A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories Part 12

"Well, now, I was thinking, Mrs. Elmore, that I should like to take you."

"Take me!" she echoed tremulously. "What an idea! I'm too old to go to mask b.a.l.l.s."

"You don't look it," suggested Hoskins.

"Oh, I couldn't go," she sighed. "But it's very, very kind."

Hoskins dropped his head, and gave the low chuckle with which he confessed any little bit of humbug. "Well, you _or_ Miss Lily."

Lily had retired to the other side of the room as soon as the parley about the invitation began. Without asking or seeing, she knew what was in the note, and now she felt it right to make a feint of not knowing what Mrs. Elmore meant when she asked, "What do _you_ say, Lily?"

When the question was duly explained to her, she answered languidly, "I don't know. Do you think I'd better?"

"I might as well make a clean breast of it, first as last," said Hoskins. "I thought perhaps Mrs. Elmore might refuse, she's so stiff about some things,"--here he gave that chuckle of his,--"and so I came prepared for contingencies. It occurred to me that it mightn't be quite the thing, and so I went round to the Spanish consul and asked him how he thought it would do for me to matronize a young lady if I could get one, and he said he didn't think it would do at all." Hoskins let this adverse decision sink into the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his listeners before he added: "But he said that he was going with his wife, and that if we would come along she could matronize us both. I don't know how it would work," he concluded impartially.

They all looked at Elmore, who stood holding the princess's missive in his hand, and darkly forecasting the chances of consent and denial. At the first suggestion of the matter, a reckless hope that this ball might bring Ehrhardt above their horizon again sprang up in his heart, and became a desperate fear when the whole responsibility of action was, as usual, left with him. He stood, feeling that Hoskins had used him very ill.

"I suppose," began Mrs. Elmore very thoughtfully, "that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic."

"Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says," answered Hoskins.

"It might be very useful to you, Owen," she resumed, "in an historical way, if Lily were to go and take notes of everything; so that when you came to that period you could describe its corruptions intelligently."

Elmore laughed. "I never thought of that, my dear," he said, returning the invitation to Hoskins. "Your historical sense has been awakened late, but it promises to be very active. Lily had better go, by all means, and I shall depend upon her coming home with very full notes upon her dance-list."

They laughed at the professor's sarcasm, and Hoskins, having undertaken to see that the last claims of etiquette were satisfied by getting an invitation sent to Miss Mayhew through the Spanish consul, went off, and left the ladies to the discussion of ways and means. Mrs. Elmore said that of course it was now too late to hope to get anything done, and then set herself to devise the character that Lily would have appeared in if there had been time to get her ready, or if all the work-people had not been so busy that it was merely frantic to think of anything.

She first patriotically considered her as Columbia, with the customary drapery of stars and stripes and the cap of liberty. But while holding that she would have looked very pretty in the dress, Mrs. Elmore decided that it would have been too hackneyed; and besides, everybody would have known instantly who it was.

"Why not have had her go in the character of Mr. Hoskins's 'Westward'?"

suggested Elmore, with lazy irony.

"The very thing!" cried his wife. "Owen, you deserve great credit for thinking of that; no one else would have done it! No one will dream what it means, and it will be great fun, letting them make it out. We must keep it a dead secret from Mr. Hoskins, and let her surprise him with it when he comes for her that evening. It will be a very pretty way of returning his compliment, and it will be a sort of delicate acknowledgement of his kindness in asking her, and in so many other ways. Yes, you've hit it exactly, Owen; she shall go as 'Westward.'"

"Go?" echoed Elmore, who had with difficulty realized the rapid change of tense. "I thought you said you couldn't get her ready."

"We must manage somehow," replied Mrs. Elmore. And somehow a shoemaker for the sandals, a seamstress for the delicate flowing draperies, a hair-dresser for the adjustment of the young girl's rebellious abundance of hair beneath the star-lit fillet, were actually found,--with the help of Hoskins, as usual, though he was not suffered to know anything of the character to whose make-up he contributed. The perruquier, a personage of lordly address naturally, and of a dignity heightened by the demand in which he found himself came early in the morning, and was received by Elmore with a self-possession that ill-comported with the solemnity of the occasion. "Sit down," said Elmore easily, pus.h.i.+ng him a chair. "The ladies will be here presently."

