‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘here is some mystery. You know that I am of your faction whatever happens. But you must tell me before I can do any good.’
Lady William did not make any immediate reply. She said at last: ‘Artémise: if you can bring me to speech of Artémise, I shall want nothing more.’ Then with a change of tone—‘Here is Mab coming back; no more of it—no more of it! there has been too much already. Mab, Leo is waiting till you give him some tea.’
‘Give it me strong and sweet,’ said Leo, who had jumped up from his low chair with perhaps a touch of embarrassment—but Lady William felt none—‘sweet and strong; for my head is a little confused, and I want it clear.’
‘Is it all about me and my father’s people? That is very good of you, Mr. Leo,’ said Mab, ‘to take so much interest—and have you converted mother to my way of thinking?—which is the thing I want most.’
‘I have been doing my best,’ he said, standing up beside her against the waning light in the window. And then it was for the first time that it occurred to Lady William—— Well, she was no more a matchmaking mother than you or I; but to see two young people together—one of them your own child, and the other a very good match—very well off, and kind, and true, and good, par-dessus le marché—this is a thing which will make the most unworldly woman think. To be sure, Leo was twice or nearly twice the age of Mab—but at their respective ages that was of no consequence. It was true also that Leo gave unmistakable signs at this present moment of much preferring Emily, the mother, to any seventeen-year-old; but that Lady William in her wisdom thought less important still. That would blow over quickly enough; it was scarcely even worth a thought; but they were smiling at each other in a very happy, pleasant way, she appealing, he answering the appeal. It was nothing, but yet it was a suggestion—and how many pleasant things it would involve! It was far too distant, too misty and vague to suggest to the mother how she should feel in her cottage if her Mab was spirited away. But it was a suggestion—and gave a new and agreeable direction to her thoughts.
Leo remained until the lamp was brought in by little Patty, whose eyes shone at the sight of him, partly because it pleased her to see ‘a gentleman’ again in the house (for Patty was a matchmaker, if you please, and never looked upon a ‘gentleman’ without an immediate calculation whether or not he would ‘do’ for Miss Mab), and partly because she felt that she must now be wholly forgiven for any wrong thing she had done in respect to him, seeing he was allowed to come back. Patty had never been sure what it was that she had done which was wrong; but none the less was it evident to her that she herself must have shared the pardon of the worst offender. And in the meantime there had been a pleasant little hour over the tea-table; as if to encourage her mother’s imagination, Mab had for once been seized with an impulse to talk, which was a thing that happened to her now and then. And it was beyond doubt that Leo was amused by her chatter, and responded gaily. They discussed Lord and Lady Portcullis with great mutual satisfaction, and the Ladies Pakenham, whom Leo had met in Paris; and he gave Mab a great deal of information as to her family, which the girl received with a mixture of amusement and offence, proving to her mother that there had been more things even in little Mab’s thoughts than were dreamt of in her philosophy. And then the young man went away, and they were left alone to resume the controversy or not, as fate might decide. Lady William, who had been brought into very close observation of her daughter, left the subject in Mab’s hands—but Mab did not enter into it again. She changed the subject to the FitzStephens’ dance, which was now so near, and led her mother to a discussion of the dresses they were to wear, which had the air of absorbing all Mab’s thoughts. ‘Do you think I will look very fat in white, mother? and my arms so red and healthy,’ she said. And this sort of conversation was carried on until Mab fairly put her mother, with all her anxieties and questions, to bed. The little girl was not without questions in her own mind, questions about her father, about the life she could not remember, or scarcely could remember, in Paris; about the family and relations she had never seen. By dint of much reflection it appeared to her that she could recollect a stiff gentleman with a fat face, who must have been Lord Portcullis himself. Why was it she knew nothing of her uncle? Why did he take no notice? Was there any reason for it? or was it her mother’s fault? If so, Mab was as strongly determined that she was of her mother’s faction as ever Leo Swinford could be; but more still than Leo Swinford she wanted to know from the beginning, and find out how and why it all was.
