The Soldier and the Gentlewoman

by Hilda Vaughan

  “There’s the bride arriving. I say, isn’t she holding her skirts high! I shall chaff her about that … By Jove, the Goldmans have brought a dazzler this time! Bet you I get introduced to her before you do, my boy!”

  Gwenllian moved to avoid the pressure of his knees against her own. The stupidity of all he said would have sickened her less, she decided, if she had not always been able to predict it to a word.

  “Must I remind you, for your dear Frances’s sake, not to dance out of our own party all night,” she stung at him in a whisper as she alighted.

  Inside the lounge, old ladies wearing antiquated capes and fleecy head-shawls were nodding and smiling their way to the foot of the shallow stairs. Others were coming down, showing their bosoms and their diamonds. At their heels, waving laughing signals to friends below, fluttered a bevy of country- bred girls. Their hair and their skirts were cut short, but they had the same starry eyes and radiant, flushed faces that Gwenllian remembered at dances long ago.

  “How pretty they all look,” Frances exclaimed. “What fun it is!”

  But Gwenllian answered not a word, for her throat was tight and her eyes smarted. In painladen silence she went up to the room she remembered so well, with its sagging ceiling and a pierglass that tilted too far forward or swung right back. Another girl was before it now. “Look at the rotten thing!” she cried. “Absurd,” was the word Gwenllian had used. There, still, stood the vast mahogany dressing-table with clumsy, twisted legs, and upon it the pin-cushion, big as a baby’s pillow, covered in white muslin over pink sateen. A coloured print of “Bubbles ” hung on the wall, and a gory battle scene of Lady Butler’s, mercifully reproduced in black and white. The former paper of roses and ribbons had been replaced by one of Japanese figures dwarfed by giant wistaria, and a meagre fireplace with ugly green tiles had supplanted the generous one with hobs. Gwenllian did not approve of these changes, any more than she did of Nancy Lloyd’s niece, who would never be the belle her aunt was once, and who was actually putting paint on her lips. But there—bless her!—was Betto, with the same very large cap and the three warts with the three hairs on each. Only—alas!—now the hairs were white. She was addressing the mother of a debutante as “Miss Dolly,” speaking through the pins she had always held in her mouth. Frances gave her a hug that almost caused the pins to be swallowed, and vowed she was grown prettier than ever.

  “Go you on, Miss Frances,” she cried, delighted. “You’re the same hoyden of a young lady ever you were! Fancy any gentleman asking you to marry him!”

  “He didn’t, Betto, till I’d made it clear that he’d got to.”

  “Oh, duwch! Isn’t the gel a caution,” the ancient chambermaid appealed to the company in general.

  Newcomers to the district looked surprised, and Gwenllian intervened with an enquiry after Betto’s rheumatism, thus making clear her great age and explaining her privileged familiarity.

  When they were downstairs again and had found their escort in the press, they pushed their way along a passage that reeked of stale beer, damp whitewash and linoleum. Music came in broken waves above the babble of voices at the ball-room door.

  “They’re off! Tally ho! Get to it! Get to it!” cried a youth with a face as pink as his coat.

  “The Lord Lieutenant isn’t here yet,” cried an older man, hurrying past. “Stop the band there! Can’t possibly begin till he’s opened the ball!”

  “Oh, I say, what rot,” grumbled young Goldman, whose swarthy glance Gwenllian was careful not to meet. “Are we to have our evening messed up for that old fogey?”

  “How too pricelessly formal and Victorian,” exclaimed his pretty companion.

  And Gwenllian in disgust heard Dick say, “Hello Goldman! You might be a sport and introduce me.

  She turned away to join in scattered talk with people of her own kind.

  “How d’ye do? Ages since I had the pleasure of meetin’ you last!”

  “Have a good run the other day?”

  “Fourteen brace o’ pheasants. Not bad, what?” “… the magistrates have grown too slack to convict.”

  “Well, look what a crew they are on the bench nowadays! Scarcely a gentleman among ’em!”

  “Thank you so much. I’ll ask Mother.”

