Voss

11

THAT winter two ships of Her Majesty’s Navy, cruising in Southern waters, put in at Sydney for the purpose of refitting, and at once it seemed to the inhabitants that, for a very long time, their lives had been wanting in some important element. Whether commerce or romance, depended upon sex and temper, but many a citizen, walking at the water’s edge, in good nankeen or new merino, did entertain secret hopes, as the vessels rode woodenly upon the accommodating little waves. If one or two professional sceptics, possibly of Irish descent, remarked that Nautilus and Samphire were insignificant and very shabby, nobody listened who did not wish to; moreover, everybody knew that a coat of paint will work wonders, and that the gallant ships were already possessed of those noble proportions and inspiring lines, which confirm one’s faith in human courage and endeavour, as one young lady recorded in her diary.

It was not long before genteel society was on terms of intimate friendship with the officers from these vessels, assuaging its own boredom and nostalgia for Home, by discovering in the strangers the finest qualities of English manhood. Pregnant though she was, Mrs Pringle, for one, could have eaten the commanding officer of Nautilus, with whom the official bond was Hampshire.

‘I find it difficult to speak too highly of him,’ she confided in Mrs Bonner. ‘Such true tact and admirable firmness are seldom found united in one and the same man. Mr Pringle,’ she hastened to add, ‘has quite taken to him.’

‘I am happy to think you have been so fortunate in your acquaintance,’ murmured Mrs Bonner, who had not yet succeeded in meeting any of the visiting officers.

‘Have you received them in your own house?’ she inquired somewhat languidly of Mrs Pringle.

‘On Friday evening, several of them,’ the latter replied. ‘All jolly, yet respectful young men. We prepared a punch cup, and several cold dishes. It was all so quickly arranged, my dear, there was little opportunity to send over for your girls.’

‘On Friday evening,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘our girls were otherwise engaged. They had been promised a fortnight to the Ebsworths, although, at the last moment, Laura refused to go.’

Then it was Mrs Pringle’s turn to murmur.

‘And how is the baby?’

Mrs Bonner no longer cared for Mrs Pringle, but had decided it would be politic to keep her as a friend.

‘Oh yes, thank you, the baby is well,’ she answered, high and bright, descending with some skill to a darker key: ‘I wish I could say the same of Laura, who devotes herself to the child so unselfishly, her own health must suffer in the end.’

Mrs Pringle tilted her head in a certain polite way. Although Dear Laura’s Baby had become an institution in their own immediate circle, she was aware that in other quarters unwholesome references frequently were made to Miss Trevelyan’s Child.

So that it was pure magnanimity on the part of Mrs Pringle, when, at a later date, she dispatched Una with Miss Abbey to the Bonners, to suggest a picnic party.

‘At short notice,’ Una had composed, ‘but Mamma did think you might possibly be free.’

They were all seated in the drawing-room — that is to say: Mrs Bonner, determined to disguise her gratitude; Belle, who had barely had time to put up her hair after washing it; Una Pringle, in new gloves; Miss Abbey, a governess in her late thirties; Dr Badgery, surgeon of Nautilus; and a midshipman so shy that nobody had caught his name. Arriving at the Pringles’ on shore leave, the two latter, although not unwilling, had at once been conscripted to escort the ladies on their morning call.

‘On Thursday afternoon, at Waverley,’ Una Pringle continued, to fulfil her duty.

‘Now, you are sure it was Thursday, dear? I cannot remember precisely what Mamma said. I have an idea it could have been Wednesday,’ interrupted Miss Abbey, who would catch thus at a conversation, as it flowed by, and hope to be carried along.

Una Pringle ignored the governess of her younger sisters.

‘Mamma suggests we all gather at our house; then we shall give one another protection on the way.’

‘Oh dear, do you think we shall need it?’ laughed Miss Abbey, and looked at the gentlemen.

She would have liked to make a clever remark, but could not think of one.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘one no longer meets the ruffians one is promised.’

It was very still in the drawing-room.

Then Mrs Bonner frowned, and sighed, and let it be understood she was engaged in a kind of higher mathematics:

‘Let me see. Thursday?’

She had grown contemplative of the whole of time.

‘Now, had it been Wednesday, that is always inconvenient. And Friday, that would be out of the question. Miss Lassiter is to fit Belle for her dress. The wedding-dress. My daughter, Mr Badgery, is to be married, you may not have heard. To Lieutenant Radclyffe.’

‘Ha!’ exclaimed the surgeon of Nautilus, and was horrified to hear himself smack his lips.

This unexpected noise was distinguished quite clearly by all the ladies present, the kinder of whom hastened in their minds to blame the madeira, of which Mrs Bonner had offered a glass, but lately imported, too. It could have been the madeira, or the biscuit; a dry biscuit does encumber the tongue. Mrs Bonner herself examined the surgeon afresh, and saw a somewhat thick-set individual, of healthy complexion, and crisp hair. If not quite a gentleman, at least his eye was honest.

‘Lieutenant Radclyffe,’ the tactful hostess continued to explain, ‘who will resign his commission shortly before the ceremony. The young couple propose to take up residence in the Hunter Valley.’

‘Oh, Mamma, you are becoming tedious!’

Belle blushed, and did look very pretty.

‘The Hunter Valley?’ said the surgeon. ‘I must confess to ignorance of almost everything concerning New South Wales, but hope to remedy that, with time and study. The sea-shells, I have noticed, appear to be particularly fine.’

It is a dismal fact that, to know one is not as dull as one can sound, does not help in the least.

‘Dr Badgery reads books,’ Una Pringle contributed.

‘Ah,’ Mrs Bonner accepted, ‘my niece, Laura, who will be down presently, is the one for reading books. She is quite highly educated, Mr Badgery, although I do say it myself. Most men, of course, are prejudiced against education in a woman; to some it even appears unseemly, but then, on the whole, men are timid things. Please do not misunderstand me, Mr Badgery. Naturally, there are exceptions. Although, in my opinion, timidity in certain avenues does enhance manliness. Just as intellect in a woman can spice her charm and sweetness. As in our Laura.’

Oh, Mamma, Belle barely breathed, who had not suspected her mother of such enlightenment.

‘Laura is so sweet,’ said Una Pringle, as she had been taught, and examined her new kid glove, which had rather a distinctive smell. ‘How is the baby? Laura has a baby,’ she explained kindly, for the sake of Dr Badgery.

‘A baby?’

The surgeon suspected that his surprise sounded less polite than indelicate and, for the second time, was made most unhappy.

It was fortunate that the midshipman had broken his biscuit. As he gathered up the fragments from the carpet, everybody was able to stare at his big, cold-looking, boy’s hands.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bonner, who was most fascinated by the midshipman’s god-sent crumbs. ‘A baby. It is a touching story. Laura herself will tell you.’

Thus inspired, she dared that Una Pringle to say another word, and Una did not.

It was then that Dr Badgery noticed the dark young woman entering the room, and realized that all else, though elegant in its way, had been the preliminary roll of kettle drums. All were soon looking at her, because by now she had closed the door, and was forced to face them. Equally, the strangers were forced to face Miss Trevelyan, so that the walls contained a certain feeling of suppressed thunder.

‘Please sit down,’ Laura did not quite command, but addressed them as a woman who had attained to a position of authority.

She had also distributed kind smiles, but as there was no further debt owing to Dr Badgery, she proceeded to talk in a low, agreeable voice to Una Pringle about the latter’s brothers and sisters.

