Chapter XVI: The Masqued Ball as It Began in Reality

Lady Bell was coy. She was provoking, she was wilful, and she was perverse, in the strange gladness which was so dashed with emotion, but of which she strove hard, and almost succeeded, to show only the frolicksome side.

“I shan’t tell you what I am going to wear, Captain Fane,” Lady Bell said, “and you are not to tell whether you are to be a peasant or a prince. I shall put my fingers in my ears if you do. I mean to keep my secret. I tell you all the fun will be in finding each other out—as if I could not find him out among a thousand,” she said to herself, while her glance fell beneath his reproachful gaze, “and if he should be too stupid to guess me under a disguise,” she added—always for her own satisfaction—“why I can take off my mask and enlighten him at any moment.”

Captain Fane was forced to submit, thinking in some measure, as his mistress thought, “Well, the information beforehand would only be a precaution to save time. However crowded the rooms may be, she can never elude me.”

But neither Lady Bell nor Captain Fane had ever been at a masquerade ball. On the lady and gentleman’s separate arrivals, after a way had been made through the excited crowd which pressed about the doors and pushed into the lobby of the club itself, and was driven back by watchmen, in order to witness the spectacle of the season, the scene which presented itself was one of wild disorder.

A great assemblage of pretentious and grotesque figures, who for the most part could do little else to assume foreign and cast-off native characters, strutted, stalked, shambled, stamped, bawled, growled, and squeaked amidst a chorus of loud remarks, shouts of laughter, and roars of derision. Communication between all save the initiated was next to impossible.

Lady Bell and Captain Fane lost themselves, and what was worse, could not find each other, incontinently, and in spite of the magnet which each formed for the other, and the conclusive test which each believed he or she could apply to the other.

“This is the very paradise of fools,” thought the not very tolerant sailor, as he elbowed his way along, and doggedly resisted the audacious attack on his notice made in very wantonness, or on mistaken premises.

“No, I won’t ogle that intolerable shepherdess, Lady Bell never perpetrated such a crook.

“If Columbus keep raking me with his glass, as if I sailed in command of his ship’s consort, I’ll be tempted to give him a knock on the head with his own telescope. He sail a carvel or discover new lands! He is only fit for the tub of that Diogenes which Dick Turpin has kicked over!

“What a game for grown men and women! All the rank, wealth, and intelligence of England engaged in it, as the news prints will have it to-morrow.

“Where on earth can Lady Bell be? She is not that fair one with the locks of gold—borrowed locks clearly—over her own dark hair. No, this lady is several inches too tall, and she walks like a stork, instead of footing it like a fairy.

“Crossing the line is a joke to this. The Jack Tars have more point in their gambols. Avast! Yonder goes Neptune with his trident, summoned by my words from the vasty deep. But I’ll have none of him. I have enough of him on his own element, to be let off from the contact here.

“Lady Bell is not walking in the minuet. What does she mean by thus giving me the slip? How do I know what harm she may be running into in the confounded freedom of this masquerade? All the rage is for adventures, pleasant or unpleasant. I suppose every pretty woman will be mortally disappointed if she do not have her share. Oh heavens! the folly of women, and oh heavens! the folly of men—of a pretended Timon in a shabby blue jacket for thinking to mend them.”

But Captain Fane was not there in a blue jacket, shabby or otherwise, else he might not have sought far and wide in vain. He had, between ignorance and a spice of spite at Lady Bell, because she would not afford him a clue to her character for the evening, taken no more distinctive disguise than one of the abounding black dominoes or loose cloaks, of which there were scores in the room, worn by lazy, shy, or proud men and women, many of the former of much the same height as Captain Fane.

After all the domino, as proved by continental patronage, and by its invariable use on the part of those who had covert designs to prosecute at this or any other masquerade, was the one sufficient and safe disguise in which men and women could glide here and there, and appear and disappear miraculously in the crowd.

But wearers of dominoes who wished to be known, must wait for the late hour when every guest was to remove his or her mask, and step forth in proper identity.

Captain Fane’s temper was not his strong point, and his disposition was not accommodating. He was too ruffled and piqued to receive any comfort from the prospect of a humiliating confession of defeat, and a petition for mercy.

