a talk, but I don’t want the others to see us at it, or they’d think I was priming you in my own defence, and the mater wants to have the first innings herself. We’ll manage it somehow in the interval between the dances, and I know you’ll turn out trumps, as usual, Darsie, and take my part.”
Ralph spoke with cheerful confidence, and Darsie listened with a sinking heart. The merry interlude of supper was robbed of its zest, as she cudgelled her brains to imagine what she was about to hear. Ralph was evidently in trouble of some sort, and his parents for once inclined to take a serious stand. Yet anything more gay and debonair than the manner with which the culprit handed round refreshments and waited on his father’s guests it would be impossible to imagine. Darsie watched him across the room, and noted that wherever he passed faces brightened. As he cracked jokes with the apple-cheeked farmers, waited assiduously on their buxom wives, and made pretty speeches to the girls, no onlooker could fail to be conscious of the fact that, in the estimation of the tenants, “Master Ralph” was as a young prince who could do no wrong.
For reasons of his own, Ralph was tonight bent on ingratiating himself to the full. For the first half-hour of the dance he led out one village belle after another, and it was not until waltz number five had appeared on the board that he returned to Darsie’s side.
“At last I’ve a moment to myself! My last partner weighed a ton, at least, and I’m fagged out. Got a scarf you can put round you if we go and sit out?”
Darsie nodded, showing a wisp of gauze, and, laying her hand on Ralph’s arm, passed with him out of the main room into the flag-decked entrance. For the moment it was empty, the dancers having made en masse in the direction of the refreshment-tables. Ralph looked quickly from side to side, and, finding himself unobserved, took a key from his pocket and opened a small door leading into the patch of garden at the back of the hall. The moonlight showed a wooden bench fitted into a recess in the wall. Ralph flicked a handkerchief over its surface, and motioned Darsie towards a seat.
“It’s clean enough. I gave it a rub this morning. You won’t be cold?”