Part 8 (1/2)
The second figure was over, and she looked across the great hall, wondering if she could not truthfully plead a headache, and go to the cloak-room. But how was she to get there? and what could she do there alone? She would have died on the spot rather than make any appeal to Mrs. Underwood. No, she must go through with it; and then as she looked again, a great, sudden sense of relief came over her, for she saw in the doorway the slouching figure of her friend of Monday. He did not look at her, and she doubted if he saw her; but it was something to have him in the room. In a moment more, however, she saw him speak to Ralph Underwood; and then the latter came up to her and asked if he might present a friend of his, and at her acquiescence, moved away and came up again with ”Miss Parke, let me introduce Mr. Smith.”
”I am very sorry to say I don't dance,” Mr. Smith began, ”but I hear that there are more ladies than men to-night; so perhaps if you have not a partner already, you won't mind doing me the favour of sitting it out with me.”
Margaret hardly knew what he meant, but she would have accepted, had he asked her to dance a _pas de deux_ with him in the middle of the hall.
She took his arm and they walked far down to a place at the very end of the line of chairs; but it did not matter; it was in the crowd.
Mr. Smith did not say much at first; he hung her opera cloak over the back of her chair carefully, so that she could draw it up if she needed it, and somehow the way he did so made her feel quite at home with him, and as if she had known him for a long time; even though she perceived, now that she had the opportunity to look more closely at him, that he was by no means so old as she had at first taken him to be. His hair was thin, and there were one or two deeply-marked lines on his face, but there was something about his figure and motions that gave an impression of youthfulness. Without knowing his age, you would have said that he looked old for it. He was rather undersized than small, having none of the trim compactness that we a.s.sociate with the latter word, and his face had the dull, thick, sodden skin that indicates unhealthy influences in childhood.
”That was a pleasant party at Mrs. Underwood's the other evening,” he began at last.
”Was it?” said Margaret, ”I never was at a party before--I mean a party like that.”
”And I have been to very few; parties are not much in my line, and when I do go I am generally satisfied with looking on; but I like that very well, sometimes.”
”Perhaps,” said Margaret ingenuously, ”if I had gone only to look on, I should have thought it pleasant too; but I did not suppose one went to a party for that.”
”You do not know many people in Boston?”
”Oh, no! I live in the country--at Royalston. I don't know anyone here but Mrs. Underwood; but I thought--mamma said, that she would probably introduce me to some of her friends; but she didn't--not to one. Don't people do so now?”
”Well, it depends on circ.u.mstances. I certainly think she might have; but then she has so much to think about, you know.”
”I suppose I was foolish to expect anything different, but I had read about parties, and I thought--I was very silly--but I thought I didn't look so very badly. I thought I should dance a little--that everybody did. Perhaps my gown doesn't look right. Mamma made it, and took a great deal of pains with it. Of course, it isn't so new or nice as the others here, but I can't see that it looks so very different; do you?”
”It looks very nice to me,” said Mr. Smith, smiling. He had a pleasant, rather melancholy smile, which gave his face the sole physical attraction it possessed, and would have given it more, if he had had better teeth. ”It looks very nice to me, and as you are my partner, I am the one you should wish most to please.”
”Oh, thank you! it was so kind in you to ask me. I can tell them when I write home that I had a partner at any rate; and you can tell me who some of the others are.”
”I am afraid not many,” said Mr. Smith, ”I go out but very little. I only went to the Underwoods because Ralph is an old friend of mine, and I came here because--” He checked himself suddenly.
”I am sorry, since he is your friend, but I must say that I do think him very disagreeable. I did not know a man could be so unpleasant. I had rather he had not danced with me at all than to do it in that terribly dreary way, as if he were doing it because he had to.”
”You mustn't be hard on poor Ralph. He's a very good fellow, really, but he's almost beside himself just now. The very day of their dance, Kitty Chester's engagement came out. She had been keeping him hanging on for more than a year, and at one time he really thought she was going to have him; and not only that, but she and Frank Thomas actually came to his party, and they are here to-night. Ralph acts as if he had lost his senses, and his mother is almost wild about him. Why, after their dance, I was up all the rest of the night with him. He can't make any fight about it, and I think it would be better if he were to go away; but he won't--he just hangs about wherever she is to be seen. We all do all we can to get him to pluck up some spirit, but it's no go--yet.”
”I am very sorry for him,” said Margaret, with all a girl's interest in a love story; and she cast an awe-struck glance toward the spot where Miss Chester was keeping half a dozen young men in conversation; ”but he need not make everyone else so uncomfortable on account of it--need he?”
”He needn't make himself so uncomfortable, you might say, for a girl who could treat him in that way; but it doesn't do to tell a man that. It doesn't seem to me that I should give up everything in the way he is doing; but then I was never in his place; of course, things are different for Ralph and me.”
”Yes, I am sure, you are different. I don't believe you would ever have behaved so ill to one girl in your own mother's house, because another hadn't treated you well.”
”I have had such a different experience of life; that was what I meant.
It made me sympathise with you when you felt a little strange; though of course, it was only a mere accident that things happened so with you.
Now, I was never brought up in society, and always feel a little out of place in it.”
”I don't know much about society either; we live very quietly at home, and when we do go out, why it is at home, you know, and that makes it different.”
”I suppose you live in a pretty place when you are at home?”
”Oh, Royalston is lovely!” said Margaret, eagerly; ”there are beautiful walks and drives all round it, and the streets have wide gra.s.s borders, and great elms arching over them, and every house has a garden, and our garden is one of the prettiest there. The place was an old one when father bought it, and the flower-beds have great thick box edges and they are so full of flowers; and there is a long walk up to the front door, between lilac bushes as big as trees, some purple and some white; and inside it is so pleasant, with rooms built on here and there, all in and out, and stairs up and down between them. Of course we are not rich at all, and things are very plain, but mamma has so much taste; and then there are all the old doors and windows, and the big fireplaces with carved mantel-pieces, and so much old panelling and queer little cupboards in the rooms--mamma says it is the kind of house that furnishes itself.”
”I see--it is a good thing to have such a home to care about. Now I was born in the ugliest village you can conceive of in the southern part of Illinois; dust all summer, and mud all winter, and in one of the ugliest houses in it; and yet, do you know, I am fond of the place; it was home.
We were very poor then--poorer than you can possibly conceive of--and I was very sickly when I was a boy, and had to stay in most of the time. I was fond of reading, though I hadn't many books, but I never saw any society--what you would call society. When I was old enough to go to college, father had got along a little, and sent me to Harvard. I liked it there, and some of the fellows were very kind to me, especially Ralph Underwood, though you might not think it. I tried to learn what I could of their ways and customs, but it was rather late for me, and I never cared to go out much; and then--there were other reasons.” A faint flush rose on his sallow face and he paused. Margaret fancied he alluded to his poverty, and felt sorry for him. She hoped he was getting on in the world, though he did not look very well fitted for it. By this time they were on a footing of easy comrades.h.i.+p, such as two people of the same s.e.x and on the same plane of thought sometimes fall into at their first meeting. It is not often that a young man and a girl of such different antecedents slide so easily into it; but as Margaret said to herself, this was a peculiar case. He had told his little story with an apparent effort to be strictly truthful and put things in their proper position at the outset. There could be no intentions on his part, or foolish consciousness or any reason for it on hers, and she asked him with undisguised interest: