Maurice Guest (47 page)

Maurice now thought the matter closed. Not many days later, however, Dove appeared again, with a crestfallen air. He had still over a dozen tickets on his hands, and, at the low price fixed, unless all were sold, the expenses of the evening would not be covered. In order to get rid of him, Maurice bought a ticket, on the condition that he was not expected to use it, and also suggested some fresh people Dove might try; so that the latter went off with renewed courage on his disagreeable errand.

Maurice mentioned the incident to Louise that evening, as he mentioned any trifle he thought might interest her. He sat on the edge of his chair, and did not mean to stay; for he had found her on the sofa with a headache.

So far, she had listened to him with scant attention; but at this, she raised her eyebrows.

"Then you don't care for dancing?"—she could hardly believe it.

He repeated the words he had used to Dove.

She smiled faintly, looking beyond him, at a sombre patch of sky.

"I should think not. If it were me!——" She raised her hand, and considered her fingers.

"If it were you?—yes?"

But she did not continue.

It had been almost a spring day: that, no doubt, accounted for her headache. Maurice made a movement to rise. But Louise turned quickly on her side, and, in her own intense way, said: "Listen. You have the ticket, you say? Use it, and take me with you. Will you?"

He smiled as at the whim of a child. But she was in earnest.

"Will you?"

"No, of course not."

He tempered his answer with the same smile. But she was not pleased—he saw that. Her nostrils tightened, and then, dilated, as they had a way of doing when she was annoyed. For some time after, she did not speak.

But the very next day, when he was remonstrating with her over some small duty which she had no inclination to perform, she turned on him with an unreasonable irritation. "You only want me to do disagreeable things. Anything that is pleasant, you set yourself against."

It took him a minute to grasp that she was referring to what he had said the evening before.

"Yes, but then . . . I didn't think you were in earnest."

"Am I in the habit of saying things I don't mean? And haven't you said yourself that I am killing myself, shut up in here?—that I must go out and mix with people? Very well, here is my chance."

He kept silence: he did not know whether she was not mainly inspired by a spirit of contradiction, and he was afraid of inciting her, by resistance, to say something she would be unable to retract. "I don't think you've given the matter sufficient thought," he said at last. "It can't be decided offhand."

She was angry, even more with herself than with him. "Oh, I know what you mean. You think I shall be looked askance at. As if it mattered what people say! All my life I haven't cared, and I shall not begin now, when I have less reason than ever before."

He did not press the subject; he hoped she would change her mind, and thus render further discussion unnecessary. But this was not the case; she clung to the idea, and was deaf to reason. To a certain extent, he could feel for her; but he was too troubled by the thought of unpleasant possibilities, not to endeavour to persuade her against it: he knew, as she did not, how unkindly she had been spoken of; and he was not sure whether her declared bravado was strong enough to sustain her. But the more he reasoned, the more determined she was to have her own way; and she took his efforts in very bad part.

"You pretend to be solicitous about me," she said one afternoon, from her seat by the fire. "Yet when a chance of diversion comes you begrudge it to me. You would rather I mouldered on here."

"That's not generous of you. It is only you I am thinking of—in all this ridiculous affair."

The word stung her. "Ridiculous? How dare you say that! I'm still young, am I not? And I have blood in my veins, not water. Well, I want to feel it. For months now, I have been walled up in this tomb. Now I want to live. Not—do you understand?—to go out alone, on a filthy day, with no companion but my own thoughts. I want to dance—to forget myself—with light and music. It's the most natural thing in the world. Anyone but you would think so."

"It is not life you mean; it's excitement."

"What it means is that you don't want to take me.—Yes, that's what it is. But I can get some one else. I will send for Eggis; he will have no objection."

"Why drag in that cad's name? You know very well if you do go, it will be with me, and no one else."

A slight estrangement grew up between them. Maurice was hurt: she had shown too openly the small value she set on his opinion. In addition to this, he was disagreeably affected by her craving for excitement at any cost. To his mind, there was more than a touch of impropriety in the proceeding; it was just as if a mourner of a few months' standing should suddenly discard his mourning, and with it all the other decencies of grief.

