“A BALL! It is not Archie, I am sure, who would like a ball,” said Mrs. Rowland from the sofa, where Eddy had been sitting by her, in an attitude of respectful adoration for some time. He had cast repeated startling glances at Marion, calling her observation while he was so engaged. And Marion, seated at a distance with a book held up in front of her face, gave way now and then to little bursts of laughter, which she quickly repressed. It was infinitely ludicrous to Marion that any one should pretend to advise Mrs. Rowland, a woman of that age; but Eddy, she thought, played his part to perfection, and it was the funniest thing in the world.
Rosamond was seated at the piano, playing as it were in an undertone, and for her own pleasure, various bits of music, one suggesting another, as one verse of poetry suggests another. She was a good musician, but she did not attempt to play to so indifferent an audience, though Rowland was always certainly civil in his desire to “have a little music,” when he came into the drawing-room after dinner. The good man knew that this was the right thing, and that Miss Saumarez would expect to be asked, and sat and yawned dutifully through what he privately thought to himself “just a terrible jingle,” out of respect to his guest. But Rowland had not left the dining-room on this occasion. He had a playfellow of his own who had dined with him, and was now engaging him in much more congenial talk. Archie was not much more educated in music than his father; but there was in his unpossessed being a power of perception, only half developed, of beautiful things. A sonata would have disconcerted him as much as it did Rowland; but the bits of melody that Rosamond was playing, and which he called in his simplicity tunes, seemed to make an atmosphere about her which was poetically appropriate, and filled the background of the large partially lighted sitting-room. The group on the sofa, with Marion’s detached figure full in the light of a lamp, seemed like a group on the stage, carrying on the thread of some half-comprehended story. Rosamond and the music belonged to a different sphere. There were shaded candles upon the piano, throwing a white light upon a pair of white hands, moving softly over the ivory keys; behind, the curtains were drawn back from one of the rounded windows, a line of moonlight came in, and in the distance from the corner in which Archie was seated unseen there was a glimmer visible of the distant waters of the Clyde, in glistening life and movement under the white blaze of the moon. Archie’s heart was full of strange and uncomprehended emotion. He was in a new world, listening to those soft strains which touched him as the light might touch a being coming to life, and feeling the vague enchantment of the night, the presence, like a charm, of the half seen figure, half dark half light, at the piano, and this subtle atmosphere in which she breathed. He had said very little to Rosamond in the week during which they had lived under the same roof. She despised him quite frankly, taking no pains to disguise it. He read in her looks that she thought him a lout, a fool, a nuisance, and he was not angry or even surprised that she should think so. But he had no such thoughts of her. He liked to watch her, as he liked to look (but this he had never betrayed to any one) at the hills. He liked this atmosphere of the music, which seemed to have a curious appropriateness to her—not that he appreciated the music, although she was playing, he thought, some very pretty tunes, but it suited her somehow. He had not read much poetry, and could not remember any that would apply to her as a better instructed man might have done; but the whole scene had a vague poetry which filled in a dim sort of way Archie’s inarticulate soul. He listened sitting in what was almost the dark, listening and listening though he did not suppose she even knew he was there.
But the sound of one’s own name penetrates distance and music and even the envelopment of thought in the strangest way. He heard Mrs. Rowland say that Archie, she could see, would not desire a ball, and the impulse of opposition sprang up quick and strong within him.
“Why should I not like a ball as well as the rest?” he said out of his corner, raising his voice that his opinion might be heard.
“There! I told you so,” said Eddy; “who wouldn’t wish for a ball in this house? The floor in the hall is perfect—it is wasting a good thing not to dance upon it. I am sure you of all people, dear lady, are not one to waste good things. Then fancy what a thing for us. We should make acquaintance with everybody, and probably reap a harvest of invitations. We are on the prowl. We want to be asked places. The Governor would feel how nobly you had done your part by us——and——and——”
That shower of fluent words flowed on, but Archie’s attention to it suddenly failed. For out of the dimness nearer to him, through the sound of the softly tinkling notes, came a soft but very distinct question—“Why should you, Mr. Rowland, wish for a ball?”
