This was the opinion of the company, and though in their hearts they excused Mr. Lovely, they were loud in their condemnation of his churlish behaviour.
Clare, afraid he was gone to work off his injured feelings by reckless play, soon followed him out of the ballroom, but could not find him at the tables.
Charles had, in fact, turned into the garden. Cupid had pierced him with a long sharp arrow, and he was not yet able to bear a rough hand on the wound. The night air came over him fresh and cool. In the darkness he was more than ever enthralled by the image and pale fancies of an ideal passion. Yet for all he was a poet, or perhaps just because he was a poet, his love was tinted with the hues of convention. She was like those Madonnas who appear to peasant children, Madonnas in crude croelean robes sown with tinsel stars. One feels that much of the apparition is due to preconceived opinion. So with Charles, his love made one of a list of women dating to the Queens of Babylon. There was too much bob-a-cherry about her and too much cream. She stood, too, on such a high pedestal that if she owned feet of cracked clay not a soul could have seen them.
Charles felt very angry with his bachelor friends, and when Clare joined him at the end of an alley was in no mood to be pleasant company.
"Sure, Charles," the latter remonstrated, "you're the last man to tie yourself to the skirts of a goddess."
"There's a medium between an angel and a woman of the town," said Charles sententiously.
"But the woman was once an angel to somebody, and 'foregad! I believe you do your charmer an injury to make her such a paragon of air. I swear those eyes can flash with more than saintly ecstasy."
"Z----ds! Tony, you are bent on a quarrel. I tell you the child's name shall not be a toast for my profligate friends."
"You are not better than any of them."
"But at least I can reverence purity."
"Aye, and so can Blewforth."
"D---- e!" swore Charles, "'tis a pity he don't exercise his talent more openly."
The argument would doubtless have continued, if the sound of voices approaching had not made the two young men pause involuntarily. Two people were passing down the adjoining alley, and it was impossible not to overhear some of the conversation, which was sufficiently ridiculous. A feminine voice declared that soldiers were romantick, and a voice of opposite sex replied that as an attribute of class, it was an undeniable quality, but not for that reason universally applicable to individual members of that class.
"But a scarlet coat is so dazzling," argued Treble.
"Madam," said Bass, "I cannot claim that my profession is romantick. The Law, Madam, has no time for romance except perhaps in the examination of an unwilling witness, but what my profession lacks, my name possesses. Moon, madam, I venture to affirm, is a singularly romantick name."
"It is," murmured the widow, for, of course, it was she.
"The moon is the method of illumination adopted by every poet of distinction."
"How true that is," she sighed.
"I might add that so far as dazzling goes my name is as capable of extreme refraction as the red coat of a soldier. Moreover, madam, the latter is very antipathetick to the complexion of a woman of quality."
"But the coat need not be worn, Mr. Moon. It could exist in a bottom drawer, I should feel it was there, and I could sometimes brush it even."
"Good heavens! ma'am, has not the Law an equal fascination? Do you know that my house is full of legal cases?"
"How untidy!" said the widow reprovingly.
"Arguments _Pro_ and _Contra_, trials!"
"But I dislike arguments, they put my hair out of curl and we have so many trials to bear already."
"They need never be used, but they can exist, madam, they can exist in calf on a bottom shelf, and they could be dusted sometimes," declared the Justice. Then in softer accents he began to plead:
"Think, my dear Mrs. Courteen, of Mrs. Moon. Mrs. Moon! I often murmur that short sentence over to myself."
"Do you, Mr. Moon? When?" said the widow, who seemed touched by his devotion.
"Oh! after dinner--or getting into bed, or--" but the third occasion was never revealed, for Major Tarry charged round the corner and carried off the dear questioner to adorn a gavotte.
Somehow the hedges no longer seemed so mysterious and the night not quite so large.
"Gad! what follies!" laughed Charles.
"D'ye know who the lady was?" inquired the other.
"Venus grown fat by the sound of her voice."
"That was Mrs. Courteen."
"Eh?"
"Your charmer's mother."
"Then she must have had a very delightful father."