She had not been entirely wrong in accusing him of unreadiness to accompany her. When he pictured to himself the astonished faces of his friends, he found it impossible to look forward to the event with composure. He saw now that it would have been better to make no secret of his friendship with Louise; so harmless was it that every one he knew might have assisted at it; but now, the very abruptness of its disclosure would put it in a bad light. Through Dove, he noised it abroad that he would probably be present at the ball after all; but he shunned Madeleine with due precaution, and could not bring himself even to hint who his companion might be. In his heart, he still thought it possible that Louise might change her mind at the last moment—take fright in the end, at what she might have to face.

But the night came, and this had not happened. While he dressed himself in the hired suit, which was too large here, too small there, he laid a plan of action for the evening. Since it had to be gone through with, it must be carried off in a highhanded way. He would do what he could to make her presence in the hall seem natural; he would be attentive, without devoting himself wholly to her; and he would induce her to leave early.

He called for her at eight o'clock. The landlady said that Fraulein was not quite ready, and told him to wait in the passage. But the door of the room was ajar, and Louise herself called to him to come in.

It was comparatively dark; for she had the lamp behind the screen, where he heard her moving about. Her skirts rustled; drawers and cupboards were pulled noisily open. Then she came out, with the lamp in her hand.

Maurice was leaning against the piano. He raised his eyes, and made a step forward, to take the lamp from her. But after one swift, startled glance, he drew back, colouring furiously. For a moment he could not collect himself: his heart seemed to have leapt into his throat, and there to be hammering so hard that he had no voice with which to answer her greeting.

Owing to what he now termed his idiotic preoccupation with himself, he had overlooked the fact that she, too, would be in evening dress. Another thing was, he had never seen Louise in any but street-dress, or the loose dressing-gown. Now he called himself a fool and absurd; this was how she was obliged to be. Convention decreed it, hence it was perfectly decorous; it was his own feelings that were unnatural, overstrained. But, in the same breath, a small voice whispered to him that all dresses were not like this one; also that every girl was not of a beauty, which, thus emphasised, made the common things of life seen poor and stale.

Louise wore a black dress, which glistened over all its surface, as if it were sown with sparks; it wound close about her, and out behind her on the floor. But this was only the sheath, from which rose the whiteness of her arms and shoulders, and the full column of her throat, on which the black head looked small. Until now, he had seen her bared wrist—no more. Now the only break on the long arm was a band of black velvet, which as it were insisted on the petal-white purity of the skin, and served in place of a sleeve.

Strange thoughts coursed through the young man's mind. His first impulse had been to avert his eyes; in this familiar room it did not seem fitting to see her dressed so differently from the way he had always known her. Before, however, he had followed this sensation to an end, he made himself the spontaneous avowal that, until now, he had never really seen her. He had known and treasured her face—her face alone. Now he became aware that to the beautiful head belonged also a beautiful body, that, in short, every bit of her was beautiful and desirable. And this feeling in its turn was overcome by a painful reflection: others besides himself would make a similar observation; she was about to show herself to a hundred other eyes: and this struck him as such an unbearable profanation, that he could have gone down on his knees to her, to implore her to stay at home.

Unconscious of his embarrassment, Louise had gone to the console-glass; and there, with the lamp held first above her head, then placed on the console-table, she critically examined her appearance. As if dissatisfied, she held a velvet bow to the side of her hair, and considered the effect; she took a powderpuff, and patted cheeks and neck with powder. Next she picked up a narrow band of velvet, on which a small star was set, and put it round her throat. But the clasp would not meet behind, and, having tried several times in vain to fasten it, she gave an impatient exclamation.

"I can't get it in."

As Maurice did not offer to help her, she went out of the room with the thing in her hand. During the few seconds she was absent, the young man racked his brain to invent telling reasons which would induce her not to go; but when she returned, slightly flushed at the landlady's ready flattery, she was still so engrossed in herself, and so unmindful of him, that he recognised once more his utter powerlessness. He only half existed for her this evening: her manner was as different as her dress.