‘And Grace?’ Laura asked.

‘Grace has had the croup. We were terrified,’ Una said.

‘But is better?’

‘But is better.’

Dr Badgery watched Miss Trevelyan’s hand, which was most pleasing, as it hung from the arm of the chair. Or withdrew itself to her lap. Or rested upon the line of her jaw. On one finger she was wearing a little agate ring, that she would twist suddenly. Her hands were never still for long, yet preserved their air of authority and grace, if not of actual beauty, for they appeared to have become reddened by some labour.

‘We are forgetting,’ said Laura, with an effort, ‘that Dr Badgery is not entertained. He will go away with the poorest opinion of the ladies at Sydney.’

This was an affectation, of course, and in which he refused to believe.

Immediately on closing her dark lips, she saw that the stranger might have read her, so she put her handkerchief to her mouth, but without being able to hide more than the lower part of her face.

Dr Badgery was, in fact, a man of some native sensibility. He would have liked to convey his appreciation of what he had observed, but had been rendered temporarily wooden by conventions and too many ladies.

At this point the aunt, beaming for her niece’s self-possession and looks, could not resist announcing:

‘Mr Badgery is anxious to study the geography of New South Wales, Laura. He, too, is of an intellectual turn of mind.’

Such compliments are apt to become accusations.

‘I do not make claims on the strength of one or two hobbies.’ The surgeon began to bristle.

Then he gave up. It would have been exhilarating if the young woman had united with him in their common defence, but he realized that for some reason she did not wish him to continue. In fact, she was beseeching him not to involve her in any way.

His immediate respect for her wishes should have increased that understanding which obviously did exist between them, but in the case of Laura, she was embarrassed. She found herself staring at his rather coarse, though kind hand spread upon his thick, uneasy thigh. As for the surgeon, he would remember certain of her attitudes, to his own torment.

‘We have forgotten the picnic, Mrs Bonner.’ Una Pringle returned in disgust to the prime reason for their visit.

This man would be good enough for Laura, she decided with the brutality of which refinement is capable.

‘Ah, the picnic,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘Why, Una, you may tell your mother it will be delightful. For all of us.’

It did seem as though she had reserved her decision, in order to enjoy the subtle pleasure of making it at last.

Laura did not comment, although everybody expected it.

There was little more to discuss, beyond the final arrangements for meeting. Then, as silences were growing, Una Pringle rose, with the two men, to whose respectability her company was tribute. However, she ignored them thoroughly, on principle, and because her thoughts were more profitably engaged.

‘Till Thursday, then.’

To this extent Laura expressed her approval of what had been arranged.

‘Till Thursday,’ repeated Una, laying her check against that of her friend.

Miss Abbey had to admire Laura’s dress. She had to touch it.

‘What a sweet dress,’ she had to say. ‘And the dearest little sprigs. Could they be heliotrope?’

The other women bore with the governess. Poor thing, she was the fourth daughter of a Bristol clergyman.

Laura made some excuse not to accompany their guests to the steps, leaving them to Belle, whose amiability seldom failed her, and to Aunt Emmy, who would have loved to receive the whole world.

Everyone seemed gratified by the general situation, although the midshipman was, in addition, relieved.

Arrived outside, this relief escaped from him in his funny, clumsy, recently acquired man’s voice, in remarks addressed exclusively to his shipmate. There was also the voice of the surgeon as he followed at the heels of the two ladies, along the wing, and round the corner of the house. Laura listened to them all talking. But it was the men, it was Dr Badgery who predominated. His rather rough, burry voice seemed unable to tear itself out of the thorny arms of the rosebushes which lined the path.

So that Laura Trevelyan was persuaded, guiltily, to lay aside her belt of nails, and to recline upon the most comfortable upholstery the room had to offer.

In passing to the front gate, the surgeon touched the creamy, if not the creamiest rose. The heat of the sun had saturated his thick clothes, and he was wondering a good deal.

‘Did you care for that Mr Badgery?’ Aunt Emmy asked at a later occasion — it was, in fact, the Wednesday, the Pringles’ picnic almost upon them.

‘One could not dislike him,’ Laura replied.

‘By some standards, not quite a gentleman.’ Aunt Emmy sighed. Then, seeming to remember, she added: ‘We must not decide too hastily, however, that those standards are desirable. Men, you will learn, I think, because you are a practical girl, Laura dear, men are what women make them.’

Mrs Bonner, who was at that moment counting the silver, was very pleased with her estimation.

‘Then, are we to assume that poor Dr Badgery’s wife did not quite finish him off?’ Laura asked, who loved to tease her aunt at moments when she most loved her.

‘Such an assumption would be most foolish,’ Aunt Emmy returned.

She was very angry with the forks.

‘A young girl, provided she is a lady, may safely assume that a gentleman is a bachelor, until such times as those who are in a position to discover the truth inform her to the contrary.’

Then Mrs Bonner, who had made it quite clear, was again pleased.

But, on the Thursday, she was dashed.

For Belle had come downstairs alone, in a bonnet that made her dreamier.

‘Where is Laura?’ asked the aunt and mother, kissing from habit, but distractedly.

‘I do not know,’ answered Belle.

She would not tell. She was drifting upon her own cloud. She was separate now.

‘Laura!’ Mrs Bonner called. ‘How provoking! Laura, wecannotexpectthehorsestostandindefinitelyyouknowwhatitleadsto!’

‘Has Tom come?’ inquired Belle, who was fitting the old gloves she wore for picnics. Her cheeks were lovely.

‘As if she has not experienced the incivility of servants who are kept waiting! It is the worst of all risks. Laura!’ persisted Mrs Bonner.

‘Yes, Aunt,’ said the niece, appearing with miraculous meekness. ‘I shall not keep anyone waiting a second longer.’

‘But you are not ready.’

‘Because I am not going.’

‘You will deprive us of such pleasure?’ asked Tom Radclyffe, who had just arrived, and who was looking not at this thorny cousin, but at his own precious property.

‘When we are all expected!’ protested Mrs Bonner.

The latter would have gone with her leg sawn off rather than diverge by one inch from the intended course.

‘My baby is suffering from the wind, and I must stay with her for the very good reason that she needs me,’ Laura answered gravely.

‘Have you really also learnt to deflate babies?’ Tom Radclyffe asked.

But Mrs Bonner’s mind had conceived a tragedy grander than the detail of the baby’s wind at first suggested.

‘Your baby,’ she gulped. ‘Give me your arm, Tom, please. I will need it.’

Then she burst into tears, and they led her to the carriage.

Laura was now free. She wiped upon her apron those hands which the observant Dr Badgery had seen to be too red, and with which she had just been washing various small articles of the baby’s clothing, for she had decided in the beginning that this was a duty she must take upon herself. Now she returned upstairs.

The healthy baby had been no more than passingly fretful that afternoon. The young woman stood looking at her. No longer could anybody have doubted their relationship. They were looking at each other in the depths of their collusion, fingering each other’s skin and face. They were covered with the faintest silvery webs of smiles, when the blood began to beat, the shadow swept across the mother’s face, and suddenly she took up her child, and was walking up and down.

