Robert Elsmere
waste a thought on such a creature, while Hugh was in her way; at one
time angry that an insignificant chit of a schoolmaster's daughter
should apparently care so little to be the Duke of Sedbergh's niece, and
should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a Flaxman; at
another, utterly sceptical as to any lasting obduracy on the chit's
part. The girl was clearly anxious not to fall too easily, but as to
final refusal--pshaw! And it made her mad that Hugh would hold himself
so cheap.
Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman felt himself in no way called upon to answer that
remark of his aunt's we have recorded.
'I have qualms,' he repeated, 'but I mean to do all I know, and you and
Helen must help me.'
Lady Charlotte crossed her hands before her.
'I may be a Liberal and a lion-hunter,' she said firmly, 'but I have
still conscience enough left not to aid and abet my nephew in throwing
himself away.'
She had nearly slipped in 'again'; but just saved herself.
'Your conscience is all a matter of the Duke,' he told her. 'Well, if
you won't help me, then Helen and I will have to arrange it by
ourselves.'
But this did not suit Lady Charlotte at all. She had always played the
part of earthly providence to this particular nephew, and it was
abominable to her that the wretch, having refused for ten years to
provide her with a love affair to manage, should now manage one for
himself in spite of her.
'You are such an arbitrary creature!' she said fretfully; 'you prance
about the world like Don Quixote, and expect me to play Sancho without a
murmur.'
'How many drubbings have I brought you yet?' he asked her laughing. He
was really very fond of her. 'It is true there is a point of likeness; I
won't take your advice. But then why don't you give me better? It is
strange,' he added musing; 'women talk to us about love as if we were
too gross to understand it; and when they come to business, and they're
not in it themselves, they show the temper of attorneys.'
'Love!' cried Lady Charlotte nettled. 'Do you mean to tell me, Hugh,
that you are really, _seriously_ in love with that girl?'
'Well, I only know,' he said, thrusting his hands far into his pockets,
'that unless things mend I shall go out to California in the autumn and
try ranching.'
Lady Charlotte burst into an angry laugh. He stood opposite to her, with
his orchid in his buttonhole, himself the fine flower of civilisation.
Ranching, indeed! However, he had done so many odd things in his life,
that, as she knew, it was never quite safe to decline to take him
seriously, and he looked at her now so defiantly, his clear greenish
eyes so wide open and alert, that her will began to waver under the
pressure of his.
'What do you want me to do, sir?'
His glance relaxed at once, and he laughingly explained to her that what
he asked of her was to keep the prey in sight.
'I can do nothing for myself at present,' he said; 'I get on her nerves.
She was in love with that black-haired, _enfant du siecle_,--or rather,
she prefers to assume that she was--and I haven't given her time to
forget him. A serious blunder, and I deserve to suffer for it. Very
well, then, I retire, and I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don't let
her go. Make yourselves nice to her; and, in fact, spoil me a little now
I am on the high road to forty, as you used to spoil me at fourteen.'
Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after which Lady
Charlotte was as wax before him. 'Thank heaven,' she reflected, 'in ten
days the Duke and all of them go out of town.' Retribution, therefore,
for wrong-doing would be tardy, if wrong-doing there must be. She could
but ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted;
moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality,
there might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal
principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused to
believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done it boldly
and with a dash. But she could not rid her mind of the Duke, and her
performance all through, as a matter of fact, was blundering.
However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being in truth
really fond of her; and Rose, however high she might hold her little
head, could find no excuse for quarrelling either with her or Lady
Helen.
Towards the middle of June there was a grand ball given by Lady
Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss Leyburns, by Lady
Helen's machinations, were invited. It was to be one of the events of
the season, and when the cards arrived 'to have the honour of meeting
their Royal Highnesses,' etc. etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed at
them with eyes which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She
wished Richard could have seen the girls dressed, 'just once.' But Rose
treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. 'If one could but put them
up to auction,' she said flippantly, holding them up, 'how many German
opera tickets I should get for nothing! I don't know what Agnes feels.
As for me, I have neither nerve enough for the people, nor money enough
for the toilette.'
However, with eleven o'clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh vision of blue
and white, to suggest certain dresses for the sisters which had occurred
to her in the visions of the night, 'original, adorable,--cost, a mere
nothing!'
'My harpy,' she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker,'would ruin you
over them, of course. Your maid'--the Leyburns possessed a remarkably
clever one--'will make them divinely for twopence-halfpenny. Listen.'
Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned; and the
invitation accepted in Agnes's neatest hand. Even Catherine was roused
during the following ten days to a smiling indulgent interest in the
concerns of the workroom.
The evening came, and Lady Helen fetched the sisters in her carriage.
The ball was a magnificent affair. The house was one of historical
interest and importance, and all that the ingenuity of the present could
do to give fresh life and gaiety to the pillared rooms, the carved
galleries and stately staircases of the past, had been done. The
ball-room, lined with Vandycks and Lelys, glowed softly with electric
light; the picture gallery had been banked with flowers and carpeted
with red, and the beautiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it,
challenging the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls.
