A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 2

CHAPTER III.

"WHERE THERE WAS NEVER NEED OF VOWS."

When Rachel came back to the house it was nearly five o'clock.

There was to be a great high tea at six, for which no dressing was required, in place of the ordinary dinner; and as she did not feel inclined to meet the crowd of company that was assembling in the drawing-room sooner than was necessary – to tell the truth, she had been crying, and her eyes were red – she returned by a back way to the ball-room, which she knew would be to all intents and purposes, empty.

As an excuse for doing so she carried in her arms some long wreaths of spiræa which she had discovered on a bush at the bottom of the garden, with which she intended to relieve the masses of box and laurestinus that made the groundwork of her decorations.

Lightly flitting up a stone-flagged passage at the rear of the house, she suddenly came upon Mr. Dalrymple. He emerged from the door of the laundry, which had been assigned to him for sleeping quarters, just as she was passing it.

"Oh!" she cried sharply, as if he had been a ghost; and then she caught her breath, and dropped her eyes, and blushed her deepest blush, which was by no means the conventional mode of salutation, but more than satisfied the man who did not know until this moment how eagerly he had looked for a welcome from her.

"How do you do?" he said, clothing the common formula with a new significance, and holding her hand in a strong grasp; "I was wondering where you were, and beginning to dread all kinds of disasters. Where are you going? May I carry these for you?"

He saw by this time the traces of her recent tears, and the cheerful cordiality of his greeting subsided to a rather stern but very tender earnestness.

Silently he lifted the white wreaths from her arm, and began to saunter beside her in the direction of the ball-room, much as he had led her away into the conservatory on that memorable night, which was only a week, but seemed a year ago.

All the time she was thinking of Mr. Kingston's prohibition, and dutifully desiring to obey him; but she had no power in her to do more.

They passed through the servants' offices, meeting only Lucilla's maid, who was in a ferment of excitement with so many ladies to attend to, and had not a glance to spare for them; they heard voices and footsteps all around them as they entered the house; but they reached the ball-room unperceived and unmolested, and found themselves alone.

The great room, with its windows draped and garlanded, was dim and silent; the gardener's steps stood in the middle ready for the lighting of the lamps; nothing but this remained to be done, and no one came in to disturb them.

For ten minutes they devoted themselves to business. Mr. Dalrymple mounted the steps, and wove the spiræa into whatever green clusters looked too thin or too dark; he touched up certain devices that seemed to him to lack stability; he straightened some flags that were hanging awry; and Rachel stood below and offered humble suggestions.

When they had done, and had picked up a few fallen leaves and petals, they stood and looked round them to judge of the general effect.

"It is very pretty," said Mr. Dalrymple; "and it makes a capital ball-room. I have not seen a better floor anywhere."

"It was laid down on purpose for dancing," said Rachel, who knew she ought now to be making her appearance elsewhere, yet lingered because he did.

"Are you fond of dancing?" he asked abruptly.

"Yes," she said; "very."

"Will you give me your first waltz to-night?"

He was leaning an elbow on the piano, near which he stood, and looking down on her with that gentle but imperious inquiry in his eyes, which made her feel as if she had taken a solemn affidavit to tell the truth.

"I – I cannot," she stammered, after a pause, during which she wondered distractedly how she could best explain her refusal so as to spare him unnecessary pain; "I am very sorry – I would, with pleasure, if I could."

"Thank you," he said, with a slight, grateful bow. "Well, I could hardly hope for the first, I suppose. But I may have the second? Here are the programmes," he added, fishing into a basketful of them that stood on the piano, and drawing two out; "let me put my name down for the second, and what more you can spare; may I?"

She took the card he gave her, opened it, looked at the little spaces which symbolised so much more than their own blank emptiness, looked up at him, and then – alas! She was a timid, tender, weakly creature when she was hurt, and she had not yet got over the effect of Mr. Kingston's harshness; and she had been crying too recently to be able to withstand the slightest provocation to cry.