The young woman was going up and down, but, in the familiar room, amongst the stolid furniture, the two beings had been overtaken by a storm of far darker colours than human passions. As they were rocked together, tossed, and buffeted, helplessness and desperation turned the woman’s skin an ugly brown. What could she do? The baby, on beginning to sense that she had been sucked into some whirlpool of supernatural dangers, could at least let out a howl for her mother to save her, and was probably convinced she would be saved. The mother, however, was unable to enjoy the comfort of any such belief and, for the moment, must be presumed lost.

‘My darling, my darling,’ Laura Trevelyan whispered, kissing. ‘I am so afraid.’

Kisses did drug the child with an illusion of safety, and she calmed down, and eventually slept. The mother saw this mercy descend as she watched. Then it seemed to the young woman that she might pray to God for love and protection of greater adequacy, but she hesitated on realizing her own incapacity to save her trusting child. Only later in the afternoon did she become aware of the extent of her blasphemy, and was made quite hollow by it.

When finally she could bring herself to pray, she did not kneel, but crouched diffidently upon the edge of an upright chair. She formed the words very slowly and distinctly, hoping that, thus, they would transcend her mind. If she dared hope. But she did pray. Not for herself, she had abandoned herself, nor for her baby, who must, surely, be exempt at the last reckoning. She prayed for that being for whom the ark of her love was built. She prayed over and over, for JOHANN ULRICH VOSS, until, through the ordinary bread of words, she did receive divine sustenance.

That evening Laura Trevelyan sat beneath smooth hair and listened to her aunt recount to her uncle details of the Pringles’ picnic, although none was deceived as to the true direction of the narrative.

‘The air was most bracing,’ Mrs Bonner declared, still snuffing it recklessly. ‘Everyone was agreeable, and some even well-informed, for a much-travelled man cannot fail to acquire instructive scraps of information. Did I perhaps forget to mention that several of the officers from Nautilus and Samphire were present? It is not surprising if I did. I am scattered from here to Waverley. Such a jolting, and worst of all down a fiendish lane where we were driven at last to the home of Judge de Courcy — whose wife is a lady of the very best connexions, it appears, in Leicestershire — and were shown their glasshouses and gardens. In the course of this little excursion, I received a most interesting lecture on topiary from Mr Badgery — you will have heard tell, Mr Bonner, the surgeon of Nautilus, who accompanied Una Pringle on the occasion of her last visit.’

Mr Bonner could sit whole evenings without answering his wife, but they understood each other.

‘Now, it appears, Mr Badgery is known to Mrs de Courcy, and that he is quite well connected, through his mother, with whom he lives when at home, for in spite of his many excellent qualities, he has remained a bachelor.’

Laura, too, in spite of her resolutions, could have strolled along the paths between the solid, masculine, clipped hedges, and touched them with her hand. All that is solid is at times nostalgic and desirable.

Mrs Bonner had paused, and was knotting a thread that her work demanded.

‘I am sorry, Laura, that I have not inquired after Mercy,’ she said. ‘Earlier in the afternoon, I myself was so very much upset.’

‘I am sorry, Aunt, if we have caused you unhappiness of any kind,’ Laura replied. ‘As it happened, it was only a slight indisposition. But I cannot run the risk of neglecting what I have sworn to do.’

Mrs Bonner could not answer. At this point, however, her husband was beginning to stir. A stranger might have failed to perceive the subtle sympathy that did exist between the couple, for coupled they were, even in irritation, by many tough, tangled, indestructible, instinctive links.

So, when the tea was brought in, Mr Bonner began. He stood upon the hearth, which was the centre of their house, and where a small fire of logs had been lit, because the nights remained chilly. He said:

‘Now, Laura, you are a reasonable girl, and we must come to a decision about this child.’

Laura did not answer. She was cold, and had twisted her fingers together as she watched the flames writhing in the oblivious grate.

‘You must realize that your own position is intolerable, however laudable your intentions, in keeping someone else’s child.’

‘It is unnatural that you should become so stubbornly attached. A young girl.’ Mrs Bonner sighed.

‘If I were a married woman,’ Laura Trevelyan answered, ‘I do not think it would be so very different.’

The pitiful fire was leaping out in sharp, thin, desperate tongues.

Mrs Bonner clucked.

‘But a baby without a name,’ she said. ‘I am surprised, to say the least, that you should not find us worthy of consideration.’

‘I am aware of my debt, and shall attempt to repay you,’ Laura replied, ‘but please, please, in any other way. As Mercy is guilty of being without a name, and this offends you, the least I can do is give her my own. I should have thought of that. Of course.’

‘But consider the future, how such a step would damage your prospects,’ said the uncle.

‘My prospects,’ cried the niece, ‘are in the hands of God.’

She was holding her head. The wood-smoke was unbearable, with its poignance of distances.

Then she dragged herself forward a little in her chair, and said:

‘I will suffer anything you care to inflict on me, of course. I, too, can endure.’

Mrs Bonner was looking round, in little, darting glances, at her normal room.

‘Oh, she is hysterical,’ she said, tugging at the innocent thread that joined her needle to the linen. And then: ‘We only wish to help you, Laura dear. We love you.’

They did. Indeed, it was that which made it most terrible.

Fortunately, just then, Belle ran across the terrace and into the room. She had accompanied the Pringles home for supper, and had returned in the brougham of the two Miss Unwins who also lived at Potts Point.

‘Am I interrupting an important conference?’ Belle inquired, rather casually.

Mr Bonner frowned.

‘Young ladies about to be married walk into a room,’ said her mother. ‘They do not run.’

But she added, from force of habit, and because she did always hope to be informed of something dreadful:

‘What is the news?’

‘The news,’ said Belle, ‘is that Una has decided at last to take Woburn McAllister.’

‘To take,’ protested the disgusted father, who maintained a high standard of ethics in the bosom of his family.

‘Money to money. Well, that is the way,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘But poor man, he is certainly in the pastoral business. To add such a silly, frizzy sheep to all those he already has.’

Her husband pointed out that Una Pringle was their friend.

‘She is our friend,’ said Mrs Bonner, biting her thread. ‘I will not deny that. And it is by being our friend that I have got to know her.’

‘I think I shall go to bed,’ Belle announced, nibbling without appetite at a little biscuit that she had picked up from the silver tray. ‘I am so tired.’

Her eyelids were heavy. She was a golden animal that would fall asleep immediately on curling up.

After that, everybody went. So the victim was saved up for the future.

During the weeks that followed nothing more was said, and Laura could have been happy if she had not suspected silence. She also dreamed dreams, which she would try to remember, but could not, only that she had been engaged in some activity of frenzied importance far outside her reason and her cold limbs.

If the nights were formidable, the days were bland, in which everyone was occupied with the preparations for Belle’s wedding.

‘I shall be married in white,’ Belle had said. ‘But I insist on muslin. Who ever heard of a satin bride go trapesing into the bush.’

‘Muslin is practical, of course,’ said Mrs Bonner, who, secretly, would have liked to shine.

And the father was disappointed, who could have afforded satin for his daughter.

This was the most important event in the merchant’s house since the departure of the expedition. Miss Lassiter came. There were yards of everything, and bridesmaids who giggled a good deal, and Chattie Wilson was pricked by a pin. All these women, whether the rusty, humble ones who knelt amongst the snippets, or the dedicated virgins who stood about in absorbed, gauzy groups, all were helping to create the bride, to breathe the myth of Belle Bonner, so that few people who saw her would fail to bore posterity. As the women worked, the origins of ritual were forgotten. As they built the tiers of sacred white, they debated and perspired. They unwound cards of lace, as if it had been string. They heaped the precious on the precious, until Belle, who laughed, and submitted, and did not tire — she was such a healthy girl — became a pure, white, heavenly symbol, trembling to discover its own significance.

