"Splendid hair! So long and thick; and not one white thread in it. Now, what colour was Mrs. Martindale's originally? It's dun-duckety mud colour now, or what you please," and her eyes involuntarily rested on Amelia's head-dress, eliciting an angry red spot upon either cheek, which was answered by a flush of ashamed confusion on her own, at the inadvertence, and brought the conversation to an abrupt conclusion.
The unconscious subject of her friend's criticism swam here and there through the figures of her dance in sympathy with the music, borne up and carried forward, like a well-trimmed yacht, upon the current of sound. She had danced little, if at all, for years; but it came naturally to her to dance. There was no heart-heaviness or carking care, no malice, envy, or uncharitableness--the unadjustable ballast which makes so many a hull roll heavily. Her health was good, as it had always been, her nerves as well strung, and her ear as sensitive to the spirit of sound. She looked well, and she knew it, with the mature and realized beauty of a summer afternoon--a lady such as the late King George admired. There was not the dewy promise of morning, but neither were there evening's pensive shadows pointing backward in regret--a handsome woman who had shed her girlhood, but showed no other sign by which to count the years. It was pleasant to be brought down off the shelf where matrons and old ladies sit and contemplate the gambols of the young, and made her think of her first ball, and how nice it had been, but without regret, for it was nice even now; and there was her own little Muriel whom she had reared, almost grown up, and marching before her just like another woman in the evolutions of the dance. And really it was very nice to have a gentleman so attentive, and all to one's self; like long ago, before her married friends got their establishments, and put on their absurdly patronizing airs, which were sometimes so provoking, though always so ridiculous--"as if one could not have done everything they succeeded in doing if one had cared to try."
That reflection brought perhaps a trifle more colour in her face, and made her shake out the ringlets just a little, till she looked at her partner before her, carefully executing with conscientious precision a gyration in her honour. She could not but smile as she gave him her hand to turn round, and the man looked positively grateful as he received it. Grateful, but was it for the smile or the hand? Yet surely he gave the hand a little squeeze. The man must be growing audacious. And yet he was so respectful. But Mr. Considine she knew was always respectful, and really very nice.
Considine thought it very nice too--did not know, in fact, how long it was since he had enjoyed anything so much. "Amazing fine woman," is how some of his compeers would have expressed their feelings; but Considine did not even pretend to be a roué, and he was not a fogy, though quite old enough to have been one, if that had been a necessary phase of existence to pass through. He felt happy with a respectful enjoyment, such as he might have known thirty years earlier, in the recognized season for such things, and he only regretted that it was to end so soon. He wondered if he might venture to ask her to dance again, and that smile we have mentioned, met him, and he thought he would risk it; but alas, the programme had been arranged to suit the younger talent, and this proved to be the last square dance. Then he bethought him of the subscription assemblies, and wondered if Miss Stanley attended them, and then the evolutions of the next figure brought him back to the business in hand.
Muriel and her partner watched him carefully solemnizing the rite with a good deal of amusement. Youth is so graspingly exclusive, and so intolerant. It engrosses the present and claims the future for itself, and accords as little place to its quite recent predecessors, the have beens, as would be given to the ancient kings at Westminster, if they should leave their vaults in the abbey and walk across the street to the hall or the palace over the way.
CHAPTER VI.
[A BENEVOLENT SPIDER].
M. Rouget de la Hache was hard up. He was a "swell," in a small way, after the mild colonial fashion, with a seigniory whose ancient privileges had been curtailed by advancing civilization; but civilization had paid him a good round sum when it abolished his rights over the persons and property of his humble neighbours--rights which were becoming an anachronism, and always more difficult to exercise. Being a swell, he did not work, but he was closely related to many who did, and who exercised the most important functions in the country, while they still looked up to him as in some sort their chief; though, in reason, the deference should have been all the other way. M. Rouget did not work, and therefore, not being a vegetable, it was necessary that he should play. When circumstances, in mistaken kindness, lay no burden on a man's shoulders, he fits one on himself--il faut s'amuser--and one which often proves hard to carry. There is a taskmaster, as the nursery saw tells us, still ready to find occupation for idle hands, occupation in which they too often burn their fingers.
Guns and dogs answer well enough at a time, so do trotting horses; but by-and-by there must be other men's horses to trot with, and give the interest of emulation. A man cannot continue to amuse himself on his own land; and in colonial cities people are too busy making their fortunes to be amusing company for an idle man. However, Saratoga, in its season, was not far away, and there was New York beyond, which lasts all the year round--more or less. Rouget had been used to be "of the best" at home--a personage, in a small way, wherever he appeared--and abroad it did not occur to him to abate his pretentions. Measured by the golden foot-rule of New York, he would have found himself on a far back bench, and even then his neighbours would have been able to lay down a dollar for every dime which he could produce; but the idea of applying such a standard did not occur to him. He believed himself a notability, and looked among the foremost for his peers. Was he not related to several of those old French governors who traded beads for peltry in the wake of a Jesuit Missionary, chaffering with the simple children of the wilderness beneath the forest shade, ere ever a vulgar common-place Englishman had arrived to cut timber, open a shop, or make money? And the foremost accepted him at his own valuation, as something "romantic, and quite beyond." He was ready to put down his stakes alongside theirs, and it would not be "manners" to ask the size of the pile from whence the stakes were drawn. Wherefore the American heart opened genially to receive him, just as it opens to the Lord Toms and Sir Harrys who each year enter its hospitable gates, and remain while their money lasts, or till they are found out.
It is hard upon the pipkin who adventures to sail down stream with the brazen bowls. There are eddies on the smoothest streams, and among the eddies there will be bumping. Only the pipkins need mind that, it is they alone who suffer. They inevitably get cracked in a collision, while the brass goes bumping and ringing along for very sport. It can come to no harm. Mr. Rouget got cracked--badly cracked--at last; but the wonder is that it had not befallen him long before. His friends did what they could for him--friends always do, when the subject is a worthless one, while virtue gets leave to shift for itself in its disasters, virtue being essentially prosaic, uninteresting and unpicturesque--but even his friends ran dry at last, and he had to mortgage his land. That occurred when Jordan began first to invest moneys for the Herkimer estate, and it was he who had bought the mortgage. It was a fairly profitable operation for Jordan, and had been the beginning of a useful intimacy; but it seemed to him, ere long, after the accruing advantages were well secured, that to sink so large a sum in so long-winded a transaction had been a mistake, and he might have done better in short loans, money on call, and general usury. There was the idea, to be sure, of engrafting his son effectually upon the dominant French interest by marriage, and if that could be compassed, it might turn out that the money had been well invested; but the boy was so head-strong and contrary, so like the Irishman's pig, which insists on going the other way, in what way soever he may be desired to go, that there was no certainty of working out the scheme, however compliant they of the other side might be.