Cressida (16 page)

Here Lady Constance, who could no longer contain herself upon hearing this startling and most unwelcome piece of news (for Cressida had said nothing to her of what had passed between her and Lord Langmere that day), burst into the conversation to demand what in the world Addison meant by making such an absurd and totally untrue statement.

“Of course nothing of the sort has occurred,” she scolded him, “and I beg you will not go about repeating such a faradiddle to everyone you meet! It is true that there is no understanding
as yet
between Cressida and Langmere—”

“Nor ever will be,” Addison said languidly. “Am I not right, Cressy, my dearest? You have laid another of your victims in the dust, and now have certainly no wish—having shown yourself the goddess triumphant once more—to raise him.”

“Do
stop talking such fustian, Drew!” Cressida said coldly. “One would think you had been indulging in reading lending library novels—which you profess to abhor!”

“And so I do, my sweet,” said Addison, smiling at her calmly. “But if one’s friends
will
persist in behaving as if they belonged between the covers of those revoltingly sentimental works, what is one to do? You really 
must
break yourself of the habit of leading besotted males to the very brink of matrimony and then baulking at the last moment at stepping over the edge with them, Cressy darling; it always leads to low drama in the general conversation.”

Cressida, who had hoped to be able to explain to Rossiter herself in a very dignified manner that she and Langmere had mutually agreed that they would not suit, and that any thought of marriage between them was now at an end, felt her heart sink. From Addison’s words it was perfectly apparent that her rejection of Lord Langmere’s suit would be one of the principal topics of conversation at the ball that evening, so that Rossiter would be certain to be treated upon every side with the most highly coloured interpretation of her conduct that gossip, and sometimes malicious gossip, could give it. A heartless jilt—that was what would be said of her; and Rossiter himself had as much as pronounced those very words in the garden at Calverton Place. How was she to explain to him, in a crowded ballroom, that it was only because she had rediscovered her love for him that she had given Langmere his dismissal? If only she might see him alone—

But the impossibility of achieving such a wish on this evening, of all others, was made abundantly clear to her as the carriage entered Cavendish Square, which was the scene at the moment of an even greater confusion than ordinarily attended the hour of arrival at a large ball. Lady Maybridge’s parties were famous for being the greatest squeezes of the Season, and the Square was already filled with a crush of jostling carriages and excited horses when they arrived, so that it seemed next to impossible that they would ever be able even to reach the door of Maybridge House.

“Tiresome!” commented Addison, regarding with some distaste the efforts of a swearing coachman driving an elegant town-chariot with a crest upon the panel to force his way in before them in the line of carriages that was slowly crawling along the street. “One does so wonder if it is worth the effort to make an appearance at one of Gussie Maybridge’s balls. Even when one succeeds in getting inside, one is always at least half an hour on the staircase, pressed in cheek by jowl, as like as not, with some quite unconversable foreign ambassador, with his wife’s ostrich plumes tickling one’s nose. Unfortunately, one cannot consider attending a party that is so very unsuccessful that one can enter the house with ease. It would be too drearily unfashionable—”

He went on speaking, but Cressida was no longer attending to him. She had caught sight, through the slanting, silvery rain, of a tall figure just alighting from a carriage that had that moment drawn up before the doorway of Maybridge House. She could see only the broad shoulders, the erect back, and the well-shaped head with its severely cropped black hair, but she knew she could not be mistaken. It was Rossiter, and if only, she thought, in sudden wild, hopeful impatience, Addison’s coachman would make haste to bring their carriage up to the door, she might manage to spend that interminable half hour upon the crowded staircase, to which Addison had alluded, in such close proximity to him that something of what she wished to inform him about her change in feelings might be conveyed to him, in spite of foreign ambassadors, their wives,
and
their wives’ ostrich plumes.