She tried to speak, but her lip quivered, and a tear that had been slowly gathering fell with an audible pat upon the piano. He drew the card from her in a moment, and at the same time swept away any veil of decorous reticence that she might have wished to keep about her.

"What is the matter?" he asked, with gentle entreaty, which in him was not inconsistent with a most evident determination to find out. "I am not distressing you, asking you to dance with me, am I?"

"Oh, no – it is nothing! Only please don't ask me," she almost sobbed, struggling against the shame that she was bringing on herself, and knowing quite well that she would struggle in vain.

He watched her in silence for half a minute – not as Mr. Kingston had watched her, though with even a fiercer attentiveness, and then he said, very quietly,

"Why?"

But he had already guessed.

"Because – because – I have promised not to."

"You have promised Mr. Kingston?"

Scarlet with pain and mortification, in an agony of embarrassment, she sighed almost inaudibly,

"Yes."

"Not to dance with me? or merely not to dance waltzes?"

"Must I tell you?" she pleaded, looking up with appealing wet eyes into his hard and haughty face.

"Not unless you like, Miss Fetherstonhaugh. I think I understand perfectly."

"Oh, Mr. Dalrymple, I want to tell you about it, but I cannot. I am saying things already that I ought not to speak of."

"I don't think so," he replied quickly, suddenly softening until his voice was almost a caress, and set all her sensitive nerves thrilling like an Æolian harp when a strong wind blows over it. "It is in your nature to be honest, and to tell the truth. You are not afraid to tell the truth to me?"

"I would not tell you an untruth," she murmured, looking down; "but the truth – sometimes one must, sometimes one ought – to hide it. And I hoped you would not need to know about this."

"Why, how could I help knowing it? Did you think it likely I might by chance forget you were in the ball-room to-night?"

What she thought clearly "blazed itself in the heart's colours on her simple face." But she did not lift her eyes or speak.

"I am very glad I know," he continued, in a rather stern tone. "If you had done this to me, and never told me why – "

"I should have trusted to you to guess that it was not my fault, and to forgive me for it," the girl interposed, looking up at last with a flash in her soft eyes that, as well as her words, told him a great deal more than she had any idea of.

"It was really so?" he demanded eagerly. "It was not your own desire to disappoint me so terribly?"

"Oh, no."

"If you had been left to yourself you would have danced with me?"

"Yes, of course."

"Quite willingly?"

"You know I would!"

Mr. Dalrymple drew a long breath. It was rather a critical moment. But he was no boy, at the mercy of the wind and waves of his own emotions, and Rachel's evident weakness of self-control was an appeal to his strength that he was not the man to disregard. Still it was wonderful how actively during these last few minutes he had come to hate Mr. Kingston, whom he had never seen.

"I suppose," he said presently, "I must not ask the reason for this preposterous proceeding?"

"Do not," she pleaded gently. "There is no reason, really. It is but Mr. Kingston's whim."

"And are you determined to sacrifice me to Mr. Kingston's whim?"

She did not speak, and he repeated his query in a more imperious fashion.

"Are you really going to throw me over altogether, Miss Fetherstonhaugh? I only want to know."

She looked up at him piteously, and he softened at once.

"Tell me what I am to do," he said, in a low voice. "Do you wish me not to ask you for any dances? It is a horrible thing – it is enough to make me wish I had gone to Queensland on Monday, after all – but I will not bother you. Tell me, am I not to ask you at all?"

"If you please," she whispered with a quick sigh, full of despairing resignation. "I am very sorry, but it is right to do what Mr. Kingston wishes."

"That is not my view in this case. However, it is right for me to do what you wish. And I will, though it is very hard."

Here Rachel, feeling all her body like one great beating heart, moved away to the door, driven by a stern sense of social duty.

Her companion did not follow her, and she paused on the threshold, turned round, and then suddenly hurried back to him.

