Mrs. Bowen was apparently too much shocked to say anything.
"You didn"t expect to meet me here?" asked the old man, as if otherwise it should be the most natural thing in the world. After that they could only unite in suppressing their astonishment. "It"s extremely interesting," he went on, "extremely! I"ve been here ever since the exercises began, and I have not only been very greatly amused, but greatly instructed. It seems to me the key to a great many anomalies in the history of this wonderful people."
If Mr. Waters took this philosophical tone about the Carnival, it was not possible for Colville to take any other.
"And have you been able to divine from what you have seen here," he asked gravely, "the grounds of Savonarola"s objection to the Carnival?"
"Not at all," said the old man promptly. "I have seen nothing but the most harmless gaiety throughout the evening."
Colville hung his head. He remembered reading once in a pa.s.sage from Swedenborg, that the most celestial angels had scarcely any power of perceiving evil.
"Why aren"t you young people dancing?" asked Mr. Waters, in a cheerful general way, of Mrs. Bowen"s party.
Colville was glad to break the silence. "Mrs. Bowen doesn"t approve of dancing at vegliones."
"No?--why not?" inquired the old man, with invincible simplicity.
Mrs. Bowen smiled her pretty, small smile below her mask.
"The company is apt to be rather mixed," she said quietly.
"Yes," pursued Mr. Waters; "but you could dance with one another. The company seems very well behaved."
"Oh, quite so," Mrs. Bowen a.s.sented.
"Shortly after I came," said Mr. Waters, "one of the masks asked me to dance. I was really sorry that my age and traditions forbade my doing so. I tried to explain, but I"m afraid I didn"t make myself quite clear."
"Probably it pa.s.sed for a joke with her," said Colville, in order to say something.
"Ah, very likely; but I shall always feel that my impressions of the Carnival would have been more definite if I could have danced. Now, if I were a young man like you----"
Imogens turned and looked at Colville through the eye-holes of her mask; even in that sort of isolation he thought her eyes expressed surprise.
"It never occurred to you before that I was a young man," he suggested gravely.
She did not reply.
After a little interval, "Imogene," asked Mrs. Bowen, "would you like to dance?"
Colville was astonished. "The veglione has gone to your head, Mrs.
Bowen," he tacitly made his comment. She had spoken to Imogene, but she glanced at him as if she expected him to be grateful to her for this stroke of liberality.
"What would be the use?" returned the girl.
Colville rose. "After my performance in the Lancers, I can"t expect you to believe me; but I really do know how to waltz." He had but to extend his arms, and she was hanging upon his shoulder, and they were whirling away through a long orbit of delight to the girl.
"Oh, why have you let me do you such injustice?" she murmured intensely.
"I never shall forgive myself."
"It grieved me that you shouldn"t have divined that I was really a magnificent dancer in disguise, but I bore it as best I could," said Colville, really amused at her seriousness. "Perhaps you"ll find out after a while that I"m not an old fellow either, but only a "Lost Youth,""
"Hush," she said; "I don"t like to hear you talk so."
"How?"
"About--age!" she answered. "It makes me feel----- Don"t to-night!"
Colville laughed. "It isn"t a fact that my blinking is going to change materially. You had better make the most of me as a lost youth. I"m old enough to be two of them."
She did not answer, and as they wound up and down through the other orbing couples, he remembered the veglione of seventeen years before, when he had dreamed through the waltz with the girl who jilted him; she was very docile and submissive that night; he believed afterward that if he had spoken frankly then, she would not have refused him. But he had veiled his pa.s.sion in words and phrases that, taken in themselves, had no meaning--that neither committed him nor claimed her. He could not help it; he had not the courage at any moment to risk the loss of her for ever, till it was too late, till he must lose her.
"Do you believe in pre-existence?" he demanded of Imogene.
"Oh yes!" she flashed back. "This very instant it was just as if I had been here before, long ago."
"Dancing with me?"
"With you? Yes--yes--I think so."
He had lived long enough to know that she was making herself believe what she said, and that she had not lived long enough to know this.
"Then you remember what I said to you--tried to say to you--that night?"
Through one of those psychological juggles which we all practise with ourselves at times, it amused him, it charmed him, to find her striving to realise this past.
"No; it was so long ago? What was it?" she whispered dreamily.
A turn of the waltz brought them near Mrs. Bowen; her mask seemed to wear a dumb reproach.
He began to be weary; one of the differences between youth and later life is that the latter wearies so soon of any given emotion.
"Ah, I can"t remember, either! Aren"t you getting rather tired of the waltz and me?"
"Oh no; go on!" she deeply murmured. "Try to remember."
The long, pulsating stream of the music broke and fell. The dancers crookedly dispersed in wandering lines. She took his arm; he felt her heart leap against it; those innocent, trustful throbs upbraided him. At the same time his own heart beat with a sort of fond, protecting tenderness; he felt the witchery of his power to make this young, radiant, and beautiful creature hang flattered and bewildered on his talk; he liked the compa.s.sionate worship with which his tacit confidence had inspired her, even while he was not without some satirical sense of the crude sort of heart-broken hero he must be in the fancy of a girl of her age.
"Let us go and walk in the corridor a moment," he said. But they walked there till the alluring melancholy music of the waltz began again. In a mutual caprice, they rejoined the dance.
It came into his head to ask, "Who is _he_?" and as he had got past denying himself anything, he asked it.
"He? What he?"
"He that Mrs. Bowen thought might object to your seeing the Carnival?"
"Oh!--oh yes! That was the not impossible he."
"Is that all?"
"Yes."