“How are you? I hear you’re to be in the quadrille. You’ll have the pretty lady we saw at Oxford for a colleague.”
He turned to see Mrs. Glendower, very much made-up and glittering with diamonds. Her face seemed to him to have grown harder and plainer, her smile more brazen since their Oxford meeting. But she filled up time agreeably till the quadrille was ready. She helped him to pin on the small rosette made of the Tamworth colours which marked all the dancers in the royal quadrille, and she told him that Constance Bledlow was to dance it with the Tamworths’ eldest son, Lord Bletchley.
“There’s a great deal of talk about her, as perhaps you know. She’s very much admired. The Langmoors are making a great fuss about her, and people say she’ll have all their money as well as her own some day—not to speak of the old aunts in Yorkshire. I shouldn’t wonder if the Tamworths had their eye upon her. They’re not really well off.”
Falloden gaily declared that he would back his cousin Mary Tamworth to get anything she wanted. Mrs. Glendower threw him a sudden, sharp look. Then she was swept into the crowd. A couple of men in brilliant uniform came by, clearing a space in the centre of the room, and Falloden saw Lady Alice beckoning.
In another minute or two he and she were in their places, and what the newspapers who record these things call “a brilliant scene” was in full tide:—the Prince and Princess dancing with the master and mistress of the house, and the rest of the quadrille made up of the tallest men and handsomest women that Lady Tamworth, with a proper respect both to rank and to looks, had been able to collect.
The six-foot-three Falloden and his fairylike partner were much observed, and Lady Alice bubbling over with fun and spirits, found her cousin Douglas, whom in general she disliked, far better company than usual. As for him, he was only really conscious of one face and form in the stately dance itself, or in the glittering crowd which was eagerly looking on. Constance Bledlow, in filmy white, was his vis-à-vis. He saw her quick movement as she perceived him. Then she bowed slightly, he ceremoniously. Their hands touched at intervals, and not a few of the spectators noticed these momentary contacts with a thrill of pleasure—the splendid physique of the young man, the flowerlike grace of the girl. Once or twice, as they stood together in the centre of the “chain,” a few words would have been possible. But Constance never spoke, nor did Falloden. He had thought her very pale at first sight. But her cheek flushed with dancing; and with every minute that passed she seemed to him more lovely and more remote, like a spirit from another world, into which he could not pass.
“Isn’t she pretty!—Connie Bledlow?” said Lady Alice enthusiastically. “She’s having a great success. Of course other people are much handsomer, but there’s something—”
Yes, there was something!—and something which, like an exquisite fluttering bird, had just escaped from Douglas Falloden, and would now, he supposed, forever escape him.
When the quadrille was over he watched her delicate whiteness disappear amid the uniforms, the jewels, and the festoons or roses hanging across the ballroom. The barbaric, overdecorated scene, with all its suggestions of a luxurious and self-confident world, where every one was rich and privileged, or hunting riches and privilege—a world without the smallest foreboding of change, the smallest doubt of its own right to exist—forced upon him by contrast the recollection of the hour he had just spent with Mr. Gregory in his father’s dusty dismantled library. He and his were, it seemed, “ruined”—as many people here already guessed. He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of the Tamworths’ ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour, that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days perhaps, to his father’s possessions of the same kind.
But it was not the loss of money or power that was separating him from Constance Bledlow. He knew her well enough by now to guess that in spite of her youth and her luxurious bringing up, there was that in her which was rapidly shaping a character capable of fighting circumstance, as her heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz’s bleeding hand and prostrate form had emerged in consciousness—a haunting presence, blurring the many-coloured movements of the ballroom.