“I don’t,” he cried abruptly in his surprise.
“Then you gave a false impression. Mrs. Rowland must think from what you said that you gave the project your support.” She spoke without turning her head, playing softly all the while, speaking in her usual calm and serious vein.
“I would not oppose,” said Archie, “what Marion wanted, and you.”
“You are quite right to put Marion first. It is not generally accounted civil, but it was honest, and I like it from you. I do not care—I am not fond of dancing. There are so many things more important in this life. I should have been surprised if you had wished it,” she added after an interval, during which she had gone on modulating, with her hands pressed down upon the keys.
“Would you tell me why?” said Archie timidly out of the dim world behind her.
“Oh,” she said, “not because it is the fashion with a certain sort of young man, for I don’t suppose you would—” she meant to say “know,” in her disdain, but moved by some better feeling, said instead “care. But I should not think you were fond of dancing,” she said, pressing firmly upon the two bass keys.
“You think,” said Archie, emboldened by the fact that she could not see him, “that I don’t look much like dancing. And it’s true. I am not good at it. Marion is, though,” he said after a little pause.
“And what has that got to do with you?”
“Oh!” he said surprised. Then after a pause, “I would naturally like her to be pleased.”
“You would naturally—like her to be pleased?” Rosamond ceased her playing and turned right round upon the music stool, facing him. But the light of the candles was now entirely behind her, shining upon the ribbons of her sash—shining a line of colour beyond her white figure, but leaving her countenance invisible as before. “Why?” she said after an interval, “Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, yes, why? Don’t I speak plain? Why? I want to know why?”
“But there is no why to it,” said Archie, “it is just so.”
She sat dark against the light and thought over this proposition for some time. “Well,” she said at length, “but you are inconsistent. You go against your father in everything, and this lady—who is so out of place here—”
“Why,” said Archie hotly, “is she so much out of place here?”
“Oh!” said Rosamond, and turning round again she burst into a loud heroic tuneful strain, filling the still room with a clamour of sound. In a few minutes more she had changed into a waltz. Then there occurred a complete transformation scene. Eddy jumped up from his seat by Mrs. Rowland, and snatched or seemed to snatch Marion from her chair, and the pair began to fly and flout about the room, as lightly as a pair of birds. Eddy Saumarez was not an elegant cavalier, but he danced very well, and Marion had not done herself more than justice when she said that she was “very good at it.” They threaded the intricacies of the furniture with the greatest lightness and ease, and whirled from dark to light and from light to dark, from where Mrs. Rowland sat looking on with a smile in the full revelation of a large lamp, to where Archie sat unseen in his corner. Rosamond never turned her head but played on, varying the tune with an esprit which her brother followed, ducking and anon sweeping on the light figure of the girl with all the art of an accomplished performer. Archie taken completely by surprise at first, watched them with a vague sensation of pleasure in the same, which was against all his prepossessions. The sudden indignation in his mind died out. The novelty and suddenness of the movement beguiled him out of himself. There appeared suddenly at the open door while the dancers still went on, all preliminary sound being drowned by the music, the jovial and ruddy countenances of Rowland and his friend, who stood looking on with broad smiles. “Well done,” cried the master of the house clapping his hands; and then, as if this had been the signal, Rosamond concluded in a moment with a resounding chord, and the dancers stopped short.
“Well, that was a pretty sight—are we to have no more of it?” Rowland said.
“I think I can manage an old-world waltz,” said Evelyn, “for Rosamond no doubt would like a turn too.”
“No, thanks—Eddy will never dance with me—and I like the piano best.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” said the master of the house. “Where’s Archie? Get up, ye lout! can ye see a pretty girl wanting a dance and not be on your feet in a moment? Come, Evelyn, let us have the old-world waltz, and see the young ones enjoy themselves.”
“Come on,” said Eddy to his partner. “It will be as slow as a funeral, but its fine all the same. Come on, and never mind.”