She gathered her skirts high under her cloak, displaying her feet in fur-lined snow-boots. In the turmoil of his mind, Maurice found nothing to say as they went. But she did not notice his silence; there was a suppressed excitement in her very walk; and she breathed in the cold, crisp air with open lips and nostrils, like a wild animal.

"Oh, how glad I am I came! I might still have been sitting in that dull room—when I haven't danced for years—and when I love it so!"

"I can't understand you caring about it," he said, and the few words contained all his bitterness.

"That is only because you don't know me," she retorted, and laughed. "Dancing is a passion with me. I have dance-rhythms in my blood, I think.—My mother was a dancer."

He echoed her words in a helpless way, and a set of new images ran riot in his brain. But Louise only smiled, and said no more.

They were late in arriving; dancing had already begun; the cloak-rooms were black with coats and mantles. In the narrow passage that divided the rooms, two Englishmen were putting on their gloves. As Maurice changed his shoes, close to the door, he overheard one of these men say excitedly: "By Jove, there's a pair of shoulders! Who the deuce is it?"

Maurice knew the speaker by sight: he was a medical student, named Herries, who, on the ice, had been conspicuous for his skill as a skater. He had a small dark moustache, and wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole.

"You haven't been here long enough, old man, or you wouldn't need to ask," answered his companion. Then he dropped his voice, and made a somewhat disparaging remark—so low, however, but what the listener was forced to hear it, too.

Both laughed a little. But though Maurice rose and clattered his chair, Herries persisted, with an Englishman's supreme indifference to the bystander: "Do you think she can dance?"

"Can't tell. Looks a trifle heavy."

"Well, I'll risk it. Come on. Let's get some one to introduce us."

The blood had rushed to Maurice's head and buzzed there: another second, and he would have stepped out and confronted the speaker. But the incident had passed like a flash. And it was better so: it would have been a poor service to her, to begin the evening with an unpleasantness. Besides, was this not what he had been bracing himself to expect? He looked stealthily over at Louise; considering the proximity of the rooms, it was probable that she, too, had overheard the derogatory words. But when she had put on her gloves, she took his arm without a trace of discomfiture.

They entered the hall at the close of a polka, and slipped unnoticed into the train of those who promenaded. But they had not gone once round, when they were the observed of all eyes; although he looked straight in front of him, Maurice could see the astonished eyebrows and open mouths that greeted their advance. At one end of the hall was an immense mirror: he saw that Louise, who was flushed, held her head high, and talked to him without a pause. In a kind of bravado, she made him take her round a second time; and after the third, which was a solitary progress, they remained standing with their backs to the mirror. Eggis at once came up, with Herries in his train, and, on learning that she had no programme, the latter ran off to fetch one. Before he returned, a third man had joined them, and soon she was the centre of a little circle. Herries, having returned with the programme, would not give it up until he had put his initials opposite several dances. Louise only smiled—a rather artificial smile that had been on her lips since she entered the hall.

Maurice had fallen back, and now stood unnoticed behind the group. Once Louise turned her head, and raised her eyebrows interrogatively; but a feeling that was mingled pride and dismay restrained him; and as, even when the choosing of dances was over, he did not come forward, she walked down the hall on Herries's arm. The musicians began to tune; Dove, as master of ceremonies, was flying about, with his hands in gloves that were too large for him; people ranged themselves for the lancers in lines and squares. Maurice lost sight for a moment of the couple he was watching. As soon as the dance began, however, he saw them again; they were waltzing to the FRANCAISE, at the lower end of the hall.

He was driven from the corner in which he had taken refuge, by hearing some one behind him say, in an angry whisper: "I call it positively horrid of her to come." It was Susie Fay who spoke; through some oversight, she had not been asked to dance. Moving slowly along, behind the couples that began a schottische, he felt a tap on his arm, and, looking round, saw Miss Jensen. She swept aside her ample skirts, and invited him to a seat beside her. But he remained standing.