"Mr. Dalrymple," she said, putting out her hand with an impulsive gesture, "do not wish you had gone to Queensland instead of coming here to-night. If you do I shall be miserable!"

He seized her hand immediately, and stooping his tall head at the same moment, brushed it with his moustache. Then, looking up into her scared face, he said – like a man binding himself by some terrible oath:

"That I never will."

Once before in that room they had touched the point where not only mere acquaintance but warmest friendship ends. Then it had been to her a new, incomprehensible experience; now she could not help seeing the reason and the meaning of it, though, perhaps, not so clearly as he.

In a moment she had drawn her hand away, and like a bird frightened from its nest, had vanished out of his sight, leaving him – thoroughly aroused from his normal impassiveness – gazing at the empty doorway behind her.

When they met again, ten minutes afterwards, it was in the drawing-room, which was crowded with people; and through all the crush and noise, she was as acutely conscious of his presence as if he alone had been there.

She moved about with tremulous restlessness and downcast eyes; afraid to look at him – afraid he should look at her; paying her little civilities mechanically, and conducting herself generally, to her aunt's extreme annoyance, more like a bashful schoolgirl and a poor relation than ever.

Mr. Kingston, doing his best to fascinate Miss Hale, who stood beside him, giggling and simpering and twiddling her watch-chain, looked anxiously at his little sweetheart when she entered, thought he saw signs of his own handiwork in her disturbed and downcast face, called her to him, and until the great tea-dinner was over, and they all had to disperse to dress, compassed her with devout attentions, intended to assure her of his royal forgiveness and favour.

But he did not remove the prohibition, which made her more and more resentful as she continued to think about it, and less and less responsive to his ostentatious "kindness;" and he treated Mr. Dalrymple – when he condescended to acknowledge his presence at all – with a supercilious rudeness that Mr. Thornley, in conjugal confidence, declared to be "very bad form," and that prompted the gentle Lucilla to be "nicer" to the younger man than Rachel had ever seen her. He was so open in his hostility that it was generally noticed and talked of (and the cause of it more or less correctly surmised).

The only person who seemed absolutely indifferent to it and to him was Mr. Dalrymple himself; and in his secret heart he was much more glad than angry to have earned such pronounced dislike from such a quarter, though as impatient of what he called "impudence" as anybody.

That Adelonga ball was a memorable event to most of the people that it gathered together – as what ball is not? Mr. Thornley celebrated the coming of age of his son and heir, to begin with. Mrs. Thornley appeared for the first time, "officially," after the birth of her baby, who was the hero of all occasions to her, and inaugurated a great "county" reputation as a charming hostess and woman.

Mrs. Hardy got her best point lace irretrievably ruined by catching it on an unprotected corner of the wire-netting upon which Rachel had worked her decorations; and she also saw the lamentable frustration of several wise plans that she had made.

Two young people became engaged; others, male and female, fell in love, or began those pleasant flirtations which led to love eventually.

Miss Hale on the other hand, quarrelled with Mr. Lessel, who took upon himself to object to her extravagant appreciation of Mr. Kingston's rather extravagant attentions; and their engagement was broken off.

Mr. Lessel at the same time captivated the fancy of a charming young lady, only daughter of the Adelonga family doctor, resident in the township close by, who was destined in less than twelve months to be his wife.

Mr. Kingston, surfeited with balls, had a deeper interest in this one than in any of the hundreds that he had attended in the course of a long and gay career.

Never before had he admired a pretty woman with such ferocious sincerity as he admired his little Rachel to-night; never before had he used such rude tactics to make the object of his affections jealous – thereby to subdue rebellion in her; never before had he been so defied and circumvented by a being in female shape as he was to-night by this presumptive little nobody, whom he had singled out for honour, and who was bound to honour him, and his lightest wish.