So the spirit of the explorer, the scarecrow that had dominated the house beyond all measure with his presence, and even haunted it after he had gone, was ruthlessly exorcized by the glistening bride. Who would think of him now, except perhaps Rose Portion, out of her simplicity, if she had been alive, the merchant, by resentful spasms, since his money was undoubtedly lost, and Laura Trevelyan. The bride had certainly forgotten that knotty man, but loved her cousin, and was wrung accordingly, as she looked down out of the mists of lace and constellations of little pearls that were gathering round her hair.

The throats of the two girls were contracting. Two cats rolled together in one ball in the sun could not have led a more intimate life, yet there was very little they had shared, with the consequence that Belle, now that they were being drawn apart, began to ransack her mind for some little favour, preferably of a secret cast, to offer her cousin as evidence of her true affection.

‘Lolly,’ she said, at last, ‘we have not thought what I shall carry on the day. Everything will be in flower, yet nothing seems suitable. To me. You are the one who must decide.’

Laura did not hesitate.

‘I would choose pear blossom.’

‘But the sticks!’ protested the bride. ‘They will only be unmanageable, and look ugly.’

It was like Laura, herself at times stiff and awkward, to suggest anything so grotesque.

‘You are not in earnest?’ Belle asked.

‘Yes,’ said Laura.

And she looked at her cousin, who was the more poignant in that her pure poetry could transcend her rather dull doubts. The blossom was already breaking from her fingertips, and from the branches of her arms.

Then Belle knew that she must do as Laura saw it.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, murmuringly. ‘If the wind will not dry it up before the day.’

All this, trivial in itself, was spoken over the busy heads of the women who were clustered round the bride. The two girls alone read the significance of what their hearts received, and locked it up, immediately.

At this period Mrs Bonner had every reason to feel satisfied, but her nature demanded that her whole house be in order. She must make her last attempt. With this end in view, she approached her niece one day as the latter was standing with the child in her arms, and said:

‘You must come in, my dear, and meet the Asbolds.’

‘The Asbolds? Who are the Asbolds?’

‘They are good people who have a little property at Penrith,’ Aunt Emmy replied.

But Laura began protecting herself with her own shoulders.

‘I am not decent,’ she complained. ‘And I do not want to inflict Mercy on the kitchen.’

‘Then, indecent as you are,’ laughed the aunt, who was in a good humour. ‘You may bring Mercy, too. They arc quite simple people.’

‘These Asbolds,’ asked the niece, as she was swept through the house, ‘are they acquaintances of long standing?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Mrs Bonner, ‘although I have known them, well, some little while.’

Which was true. All this time Laura’s wise child was looking at the older woman.

Then they went into the little, rarely used parlour, where the visitors were waiting, as befitted quite simple people from Penrith.

Mrs Asbold, who had risen and made some deferential gesture, was a large, comfortable body, with pink cheeks that the sun had as yet failed to spoil. On the other hand, her husband, who had led a life of exposure to all weathers in both countries, was already well cured; he was of seasoned red leather, and beginning to shrivel up. So clearly was honesty writ upon their faces, one felt it would have been dishonest to submit the couple to proof by questioning.

However, when everyone was seated, and shyness dissolved, a pleasant talk was begun, in the course of which Mrs Asbold had to exclaim:

‘And this is the little girl. How lovely and sturdy she is.’

The baby, who had but lately gone into frocks, was indeed a model child, both in her rosy flesh, and, it appeared, in her unflinching nature.

‘Would you come to me, dear?’ asked Mrs Asbold, her grey-gloved hands hesitating upon her comfortable knees.

Mercy did not seem averse, and was soon planted in the visitor’s lap.

‘Are you as Christian as your name, eh?’ asked the husband, feeling the substance of the child’s cheek with his honest fingers, and grinning amiably, up to the gaps in his back teeth. ‘We could do with such a little girl. Eh?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the woman, as if she had been hungry all these years.

Like Mr Asbold, Laura was also smiling, but stupidly. She felt ill.

‘She would be killed with kindness, I feel sure,’ said Mrs Bonner, fidgeting with the ribbons of her cap.

The aunt remembered a play she had once seen in which all the actors were arranged in a semicircle, in anticipation of a scene the dramatist had most cunningly prepared, and just as he had controlled his situation, Mrs Bonner now hoped to manage hers, forgetting that she was not a dramatist, but herself an actor in the great play.

‘The Asbolds,’ said Aunt Emmy, looking at Laura, but lowering her eyelids and fluttering them as if there had been a glare, ‘the Asbolds,’ she repeated, ‘have the finest herd of dairy cows at Penrith. And the prettiest house. Such pigs, too. But it is the house that would take your eye, Laura, so I am led to understand, and in the spring, with the fruit blossom. Is not the fruit blossom, Mr Asbold, looking very fine?’

‘They are nice trees,’ the man said.

‘In such healthy, loving surroundings, a little girl could not help but grow up happy,’ suggested Mrs Bonner.

Mrs Asbold wetted her lips.

‘You have no children of your own?’ asked Laura, whose limbs had turned against her.

‘Oh, no,’ said the woman, shortly.

She was looking down. She was busy with the child’s short skirt, touching, and arranging, but guiltily.

‘It must be a great sadness for you,’ said Laura Trevelyan.

Her compassion reached the barren woman, who now looked up, and returned it.

Mrs Bonner had the impression that something was happening which she did not understand. So she said, almost archly:

‘Would you not be prepared to give Mercy to Mrs Asbold, Laura?’ Then, with the sobriety that the situation demanded: ‘I am sure the poor child’s unfortunate mother would be only too grateful to see her little one so splendidly placed.’

Laura could not answer. This is the point, she felt, at which it will be decided, one way or the other, but by some superior power. Her own mind was not equal to it.

‘Will you take it, Liz?’ Mr Asbold asked, doubtfully.

His wife, who was ruffling up the child’s hair as she pondered, seemed to be preparing herself to commit an act of extreme brutality.

The child did not flinch.

‘Yes,’ said the woman, peering into the stolid eyes. ‘She knows I would not hurt her. I would not hurt anyone.’

‘But will you take her?’ asked the man, who was anxious to be gone to things he knew.

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘She would not be ours.’

Her mouth, in her amiable, country face, had become unexpectedly ugly, for she had committed the brutal act, only it was against herself.

‘Oh, no, no,’ she said. ‘I will not take her.’

Getting up, she put the child quickly but considerately in the young lady’s lap.

‘She would have too many mothers.’

Everybody had forgotten Mrs Bonner, who was no longer of importance in that scene, except to show the Asbolds out. This she did, and immediately went upstairs.

Because she, too, was powerless, Laura Trevelyan continued to sit where left, and at first scarcely noticed the persistent Mercy. Important though it was that the child should remain, her considerable victory was by no means final. No victory is final, the unhappy Laura saw, and in her vision of further deserts was touching his face with a renewed tenderness, where the skin ended and the rather coarse beard began, until the little girl became frightened, first of her mother’s eyes, then of her devouring passion, and begged to be released.

Because of her own duplicity, Mrs Bonner also was a little frightened of her niece, although they addressed each other in pleasant voices, when they were not actually avoiding, and it was easy to avoid during the days that preceded the wedding, there was such a pressure of events.