In the meantime, if her vexed partner could have known it, poor Lady Bell was not enjoying this masquerade, to which she had looked forward with keen, girlish zest and a softer interest. She had the sore humiliation—granted it was by her own fault—to be recognised by a multitude of her set, of Mrs. Lascelles’ friends and of Lady Bell’s danglers, and yet to remain unrecognised by the one man whose recognition she craved.

Lady Bell had dressed herself as a gipsy fortune-teller, in a remarkably respectable rustic gown—for a gipsy, in the authentic red cloak and kerchief over her head, with a pack of incorrectly clean cards. But, unfortunately, fortune-telling, though not so plentiful as blackberries or dominoes, abounded to the degree that Captain Fane, himself undistinguished, passed at a little distance without eliciting a spark of the magnetic influence, the very woman who was swaying him in spite of his reason, and almost of his conscience, who was filling him with a strong, untrained heart’s concentrated love, which in contrast with the calculating spent loves of the jaded hearts around, was fit to work like madness in the brain.

Lady Bell was greatly chagrined, half angry with Captain Fane for being horribly, unaccountably stupid, half doubtful, with a pang, if he who continued hidden from her, as she from him, was really in the room. Something might have happened, a sudden appointment to a ship, an accident—his being stopped, and wounded as well as robbed, on his way to the ball—or a malicious story heard to her discredit, for he was precise in his notions, and stern in upholding them, as she knew from her experience at the water-party.

Sailors had two standing-points from which they regarded women. The one standing-point was that of coarser salt-water Lovelaces and Lotharios, to whom no woman was sacred, and who trusted none. The other was that of Turks, who locked up their women in western harems, and exacted from the women the meekest domesticity.

Harry Fane was no profligate Lovelace, Lady Bell was sure; but she was not equally certain that he might not develop into a rigid, caustic captain of his own household.

Lady Bell had murmured loudly at the moroseness of poor old Squire Trevor, when she, as a silly child, had tried his patience; should she not be a fool indeed to put herself, as a woman, in the power of another master?

And this would not be a fine gentleman who might neglect and be unfaithful to her, and still be suave and tolerant to her faults, having consideration of his own grievous sins.

This would be another sour and savage man, rendered a hundred times more formidable in his prime by the weapons which her love and his would put into his hands to pierce both their hearts.

Yet she was old and wise enough to know that infinitely worse might befall her. What a poor chance there was for women of her class and culture in life! Humbler women might be more stolid, less alive to their injuries, abler to keep their own.

These were sad reflections to qualify the noisy nonsense of a masquerade. Lady Bell was very sorry for herself, and soon grew weary of the amusement. She discovered that it was rarely dependent on the lively cleverness which could enter into the spirit of the game and play it out well. The ball was kept up rather by the impudence and effrontery which could break through every restraint, and could administer and endorse, without flinching, the rudest rebuffs.

The Troubadours, King Alfreds, and Friar Tucks, the Abbesses, Beggar Girls, and Sapphos, aimed more frequently at outraging than at expressing their _rôles_. It was regarded as the best joke when the Troubadour flung away his guitar, King Alfred hobnobbed with Captain Macheath, and Friar Tuck swam, sauntered, and sniffed at a vinaigrette. In like manner fair applause was won by the Abbess entering into an open flirtation with a soldier of fortune; by the Beggar Girl complaining peevishly of the liberties taken by a courtier, who had trodden on her beggar’s trappings; and by Sappho, while oppressed with a “snivelling cold,” and beset by a most pronounced Devonshire dialect, indulging in entirely prosaic and matter-of-fact remarks.

No doubt, the abuse of the characters adopted, was a great deal more easily attained than the use would have been, and, making allowance for the average limits of human intellect, the people were wise in their generation. But the effect was disappointing to an enthusiastic young Lady Bell.

The affair did not stop at a brilliant burlesque—it went as far as an earlier screaming farce.

Lady Bell began to grow timid and nervous as the mirth grew faster and more furious. She clung to the support of any acquaintance such as Mrs. Lascelles—who, the wish being father to the thought, possibly, personated the widow loved by Sir Roger de Coverley—in passing through the heaving, changing groups.

Captain Fane was wrong in one suspicion: Lady Bell did not seek adventures. On the contrary, when she saw the bold licence to which they tended, she shrank back from them; she had very soon ceased to play the rustic fortune-teller, as she had begun to play it with innocent spirit and pains. She was ashamed of thinking of acting where hardly any one else acted.