"But I have no time to sit down, signore!" replied the artist, with an imperious bow, "and the ladies must be here instantly."

Mrs. Elmore always said that if she had not heard this conversation, and hurried in at once, the perruquier would have left them at that point.

But she contrived to appease him by the manifestation of an intelligent sympathy; she made Lily leave her breakfast untasted, and submit her beautiful head to the touch of this man, with whom it was but a head of hair and nothing more; and in an hour the work was done. The artist whisked away the cloth which covered her shoulders, and crying, "Behold!" bowed splendidly to the spectators, and without waiting for criticism or suggestion, took his napoleon and went his way. All that day the work of his skill was sacredly guarded, and the custodian of the treasure went about with her head on her shoulders, as if it had been temporarily placed in her keeping, and were something she was not at all used to taking care of. More than once Mrs. Elmore had to warn her against sinister accidents. "Remember, Lily," she said, "that if anything _did_ happen, NOTHING could be done to save you!" In spite of himself Elmore shared these anxieties, and in the depths of his wonted studies he found himself pursued and hara.s.sed by vague apprehensions, which upon a.n.a.lysis proved to be fears for Miss Lily's hair. It was a great moment when the robe came home--rather late--from the dressmaker's, and was put on over Lily's head; but from this thrilling rite Elmore was of course excluded, and only knew of it afterwards by hearsay. He did not see her till she came out just before Hoskins arrived to fetch her away, when she appeared radiantly perfect in her dress, and in the air with which she meant to carry it off. At Mrs.

Elmore's direction she paraded dazzlingly up and down the room a number of times, bending over to see how her dress hung, as she walked. Mrs.

Elmore, with her head on one side, scrutinized her in every detail, and Elmore regarded her young beauty and delight with a pride as innocent as her own. A dim regret, evaporating in a long sigh, which made the others laugh, recalled him to himself, as the bell rang and Hoskins appeared.

He was received in a preconcerted silence, and he looked from one to the other with his queer, knowing smile, and took in the whole affair without a word.

"Isn't it a pretty idea?" said Mrs. Elmore. "Studied from an antique bas-relief, or just the same as an antique,--full of the anguish and the repose of the Laoc.o.o.n."

"Mrs. Elmore," said the sculptor, "you're too many for me. I reckon the procession had better start before I make a fool of myself. Well!" This was all Hoskins could say; but it sufficed. The ladies declared afterwards that if he had added a word more, it would have spoiled it.

They had expected him to go to the ball in the character of a miner perhaps, or in that of a trapper of the great plains; but he had chosen to appear more naturally as a courtier of the time of Louis XIV. "When you go in for a disguise," he explained, "you can't make it too complete; and I consider that this limp of mine adds the last touch."

"It's no use to sit up for them," Mrs. Elmore said, when she and her husband had come in from calling good wishes and last instructions after them from the balcony, as their gondola pushed away. "We sha'n't see anything more of _them_ till morning. Now this," she added, "is something like the gayety that people at home are always fancying in Europe. Why, I can remember when I used to imagine that American tourists figured brilliantly in _salons_ and _conversazioni_, and spent their time in masking and throwing _confetti_ in carnival, and going to b.a.l.l.s and opera. I didn't know what American tourists were, then, and how dismally they moped about in hotels and galleries and churches. And I didn't know how stupid Europe was socially,--how perfectly dead and buried it was, especially for young people. It would be fun if things happened so that Lily never found it out! I don't think two offers already,--or three, if you count Rose-Black,--are very bad for _any_ girl; and now this ball, coming right on top of it, where she will see hundreds of handsome officers! Well, she'll never miss Patmos, at this rate, will she?"

"Perhaps she had better never have left Patmos," suggested Elmore gravely.

"I don't know what you mean, Owen," said his wife, as if hurt.

"I mean that it's a great pity she should give herself up to the same frivolous amus.e.m.e.nts here that she had there. The only good that Europe can do American girls who travel here is to keep them in total exile from what they call a good time,--from parties and attentions and flirtations; to force them, through the hard discipline of social deprivation, to take some interest in the things that make for civilization,--in history, in art, in humanity."