Rosamond stood up by the piano with a perfectly serious face. She turned half round towards Archie’s corner, who in an agony of incapacity and reluctance hesitated to make a step towards her. Rosamond did not care any more for the young man than if he had been a cabbage. He had no mystery or attraction for her, as she had for him, nor was her amour propre affected by his hesitation. She said, scarcely looking at him from the pitch to which her head thrown high seemed to reach, above every one, “Are we to dance?” in those clear tones of unaffected indifference and disdain. She knew that she would be bumped against all the furniture, and expected to be thrown upon the rock of Mr. Rowland standing in the middle of the room where Eddy and Marion encircled, brushed with their wings, wound into the gyrations of their indefatigable whirl; but she was resigned, and ready for the sacrifice. To poor Archie it was a far more serious affair. He came slowly forward, slouching his shoulders and bending his head. “You were right in thinking I was not fit for it,” he said; “if it’s disagreeable to you, you will remember it’s not my fault.” She put out her hand without a word and placed it on his shoulder. I have read many rhapsodies about the manly character of a waltz, in which two people on the verge of love find themselves suddenly swept together into paradise; but the unhappy young man who cannot dance, who finds a fair partner suddenly, in spite of himself, thrust into his awkward arms, who does not know what to do with her, nor with his own unlucky fate, and the things which seem suddenly to spring up and put themselves into his way—no one, so far as I know, has ever found any interest in the sufferings of such an unlucky hero. He held himself as far apart from her as possible as he turned her slowly round, wondering if she hated him, if she would ever again look at him, afraid to glance at her lest he should read disgust in her face. A time of giddy anguish followed, how long or how short Archie could not tell. He supposed that Rosamond exerted herself to keep him up, to guide him blindly about the room; for when those horrible gyrations were over, and the whirl ceased, and the walls began once more to settle straight into their places, he heard himself addressed with noisy congratulations. “Well done, Archie, you’re not such a duffer after all,” cried his father. “Bravo, Rowland!” said Eddy. Mrs. Rowland laughed and clapped her hands. “You are far better at it than I thought,” said Marion. Rosamond alone stood as serious as before, her breathing a little quickened, looking at it as if she thought she might have soiled the hand which had been upon his shoulder. He felt as if he could have struck her as he turned away his head.
“After this,” said Mrs. Rowland, “I must tell you what the children want, James. I was opposing it as in duty bound, but their little performance, I am sure, has thrown you on their side: they want us to give a ball.”
“A ball!” said Mr. Rowland with many notes of interrogation, and then he added with the broad smile, which in its warmth and ruddiness breathed a little intimation of being after dinner, “Why not?”
“Ah, I knew you would be on their side. I have been resisting as in duty bound——”
“And why in duty bound? In your heart,” said Rowland, “it is you who are always on their side. I may have my little moments of fatherly wrath. A father is nothing, you know, Ledgen, if he does not find fault.”
“That’s quite so,” said the great ironmaster, who had been dining with the great railway man. “We must keep up our authority, and discipline must always be preserved.”
“But she stands up for them through thick and thin,” said the happy man. “I cannot wallop my own niggers, so to speak, meaning to give my boy a wigging, but she pushes in, standing up for two. To hear her speak, you would think my two were angels, and I an old curmudgeon always finding fault: that’s the beauty of a wife.”
“Well,” said Evelyn, “never mind; I am to give in, I suppose. You know, James, it will turn the whole house upside down.”
“We’ll put it right again,” he said.
“And probably make a revolution among the servants.”
“We’ll crush the revolution, or get other servants in their places.”
“And you will have no comfort in your life for at least three days—the day before the performance, the day of the performance, and the day after the performance.”
“Hoot!” said Rowland, and he said no more.
