Part 66 (1/2)
”And still I am not 'appy?' How could I be when you did me out of that solitary dance you promised me? I really believed, when I asked you with such pathos in the early part of the evening to keep that one green spot in your memory for me, you would have done so.”
”Did I forget you?” remorsefully. ”Well, don't blame me. Mr. Lowry _would_ keep my card for me, and, as a natural consequence, it was lost. After that, how was it possible for me to keep to my engagements?”
”I think it was a delightful ball,” Molly says, with perhaps a shade too much _empress.e.m.e.nt_. ”I never in all my life enjoyed myself so well.”
”Lucky you,” says Cecil. ”Had I been allowed I should perhaps have been happy too; but”--with a glance at Stafford, who is looking the very personification of languid indifference--”when people allow their tempers to get the better of them----” Here she pauses with an eloquent sigh.
”I hope you are not alluding to me,” says Lowry, who is at her elbow, with a smile that awakes in Stafford a mild longing to strangle him.
”Oh, no!”--sweetly. ”How could you think it? I am not ungrateful; and I know how carefully you tried to make my evening a pleasant one.”
”If I succeeded it is more than I dare hope for,” returns he, in a low tone, intended for her ears alone.
She smiles at him, and holds out her arm, that he may refasten the eighth b.u.t.ton of her glove that has mysteriously come undone. He rather lingers over the doing of it. He is, indeed, strangely awkward, and finds an unaccountable difficulty in inducing the refractory b.u.t.ton to go into its proper place.
”Shall we bivouac here for the remainder of the night, or seek our beds?” asks Sir Penthony, impatiently. ”I honestly confess the charms of that eldest Miss Millbanks have completely used me up. Too much of a good thing is good for nothing; and she _is_ tall. Do none of the rest of you feel fatigue? I know women's pa.s.sion for conquest is not easily satiated,”--with a slight sneer--”but at five o'clock in the morning one might surely call a truce.”
They agree with him, and separate, even the tardiest guest having disappeared by this time, with a last a.s.surance of how intensely they have enjoyed their evening; though when they reach their chambers a few of them give way to such despair and disappointment as rather gives the lie to their expressions of pleasure.
Poor Molly, in spite of her false gayety,--put on to mask the wounded pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with dismay,--flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining hours that rest between her and her maid's morning visit.
”Alas! how easily things go wrong: A sigh too much or a kiss too long.”
For how much less--for the mere suspicion of a kiss--have things gone wrong with her? How meagre is the harvest she has gathered in from all her antic.i.p.ated pleasure, how poor a fruition has been hers!
Now that she and her lover are irrevocably separated, she remembers, with many pangs of self-reproach, how tender and true and honest he has proved himself in all his dealings with her; and, though she cannot accuse herself of actual active disloyalty toward him, a hidden voice reminds her how lightly and with what persistent carelessness she accepted all his love, and how indifferently she made return.
With the desire to ease the heartache she is enduring, she tries--in vain--to encourage a wrathful feeling toward him, calling to mind how ready he was to believe her false, how easily he flung her off, for what, after all, was but a fancied offense. But the very agony of his face as he did so disarms her, recollecting as she does every change and all the pa.s.sionate disappointment of it.
Oh that she had repulsed Philip on the instant when first he took her hand, as it had been in her heart to do!--but for the misery he showed that for the moment softened her. Mercy on such occasions is only cruel kindness, so she now thinks,--and has been her own undoing. And besides, what is his misery to hers?
An intense bitterness, a positive hatred toward Shadwell, who has brought all this discord into her hitherto happy life, grows within her, filling her with a most unjust longing to see him as wretched as he has unwittingly made her; while yet she shrinks with ever-increasing reluctance from the thought that soon she must bring herself to look again upon his dark but handsome face.
Luttrell, too,--she must meet him; and, with such swollen eyes and pallid cheeks, the bare idea brings a little color into her white face.
As eight o'clock strikes, she rises languidly from her bed, dressed as she is, disrobing hurriedly, lest even her woman should guess how wakeful she had been, throws open her window, and lets the pure cold air beat upon her features.
But when Sarah comes she is not deceived. So distressed is she at her young mistress's appearance that she almost weeps aloud, and gives it as her opinion that b.a.l.l.s and all such nocturnal entertainments are the invention of the enemy.
CHAPTER XXV.
”Ah, starry hope, that didst arise But to be overcast!”
--Edgar A. Poe.
”The ring asunder broke.”
--_German Song._