Annette brought them, from the locked dressing-case under her own bed where she jealously kept them. They were famous pearls and many of them.
One string was presently wound in and out through the coils of hair that crowned the girl"s delicate head; the other string coiled twice round her neck and hung loose over the black dress. They were her only ornament of any kind, but they were superb.
Connie looked at herself uneasily in the gla.s.s.
"I suppose I oughtn"t to wear them," she said doubtfully.
"Why?" said Nora, staring with all her eyes. "They"re lovely!"
"I suppose girls oughtn"t to wear such things. I--I never have worn them, since--mamma"s death."
"They belonged to her?"
"Of course. And to papa"s mother. She bought them in Rome. It was said they belonged to Marie Antoinette. Papa always believed they were looted at the sack of the Tuileries in the Revolution."
Nora sat stupefied. How strange that a girl like Connie should possess such things!--and others, nothing!
"Are they worth a great deal of money?"
"Oh, yes, thousands," said Connie, still looking at herself, in mingled vanity and discomfort. "That"s why I oughtn"t to wear them. But I shall wear them!" She straightened her tall figure imperiously. "After all they were mamma"s. I didn"t give them myself."
Popular as the Marmion ball had been, the Magdalen ball on the following night was really the event of the week. The beauty of its cloistered quadrangle, its river walks, its President"s garden, could not be rivalled elsewhere; and Magdalen men were both rich and lavish, so that the illuminations easily surpa.s.sed the more frugal efforts of other colleges. The midsummer weather still held out, and for all the young creatures, plain and pretty, in their best dancing frocks, whom their brothers and cousins and friends were entertaining, this particular ball struck the top note of the week"s romance.
"Who is that girl in black!" said his partner to Douglas Falloden, as they paused to take breath after the first round of waltzing. "And--good heavens, what pearls! Oh, they must be sham. Who is she?"
Falloden looked round, while fanning his partner. But there was no need to look. From the moment she entered the room, he had been aware of every movement of the girl in black.
"I suppose you mean Lady Constance Bledlow."
The lady beside him raised her eyebrows in excited surprise.
"Then they"re not sham! But how ridiculous that an unmarried girl should wear them! Yes they are--the Risborough pearls! I saw them once, before I married, on Lady Risborough, at a gorgeous party at the Palazzo Farnese. Well, I hope that girl"s got a trustworthy maid!"
"I dare say Lady Constance values them most because they belonged to her mother!" said Falloden drily.
The lady sitting beside him laughed, and tapped him on the arm.
"Sentimentalist! Don"t you know that girls nowadays--babes in the schoolroom--know the value of everything? Who is she staying with?"
Falloden briefly explained and tried to change the subject. But Mrs.
Glendower could not be persuaded to leave it. She was one of the reigning beauties of the moment, well acquainted with the Falloden family, and accustomed since his Eton days to lay violent hands on Douglas whenever they met. She and her husband had lately agreed to live apart, and she was now pursuing amus.e.m.e.nt wherever it was to be had. A certain Magdalen athlete was at the moment her particular friend, and she had brought down a sister to keep her in countenance. She had no intention, indeed, of making scandal, and Douglas Falloden was a convenient string to her bow.
Falloden was quite aware of the situation. But it suited him to dance with Mrs. Glendower, and to dance with her a great deal. He and Constance exchanged greetings; he went through the form of asking her to dance, knowing very well that she would refuse him; and then, for the rest of the evening, when he was not dancing with Mrs. Glendower, he was standing about, "giving himself airs," as Alice repeated to her mother, and keeping a sombre watch on Constance.
"My dear--what has happened to Connie!" said Mrs. Hooper to Alice in bewilderment. Lord Meyrick had just good-naturedly taken Aunt Ellen into supper, brought her back to the ballroom, and bowed himself off, bursting with conscious virtue, and saying to himself that Constance Bledlow must now give him at least two more dances.
Mrs. Hooper had found Alice sitting solitary, and rather drooping.
n.o.body had offered her supper; Herbert Pryce was not at the ball; her other friends had not showed her any particular attention, and her prettiness had dribbled away, like a bright colour washed out by rain.
Her mother could not bear to see her--and then to look at Connie across the room, surrounded by all those silly young men, and wearing the astonishing jewels that were the talk of the ball, and had only been revealed to Mrs. Hooper"s bewildered gaze, when the girl threw off her wraps in the cloak-room.
Alice answered her mother"s question with an irritable shake of the head, meant to indicate that Connie was nothing to her.
Whereupon Mrs. Hooper settled herself carefully in the chair which she meant to keep for the rest of the evening, smoothing the bright folds of the new dress over her knee. She was much pleased with the new dress; and, of course, it would be paid for some time. But she was almost forgetting it in the excitement of Connie"s behaviour.