XXVI
The night of the FitzStephens’ dance was a great one in Watcham. It was not precisely a dance, to tell the truth, as, to temper the pretensions belonging to the name of a ball, there was to be a little musical performance to begin with—a duet from Emily and Florry Plowden, a few pieces for violin and piano, and so on—which was sufficient to give something of the air of an impromptu and accidental performance to the dance, which, of course, was the real meaning of the whole. Some of the people were so unkind as not to arrive till the music was over, which was thought exceedingly bad taste by the performers and their families, and gave the General and his wife a moment of dread lest the party they had got up so carefully might not be a success after all. But by ten o’clock the music was over, the piano rolled into its appointed corner, and the music stands, which had been prepared for the violinists, put away. The musicians who were engaged for the dance did not want any music stands, and the assembled party required every scrap of room that was available. The excellent FitzStephens had done wonders to enlarge the space. They had taken away everything—almost the fixtures of the house: doors were unhung, carpets lifted: I cannot really calculate the trouble that had been taken. Even after the party assembled, the removal of the chairs on which they had been seated to hear the music was a matter of labour, for they were not all light chairs like those which people in Watcham borrow by the dozen from Simpkinson of the ‘Blue Boar,’ but included a number of comfortable easy-chairs for the ladies who did not dance, of whom there were a considerable number. The FitzStephens did not see the necessity of leaving the elder people out. They were old themselves, and though they delighted in seeing the young ones enjoy themselves, as they said, yet they liked also to have their own playfellows, with whom to have a comfortable talk, while they looked on. What Mrs. FitzStephen would have liked best would have been to keep the elder ladies apart in the room which was called the General’s study, which had a door (removed) into the dancing room, by the opening of which (had it not been crowded by the elder gentlemen) the matrons could have seen enough of their children’s performances, as well as have been out of the way. This, however, was the one point which was not successful in the arrangements, for the mothers preferred to cling to the walls in the dancing room itself, at the risk of being swept away by flying skirts, or trodden upon by nimble feet; and the fathers occupied the doorway in a solemn block, so that nobody could see anything through them. Even Lady William, who generally was so great a help in getting people to stay where they were wanted, herself got into a corner in the dancing room, taking up, it must be admitted, very little room, as she stood up against the wall to watch how Mab got on among the dancers; and Miss Grey, in a costume in which she had gone to all the parties in the neighbourhood for the last twenty years, flitted about like an aged butterfly, getting the puffs of superannuated tulle about her into everybody’s way, in order to see not only how Mab got on, but how everybody got on in whom she was interested, and that meant every girl in the room. Thus Mrs. FitzStephen had one little point of vexation amid the perfect success of everything else. But it was so natural. The General declared that he himself liked to see the dancing, and was not at all satisfied to be sent away into another room.
The reader, perhaps, would like to know at once how Mab, who was the débutante of the evening, got on. Her white frock was very simple, being, as has been said, the manufacture of her mother and herself; but Lady William was universally allowed to have great taste, and it is saying a great deal to say that she herself was satisfied with the effort. As a matter of fact, the finest dressmaker in the world could not have disguised the fact that Mab’s figure was too solid, and her well-formed, round arms a little too rosy with health, for perfect grace. But that solid form and rosy tint agreed very well with the childish roundness of the face, under the dimpled and infantile softness of which Mab hid so much good sense and independent judgment of her own. She looked as she was, like a little girl just escaped from the trammels of childhood, enjoying the dance with all her might, without thinking for a moment whether anybody admired her, or what people thought of her dancing or demeanour, and without the slightest thrill of consciousness in mind or person. Mab was so popular that she was a little bored at first by her own success, for many of the most dignified persons present, men quite old enough to be her father, considered it a right thing to show their interest in her by ‘coming forward’ and performing a solemn dance with her—General FitzStephen himself (who might have been her grandfather) taking her out for a quadrille as he might have taken Mrs. Swinford had she been there. There passed through Mab’s mind a devout thanksgiving that Uncle James was a clergyman, or perhaps he might have asked her too. The Archdeacon, indeed, who was also prevented by his cloth from any such escapades, insisted on taking her to have an ice, which she did not want, and which almost lost her one waltz. It will be seen from this that the dance was all that a first dance ought to be to Mab. Her card was filled before she had been two minutes in the room, the gentlemen crowding round her, so that before the end of the evening she, who accepted everybody at first with smiles and pleasure, became critical, and actually threw over young Mr. Wade, one of the county people, whom most girls delighted to dance with, in order to career over the floor with Jim for the third time in succession, to the astonishment of everybody. Jim, with whom she was on terms of easy family intimacy, finding fault with him all the time, was, on the whole, the dancer she preferred—though there was much to be said for Leo, who was making himself extremely agreeable, and whose ‘style’ most of the ladies admired greatly as something quite out of the common, and not in the least like the careless romping of Bobby Wade, who had been supposed to be the representative of the fashionable world, and to bring the last graces of the beau monde to astonish the villagers. That Mr. Swinford, on the contrary, should be so quiet, so far from any ideas of romping, filled the ladies with surprise, who had been watching Bobby as the glass of fashion and the mould of form. But Mab thought, and did not hesitate to say so, that Leo was a little stiff. She said whatever came into her head, that daring little girl—she was not afraid of offending anybody, especially not Mr. Leo, as she called him, to the admiration and wonder of all the other girls.
Mab, in short, enjoyed herself so much, and was so frankly delighted with the progress of events, that the questions that were poured upon her by all the old ladies became superfluous.