Rose's card was soon full to overflowing. The young men present were of
the smartest, and would not willingly have bowed the knee to a nobody,
however pretty. But Lady Helen's devotion, the girl's reputation as a
musician, and her little nonchalant disdainful ways, gave her a kind of
prestige, which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of
anybody. Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalty was introduced,
and smiled both upon the beauty and the beauty's delicate and becoming
dress; and still Rose, though a good deal more flushed and erect than
usual, and though flesh and blood could not resist the contagious
pleasure which glistened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more
than half-inclined to say with the Preacher, that all was vanity.
Presently, as she stood waiting with her hand on her partner's arm
before gliding into a waltz, she saw Mr. Flaxman opposite to her, and
with him a young _debutante_ in white tulle--a thin, pretty, undeveloped
creature, whose sharp elbows and timid movements, together with the
blushing enjoyment glowing so frankly from her face, pointed her out as
the school-girl of sweet seventeen, just emancipated, and trying her
wings.
'Ah, there is Lady Florence!' said her partner, a handsome young Hussar.
'This ball is in her honour, you know. She comes out to-night. What,
another cousin? Really she keeps too much in the family!'
'Is Mr. Flaxman a cousin?'
The young man replied that he was, and then, in the intervals of
waltzing, went on to explain to her the relationships of many of the
people present, till the whole gorgeous affair began to seem to Rose a
mere family party. Mr. Flaxman was of it. She was not.
'Why am I here?' the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely as she
waltzed; 'it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong to them, nor they
to me!'
'Miss Leyburn! charmed to see you!' cried Lady Charlotte, stopping her;
and then, in a loud whisper in her ear, 'Never saw you look better. Your
taste, or Helen's, that dress? The roses--exquisite!'
Rose dropped her a little mock curtsey and whirled on again.
'_Lady Florences_ are always well dressed,' thought the child angrily;
'and who notices it?'
Another turn brought them against Mr. Flaxman and his partner. Mr.
Flaxman came at once to greet her with smiling courtesy.
'I have a Cambridge friend to introduce to you--a beautiful youth. Shall
I find you by Helen? Now, Lady Florence, patience a moment. That corner
is too crowded. How good that last turn was!'
And bending with a sort of kind chivalry over his partner, who looked at
him with the eyes of a joyous excited child, he led her away. Five
minutes later Rose, standing flushed by Lady Helen, saw him coming again
towards her, ushering a tall blue-eyed youth, whom he introduced to her
as 'Lord Waynflete.' The handsome boy looked at her with a boy's open
admiration, and beguiled her of a supper dance, while a group standing
near, a mother and three daughters, stood watching with cold eyes and
expressions which said plainly to the initiated that mere beauty was
receiving a ridiculous amount of attention.
'I wouldn't have given it him, but it is _rude_--it is _bad manners_,
not even to ask!' the supposed victress was saying to herself, with
quivering lips, her eyes following not the Trinity freshman, who was
their latest captive, but an older man's well-knit figure, and a head on
which the fair hair was already growing scantily, receding a little from
the fine intellectual brows.
An hour later she was again standing by Lady Helen, waiting for a
partner, when she saw two persons crossing the room, which was just
beginning to fill again for dancing, towards them. One was Mr. Flaxman,
the other was a small wrinkled old man, who leant upon his arm,
displaying the ribbon of the Garter as he walked.
'Dear me,' said Lady Helen, a little fluttered, 'here is my uncle
Sedbergh. I thought they had left town.'
The pair approached, and the old Duke bowed over his niece's hand with
the manners of a past generation.
'I made Hugh give me an arm,' he said quaveringly. 'These floors are
homicidal. If I come down on them I shall bring an action.'
'I thought you had all left town?' said Lady Helen.
'Who can make plans with a Government in power pledged to every sort of
villainy and public plunder?' said the old man testily. 'I suppose
Varley's there to-night, helping to vote away my property and
Fauntleroy's.'
'Some of his own too, if you please!' said Lady Helen smiling. 'Yes, I
suppose he is waiting for the division, or he would be here.'
'I wonder why Providence blessed _me_ with such a Radical crew of
relations?' remarked the Duke. 'Hugh is a regular Communist. I never
heard such arguments in my life. And as for any idea of standing by his
order----' The old man shook his bald head and shrugged his small
shoulders with almost French vivacity. He had been handsome once, and
delicately featured, but now the left eye drooped, and the face had a
strong look of peevishness and ill-health.
'Uncle,' interposed Lady Helen, 'let me introduce you to my two great
friends, Miss Leyburn, Miss Rose Leyburn.'
The Duke bowed, looked at them through a pair of sharp eyes, seemed to
cogitate inwardly whether such a name had ever been known to him, and
turned to his nephew.