As for Mr. Dalrymple and Rachel – they must be classed together in this catalogue of special experiences, for they shared theirs between them – the Adelonga ball marked a new and very memorable departure in the history of their lives. For half the evening they danced decorously apart.

Mr. Dalrymple justified Mrs. Thornley's expectations, of course, and distinguished himself above all the dancing men assembled; Rachel, who had had but little teaching, was a dancer by nature and instinct, as light and effortless, as airy and graceful as a bit of wind-blown thistle-down.

She loved it, as she loved all pleasant and poetic things; and though she could not have the partner she wanted, and had to take whom she could get, she felt to-night, and more and more as the evening wore away, that she had never heard and felt, in the strains of mere senseless instruments and in the thrill of responsive pulses, music of mundane waltzes and galops of such inspired and impassioned beauty.

There was a young artist from Melbourne who played lovely airs on a violin to a piano accompaniment, and he seemed literally to play upon her, spiritually sensitive as she was to-night to the lightest touch of that divine afflatus which makes poetry of certain passages in the most prosaic lives.

Now rapturously happy, now tragically miserable, and tremulously fluctuating up and down between these two extremes, she was blown about like a leaf in autumn wind by the subtle harmonies of that magical violin. At least she thought it was the violin. We know better.

At about twelve o'clock she went into the house on an errand for Lucilla, and came back by way of the conservatory, as the first bars of a Strauss waltz were stealing through the fern-roofed alleys, with nameless tender associations in every liquid note.

For a few seconds she paused in the shadowy doorway, a slight, white figure against the dim background, with hair like a golden aureola, and milk-white neck and arms – a gracious vision of youth and beauty as prince could wish to see.

But the Sleeping Princess now was acutely wide awake; the life that ran in her quickened pulses was almost more than she could bear. Her eyes shone restlessly, her breath fluttered in her throat, her heart ached and swelled with some vague, irresistible passion, as the waves of that delicious melody flowed over her, like an enchanter's incantation.

A few paces off, within the ball-room, Mr. Dalrymple stood with his back to the wall watching her; his dark face was lit and transfigured with the same kind of solemn exaltation. She turned her head, and they looked at one another, mutually conscious of the supreme moment that had unawares arrived.

He held out his hand – she almost sprang to meet him; and then, oblivious of betrothals, and promises, and houses, and diamonds, she floated down the long room, under the very noses of her aunt and Mr. Kingston, lying in a reckless ecstasy of contentment in her true love's arms.

CHAPTER IV.

AFTER THE BALL

WHATEVER might have been Rachel's confusion of mind as to the nature and consequences of her escapade, Mr. Dalrymple, from the moment that he took her in his arms, understood the situation perfectly. It was sufficiently serious to a man in his position, who, whatever his faults, was the soul of honour; but it was never his way to dally with difficulties, and he left himself in no sort of suspense or uncertainty as to how he would deal with this one.

Whether right or wrong, whether wise or foolish, in any sudden crisis requiring sudden choice of action, he obeyed his natural impulse, subject to his own rough code of duty only, without an instant's hesitation, and followed it up with unswerving determination, totally unembarrassed by any anxiety as to where it might lead or what it might cost him, or as to any ultimate consequences that might ensue.

In nine cases out of ten a man of honour, placed as he was now, would have regretted an unconsidered act of folly, and have cast about for means of extricating himself and the girl who was behaving badly to her affianced husband from the position into which it had led them – even, perhaps, to the extent of using

But he was the one man in ten who, equally a man of honour, felt himself under no obligation to do anything of the kind. If she loved him – and now he knew she did; if he loved her, or was able to love her – and he allowed himself no doubt upon that point from this moment of her self-revelation, though he had not meant to permit anybody (least of all a mere child like this) to supplant the dead woman on whom the passion of his best years had been spent – then the thing was settled. They might waltz together till daylight, and no one would have any right to interfere.