“It will not be a bad plan at all if ye think anything of my opinion,” said the ironmaster. “I’m but new in my place myself, a matter of two or three years. And one of the first things I did was to give a ball. It was a very popular thing—we just got in everybody. The young folk, who are very important, who just give you a great lift in reconciling a place where they are pleased, and the mothers that come with them, and all the intermediate ones that are neither young nor old, that are hanging at a loose thread. If your house is a good size, you can ask anybody; and this is a very fair size,” said the other rich man, looking condescendingly round the drawing-room, which was certainly not so immense as his great new-built castle down the Clyde.
“Oh, it’s big enough,” said Rowland, a little wounded in his feelings. To compare Rosmore to any bran new house with fictitious battlements and towers, was at once a brutality and a bad joke. “We will get in a good number here,” he said, looking round him complacently, “and as we have nothing but Eastern carpets, there will be the less trouble. Well, my dear, that is settled. I am not such a stern parent as I get the credit of being, and the bairns shall have their will.”
“I told you I could make her do it,” said Eddy to Marion behind the shelter of the book of pictures which she had taken up again.
“It was neither you nor her that did it,” said Marion: “it was papa.”
“It was because she put it to him so cleverly. You will see Mrs. Rowland will always follow my lead. She can’t forget that I am my father’s son.”
“Will you tell me that story?” said Marion, whose curiosity he had raised and allowed to drop a dozen times.
“Some time or other,” said Eddy. “I like to keep you on the tenter hooks. You look prettier than ever when you have a fit of curiosity which makes your eyes shine. Do you know your eyes give out sparks when you look at me like that?”
“Like a cat?” said Marion, “that is no compliment.”
“Yes, just like a cat, torturing the poor little mouse that she has fascinated with her big shining eyes.” He opened his own eyes wide with a threatening movement of his hand, at which they both laughed. “Before she devours him, she tortures him,” he said. Which was it? he or she? But poor little Marion had not the faintest idea that she was in the way of being devoured. She did not require very fine methods; but accepted the compliments and the badinage in her simplicity. It amused her extremely to “tease” him, as she thought, to make little rude speeches and show her innocent power. After all it was innocent enough, and artless, if without much delicacy or dignity. So much meaning as was in it was all on Eddy’s side.
There was no question of cat or mouse between the other two, who stood by each other’s side without movement, without looking at each other, while the question of the ball was discussed. Rosamond at last said to her partner, speaking as usual from her full height, and without even turning her head his way: “You do not dance so very badly, if you would take time and not be flurried.” It was the same advice which Evelyn had given him about his shooting, and which he had resented then, as he resented this counsel now.
“You are very kind to encourage me. I have no desire to learn,” he said.
“Oh, that’s silly,” said Rosamond “Why shouldn’t you learn? Why shouldn’t you make yourself a little agreeable, Mr. Rowland? No, of course it is nothing to me. I see you for a few weeks, a great deal of you, and then perhaps I never see you again. It does not matter to me in the very least. Still it is a pity to see a man sitting as you do—not speaking, not taking an interest in anything. What is the good of being a man at all?”
Archie was very much taken aback by this onslaught. He stared at her for a moment helplessly. His wit was not quick enough to make any lively rejoinder as he might have done. All he could say was rather vulgar, and said with an injured, offended air—“I did not make myself.”
“You ought to make yourself,” said the severe young judge, “if you are not made properly to begin with; but that is not the question. Don’t you know it makes everybody uncomfortable to see the son of the house sitting behind never saying anything. I hate to be made uncomfortable,” said Rosamond, “it makes me think all sorts of horrid things. But there is nothing the matter with you. You are not deformed or bad in your head, or out of health, or badly snubbed. Mrs. Rowland keeps looking at you: she does not know what to do; and you make me horribly uncomfortable,” said Rosamond with energy; “that was why I made you get up and dance.”
“It wasn’t very successful,” said Archie, with a grim smile; “don’t you wish you had let it alone?”
“No, I don’t wish I had let it alone. I should like to take you by the shoulders and shake you. Oh, if I were your sister!” She broke off with a suggestive grind of her white teeth. “Eddy is bad enough,” she added after a moment. “He’s a little ape: I can do nothing with him; but I could put up with even Eddy better than I could put up with you—if I were your sister.”