"Now, there I differ with you, Owen. I think American girls are the nicest girls in the world, just as they are. And I don't see any harm in the things you think are so awful. You've lived so long here among your ma.n.u.scripts that you've forgotten there is any such time as the present.

If you are getting so Europeanized, I think the sooner we go home the better."

"_I_ getting Europeanized!" began Elmore indignantly.

"Yes, Europeanized! And I don't want you to be so severe with Lily, Owen. The child stands in terror of you now; and if you keep on in this way, she can't draw a natural breath in the house."

There is always something flattering, at first, to a gentle and peaceable man in the notion of being terrible to any one; Elmore melted at these words, and at the fear that he might have been, in some way that he could not think of, really harsh.

"I should be very sorry to distress her," he began.

"Well, you haven't distressed her yet," his wife relented. "Only you must be careful not to. She was going to be very circ.u.mspect, Owen, on your account, for she really appreciates the interest you take in her, and I think she sees that it won't do to be at all free with strangers over here. This ball will be a great education for Lily,--a _great_ education. I'm going to commence a letter to Sue about her costume, and all that, and leave it open to finish up when Lily gets home."

When she went to bed, she did not sleep till after the time when the girl ought to have come; and when she awoke to a late breakfast, Lily had still not returned. By eleven o'clock she and Elmore had pa.s.sed the stage of accusing themselves, and then of accusing each other, for allowing Lily to go in the way they had; and had come to the question of what they had better do, and whether it was practicable to send to the Spanish consulate and ask what had become of her. They had resigned themselves to waiting for one half-hour longer, when they heard her voice at the water-gate, gayly forbidding Hoskins to come up; and running out upon the balcony, Mrs. Elmore had a glimpse of the courtier, very tawdry by daylight, re-entering his gondola, and had only time to turn about when Lily burst laughing into the room.

"Oh, don't look at me, Professor Elmore!" she cried. "I'm literally danced to rags!"

Her dress and hair were splashed with drippings from the wax candles; she was wildly decorated with favors from the German, and one of these had been used to pin up a rent which the spur of a hussar had made in her robe; her hair had escaped from its fastenings during the night, and in putting it back she had broken the star in her fillet; it was now kept in place by a bit of black-and-yellow cord which an officer had lent her. "He said he should claim it of me the first time we met," she exclaimed excitedly. "Why, Professor Elmore," she implored with a laugh, "don't look at me _so_!"

Grief and indignation were in his heart. "You look like the spectre of last night," he said with dreamy severity, and as if he saw her merely as a vision.

"Why, that's the way I _feel_!" she answered; and with a reproachful "Owen!" his wife followed her flight to her room.

XI.

Elmore went out for a long walk, from which he returned disconsolate at dinner. He was one of those people, common enough in our Puritan civilization, who would rather forego any pleasure than incur the reaction which must follow with all the keenness of remorse; and he always mechanically pitied (for the operation was not a rational one) such unhappy persons as he saw enjoying themselves. But he had not meant to add bitterness to the anguish which Lily would necessarily feel in retrospect of the night's gayety; he had not known that he was recognizing, by those unsparing words of his, the nervous misgivings in the girl's heart. He scarcely dared ask, as he sat down at table with Mrs. Elmore alone, whether Lily were asleep.

"Asleep?" she echoed, in a low tone of mystery. "I hope so."

"Celia, Celia!" he cried in despair. "What shall I do? I feel terribly at what I said to her."

"s.h.!.+ At what you said to her? Oh yes! Yes, that was cruel. But there is so much else, poor child, that I had forgotten that."

He let his plate of soup stand untasted. "Why--why," he faltered, "didn't she enjoy herself?" And a historian of Venice, whose mind should have been wholly engaged in philosophizing the republic's difficult past, hung abjectly upon the question whether a young girl had or had not had a good time at a ball.

"Yes. Oh, yes! She _enjoyed_ herself--if that's all you require,"

replied his wife. "Of course she wouldn't have stayed so late if she hadn't enjoyed herself."

"No," he said in a tone which he tried to make leading; but his wife refused to be led by indirect methods. She ate her soup, but in a manner to carry increasing bitterness to Elmore with every spoonful.