“It’s the way they dance—that makes people talk!” said Alice. “As for Mr. Falloden—perhaps she’s found out what a horrid creature he is.”
The band struck up. It was a mazurka with a swinging tune. Radowitz opposite sprang to his feet, with a boyish gesture of delight.
“Come!” he said to Constance; and they took the floor. Supper had thinned the hall, and the dancers who stood in the doorways and along the walls involuntarily paused to watch the pair. Falloden and Mrs. Glendower had just returned from supper. They too stood among the spectators.
The dance they watched was the very embodiment of youth, and youth’s delight in itself. Constance knew, besides, that Falloden was looking on, and the knowledge gave a deeper colour to her cheek, a touch of wildness to her perfect grace of limb and movement. Radowitz danced the Polish dance with a number of steps and gestures unknown to an English ballroom, as he had learnt them in his childhood from a Polish dancing-mistress; Constance, with the instinct of her foreign training, adapted herself to him, and the result was enchanting. The slim girl in black, and the handsome youth, his golden hair standing up straight, en brosse, round his open brow and laughing eyes, seemed, as dancers, made for each other. They were absorbed in the poetry of concerted movement, the rhythm of lilting sound.
“Mountebank!” said Falloden to Meyrick, contemptuously, as the couple passed.
Radowitz saw his enemy, and though he could not hear what was said, was sure that it was something insulting. He drew himself up, and as he passed on with Constance he flung a look of mingled triumph and defiance at the group of “bloods” standing together, at Falloden in particular. Falloden had not danced once with her, had not been allowed once to touch her white hand. It was he, Radowitz, who had carried her off—whom she had chosen—whom she had honoured. The boy’s heart swelled with joy and pride; the artist in him, of another race than ours, realising and sharpening the situation, beyond the English measure.
And, afterwards, he danced with her again—many times. Moreover with him and an escort of his friends—for in general the young Pole with his musical gift and his romantic temperament was popular in Oxford—Constance made the round of the illuminated river-walks and the gleaming cloisters, moving like a goddess among the bevy of youths who hung upon her smiles. The intoxication of it banished thought and silenced regret.
But it was plain to all the world, no less than to Mrs. Hooper, that Falloden of Marmion, who had seemed to be in possession of her the night before, had been brusquely banished from her side; that Oxford’s charming newcomer had put her supposed suitor to open contumely; and that young Radowitz reigned in his stead.
Radowitz walked home in a whirl of sensations and recollections that made of the Oxford streets an “insubstantial fairy place,” where only Constance lived.