Of course nothing so fortunate occurred. Instead, she was obliged, during the five-and-twenty minutes she spent ascending, step by step, the magnificent red-carpeted staircase of Maybridge House, to endure the torments of Tantalus, seeing Rossiter’s dark head directly before her the whole time, but separated from her by the stout and exceedingly solid bulk of a lady in a puce satin gown and a diamond tiara. By the time she had reached the head of the staircase he had already exchanged greetings with Lord and Lady Maybridge and passed on into the ballroom, and seeking for him there, she knew, amidst upwards of six hundred people, half of whom were dancing, while the other half milled about in a kaleidoscopic fashion behind the red-velvet ropes that divided the dance-floor from the rest of the room, would certainly be a tedious and perhaps unsuccessful task.

To her discomfort, the first person she
did
see was Lord Langmere, who was pressed, willy-nilly, almost directly up to her in the crush, bowed slightly to her with a somewhat heightened colour, and immediately made the most determined effort to escape from her presence.

“So you haven’t given him his marching orders!” Addison’s cynical voice said behind her. “Dearest Cressy, do you think me
quite
muttonheaded, that you expect me to swallow such a rapper as that? He had as well be wearing a placard reading
Rejected Lover
on the back of his coat! And what odds, ” he added thoughtfully, “will you give me that young Harries won’t be the next to succeed to his honours? The bettors at White’s, I may tell you, will be badly scorched if he is not: he has been so much in your company of late that a good many of them are plunging heavily on him. But here he comes now. Will you stand up to dance with him and swing the odds even more in his favour, or do you intend to cause a panic by snubbing him?”

Cressida felt that if it were possible and legal to kill someone in a ballroom, the odds were that Drew Addison would be dead at that moment by her hand, but she was obliged to content herself with ignoring him as completely as if she had not heard a word he had spoken, and greeted Captain Harries with great cordiality instead.

“Good evening, Miss Calverton; I’d like very much to ask you to do me the honour of standing up with me for the next dance,” said the Captain, who looked, as usual, rather harassed by the responsibility of living up to his elegant coat and knee breeches but very pleased to see her. “But they tell me it’s to be the quadrille, and for the life of me I haven’t been able to master the steps.

He then looked at Kitty, who appeared to the greatest advantage that evening in a robe of pale blue crape caught together down the front with small silver clasps over a white sarsnet slip, and he was obviously about to address himself to her when, Addison having dropped a few words into her ear, she turned to Lady Constance and very prettily asked her permission to stand up for the quadrille with him. Lady Constance looked disapproving, but she was too well aware of the power Addison wielded in Society to cross swords with him, and, with a slight, expressive shrug of her shoulders, gave her consent.

“Detestable man!” she said, as the two walked off together. “He is only singling her out for his attentions to set Rossiter on end, and though I am as well aware as the next person that there is nothing like a little jealousy to bring
some
gentlemen to the point, Rossiter does
not 
appear to me to be that sort of man. If Kitty is not careful, she will find she has whistled him down the wind. ” She broke off to greet a dowager in purple-bloom silk, with whom she at once moved away down the room. Cressida looked at Captain Harries.

“I see,” she said, “that you have not been having a great deal of success while I have been away. ”

The Captain, looking downcast, said no, he had not. “But I’m bound to say,” he added, plucking up his spirits slightly, “that, with Dev away, too, it’s that Addison fellow who’s been claiming most of her time, and they say there’s safety in numbers.”

“Perhaps there is,” said Cressida, suddenly feeling an irresistible urge to confide her difficulties to the Captain, who was, after all, in much the same dilemma as she was herself, and had as much interest as she had in seeing to it that Rossiter did not marry Kitty. “But it’s a great deal like playing hazard: there is always the chance that the very number one particularly does not wish to will turn up!”

She glanced about impatiently at the long, crowded room: it was quite useless, she saw, to expect that anywhere within its brilliant confines she might have a few minutes of private, uninterrupted conversation with her companion. But she was familiar with Maybridge House, and remembered suddenly that, behind the heavy crimson brocade draperies before which they were at present standing, there was a shallow embrasure leading to one of the ballroom’s long double windows, each of which had built outside it a narrow balcony enclosed by a low iron railing.

“I should like to talk to you—come along!” she said to the Captain, parting the heavy draperies and passing swiftly into the embrasure.

