A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
Look, there he is with Lady Ida Arden! Nice-looking boy, isn’t he? It doesn’t seem the right thing for his mother to be dancing about, now does it?”
She laughed again, a gay little laugh, well in the key she had set in her first introduction of Julian, and the man to whom she spoke protested vigorously.
“It seems to me exactly the right thing,” he said. “The idea of your having a grown-up son is the preposterous point, don’t you know. Come, I say, Mrs. Romayne, don’t be so horribly hard-hearted!”
“But I must introduce him, don’t you see. I must do my duty as a mother.”
“Lady Ida is introducing him! She has introduced him to half-a-dozen of the best girls in the room already.”
The colloquy, carried on on either side in the lightest of tones, finally ended in Mrs. Romayne’s promising a “turn by-and-by,” and the couple drifted apart; Mrs. Romayne to find acquaintances close at hand. Among the first she met was Lady Bracondale, condescendingly amiable, to whom she pointed out Julian, with laughing self-excuse. He was dancing now, and dancing extremely well.
“I am so absurdly proud of him!” she said. “I want to introduce him to you by-and-by, if I can catch him. But dancing men are so inconveniently useful.”
Some time had worn away, and she had repeated the substance of this speech in sundry forms to sundry persons, before Julian rejoined her. She had cast several rather preoccupied glances in his direction, when she became aware of him on the opposite side of the room, threading his way through the intervening groups in her direction, just as she was accosted by a rather distinguished-looking, elderly man.
“How do you do, Mrs. Romayne? They tell me that you have a grown-up son here, and I decline to believe it.”
He spoke in a pleasant, refined voice, marred, however, by all the affectation of the day, and with a tone about it as of a man absolutely secure of position and used to some amount of homage. He was a certain Lord Garstin, a distinguished figure in London society, rich, well-bred, and idle. He was troubled with no ideals. Fashionable women, with all the weaknesses which he knew quite well, were quite as high a type of woman as he thought possible; or, at least, desirable; and he had a considerable admiration for Mrs. Romayne as a very highly-finished and attractive specimen of the type he preferred.
She shook hands with him with a laugh, and a gathering together of her social resources, so to speak, which suggested that in her scheme of things he was a power whose suffrage was eminently desirable.
“It is true, notwithstanding,” she said brightly. “I am the proud possessor of a grown-up son, Lord Garstin; a very dear boy, I assure you. We are settling down in London together.”
“Is it possible?” was the answer, uttered with exaggerated incredulity. “And what are you going to do with him, may I ask?”
“He is reading for the bar——” began Mrs. Romayne; and then becoming aware that the subject of her words had by this time reached her side, she turned slightly, and laid her hand on Julian’s arm with a pretty gesture. “Here he is,” she said. “Let me introduce him. Julian, this is Lord Garstin. He has been kindly asking me about you.”
Julian knew all about Lord Garstin, and his tone and manner as he responded to his mother’s words were touched with a deference which made them, as his mother said to herself, “just what they ought to be.” The elder man looked him over with eyes which, as far as their vision extended, were as keen as eyes need be.
“A great many of your mother’s admirers will find it difficult to realise your existence,” he said pleasantly. “Though of course we have all heard of you. You are going to the bar, eh?”
Lord Garstin had a great following among smart young men, and the fact was rather a weakness of his. He liked to have young men about him; to be admired and imitated by them. His manner to Julian was characteristic of these tastes; free from condescension as superiority can only be when it is absolute and unassailable, and full of easy familiarity.
Mrs. Romayne, standing fanning herself between them, listened for Julian’s reply with a certain intent suspense beneath her smile; Lord Garstin’s approval was so important to him. The simple, unaffected frankness of the answer satisfied her ear, and Lord Garstin’s expression, as he listened to it, satisfied her eye; and with a laughing comment on Julian’s words, she allowed her attention to be drawn away for the moment by an acquaintance who claimed it in passing.
There was a slight flush of elation on her face when, a few moments later, the chat between Lord Garstin and Julian being broken off, the former moved away with a friendly nod to the young man, and a little gesture and smile to herself, significant of congratulation.
“Come and walk round the room,” she said gaily, slipping her hand through Julian’s arm. “There are hundreds of people you must be introduced to.”
During the half-hour that followed, Julian was introduced to a large proportion of those people in the room who were best worth knowing. Mrs. Romayne seemed to have wasted no time on the acquaintance of mediocrities.
His presentation to Lady Bracondale had just been accomplished, when Mrs. Halse appeared upon the scene and greeted Mrs. Romayne with stereotyped enthusiasm.
“Such a success!” she said in a loud whisper, as Julian talked to Lady Bracondale. “Everybody is quite taken by surprise. I don’t know why, I’m sure, but I don’t think any one was prepared for such a charming young man. I’ve been quite in love with him ever since I saw him first, you know, and we really must have him on the bazaar committee.” Mrs. Halse had been out of town for Easter, and the affairs of the bazaar had been somewhat in abeyance in consequence. “Mr. Romayne,” she continued, seizing upon Julian, “I want to talk to you. You really must help me——”
At this juncture the man who had pressed Mrs. Romayne to dance earlier in the evening came up to her and claimed the promise she had made him then. She cast a glance of laughing pity at Julian, intended for his eyes alone, and moved away.
“It was too bad, mother,” he declared, laughing, as he met her a little later coming out of the dancing-room. “Now, to make up you must have one turn with me—just one. We haven’t danced together for ages.”
He was full of eagerness, a little flushed with the excitement of the evening, and her laughing protestations, her ridicule of him for wanting to dance with his mother, went for nothing. They only let loose on her a torrent of boyish persuasion, and finally she hesitated, laughed undecidedly, and yielded. She, too, was a little flushed and elated, as though with triumph.
“One turn, then, you absurd boy!” she said; and she let him draw her hand through his arm and lead her back into the dancing-room. They went only half-a-dozen times round the room in spite of his protestations against stopping, but Mrs. Romayne was too excellent a dancer and too striking a figure for those turns to pass unnoticed. When she stopped and made him take her, flushed and laughing, out of the room, she was instantly surrounded by a group of men vehemently reproaching her for dancing with her son to the exclusion of so many would-be partners, and laughingly denouncing Julian.
“I couldn’t help it!” she protested gaily. “Yes, I know it’s a ridiculous sight, but we are rather ridiculous, we two, you know! Come, Julian, take me home this moment! Let me disappear covered with confusion.”
She went swiftly downstairs as she spoke, laughing prettily, and a few minutes later Julian, with a good deal of extraneous and wholly unnecessary assistance, was putting her into her carriage.
The whole evening had gone off admirably, Mrs. Romayne said the next morning; repeating the dictum with which she had parted from Julian at night, with less excitement, but with undiminished satisfaction.
During the course of the next three or four weeks that satisfaction—a certain genuine and deliberate satisfaction which seemed to underlie the superficial gaiety and brightness of her manner—seemed to grow upon her. The season had begun early, and very gaily, and she and Julian were in great request. It was perhaps as well that little work