Lord Tony’s Wife Baroness Orczy (story read aloud .TXT) 📖

my use in the morning. I shall have to make my way to Chelwood as early as may be.”

“Aye, aye, zir,” assented the woman placidly. It were no use, she thought, to upset the Mounzeer’s temper once more by telling him that his guide had decamped. Time enough in the morning, when she would be less busy.

“And my John can see ’im as far as Chelwood,” she thought to herself as she finally closed the door on the stranger and made her way slowly down the creaking stairs.

III The Assembly Rooms I

The sigh of satisfaction was quite unmistakable.

It could be heard from end to end, from corner to corner of the building. It sounded above the din of the orchestra who had just attacked with vigour the opening bars of a schottische, above the brouhaha of moving dancers and the frou-frou of skirts: it travelled from the small octagon hall, through the central salon to the tearoom, the ballroom and the card-room: it reverberated from the gallery in the ballroom to the maids’ gallery: it distracted the ladies from their gossip and the gentlemen from their cards.

It was a universal, heartfelt “Ah!” of intense and pleasurable satisfaction.

Sir Percy Blakeney and his lady had just arrived. It was close on midnight, and the ball had positively languished. What was a ball without the presence of Sir Percy? His Royal Highness too had been expected earlier than this. But it was not thought that he would come at all, despite his promise, if the spoilt pet of Bath society remained unaccountably absent; and the Assembly Rooms had worn an air of woe even in the face of the gaily dressed throng which filled every vast room in its remotest angle.

But now Sir Percy Blakeney had arrived, just before the clocks had struck midnight, and exactly one minute before His Royal Highness drove up himself from the Royal Apartments. Lady Blakeney was looking more radiant and beautiful than ever before, so everyone remarked, when a few moments later she appeared in the crowded ballroom on the arm of His Royal Highness and closely followed by my lord Anthony Dewhurst and by Sir Percy himself, who had the young Duchess of Flintshire on his arm.

“What do you mean, you incorrigible rogue,” her Grace was saying with playful severity to her cavalier, “by coming so late to the ball? Another two minutes and you would have arrived after His Royal Highness himself: and how would you have justified such solecism, I would like to know.”

“By swearing that thoughts of your Grace had completely addled my poor brain,” he retorted gaily, “and that in the mental contemplation of such charms I forgot time, place, social duties, everything.”

“Even the homage due to truth,” she laughed. “Cannot you for once in your life be serious, Sir Percy?”

“Impossible, dear lady, whilst your dainty hand rests upon mine arm.”

II

It was not often that His Royal Highness graced Bath with his presence, and the occasion was made the excuse for quite exceptional gaiety and brilliancy. The new fashions of this memorable year of 1793 had defied the declaration of war and filtrated through from Paris: London milliners had not been backward in taking the hint, and though most of the more starchy dowagers obstinately adhered to the prewar fashions⁠—the huge hooped skirts, stiff stomachers, pointed waists, voluminous panniers and monumental head erections⁠—the young and smart matrons were everywhere to be seen in the new gracefully flowing skirts innocent of steel constructions, the high waist line, the pouter pigeon-like draperies over their pretty bosoms.

Her Grace of Flintshire looked ravishing with her curly fair hair entirely free from powder, and Lady Betty Draitune’s waist seemed to be nestling under her armpits. Of course Lady Blakeney wore the very latest thing in striped silks and gossamer-like muslin and lace, and it was hard to enumerate all the pretty débutantes and young brides who fluttered about the Assembly Rooms this night.

And gliding through that motley throng, bright-plumaged like a swarm of butterflies, there were a few figures dressed in sober blacks and greys⁠—the émigrés over from France⁠—men, women, young girls and gilded youth from out that seething cauldron of revolutionary France⁠—who had shaken the dust of that rampant demagogism from off their buckled shoes, taking away with them little else but their lives. Mostly chary of speech, grave in their demeanour, bearing upon their wan faces traces of that horror which had seized them when they saw all the traditions of their past tottering around them, the proletariat whom they had despised turning against them with all the fury of caged beasts let loose, their kindred and friends massacred, their King and Queen murdered. The shelter and security which hospitable England had extended to them, had not altogether removed from their hearts the awful sense of terror and of gloom.

Many of them had come to Bath because the more genial climate of the West of England consoled them for the inclemencies of London’s fogs. Received with open arms and with that lavish hospitality which the refugees and the oppressed had already learned to look for in England, they had gradually allowed themselves to be drawn into the fashionable life of the gay little city. The Comtesse de Tournai was here and her daughter, Lady Ffoulkes, Sir Andrew’s charming and happy bride, and M. Paul Déroulède and his wife⁠—beautiful Juliette Déroulède with the strange, haunted look in her large eyes, as of one who has looked closely on death; and M. le duc de Kernogan with his exquisite daughter, whose pretty air of seriousness and of repose sat so quaintly upon her young face. But everyone remarked as soon as M. le duc entered the rooms that M. Martin-Roget was not in attendance upon Mademoiselle, which was quite against the order of things; also that M. le duc appeared to keep a more sharp eye than usual upon his daughter in consequence, and that he