Two days before the ceremony, the Pringles gave a ball in honour of Belle Bonner, whom everybody liked. It had been decided to take the ballroom at Mr Bright’s Dancing Academy in Elizabeth Street, on account of its greater convenience for those among the guests who would have to be brought by boat from the North Shore. From the hiring of such an elegant establishment, and references to other details let slip by the organizers, it became obvious that the Pringles were preparing to spend a considerable sum of money, with the result that their ball was soon all the talk, both amongst those who were invited, and even more amongst those who were not. Of the latter, some voiced the opinion that it was indelicate on the part of the hostess to show herself in her condition, until those who took her part pointed out that, in obedience to such a principle, the unfortunate lady must remain almost permanently hidden.

On the morning of the event, Mrs Pringle, by now a martyr to her heaviness, proceeded none the less to the hall, accompanied by her daughters Una and Florence, where they arranged quantities of cinerarias, or saw to it, rather, that the pots were massed artistically by two strong gardeners, while they themselves held their heads to one side, the better to judge of effects, or came forward and poked asparagus fern into every visible gap. Mr Bright, the dancing instructor, who was experienced in conducting Assemblies and such like, offered many practical suggestions, and was invaluable in ordering their execution. It was he, for instance, who engaged the orchestra, in consultation with Mr Topp. It was he who was acquainted with a lady who would save Mrs Pringle the tiresomeness of providing a supper for so many guests, although how intimately Mr Bright was connected with the catering lady, and how well he did by the arrangement, never became known. For Mrs Pringle he remained quite omniscient and a tower of strength, while his two young nephews showed commendable energy in polishing the floor, running at the shavings of candle-fat until the boards were burning under their boots, and the younger boy sustained a nasty fall.

As evening approached, the gas was lit, and activity flared up in the retiring- and refreshment-rooms, where respectable women in black were setting out such emergency aids to the comfort of ladies as eau de Cologne, lozenges, safety pins, and needles and thread, and for the entertainment of both sexes every variety of meat that the Colony could provide, in profusion without vulgarity, as well as vegetables cut into cunning shapes, and trifles and jellies shuddering under their drifts of cream.

Only the room of rooms, the ballroom, remained empty, in a state of mystical entrancement, under the blue, hissing gas, as the invisible consort in the gallery began to pick over the first, fragile notes of music. Such was the strain of stillness and expectation, it would not have been surprising if the walls had flown apart from the pressure, shattering the magic mirrors, of golden mists and blue, gaseous depths, and scattering the distinct jewels from the leaves of the cinerarias.

The Pringles’ guests, however, did begin to trickle in, then to flow, and finally to pour. Everyone was there who should, as well as some who, frankly, should not have been. Several drunken individuals, for instance, got in out of the street. Their pale, tuberous faces lolled for an instant upon the banks of purple flowers, terrifying in some cases, infuriating in others, those who had succeeded in thrusting ugliness out of their own lives. Then, order was restored. Attendants put an end to the disgraceful episode by running the intruders into the night from which they had come, and they were soon forgot in the surge of military, the gallant demeanour of ships’ officers, the haze of young girls that drifted along the edges of the hall or collected in cool pockets at the corners.

The music played. The company wove the first, deliberate figures of the dance.

Mrs Pringle, who had been receiving her guests in a disguise of greenery, came forward especially far to embrace her dearest friends, the Bonners. There was a clash of onyx and cornelian.

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Bonner, when she had extricated herself sufficiently from the toils of jewellery, ‘I must congratulate you on what appears to be a triumph of taste and festivity.’

For once the scale of her enterprise prevented Mrs Pringle from drawing attention to her friend’s unpunctuality.

‘I must remember on some more appropriate occasion to tell you what has detained us,’ Mrs Bonner whispered, and hinted, and smiled. Then, raising her voice to a rather jolly pitch: ‘But delay will not detract from our enjoyment; first glances assure me of that.’

No one had ever thought to remind her at a later date of her offer to explain, so perhaps ladies do respect one another’s stratagems. For Mrs Bonner, in the belief that fresh flowers will catch the eye when others are beginning to wilt, always arrived late at a ball.

‘Belle is radiant,’ said Mrs Pringle, accepting the part she was to play.

‘Belle is looking well,’ said her mother, as if she had but noticed.

‘Will you not agree that she is the loveliest girl in Sydney?’ asked Mrs Pringle, who could be generous.

‘Poor Sydney!’ protested Belle.

At times she would grimace like some ugly boy, and even this was acceptable. But, on the present occasion, she returned very quickly to her high, white cloud.

‘And Laura,’ added Mrs Pringle, kindly.

For Laura Trevelyan was also there.

Belle Bonner at once sailed out with Mr Pringle, an ugly man, who smelled of tobacco, but respected for his influence and money. Belle was wearing satin for tonight, smoother than the music, whiter than the silences, for most men, and even conspicuously pretty girls stopped talking as she floated near. In their absorption, those who knew her intimately would not have obtruded the reality of their relationship. They only thought to support themselves on their own, prosaic legs, and watch Belle as she danced past.

There was also Laura Trevelyan.

Laura was wearing a dress that nobody could remember when asked to do so afterwards. Only after much consideration, and with a feeling that what they were saying had been dragged up from their depths and did not properly fit their mouths, some of them replied that the dress was probably the colour of ashes, or the bark of some native tree. Of course, the dress did not match either of these descriptions. It was only that its wearer, by the gravity of her face and set of her rather proud head, did make a sombre impression. Although she replied with agreeable directness and simplicity to all those who dared address her, few did, on account of some indefinite obscurity that they sensed, but could not penetrate, or worse still, because they began to suspect the presence of darkness in their own souls. So they were for ever smoothing their skins, and ruffling up their pink or blue gauze in mirrors, before allowing themselves to be thrown together again by that mad wind of concealed music. They, the larkspurs of life, were only appreciable in masses.

At one point Laura was approached by Chattie Wilson, a plump, and rather officious girl, who was always giving good advice, who knew everything, who went everywhere, always the bridesmaid, but who had been overlooked, it seemed, because she was so obviously there.

Now Chattie asked:

‘Are you not enjoying yourself, Laura?’

‘Not particularly,’ answered Laura. ‘To be perfectly candid.’

Chattie giggled. To confess to the sin of not enjoying was something she would never have dared, so she pretended that she did not believe.

‘Are you not well, perhaps? There is quite a respectable sofa in the retiring-room. Quite clean. You could put your feet up for a little. I will come and sit with you, if you like.’

Chattie was most anxious to be of service to her friend, for, in spite of her relentless pursuit of enjoyment, at times she did suspect that enjoyment refused as relentlessly to be pursued.

Then Laura replied:

‘Are you really able to lie down on the sofa and be cured? Ah, Chattie, how I do envy you!’

This was the sort of thing that people did not like in Laura, and Chattie giggled, and dabbed with her handkerchief at the perspiration on her upper lip.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, and giggled again to stop the gap.

But Laura was grateful to her rather suety friend.

‘Come,’ she said, touching Chattie, because it cost her an effort. ‘Let us stand over there and watch, near that column, where we shall not be seen.’

‘Oh, dear, no,’ said Chattie, for whom it was a first duty to be noticed, and was propelling her friend up a short flight of steps leading to a little dais, from which prizes were distributed after the term’s dancing classes, and on which chairs had been arranged in a bower of flowers. ‘One does not accept to go to a ball simply to hide behind a column.’