  Frances had become the centre of a group of former admirers. How was it, Gwenllian wondered, that, with such Bohemian ways and subversive views, her sister retained the liking of so many quite nice men? She herself was marooned with her brother-in-law. Making no more pretence of enjoying each other’s company than good manners required, they danced together. When this duty was performed, they leaned against the wall, exchanging a few civil comments, but both were absorbed in watching, he his wife, and she her husband. It was not love or pride, not even jealousy, that kept her eyes on Dick. To spy upon him with disapproval was her habit. What silly thing was he saying now to make Ena Williams laugh in that blatant way? Why had he attached himself to the Lewis Vaughans the moment they arrived? People would imagine that he was in the bride’s tow as usual. Frances dis- entangled herself from the old friends pressing for dances and returned, radiant, to ask, “Will you dance the next with me, Stanley?”

  “Don’t I always hang about waiting for orders?” he smiled. “Who were all your adorers?”

  “Frances,” Gwenllian was prompted to interrupt, “your hair looks as if it might come down. Hadn’t you better go up and make yourself presentable?” But the conductor of the band, raised on a palm decorated platform, had flourished his baton. The strife of drum and saxophone was renewed, making Gwenllian wince. She turned her back, not caring to watch her sister closely held in the arms of a ridiculously doting husband. Nor could she endure to see Dick, jigging and grinning and rocking his shoulders to and fro, while his wife stood by without a partner! Had he abandoned even the attempt to behave like a gentleman? She rejoined the crowd of elderly folk by the door and was presently sitting out in the lounge with a lethargic judge.

  “I come here to support the Hunt,” he informed her. “One must shew up in the ball-room, don’t you know, to encourage the young ’uns.”

  “D’you find they need encouraging these days?” she asked with a bitter laugh.

  He looked at her sideways. “You don’t much like the present generation? Well, I confess that I shall be glad to get away from them myself for a quiet game of bridge. Will you take a hand?”

  She made excuses. Surely she was not come to that yet? And she remembered how she had delighted to waltz all night and had marvelled that any but the infirm could keep to their chairs while dance music was calling. She had never tired of dancing then. At two or three in the morning, when the fiddles played John Peel and then God Save the Queen, she could have cried with vexation that joy should be so soon ended. How far away, how long ago, seemed those few hours of happiness!

  After the judge had left her, she sat alone behind the screen that hid their two chairs, and tried to nerve herself for a return to the ball-room. Dick would have, for appearances’ sake, to ask her for at least one dance or two. He danced well, she sup- posed, in this jerky modern fashion. Like a clockwork toy he looked. But she felt discomfort in yielding herself to so angular a rhythm, and she detested dancing with him. His slightest touch, since Richard’s birth, aroused loathing in her. Perhaps, seeing her neglected among the chaperons, a few courteous old men would lead her away and trample on her toes. They would stumble with her round the room where once she had skimmed and darted like a swallow. Still, she could not hide all night. And sighing, she was about to rise, when a black silk skirt rustled against the sheltering screen.

  “This will do, dear. No one will overhear us,” said a voice she knew.

  And another, equally familiar, answered. “Yes, my dear, do go on.”

  The speakers were Doctor Roberts’s wife and the sister of Mr. Price the solicitor. They were proud, Gwenllian knew, of being admitted to the Hunt Ball. Afterwards, they would boast to members of the Mothers’ Union, whose husband
s were in trade, of their intimate acquaintance with the misdoings of their betters. Gwenllian gathered much useful knowledge of local affairs from Mrs. Doctor Roberts. But sometimes, she suspected, the lady withheld information for fear of giving offence. To Miss Price, the friend of her bosom, she might talk more openly, and, with a scornful grimace, Gwenllian stayed to eavesdrop.

  “It’s gone beyond a joke,” she heard the soft Pembrokeshire voice cooing. “Of course the Doctor never breathes a word to me. You’ve no idea the discretion I have to put up with from that man!” Miss Price made clicking sounds of sympathy, and Gwenllian, in her place of hiding, smiled.

  “But he’s truly vexed,” the Doctor’s wife went on, “I know from his looks whenever he’s called there, to see her marriage such an utter failure.”