The social complications that surrounded them, and which a conventional gentleman would have considered of the last importance, were to him mere matters of detail. They must manage to get out of them as best they could.

So he carried her round and round the room, the most perfect partner he had ever danced with, who moved so sympathetically with all his movements that she might have been his shadow – but for the electric current of strong life that her hand in his, and her light weight on his shoulder, and the subtle sense of her emotion, sent thrilling through his veins; and in the teeming silence his brain was busy making rapid plans and calculations for effectively dealing with the many difficulties that would come crowding upon both of them as soon as this waltz was over.

Clearly, the first thing to do was to dispose of ambiguities between themselves.

"Come into the conservatory," he said, in a quick under tone, when five silent, delicious minutes had passed; "I want to say something to you before these people begin to spread all over the place again."

But even as he spoke, as if a spell had been broken, the light and rapture died suddenly out of her face, her limbs relaxed, her airy footsteps faltered, she seemed to melt away in his arms.

"Oh," she whispered, looking up at him with tragic eyes, full of fear and despair, "how wicked I have been! What will he say to me?"

"Never mind him," replied Mr. Dalrymple; "you must not let him have any right to dictate to you any more – you must break off your engagement at once, and get out of his hands. Wicked! – the only wicked thing would be to deceive him any longer. You know you don't love him. Come into the conservatory, and let us talk about it. Do come – there is nobody there now!"

But Rachel, being a woman, and a coward, and only eighteen years old, would not come. She knew what she wanted, but she dared not do it – she dared not even think of it.

"I must not – I must not!" she protested, in a childish panic of terror. "Let me go, Mr. Dalrymple, please– I have done very wrong – I am afraid to stay – "

And slipping out of his arms, which did the utmost that courtesy permitted to hold her, she fled through a doorway near and disappeared; and thus threw away an opportunity the loss of which was to cost them both long days and nights of suspense and suffering – as she foresaw with agonies of regret, even while she did it.

Mr. Dalrymple danced and talked, and sauntered about, proud and cool as usual to the superficial observer, but raging with impatience in his heart, and watched for her return; but he saw her no more until supper time, when she was led into the dining-room, looking very pale and quiet, on Mr. Kingston's arm.

The whole night passed, and he never had a chance to get near her again; though as may be supposed, it was from no lack of effort on his part; and he went to the laundry at last, hours after she had gone to bed, to change his clothes preparatory to taking a morning walk up the hills, without even having had the satisfaction of one look from her eyes, which, however timid and terrified, he felt sure would have told him the truth.

She did not come into the drawing-room before breakfast; and at that irregularly conducted meal she sat again by Mr. Kingston's side, the whole table's length from him. But glancing round her as she took her seat, she met his fixed gaze, and bowed with a subtle, wistful impressiveness that reassured him completely as to the state of her mind towards him, let her outward actions be what they might.

It was very tantalising; all his habitual calmness was upset; his very hand trembled as he took his coffee from Lucilla, and once when his gentle hostess spoke to him, he did not hear her.

The fret of this state of things, it is needless to say, chafed his incipient passion into flame; and the flame was kept up thereafter, at a more or less fierce heat and brightness, by the winds of adversity that ought to – and in nine cases out of ten would – have put it out.

After breakfast the company began to disperse in a desultory manner by installments. Some of the guests lingered until the afternoon; some until the next day.

The Digbys were the first to leave – partly because they had so far to go, partly because Mrs. Digby was anxious about her children – and of course Mr. Dalrymple had to go with them.

He hunted in vain for Rachel when the breakfast party broke up. She knew he was hunting for her, and she longed to go to him, and therefore as a matter of course, she hid herself.

Only at the last moment, as he was about to ride gloomily away, she appeared on the threshold of one of the inferior front doors, pale and shrinking, but desperate with vague despair – thinking to solace herself with one more glimpse of him when he would not know she was looking. But he saw her in a moment, flung himself from Lucifer's back, and caught her before she could steal away again.