‘Will it do us any good to sit exposed in the open, like a target?’ Laura asked.

Chattie knew that targets were designed for arrows, but contained her thoughts.

‘If we do not actually benefit by it, we can come to no positive harm,’ she was careful to observe.

So they seated themselves.

It was Belle’s night. Belle was everywhere, in her white dress, almost always and inevitably in the arms of Tom Radclyffe. Other dancers made way, encouraging her presence in their midst, as if she had been a talisman of some kind, and they would have touched her magic dress. As she danced, sometimes she would close her eyes against the music, although more often she would hold them open, expressing her love in such lucid glances that some mothers considered it immodest, and Laura, intercepting the touching honesty of that almost infinite blue, was afraid for her cousin’s safety, and wanted to protect her.

Or herself. She shuddered to realize that love might not remain hidden, and was nervously turning her head this way and that. She was most alarmingly, chokingly exposed. Her neck had mottled.

When the man approached so quietly, and bowed so civilly, she could have cried out, to ward off that being who, from his very modesty and reasonableness, might possibly have understood.

‘It is very kind,’ she said, in a loud, ugly voice. ‘Thank you. But I am not dancing.’

‘I do not blame you,’ he replied. ‘I am never surprised at any person not wishing to dance. It is not sociable, for one thing. It is not possible to jig up and down and express one’s thoughts clearly at the same time.’

‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘I had always been led to understand that the expression of thought was the height of unsociability.’

Chattie Wilson laughed rather bitterly. She was hating everything.

Then Laura Trevelyan introduced Dr Badgery, surgeon of Nautilus, to Miss Chattie Wilson, and felt that she herself was absolved from further duty.

But his expression would not leave her in peace. Although his voice would be engaged with Chattie Wilson, it was not Chattie whom he was questioning.

‘Tell me, Miss Wilson,’ he said, ‘are you well acquainted with the country?’

‘Oh, dear, no. I have been very seldom into the bush. It is different, of course, if one marries; then it may become a matter of necessity.’

Miss Wilson did not intend to waste much time on Dr Badgery, who was neither young, nor handsome, of moderate means, she suspected, and not quite a gentleman. If she did not also recognize sympathy, it was because she was not yet desperate enough.

‘I would give anything to satisfy my curiosity,’ he said.

‘You should join some expedition,’ advised Chattie, and tried anxiously to be recognized by someone nice.

‘Such as left last year,’ she added, for she had been well trained, ‘under the leadership of that German, Mr Voss.’

No expedition, it appeared, would be led to the rescue of Chattie Wilson.

‘Ah,’ said Dr Badgery. ‘So I have heard. Tell me about him.’

He was looking most intently at Chattie, but would be turned at any moment, Laura knew, to intercept her distress.

‘I did not make his acquaintance,’ Chattie replied, but remembered at once. ‘Laura did, though.’

Then Dr Badgery turned, straining a little, as well-fleshed men of forty will, and was looking at Laura with the highest hopes. He would have been singularly unsurprised at anything of an oracular nature that might have issued from the mouth of that dark young woman.

Laura, who had looked away, remained conscious of his rather heavy eyebrows.

‘Did you?’ he asked.

And waited.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That is to say, my uncle was one of those who subscribed to Mr Voss’s expedition.’

‘And what manner of man is this German?’

‘I do not know,’ said Laura. ‘I cannot judge a person on superficial evidence. Sometimes,’ she added, for she had by now lived long enough, ‘it will even appear that all evidence is superficial.’

‘I have heard the most extraordinary things,’ said the surgeon, ‘of Mr Voss.’

‘Then, no doubt,’ said the young woman, ‘you are better informed than I.’

It was at this point that Dr Badgery realized he should ask Miss Wilson to dance, and she, for want of better opportunities, accepted graciously enough. They went down. Now the surgeon, that ordinarily jolly man, who wrote affectionate letters to young girls long after their mothers had given him up, was engulfed in the tragic hilarity of the polka, as if rivers of suffering had gushed to the surface from depths where they had remained hitherto unsuspected, or he, perhaps he alone had not tapped them.

This was before his sense of duty returned.

‘Do you know Waverley?’ asked the jigging surgeon.

‘Oh, dear, yes. Waverley,’ sighed, and jigged Miss Chattie Wilson. ‘I know everywhere round here. Although, of course, there are some places where one cannot go.’

‘I was at Waverley recently, in the garden of a Judge de Courcy. Do you know him?’ asked the surgeon, who had heard it done this way.

‘His wife is my aunt’s second cousin.’

‘Is everybody related?’

‘Almost everybody.’ Chattie sighed. ‘Of course, there are some people who cannot be.’

‘I was at Waverley with the Pringles. Miss Bonner and her mother happened to be of the party.’

‘Belle,’ said Chattie, ‘is the sweetest thing. And so lovely. She deserves every bit of her good fortune. Nobody could envy Belle.’

‘And Miss Trevelyan,’ the surgeon suggested.

‘Laura is sweet, too,’ Chattie sighed. ‘But peculiar. Laura is clever.’

They continued to dance.

Or the surgeon was again threading the dark maze of clipped hedges at Waverley. He knew that, already the first day, he was dedicated to Laura Trevelyan, whatever the nature of her subterranean sorrows. So they sailed against the dark waters, trailing hands, she holding her face away, or they walked in the labyrinth of hedges, in which, he knew from experience, they did not meet.

From where she had continued to sit, Laura Trevelyan watched the antics of the fat surgeon, an unlikely person, whom she would have learnt to love, if seas of experience and music had not flowed between them.

Then the dancers stopped, and everybody was applauding the capital music with their hot gloves.

Laura was for the moment quite separate in the roomful of human beings, but as she had outlived the age of social panic, she did not try to burrow in, and presently she saw Willie Pringle, on whom the hair had begun to sprout in unsatisfactory patches.

Willie wandered through his own party, and finally arrived at Laura.

‘I do not care for a ball, Laura, do you?’ the young man asked, with his silly, loose mouth.

‘You are my host,’ Laura answered, kindly.

‘Good Lord, I do not feel like one. Not a bit. I do not know what I feel like.’

Without realizing that this is frequently the case before the yeast begins to work, his mother was in the habit of blaming his ineffectuality on the fact that he had outgrown his strength.

‘Perhaps you will discover in time, and do something extraordinary,’ Laura suggested.

‘In a solicitor’s office?’

That he would find out and do something extraordinary was an eventuality of which Willie was afraid. But, in the meantime, he enjoyed the company of older girls. Not so much to talk to, as to watch. He sensed that mysticism which their presence bred, by secrets and silences, and music of dresses. Intent upon their own iridescent lives in the corners of a ballroom, or seated in a landscape, under trees, their purely formal beauty obsessed him. Often he would turn his back upon the mirrors that could not perpetuate their images.

‘Not in a solicitor’s office,’ he did hear Laura agree. ‘If we were bounded by walls, that would be terrible.’

She seemed to emphasize the we, which made Willie happy, although he wrinkled his forehead prodigiously to celebrate his happiness.

‘Should we dance, Laura?’ he asked, in some doubt.

This was a wholly and unexpectedly delightful prospect to Laura Trevelyan.

‘Do let us, Willie,’ she said, laughing for the approach of tenuous pleasure. ‘It will be fun.’

With Willie whom she had known since childhood. It was so blameless.

