Laura was for the moment quite separate in the roomful of human beings, but as she had outlived the age of social panic, she did not try to burrow in, and presently she saw Willie Pringle, on whom the hair had begun to sprout in unsatisfactory patches.
Willie wandered through his own party, and finally arrived at Laura.
‘I do not care for a ball, Laura, do you?’ the young man asked, with his silly, loose mouth.
‘You are my host,’ Laura answered, kindly.
‘Good Lord, I do not feel like one. Not a bit. I do not know what I feel like.’
Without realizing that this is frequently the case before the yeast begins to work, his mother was in the habit of blaming his ineffectuality on the fact that he had outgrown his strength.
‘Perhaps you will discover in time, and do something extraordinary,’ Laura suggested.
‘In a solicitor’s office?’
That he would find out and do something extraordinary was an eventuality of which Willie was afraid. But, in the meantime, he enjoyed the company of older girls. Not so much to talk to, as to watch. He sensed that mysticism which their presence bred, by secrets and silences, and music of dresses. Intent upon their own iridescent lives in the corners of a ballroom, or seated in a landscape, under trees, their purely formal beauty obsessed him. Often he would turn his back upon the mirrors that could not perpetuate their images.
‘Not in a solicitor’s office,’ he did hear Laura agree. ‘If we were bounded by walls, that would be terrible.’
She seemed to emphasize the we, which made Willie happy, although he wrinkled his forehead prodigiously to celebrate his happiness.
‘Should we dance, Laura?’ he asked, in some doubt.
This was a wholly and unexpectedly delightful prospect to Laura Trevelyan.
‘Do let us, Willie,’ she said, laughing for the approach of tenuous pleasure. ‘It will be fun.’
With Willie whom she had known since childhood. It was so blameless.
So they held hands. To move along the sunny avenues of rather pretty music, produced in the young woman such a sense of innocent happiness she did for a moment feel the pricking of tears. She glanced in a glass and saw that her eyelids had reddened in her pale face, and her nose was swollen. She was ugly tonight, but gently happy.
So the two peculiar people danced gently together. Nobody noticed them at first, except the surgeon, who had been reduced to the company of his own nagging thoughts.
Then Belle saw, and called, across several waves of other dancers, that were separating the two cousins, as at all balls.
‘Laura!’ Belle cried. ‘I am determined to reach you.’
She swam, laughing, through the sea of tulle, and was rising from the foam in her white, shining dress. Belle’s skin was permitted to be golden, while others went protecting their pink and white. At close quarters, changed back from goddess into animal, there were little, fine, golden hairs on what some people dared to refer to as Belle Bonner’s brown complexion. Indeed, there were mothers who predicted that Belle would develop a coarse look later on. But she smelled still of youth and flint, sunlight could have been snoozing upon her cheeks, and, amiably, she would let herself be stroked with the clumsiest of compliments. In which she did not believe, however. She laughed them off.
Now the cousins were reunited in midstream. Tugged at and buffeted, they swayed together, they clung together, they looked in through each other’s eyes, and rested there. All they saw most concerned themselves.
Until Belle had to bubble.
‘Remind me to tell you,’ she said, too loud, ‘about Mrs de Courcy’s hair. You are not moping?’
‘Why should I mope?’ asked Laura, whose sombre breast had begun to rustle with those peacock colours which were hers normally.
Then Belle was whisked away to dance gravely with the judge.
As Willie had wandered off, as he did on practically all occasions, particularly at balls, Laura was left with her own music, of which she dared to hum a few little, feverish phrases. The fringe of metal beads, that hung from the corsage of what had been her dull dress, glittered and chattered threateningly, and swords struck from her seemingly cavernous eyes, from beneath guarded lids.
In consequence, Tom Radclyffe was of two minds when approaching his cousin-to-be.
‘I presume you are not dancing,’ he began.
‘If you would prefer it that way,’ Laura smiled, ‘I am willing to set your feelings at rest.’
She knew that Belle, who was kind by instinct, had come to some arrangement with Tom.
‘You know it is not a question of that,’ he blurted. ‘I thought you would prefer to talk.’
‘That would be worse! Would it not?’ Laura laughed.
He might have ignored her more completely if he had not permitted himself to frown.
‘In that case,’ he said, and blushed, ‘let us, rather, dance.’
Were it not for his physical strength, one might have suspected Tom Radclyffe of being a somewhat frightened man. As it was, and taking into account his military career, such a suspicion could only have been absurd.
Laura said, as she touched his sleeve:
‘I cannot grow accustomed to this new disguise.’
‘I cannot grow accustomed to myself,’ he answered rather gloomily.
For Tom had resigned his commission, and was now plain man. That, perhaps, was most of his predicament. He was not yet reconciled to nakedness.
As they danced together, the man and woman could have been two swords holding each other.
‘Will you be kind to Belle?’ Laura asked. ‘I could never forgive you if you were not.’
Observed in a certain light, all the dancers wore bitter smiles. The heavy fringe of beads ornamenting her relentless dress was coldly metallic under his hand.
‘But Belle and I love each other.’
And men become as little children.
‘He who was not in love was never hurt,’ Laura said.
‘Let us be reasonable,’ he ordered, reasserting his masculinity. ‘Because you have been hurt, it does not follow that other people must suffer the same experience. Even though you may wish it.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ she said.
As she was looking over his shoulder it sounded humble, and her opponent, who had but recently lost his balance, was quick to take advantage.
‘You know I am an ordinary sort of fellow,’ he said; he could make cunning use of his simplicity. ‘My intelligence is of the practical kind. As for imagination, you will say that mine is not developed to the degree that you admire.’ Such was his haste, he scarcely paused for his due reward. ‘Or that I am even lacking in it. For which I am deuced glad. You see, it is a great temptation to live off one’s imagination, as some people do.’
His voice had risen too high and left him breathless, but he no longer paused; he rushed on, in fact, right over the precipice:
‘What do you expect of Voss?’
His stiff lips were grinning at his own audacity.
It was the first time that Laura Trevelyan had been faced with this phantom, and now that it had happened, the situation was made more terrible by the quarter from which it had come. The silly, invisible music was suddenly augmented by her own heartbeat. Great horns were fluctuating through the wood-and-plaster room.
‘Voss?’ she clattered discordantly.
Now the metal beads were molten under his fingers.
‘Expect?’ she responded. ‘I do not expect anything of anyone, but am grateful for the crumbs.’
Tom Radclyffe did not absorb this, but was still grinning stiffly.
The two people were dancing and dancing.
Now that he was master of all, the man offered:
‘If I could help you in any way, Laura, for Belle’s sake.’