‘Are you not well, perhaps? There is quite a respectable sofa in the retiring-room. Quite clean. You could put your feet up for a little. I will come and sit with you, if you like.’
Chattie was most anxious to be of service to her friend, for, in spite of her relentless pursuit of enjoyment, at times she did suspect that enjoyment refused as relentlessly to be pursued.
Then Laura replied:
‘Are you really able to lie down on the sofa and be cured? Ah, Chattie, how I do envy you!’
This was the sort of thing that people did not like in Laura, and Chattie giggled, and dabbed with her handkerchief at the perspiration on her upper lip.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, and giggled again to stop the gap.
But Laura was grateful to her rather suety friend.
‘Come,’ she said, touching Chattie, because it cost her an effort. ‘Let us stand over there and watch, near that column, where we shall not be seen.’
‘Oh, dear, no,’ said Chattie, for whom it was a first duty to be noticed, and was propelling her friend up a short flight of steps leading to a little dais, from which prizes were distributed after the term’s dancing classes, and on which chairs had been arranged in a bower of flowers. ‘One does not accept to go to a ball simply to hide behind a column.’
‘Will it do us any good to sit exposed in the open, like a target?’ Laura asked.
Chattie knew that targets were designed for arrows, but contained her thoughts.
‘If we do not actually benefit by it, we can come to no positive harm,’ she was careful to observe.
So they seated themselves.
It was Belle’s night. Belle was everywhere, in her white dress, almost always and inevitably in the arms of Tom Radclyffe. Other dancers made way, encouraging her presence in their midst, as if she had been a talisman of some kind, and they would have touched her magic dress. As she danced, sometimes she would close her eyes against the music, although more often she would hold them open, expressing her love in such lucid glances that some mothers considered it immodest, and Laura, intercepting the touching honesty of that almost infinite blue, was afraid for her cousin’s safety, and wanted to protect her.
Or herself. She shuddered to realize that love might not remain hidden, and was nervously turning her head this way and that. She was most alarmingly, chokingly exposed. Her neck had mottled.
When the man approached so quietly, and bowed so civilly, she could have cried out, to ward off that being who, from his very modesty and reasonableness, might possibly have understood.
‘It is very kind,’ she said, in a loud, ugly voice. ‘Thank you. But I am not dancing.’
‘I do not blame you,’ he replied. ‘I am never surprised at any person not wishing to dance. It is not sociable, for one thing. It is not possible to jig up and down and express one’s thoughts clearly at the same time.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘I had always been led to understand that the expression of thought was the height of unsociability.’
Chattie Wilson laughed rather bitterly. She was hating everything.
Then Laura Trevelyan introduced Dr Badgery, surgeon of Nautilus, to Miss Chattie Wilson, and felt that she herself was absolved from further duty.
But his expression would not leave her in peace. Although his voice would be engaged with Chattie Wilson, it was not Chattie whom he was questioning.
‘Tell me, Miss Wilson,’ he said, ‘are you well acquainted with the country?’
‘Oh, dear, no. I have been very seldom into the bush. It is different, of course, if one marries; then it may become a matter of necessity.’
Miss Wilson did not intend to waste much time on Dr Badgery, who was neither young, nor handsome, of moderate means, she suspected, and not quite a gentleman. If she did not also recognize sympathy, it was because she was not yet desperate enough.
‘I would give anything to satisfy my curiosity,’ he said.
‘You should join some expedition,’ advised Chattie, and tried anxiously to be recognized by someone nice.
‘Such as left last year,’ she added, for she had been well trained, ‘under the leadership of that German, Mr Voss.’
No expedition, it appeared, would be led to the rescue of Chattie Wilson.
‘Ah,’ said Dr Badgery. ‘So I have heard. Tell me about him.’
He was looking most intently at Chattie, but would be turned at any moment, Laura knew, to intercept her distress.
‘I did not make his acquaintance,’ Chattie replied, but remembered at once. ‘Laura did, though.’
Then Dr Badgery turned, straining a little, as well-fleshed men of forty will, and was looking at Laura with the highest hopes. He would have been singularly unsurprised at anything of an oracular nature that might have issued from the mouth of that dark young woman.
Laura, who had looked away, remained conscious of his rather heavy eyebrows.
‘Did you?’ he asked.
And waited.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That is to say, my uncle was one of those who subscribed to Mr Voss’s expedition.’
‘And what manner of man is this German?’
‘I do not know,’ said Laura. ‘I cannot judge a person on superficial evidence. Sometimes,’ she added, for she had by now lived long enough, ‘it will even appear that all evidence is superficial.’
‘I have heard the most extraordinary things,’ said the surgeon, ‘of Mr Voss.’
‘Then, no doubt,’ said the young woman, ‘you are better informed than I.’
It was at this point that Dr Badgery realized he should ask Miss Wilson to dance, and she, for want of better opportunities, accepted graciously enough. They went down. Now the surgeon, that ordinarily jolly man, who wrote affectionate letters to young girls long after their mothers had given him up, was engulfed in the tragic hilarity of the polka, as if rivers of suffering had gushed to the surface from depths where they had remained hitherto unsuspected, or he, perhaps he alone had not tapped them.
This was before his sense of duty returned.
‘Do you know Waverley?’ asked the jigging surgeon.
‘Oh, dear, yes. Waverley,’ sighed, and jigged Miss Chattie Wilson. ‘I know everywhere round here. Although, of course, there are some places where one cannot go.’
‘I was at Waverley recently, in the garden of a Judge de Courcy. Do you know him?’ asked the surgeon, who had heard it done this way.
‘His wife is my aunt’s second cousin.’
‘Is everybody related?’
‘Almost everybody.’ Chattie sighed. ‘Of course, there are some people who cannot be.’
‘I was at Waverley with the Pringles. Miss Bonner and her mother happened to be of the party.’
‘Belle,’ said Chattie, ‘is the sweetest thing. And so lovely. She deserves every bit of her good fortune. Nobody could envy Belle.’
‘And Miss Trevelyan,’ the surgeon suggested.
‘Laura is sweet, too,’ Chattie sighed. ‘But peculiar. Laura is clever.’
They continued to dance.
Or the surgeon was again threading the dark maze of clipped hedges at Waverley. He knew that, already the first day, he was dedicated to Laura Trevelyan, whatever the nature of her subterranean sorrows. So they sailed against the dark waters, trailing hands, she holding her face away, or they walked in the labyrinth of hedges, in which, he knew from experience, they did not meet.
From where she had continued to sit, Laura Trevelyan watched the antics of the fat surgeon, an unlikely person, whom she would have learnt to love, if seas of experience and music had not flowed between them.
Then the dancers stopped, and everybody was applauding the capital music with their hot gloves.