  “What could you expect?” demanded Miss Price with self-righteous gusto. “I never could have made myself a laughing-stock, marrying a man young enough to be my son.”

  Gwenllian stiffened.

  “Of course it was a sad mistake. But he needn’t run after his neighbour’s wife so scandalously. All the servants at the Lewis Vaughans are talking.”

  “His neighbour’s wife,” exclaimed Miss Price. “I heard it was the unmarried one with whom he was behaving so badly. Miss Powell the Schools was saying she felt it her duty to write Mrs. Williams a letter about her daughter—an anonymous letter, of course.”

  “It’s both of them, if you must know, dear,” said Mrs. Roberts, more than ever resembling a wood-pigeon in the gentleness of her tone. “It’s truly shocking. And when that over-trusting husband, young Vaughan, finds out—”

  Miss Price drew in her breath as though she were sucking some juicy fruit.

  “They say he has a violent temper, once it’s roused,” murmured Mrs. Roberts.

  “What a frightful scandal there’s bound to be then!”

  “Yes indeed. Poor, poor Gwenllian! How I pity her!”

  “So do I, though, of course, she’s only herself to blame. My brother says that husband of hers will soon have squandered every penny of the money she married him for. The estate’s already mortgaged as heavily as ever it was under the old Squire.”

  “You don’t say so!”

  “Yes, but I was to keep it an absolute secret.”

  “Things like that are bound to come out, my dear. Poor Gwenllian, with all her virtues, was always much too stuck up. I’m afraid the whole country will soon see her pride have a fall.” Gwenllian started up with the mad intention of flinging down the screen on top of the two gossips. But she controlled her fury, and sat down again until the crowd of laughing couples coming past after another dance enabled her to slip away undetected. She drifted through the red plush drawing-room and gazed up the stairs. Everywhere young men and maidens were sitting two by two, looking at one another with laughter or love in their glances.

  “You know I haven’t another thought in the world,” someone whispered from behind a bank of flowers as she passed by. Her own sweetheart had once said the same fond foolish thing to her. “But you,” he had added, “think only of your position as mistress of your father’s house.” “I don’t! I don’t!” she had protested. “I’m always thinking of you.” And yet she had let him go. Aimless now and alone, she walked down a passage leading to the garden. Here once she had been led, all eagerness, her finger tips in a shy flutter on his sleeve. A curtain hung across the entrance. She drew it aside, and in the half darkness saw a tall youth stooping to kiss a girl. His encircling arm was black against the pallor of her dress. She was turned away, her little head and slim bare shoulders drooped from him as though she were afraid. But as Gwenllian retreated, she saw the girl turn round and, with a sudden gesture of passionate response, fling her arms round her lover’s neck and strain upward to the lips that sought her own. It might have been herself! How fast her heart beat with disquieting recollections! No longer caring where she went, she let herself be swept by the returning tide of dancers back into the ball-room.

  Supporters of the Hunt no longer impeded the way. There lingered only such mammas as surveyed their daughters for an excuse to interfere, and a few bald men who watched the dancing that they might complain how ungraceful it was grown. The amiable old men were gone to enjoy themselves at the supper- or the card-table. Gwenllian listened to the talk of those ill-natured elders who chose not to let youth alone. Their discontent accorded with her own.

  “The banging of this infernal nigger music sets my teeth on edge.”

  “Walkin’ up and down! Did you ever see anything so ridiculous? There’s nothing in it!”

  “ No, by Jove! In our day we danced. I had to change my collar three times in an evening.”

  “Don’t you think he holds his partner unnecessarily close?”

  “Oh my dear, they all do now.”

  “Well, I think it ought to be stopped. It’s really quite disgusting.”

  “One would not have dreamed of receiving them before the war.”

  “That’s never your youngest? Dear me, how sadly time flies!”

  “… got herself talked about with old Pelham’s heir.”

  “They tried to hush it up.”

  . four, plain unmarriageable daughters.”