"She has never danced once with Mr. Falloden!" she whispered in Alice"s ear. "It has been all Mr. Radowitz. And the talk!" She threw up her hands maliciously.
"It"s the way they dance--that makes people talk!" said Alice. "As for Mr. Falloden--perhaps she"s found out what a horrid creature he is."
The band struck up. It was a mazurka with a swinging tune. Radowitz opposite sprang to his feet, with a boyish gesture of delight.
"Come!" he said to Constance; and they took the floor. Supper had thinned the hall, and the dancers who stood in the doorways and along the walls involuntarily paused to watch the pair. Falloden and Mrs.
Glendower had just returned from supper. They too stood among the spectators.
The dance they watched was the very embodiment of youth, and youth"s delight in itself. Constance knew, besides, that Falloden was looking on, and the knowledge gave a deeper colour to her cheek, a touch of wildness to her perfect grace of limb and movement. Radowitz danced the Polish dance with a number of steps and gestures unknown to an English ballroom, as he had learnt them in his childhood from a Polish dancing-mistress; Constance, with the instinct of her foreign training, adapted herself to him, and the result was enchanting. The slim girl in black, and the handsome youth, his golden hair standing up straight, _en brosse_, round his open brow and laughing eyes, seemed, as dancers, made for each other. They were absorbed in the poetry of concerted movement, the rhythm of lilting sound.
"Mountebank!" said Falloden to Meyrick, contemptuously, as the couple pa.s.sed.
Radowitz saw his enemy, and though he could not hear what was said, was sure that it was something insulting. He drew himself up, and as he pa.s.sed on with Constance he flung a look of mingled triumph and defiance at the group of "bloods" standing together, at Falloden in particular.
Falloden had not danced once with her, had not been allowed once to touch her white hand. It was he, Radowitz, who had carried her off--whom she had chosen--whom she had honoured. The boy"s heart swelled with joy and pride; the artist in him, of another race than ours, realising and sharpening the situation, beyond the English measure.
And, afterwards, he danced with her again--many times. Moreover with him and an escort of his friends--for in general the young Pole with his musical gift and his romantic temperament was popular in Oxford--Constance made the round of the illuminated river-walks and the gleaming cloisters, moving like a G.o.ddess among the bevy of youths who hung upon her smiles. The intoxication of it banished thought and silenced regret.
But it was plain to all the world, no less than to Mrs. Hooper, that Falloden of Marmion, who had seemed to be in possession of her the night before, had been brusquely banished from her side; that Oxford"s charming newcomer had put her supposed suitor to open contumely; and that young Radowitz reigned in his stead.
Radowitz walked home in a whirl of sensations and recollections that made of the Oxford streets an "insubstantial fairy place," where only Constance lived.
He entered Marmion about four o"clock in a pearly light of dawn.
Impossible to go to bed or to sleep!
He would change his clothes, go out for a bathe, and walk up into the c.u.mnor hills.
In the quadrangle he pa.s.sed a group of men in evening dress returned like himself from the ball. They were talking loudly, and reading something which was being pa.s.sed from hand to hand. As he approached, there was a sudden dead silence. But in his abstraction and excitement he noticed nothing.
When he had vanished within the doorway of his staircase, Meyrick, who had had a great deal too much champagne, said fiercely--
"I vote we give that young beggar a lesson! I still owe him one for that business of a month ago."
"When he very nearly settled you, Jim," laughed a Wykehamist, a powerfully built fellow, who had just got his Blue for the Eleven, had been supping freely and was in a mood for any riotous deed.
"That was nothing," said Meyrick--"but this can"t be stood!"
And he pointed to the sheet that Falloden, who was standing in the centre of the group, was at the moment reading. It was the latest number of an Oxford magazine, one of those _ephemerides_ which are born, and flutter, and vanish with each Oxford generation. It contained a verbatim report of the attack on the Marmion "bloods" made by Radowitz at the dinner of the college debating society about a fortnight earlier. It was witty and damaging in the highest degree, and each man as he read it had vowed vengeance. Falloden had been especially mocked in it. Some pompous tricks of manner peculiar to Falloden in his insolent moods, had been worked into a pseudo-scientific examination of the qualities proper to a "blood," with the happiest effect. Falloden grew white as he read it.
Perhaps on the morrow it would be in Constance Bledlow"s hands. The galling memories of the evening just over were burning too in his veins.
That open humiliation in the sight of Oxford had been her answer to his prayer--his appeal. Had she not given him a right to make the appeal?
What girl could give two such rendezvous to a man, and not admit some right on his part to advise, to influence her? It was monstrous she should have turned upon him so!