So they held hands. To move along the sunny avenues of rather pretty music, produced in the young woman such a sense of innocent happiness she did for a moment feel the pricking of tears. She glanced in a glass and saw that her eyelids had reddened in her pale face, and her nose was swollen. She was ugly tonight, but gently happy.

So the two peculiar people danced gently together. Nobody noticed them at first, except the surgeon, who had been reduced to the company of his own nagging thoughts.

Then Belle saw, and called, across several waves of other dancers, that were separating the two cousins, as at all balls.

‘Laura!’ Belle cried. ‘I am determined to reach you.’

She swam, laughing, through the sea of tulle, and was rising from the foam in her white, shining dress. Belle’s skin was permitted to be golden, while others went protecting their pink and white. At close quarters, changed back from goddess into animal, there were little, fine, golden hairs on what some people dared to refer to as Belle Bonner’s brown complexion. Indeed, there were mothers who predicted that Belle would develop a coarse look later on. But she smelled still of youth and flint, sunlight could have been snoozing upon her cheeks, and, amiably, she would let herself be stroked with the clumsiest of compliments. In which she did not believe, however. She laughed them off.

Now the cousins were reunited in midstream. Tugged at and buffeted, they swayed together, they clung together, they looked in through each other’s eyes, and rested there. All they saw most concerned themselves.

Until Belle had to bubble.

‘Remind me to tell you,’ she said, too loud, ‘about Mrs de Courcy’s hair. You are not moping?’

‘Why should I mope?’ asked Laura, whose sombre breast had begun to rustle with those peacock colours which were hers normally.

Then Belle was whisked away to dance gravely with the judge.

As Willie had wandered off, as he did on practically all occasions, particularly at balls, Laura was left with her own music, of which she dared to hum a few little, feverish phrases. The fringe of metal beads, that hung from the corsage of what had been her dull dress, glittered and chattered threateningly, and swords struck from her seemingly cavernous eyes, from beneath guarded lids.

In consequence, Tom Radclyffe was of two minds when approaching his cousin-to-be.

‘I presume you are not dancing,’ he began.

‘If you would prefer it that way,’ Laura smiled, ‘I am willing to set your feelings at rest.’

She knew that Belle, who was kind by instinct, had come to some arrangement with Tom.

‘You know it is not a question of that,’ he blurted. ‘I thought you would prefer to talk.’

‘That would be worse! Would it not?’ Laura laughed.

He might have ignored her more completely if he had not permitted himself to frown.

‘In that case,’ he said, and blushed, ‘let us, rather, dance.’

Were it not for his physical strength, one might have suspected Tom Radclyffe of being a somewhat frightened man. As it was, and taking into account his military career, such a suspicion could only have been absurd.

Laura said, as she touched his sleeve:

‘I cannot grow accustomed to this new disguise.’

‘I cannot grow accustomed to myself,’ he answered rather gloomily.

For Tom had resigned his commission, and was now plain man. That, perhaps, was most of his predicament. He was not yet reconciled to nakedness.

As they danced together, the man and woman could have been two swords holding each other.

‘Will you be kind to Belle?’ Laura asked. ‘I could never forgive you if you were not.’

Observed in a certain light, all the dancers wore bitter smiles. The heavy fringe of beads ornamenting her relentless dress was coldly metallic under his hand.

‘But Belle and I love each other.’

And men become as little children.

‘He who was not in love was never hurt,’ Laura said.

‘Let us be reasonable,’ he ordered, reasserting his masculinity. ‘Because you have been hurt, it does not follow that other people must suffer the same experience. Even though you may wish it.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ she said.

As she was looking over his shoulder it sounded humble, and her opponent, who had but recently lost his balance, was quick to take advantage.

‘You know I am an ordinary sort of fellow,’ he said; he could make cunning use of his simplicity. ‘My intelligence is of the practical kind. As for imagination, you will say that mine is not developed to the degree that you admire.’ Such was his haste, he scarcely paused for his due reward. ‘Or that I am even lacking in it. For which I am deuced glad. You see, it is a great temptation to live off one’s imagination, as some people do.’

His voice had risen too high and left him breathless, but he no longer paused; he rushed on, in fact, right over the precipice:

‘What do you expect of Voss?’

His stiff lips were grinning at his own audacity.

It was the first time that Laura Trevelyan had been faced with this phantom, and now that it had happened, the situation was made more terrible by the quarter from which it had come. The silly, invisible music was suddenly augmented by her own heartbeat. Great horns were fluctuating through the wood-and-plaster room.

‘Voss?’ she clattered discordantly.

Now the metal beads were molten under his fingers.

‘Expect?’ she responded. ‘I do not expect anything of anyone, but am grateful for the crumbs.’

Tom Radclyffe did not absorb this, but was still grinning stiffly.

The two people were dancing and dancing.

Now that he was master of all, the man offered:

‘If I could help you in any way, Laura, for Belle’s sake.’

‘You cannot help me,’ Laura replied, ‘for Belle’s, or anybody else’s sake. You could not even help me by your own inclination, of your own will, for Mr Voss, Tom, is lost.’

Tom Radclyffe was quite shocked by the ugly music, and by the lurching movements of his partner. The truth that he had let loose made him protest and bluster.

‘If it is second sight that keeps you so well informed, then we are all threatened.’

Whether from emotion, or exertion, he emphasized every other word. But Laura did not defend herself. Almost at once, she left her partner, and went straight to the retiring-room. Chattie Wilson, noticing, wondered whether she should accompany her friend, whose face was shrunk to the extent that it resembled a yellow skull.

In the resilient hall the music continued to ache until it was time for supper.

Mrs Pringle’s triumph was complete when the doors were flung open and her guests burst into the supper-room. If burst is not a refined, it is yet an unavoidable word. For those well-conducted, but prudent people who had quietly stationed themselves in readiness, were propelled from behind by the feckless rout, which had continued to dance, and chatter, and fall in love. Suddenly the two parties were united in one thought, only differently expressed, and although the prudent were protesting, and even leaning back to restrain the flushed, impulsive horde of feckless that continued pushing from behind, their common thought did prevail, in final eruption, which brought them in a rush of churned bodies right to the edge of the long tables, threatening the rosy hams and great unctuous sirloins of bloody beef.

‘It is disgraceful,’ laughed Mrs Bonner, ‘that a gathering of individuals from genteel homes should behave like cattle.’

However, she did really rather approve of all signs of animal health, and might have been alarmed had the company behaved like human beings.

Her friend and hostess, Mrs Pringle, who had been frightened at first, for her condition, and who had sought protection behind a most convulsive palm, now emerged, and was walking amongst her guests, with advice such as:

‘Do let me press you to a little of this fish in aspic,’

or:

‘I can recommend the Salad à la Roosse, Miss Hetherington.’

By her very hospitality, Mrs Pringle, who had wounded many a friend in the name of friendship, was laying herself open to the most savage forms of counter-attack. Now, some of those friends might never have seen her before, while the expression of others suggested they had, indeed, recognized what they must force themselves to endure. As the resigned Mrs Pringle humbly went about her duties, always the servant of their pleasure, the guests were frowning at her from above their whiskers of crimped lettuce and lips of mayonnaise.

Of all those friends perhaps only Mrs Bonner was truly grateful, and she had grown obsequious.

‘Allow me to fetch you a jelly, my dear,’ she begged. ‘Even if, as you say, you have no appetite, a little wine jelly, in your condition, can only fortify.’