The Captain obediently followed her, unbolted and flung open the long window at her direction, and then stepped outside with her onto the narrow covered ledge beyond.

“This is far better!” Cressida said, much relieved, and looking about her at the misty darkness. She felt, in fact, so very much relieved, after Addison’s disagreeable words and the knowledge that at that precise moment some equally nasty-minded person was undoubtedly pouring into Rossiter’s ears the most unpleasant version he or she could concoct of her dismissal of Langmere, that she experienced a sudden desire to put her head upon the Captain’s broad, comforting shoulder and wail out her troubles like a schoolgirl. “Oh!” she said, bringing herself up short before she could give way to this ignoble impulse, “you will think I am an idiot, Captain Harries, but I simply
must
tell someone. I have just learned, you see, that while I was thinking all these years that Dev wished to break off our engagement because of not wanting to marry a girl with no money, he really did it only because he had been told that I shouldn’t inherit my great-aunt’s fortune if I married him. And it has made me feel quite, quite different about him, of course, and—and I don’t at all wish him to marry Kitty Chenevix now, any more than you wish him to do so. Only everyone says he is quite on the point of offering for her, and—oh, Captain Harries, what
are
we to do?”

Captain Harries, who had hitherto been in the way of regarding Miss Calverton as the sort of goddesslike female who was so capable of managing her own affairs to her entire satisfaction that any male interference in them would be not only unnecessary but impertinent, was shocked beyond measure to find a face that distinctly appeared to be upon the verge of tears turned up in despairing appeal to his. But he recovered himself quickly, and, much touched, put his arm around Cressida in an extremely comforting and brotherly way and said he had suspected it all along.

“Suspected what?” said Cressida in a rather muffled voice, giving herself up in an unwonted way to the luxury of having someone to lean on in her distress.

“That you were in love with him, and he with you,” said the Captain simply.

“Oh!” Cressida exclaimed, looking up at him with a radiant face. “Oh, do you
really
think so?”

And at that precise moment the draperies parted suddenly and Rossiter walked into the embrasure.

The tableau he saw before him at that instant—the dashing Miss Calverton, her waist encircled by a manly arm, gazing up radiantly into the face of her companion —was one he could have been pardoned for misconstruing; in point of fact, it was scarcely possible that he could have avoided misinterpreting it. He remained standing for a moment, thunderstruck, his arm still raised to hold back the draperies, so that the brilliant candlelight from the ballroom streamed full upon the startled pair before him. Then he said, in a harsh, even voice, “I beg your pardon! I came to ask you to dance, Miss Calverton. I was not aware that you were otherwise engaged.”

“But I wasn’t—I mean I’m not—” Cressida, finding her tongue, stammered, quite idiotically, as she was furiously aware.

Rossiter’s contemptuous gaze scorched her. “Good God,” he exclaimed savagely, “don’t think to shuffle Miles aside now while you attempt to add
me
to your list of conquests for the evening! Isn’t it enough that you have made Langmere a laughingstock, without wishing to do the same for him?”

And without another word he stepped back into the ballroom and let the draperies fall to behind him. The light was cut off abruptly; in the damp, late spring darkness Cressida and Captain Harries faced each other, pale and aghast.

“I’d best go after him and explain—” the Captain began hastily, at the same moment that Cressida said in a stifled voice, “I
must
explain—”

Then they both stopped speaking, a look of dismayed realisation appearing simultaneously upon both their faces.

“We can’t possibly!” Cressida said despairingly. “He will never believe that I brought you out here only to tell you I am in love with
him!
He will think we are merely making game of him!”

The Captain, to whom the same idea appeared to have occurred, looked shaken, but said he had best have a try at it, all the same.

“No, don’t!” said Cressida anxiously. “Not just now, at any rate. He is in a black rage—can’t you see? He won’t listen to you, and if you try to defend me, he will think it is because I have b-bewitched you— Deuce take it, I am
not
going to cry!” she said, searching angrily in her reticule for a handkerchief. “That ghastly Addison will be certain to notice if I do, and say I am regretting having turned Langmere off, or something beastly like that.”