“But fortunately you are not my sister.”
“No, nor your stepmother either,” said Rosamond with energy, “or I don’t know what I should do. Can’t you talk a little, can’t you try to dance a bit, can’t you be like other people? Usually I don’t advise other people so very much: they chatter for ever and ever, and talk a great deal of nonsense. But it reconciles one to them. When one sees you—”
“Perhaps I had better take myself off,” said Archie; “and then you will not have that annoyance any more.”
“You want to try to make me out to be a meddler and a busybody,” said Rosamond; “but I am not that. I only say what I feel. Why, you should be the one to make the house pleasant! You are going out to shoot to-morrow, you and Eddy, and we are to bring you your luncheon out on the hill. You ought to be all full of petits soucis, and make it pleasant for us; but you will not. I know what you will do. You will sit down on a stone as far away as you can go, and you will bend down your brow, and perhaps turn your back, and never say one word.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Archie, red with rage, especially as she shrugged up her shoulders, and put down her chin, and contracted her forehead in a manner which he felt to be more or less like himself.
“Yes, you will,” said Rosamond, with the point-blank contradiction of youth.
“No, I will not,” cried the boy, forgetting everything but his wrongs. A hot moisture came to his eyes. “I hate shooting,” he said; “I hate company. I hate all those antics I was not brought up to. What business have you to come here and want London manners from me?”
“You poor boy,” said Rosamond, shaking her highly poised head. “London manners,” she said, in a tone of the mildest philosophy, “are often just what yours are. Men in London ape being rude like you. They pretend to care for nothing; not to hear what people say to them. It is smart to be uncivil, don’t you know? If you keep it up, you will be the fashion when you go to town.”
Archie clenched his fist in the height of his passion; not, of course, to hit out at Rowland, but at somebody—at the London men—at the detestable world.
“Oh, you may be angry,” said the young lady, “but it is quite true. Should you like to dance with me again, Mr. Rowland, for you see Eddy and Marion are off once more? and Mrs. Rowland plays very well—really very nicely, for such an old-fashioned thing as she is playing. If you do not choose to dance, as there is nobody else to take me out, perhaps you will kindly say so, and then we need not continue standing here.”
Said Archie, with a gasp, with sudden humility, “I can’t dance at all; do you want to make a fool of me! If you think it is my fault, you are quite mistaken. I don’t want to be ridiculous. I would talk and do things if I could——”
“Come along then and try,” said the girl. “Don’t be flurried and nervous. Let us make for the other end of the room, where there is not much light—and do remember not to knock against your father. That was not bad at all; now, one turn more, and then make for the window, and take me out.”
“You will catch cold,” said Archie, breathlessly.
“Oh, I’m not afraid; and it will make an end of it. Here we are,” she cried, as they emerged suddenly into the moonlight. “Now give me your arm, please, and take me round to the back door. Eddy will be after us in a moment; it will be just the chance for him. That was all very well for ten minutes, but it would not do to carry it on all night. Oh!” she said, suddenly, “look! look!”
They had come out suddenly upon the colonnade, and in a moment stood in another world. Far below the Clyde lay like molten silver, in a ripple of glistening movement, with the mass of trees, wholly denuded of their leaves, paving it in on either side. Into the opening glided in a moment a little pleasure boat, with a white sail catching the white blaze of the moon. It was wafted by in a moment, as they stood, appearing and disappearing like a bird across the silver tide. The sky, a wide, vast vault of blue, flaked with little white clouds, seemed to envelop and hold that little vignette of earth and sky. In the far distance was the darkness of heaven’s vault, the smoke of the town on the other side, with a few lights appearing out of it here and there. Rosamond, forgetting herself in the sudden sensation, pressed his arm with her fingers to call his attention. “Did you ever see it like that before?” she said.
“Never!” said Archie, with a fervour of which he was not himself conscious, feeling as if all the evil conditions of life had vanished and paradise come.
Was this another version of the cat and the mouse?
END OF VOL. I.