For Mrs Bonner, with her head for figures, and her honest beginnings — it was, in fact, not generally known that she had helped her husband with the books — made a habit of reckoning up the cost, and was always flattered by magnificence.

With everyone so busily employed, it was easy for Laura to return unnoticed and take her place amongst the company. Superficially restored, her composure might have seen the evening out if, in the arrangement of things, she had not found herself standing beside Dr Badgery. The surgeon would not, however, suffer her to bite him twice, nor his attention to stray from a helping of beef, and there he might have continued to stand, ignoring the true object of his concern, if their hands had not plunged at the same unhappy moment into a basket of bread.

‘Then, you enjoy yourself at dancing, Miss Trevelyan?’ the surgeon asked finally, while suggesting that her answer did not signify.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no.’

And he recognized the cries of men when their wounds are opened.

‘Why must you return to that?’

Dr Badgery ate his beef, realizing he had begun to feel too deeply to trust himself upon stilts of words. On the other hand, a curious cracking sound, that his jaws always made while chewing, was now turning silence into something painfully grotesque.

‘I did accept the invitations of two partners,’ Laura admitted, ‘one because we had been happy together, as children, the other because, for the present at least, our relationship is inescapable.’

‘That is all very well,’ said the surgeon, ‘and sentimental, and stoical. The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands, and it is in the nature of the present to appear rough and uncharitable. But when it comes to the future, do you not feel that chances are equal?’

He had rather blunt, white teeth, set in a trap, in his crisp beard.

‘I feel,’ she said slowly, and was already frightened at what she was about to admit, ‘that the life I am to live is already utterly beyond my control.’

Even the dependable Dr Badgery could not have rescued her from that sea, however much she might have wished it. That she did wish, must be recorded, out of respect for her rational judgement and his worthiness. But man is a rational judge only fleetingly, and worthiness is too little, or too much.

So the surgeon returned presently to his ship, and had soon restored the shape to his orderly life, except that on occasions the dark waters would seep between the timbers. Then he would welcome them, he would be drowning with her, their transparent fears would be flickering in and out of their skulls, trailing long fins of mutual colours.

Long after Dr Badgery had fallen asleep in his brassbound cabin, on the night of his last meeting in the flesh with Laura Trevelyan, the ball at Bright’s Dancing Academy, Elizabeth Street, the much discussed, and finally legendary ball that the Pringles gave for Belle, continued to surge and sound. O the seas of music, the long blue dreamy rollers, and the little, rosy, frivolous waves. All was swept, all was carried up and down. To swim was the only natural act, although the eyes were smarting, as the fiddles continued to flick the golden spray, although, in the swell of dawn, question and answer floated out of reach.

‘It is really too much to expect of you, dear Mrs Pringle,’ said Mrs Bonner. ‘Let me order the horses. Could you not simply slip away? Or, supposing I were to go amongst the dancers, and hint to one or two of the more responsible girls, that it is almost morning? I am sure they would listen to reason.’

O reason, O Mrs Bonner, speak to the roses and the mignonette. They will be trampled, rather, or float up and down in the silver seas of morning, together with the programmes and the used napkins.

‘Oh, Mrs Pringle, it has been the most lovely, lovely ball,’ said Belle Bonner, as she woke from her dream of dancing.

Her cheek was still hot.

‘Thank you, Mrs Pringle,’ smiled Laura Trevelyan, who offered a frank hand, like a man. And added: ‘I have enjoyed myself so much.’

Because she was a woman, she was also dishonest whenever it was really necessary.

Then all the dancers were going. Some of the girls, although well acquainted with the Bonners, carefully guided their skirts past Laura Trevelyan, who had observed them all that night as from a promontory, her eyes outlined in black.

When the Bonners returned that morning, and had kissed, and sighed, and gone to their rooms, Laura sat down at her writing-desk, as if she had been waiting to satisfy a desire, and scrabbled in her trayful of pens, and immediately began to write:

My dear Johann Ulrich,

We have this moment come in from a ball, at which I have been so miserable for you, I must write, not knowing by what means in the world it will be possible to send the letter. Except by miracle, it will not be sent, and so, I fear, it is the height of foolishness.

But write I must. If you, my dear, cannot hope to benefit, it is most necessary for me. I suppose if I were to examine my thoughts honestly, I should find that self-pity is my greatest sin, of which I do not remember being guilty in the past. How strong one was, how weak one always is! Was the firm, upright, reliable character one seemed to have been, a myth? …

The reddish light of morning had begun to flow into the rooms of the sleeping house. The tender rooms were like transparent eggs, from which the protective shell had been removed.

The young woman, whose eyelids were turned to buckram, was writing in her red room. She wrote:

… It would seem that the human virtues, except in isolated, absolved, absurd, or oblivious individuals are mythical. Are you too, my dearest, a myth, as it has been suggested? …

The young woman, whose stiff eyelids had been made red and transparent by the unbearably lucid light of morning, began to score the paper, with quick slashes, of her stricken, scratching pen.

Ah, God, she said, I do have faith, if it is not all the time.

Odd lumps of prayer were swelling in her mouth. Her movements were crippled as she stumbled about her orderly room that the red light made dreadful. She was tearing the tough writing-paper, or attempting to, for it was of an excellent quality; her uncle saw to it that she used no other. So that, in the end, the paper remained twisted up. Her breath was rasping, or retching out of her throat.

Mercifully, she fell upon her bed soon after, recovering in sleep that beauty which was hers in private, and which, consequently, many people had never seen.

*

After a very short interval, it seemed, Belle Bonner was married to Tom Radclyffe, at St James’s, on a windy day. If Mrs Bonner had swelled with the material importance of a wedding, the disbelieving father appeared much shrunken as he supported his daughter up the aisle. How Belle felt, almost nobody paused to consider, for was not the bride the symbol of all their desires? Indeed, it could have been that Belle herself did not feel, so much as vibrate, inside the shuddering white cocoon from which she would emerge a woman. A remote, a passive rapture veiled her normally human face. To Laura Trevelyan, a bridesmaid who did not match the others, there was no longer any means of communicating with her cousin. She would have resented it more, and dreaded the possibility that their intimacy might never be restored, if she, too, was not become temporarily a torpid insect along with everyone else.

So satin sighed, lozenges were discreetly sucked, and the scented organ meandered through the melodious groves of flowers.

Then, suddenly, the bells were beginning to tumble.

Everyone agreed that the Bonner wedding was the loveliest and most tasteful the Colony had witnessed. Afterwards, upon the steps, emotion and colour certainly flared high, as the wind took veil, hair, and shawl, rice stung, carriages were locked together in the crush, and the over-stuffed and excited horses relieved themselves copiously in the middle of the street. There was also an episode with a disgraceful pink satin shoe, which a high-spirited young subaltern, a second cousin of Chattie Wilson, had carried off, it was whispered, from the dressing-room of an Italian singer. Many of the women blushed for what they knew, others were crying, as if for some tragedy at which they had but lately assisted in a theatre, and a few criticized the bride for carrying a sheaf of pear-blossom, which was original, to say the least.

Standing upon the steps of the church, in the high wind, Laura Trevelyan watched her cousin, in whose oblivious arms lay the sheaf of black sticks, of which the flowerets threatened to blow away, bearing with them tenderly, whitely, imperceptibly, the myth of all happiness.