"That's neither here nor there," said Clare. "Your angel's wings may moult, and she who now goes tiptoe for very lightness will one day--but, pshaw! if you love her, she will always skim the ground."
"Tony!" said Charles, "I've made a fool of myself."
"In the best way of folly."
It may seem odd that Charles should have been so ready to admit the mortality of his goddess, but after all as yet his love was an apparition. No miracles had been worked at the shrine, and she had a mother.
Also Charles began to smell romance, of which he pretended to an exaggerated horror. Like mother, like daughter. He made up his mind to neglect Miss Phyllida Courteen, and having done so, went back to the ballroom with the temerity of a successful anchorite. Yet when he saw her again she was young and adorable, and he was as madly in love with her as ever; all the more perhaps because he realized that one day she would fade. However, he was no longer so full of heroick rebukes for his friends. Perhaps, like the Greeks, he was beginning to understand that romantick Troy was a menace to the common sense of the world.
Charles found the young men in precisely the same position as that in which he left them.
"Oddslife," cried Blewforth, "there's Charles come back. What, man! have you been languishing under the sky? Your mistress has been dancing merrily with Ripple himself, while you were star-gazing."
"'Tis a pity that none of you have enough impudence to follow his example," retorted Charles, "for on my soul you all stand stiff and awkward as the figures on a Gothick tombstone. Gad! I've a mind to tell the ladies how nimbly you tripped it at Baverstock, Blewforth, and as for you, Tom, I'm hanged if I'd be cut out by a beggarly half-pay militia captain," continued Charles pointing to the disreputable Captain Mann who was handing Miss Morton through the gavotte.
"Well said!" Clare joined in, "we shall find it more difficult than ever to believe Blewforth's tales of conquest in the ports of civilization."
"Unless," added Charles, "like a picture by a great master he possesses an immovable reputation and attracts by beauty in repose."
"Ha--ha--ha," bellowed the Lieutenant, "you should have seen me at Minorca. These finicking hussies aren't worth the shoe leather one uses in dragging them round the room." But just as Mr. Blewforth was about to give a discourse on the beauty, grace, and agility of feminine Spain, Mr. Ripple scaled the rigid group:
"Now, gentlemen, you are not dancing. Come, come this won't do. I've let you off the Minuets and Gavottes, but I insist on the Country Dances. Let me see, Lieutenant Blewforth, I have the very Vis a Vis you are looking for--Mrs. Georgina Bean, widow of the late Captain Bean, of your own Service. She will like to hear the latest Marine Information."
Blewforth struck his colours with an almost humble salute.
"Mr. Chalkley," the Beau continued, "Miss Margery Mansel a young lady fresh from boarding-school, will certainly suit your accomplishments. Treat her kindly, sir. Mr. Golightly, I insist on your dancing with Lady Jane Vane--your father and hers were intimate friends. Mr. Harthe-Brusshe, your respected father tells me that he has a particular desire you should dance with Miss Mimsy; she's an heiress, sir, and as good as she is wealthy. Come, come, gentlemen, make no doubt that I shall find a partner for every one of you."
The young gentlemen, a little stiffer, a little more awkward, followed Mr. Ripple very mildly across the room. The rest of the Assembly fluttered quite perceptibly at their approach.
Lovely had no opportunity of asking Phyllida to dance with him as by the time he had crossed the room, she was standing opposite Mr. Moon. So he hurried up to Miss Sukey Morton who flashed her black eyes and took his arm with all the grace in the world and discussed the attraction of the British Army with much fan-play and volubility. He met Phyllida in the course of the dance and begged her hand for the Cotillon, but she shook her head gravely with a glance in the direction of old General Morton, and Charles passed on to less interesting encounters much exasperated by the impertinence of old age.
"Why aren't you a soldier, Mr. Lovely?" asked Miss Morton in a wondering voice.
"I like to pull the sheets over my head when I sleep," said Charles very solemnly, "but soldiers always have to put them on top of a pole."
"Oh! but think of war and fortresses and sieges and bivouacks."
"I dislike war, I object to fortresses. For sieges I lack the patience and I abominate bivouacks."