  “…drummed out of his regiment…”

  Clack, clack, clack went their spiteful tongues. Some of them were people of whom she was accustomed to approve. To-night she hated them, everyone. They would be clacking about her affairs soon, blaming her, pitying her, dragging her pride, her cherished domestic privacy through the mud of their mean gossip, as those two common women had already dared to do. She, whose morals had been stricter than any of theirs, would come off no better with them than an adulteress. They wouldn’t spare the pride they had once envied. But she’d face them all out. Over their wagging grey heads she stared, smiling a smile of steel, while the young couples swirled past her, smiling because they were happy.

  After a while she noticed the broad shoulders and head of a tall man, standing with his back to her. His hair was as dark as her own and refused to be sleeked down. The glimpse she had of his firm profile set her dreaming of the young man she had loved so long ago. His hair, too, had been defiant. But it had been thicker, more glossy than this stranger’s. She began to take an interest in him, forgetting her anger with the rest of the world. Who was he? Why did he stand aloof from the dancers, gazing at them with an intent sadness that had been communicated to her even by the fragmentary glimpse that she had had of his face? It was not her custom to shew curiosity about a man whom she did not know, and she surprised herself by edging through the crowd to make a closer inspection of this one. Look at him more nearly, she must, she knew not why. Many old acquaintances tried to detain her with their shew of affability, but she evaded them all. Lady Llangattoc was signalling from her chair against the wall, but Gwenllian was purposefully blind. At last she was divided from the stranger only by an osprey plume that whisked to and fro in an Edwardian head-dress. She slipped past the obstruction and stood close behind him. He turned round at once as if he had felt her presence. He had the large square jaw that she admired. Perhaps he was fifty years of age. But she found him very handsome, far handsomer than any younger man in the room. A spasm of recognition contracted his mouth.

  “Hello,” he exclaimed.

  She stared at him, frozen in surprise.

  “How d’you do?” he said, and in a very low tone, he added, “Bitty.”

  No-one had called her that for—it must be twenty years! And suddenly she felt a flutter and jump of her heart, startling, exciting, of promise, as full of wonder as the earliest movement of a first child within the womb. She held out her hand. He took it, and she looked down at their clasped hands as from a very long way off. It was not often that hers was made by comparison to seem so small. There were little black hairs on the back of his great hand. She did not remember them, nor the veins standing out, raised and blue. It was aged, but it felt the same—very strong, warm, enclosing! H
ow that tormenting new music thumped and clattered! The room seemed to be rocking with the dancers.

  She was shaken by its vibration. Never in her life had she fainted. I mustn’t faint, she told herself. I can’t faint! I won’t faint.

  “Isn’t it hot?” she heard a voice saying that had once been her own. It had ceased to be under her control. It made a surging sound like that of the sea in a big shell. There was a shell on the nursery mantelpiece. She used to hold it to her ear. He had kissed her for the first time in the old nursery at home. She had been arranging a vase of red dahlias, and the flowers had dropped through her fingers to the floor. So that was why she had grown red dahlias ever since! She had forgotten the reason—but not the kiss. Did any woman ever forget the first kiss of her first love? It was that, not any later experience, which deflowered her.

  “Supposing we find somewhere to sit down,” she heard his voice suggest

  “Yes. By a window, if you don’t mind.”

  “Take my arm.”

  Once again she laid her hand on that sleeve which sent so vibrant a tremor through her finger tips. “Thank you,” she murmured. “These crushes always make me feel rather breathless.”

  “Terrible mob,” he said, staring straight in front of him with set face.

  “Yes,” she agreed, because she must needs say something. “But the band is good, don’t you think? They keep such excellent time.”

  She had loathed the beat, beat, beat, as of tom-toms, arousing savages to an obscene orgy. It was not fit that white men and women of breeding should dance to such music. Thank heaven it had stopped! Why did it echo still in her leaping pulses?

  He did not lead her in the wake of the laughing talkative stream that flowed from the ball-room in search of secluded sitting-out places, but took her to the window embrasure farthest from the dowagers and the band. He found her a chair and she dropped down on to it, her knees weak, as though she had been running until she was exhausted. He flung open a window and the icy air flowed in over her naked arms and neck.