Chapter XVII: The “common Domino.”

Lady Bell continued, however, to pay the penalty for the choice of a character, by being accosted on the part of numerous Indian conjurers, sailors, and Roman emperors, all uniting in the demand that she should tell them their fortunes. Neither was the demand made in formal histrionic phrase, but in free and easy modern language, spoken by voices teasingly familiar to her.

But Lady Bell was so bewildered and vexed because all her boasted penetration had failed her, that not having succeeded in detecting the one, she would not take the trouble to identify the many. She guessed that some of these masquers were Sir George Waring, Lord Boscobel, Colonel Selby; but she did not care to come to a decision. What was it to her who they were?

The gentlemen were not so indifferent or irresolute about the secret of the graceful little fortune-teller. Fine gentlemen though they were, and at their own ball, they were importunate and aggressive, until their advances became irksome and offensive to Lady Bell. She grew sick of them, and the whole riotous company, and wished herself with all her heart well out of it—out of town—back to her peaceful Summerhill, with her calm, beneficent Mrs. Sundon.

Lady Bell absolutely declined doing any more palmistry, and put off the pressing claimants on her powers with as much determination as she could summon to her aid on the spur of the moment.

“No, no, sirs, the stars are not in the ascendant,” she said, with a very sincere sigh, “the cards won’t shuffle. You must go to another fortune-teller.”

“To no other, most unpropitious Sybil,” asserted one voice.

“Let me shuffle your cards,” suggested another, offering to take the tools of Lady Bell’s trade for the night out of her hands.

“I’ll cross your hand with gold, my girl,” said a third, and at the same time presumed to seize Lady Bell’s disengaged hand.

Lady Bell was roused to a more energetic renunciation of her character.

“I won’t be bribed. See here!” she cried.

And raising the spread-out pack of cards, she scattered them far and near.

Her action was partly misunderstood, and some of her followers stopped to pick up the cards, as Lady Bell had hoped they would. She moved on directly, but in the little scuffle she had already been separated from her party. For the moment the crowd had closed in between them, and Lady Bell found herself alone in her disguise, exposed to rougher horse-play.

Any masquer who saw a woman alone in the crowd, might regard her, charitably, in Captain Fane’s strain, as a lady looking out for adventures. Whether so looking out, or innocent of such an intention, the mere fact of her having foolishly exposed herself, constituted her good game for the buffoonery of the masquerade.

Yet Lady Bell’s trepidation did not amount to panic, and she assured herself that it was silly, for she had simply to take off her mask, and show that she was Lady Bell Trevor, in order to find friends, and be freed from molestation. Any woman who had ever sustained a serious misadventure at a masquerade, like most women who sustained misadventures in a wider sphere—the world, had only been too willing to undergo the infliction, or had yielded to a private reason for risking it, and either way had themselves to thank for their humiliation.

But Lady Bell was certainly unwilling to plead helplessness, crave pity, and virtually acknowledge that her natural dignity did not stand her in good stead. Moreover, the acknowledgment ought not to be required of her; for already some who knew her, as she was convinced, though it was their present cue to conceal their knowledge, were there. Sir George Waring and Colonel Selby, the first as Sir Roger de Coverley, the second as the Lord Chancellor of England, had come up with her, holding some of her cards in their hands.

Lady Bell was tired, shaken. She could think of no other resource than that of flying from her persecutors with as much speed as she could command, or the crowd would allow. While she hurried along she held down her head, and tried not to listen to besieging addresses, suggesting in her attitude something of the aspect of Ferdinand seeking vainly to shake off Ariel’s tricksy sprites; notwithstanding that Lady Bell’s foes were of more solid substance.

The group arrested the attention of a domino, who at once made for it, catching up by chance as he did so one of the fortune-teller’s cards which dropped from a gentleman’s hand. While he joined in the pursuit, which was attracting notice, he heard bets laid on the race that caused his blood to boil, little as bets meant at a time when men wagered on drops running down a window-pane, on an old woman’s hobbling, or on the hours that a sick man might live.

The prize might be nothing to Captain Fane, for it was possibly a case of mistaken identity where he was concerned; and even if he were in the right, he was ignorant and jealous of Lady Bell’s reason for keeping herself hidden from him, as it seemed.

It might very well be that she would resent his interference. He could not help remembering, though she had sought to atone for it, how she had treated his opposition at the water-party.

He might reap no thanks, only anger and disgust as the result of his officiousness. But for her sake he would venture all.

He scrawled with his pencil on the card which he had appropriated. “Do you wish to get away and go home without waiting for the unmasking? I shall put you into a chair—say yes, and I shall be satisfied that I am right.”

He pushed forward in advance of the others and thrust the card into Lady Bell’s hand.

She glanced mechanically at the writing, with which she was not sufficiently acquainted for it to show the writer. But the electric shock was given at last, she had not the slightest fear of trusting herself with that domino. “Oh yes!” she drew a long sigh of relief and joy, standing still and speaking in her natural tones.

“A swindle, a cheat, madam,” shouted the wildest of her train; “you decline to read our fortunes, and you answer the first question put to you by an interloper.”

“Gentlemen,” interposed the domino, speaking in cold tones of indisputable authority and sober reason, “the lady is fatigued with the foolery, and wishes to go home. I suppose you do not interfere with the inclinations of your guests?”

The gentlemen looked at each other and paused discomfited.

“Sold, by Jove!”

“I wish you joy, Sir George, of your successful rival.”

“Devil take him, who can he be? never heard that my lady had any troublesome appendage—country cousin, parson in disguise, former husband come alive again, recent husband come to light.”

Before the exclamations burst forth, the domino was leading the fortune-teller through the crowd, compelling a passage for her, to the door of the room, out into the vestibule, and down the stairs, at the foot of which they stopped, and he bade a watchman call a chair.

Then Lady Bell took off her mask, and he pulled off his, and each smiled forgiving and forgiven in the face of the other, while the servants and their company thought the two a proper couple (though Harry was no Adonis), and on plain enough terms.

But the lady and gentleman were not bent on one of the clandestine expeditions and frantic escapades in which masquerades frequently ended, since they would not set about it barefaced. Therefore the pair being manifestly honest, were left to themselves, unmolested by the kind souls that liked to look on them at a little distance. For anything more Lady Bell and Captain Fane were deficient to the apprehension of their more or less debased fellow-creatures in what are to them essential elements of thrilling interest—crime and shame.

“I am so glad to get out of it—I shall never wish to go to a masquerade again. But could you find no better disguise than a common domino?” Lady Bell began to recover herself, and to pout the least in the world. “There were scores of dominoes like this,” she hinted regretfully, putting a little finger shyly on a fold of the objectionable domino.

“Could my Lady Bell not dress up herself more fitly than in the cloak of a gipsy fortune-teller, when there were crowns and sceptres, wands and wings, in the room?” the gentleman reproached his partner with delirious fervour, softly grasping a corner of the maligned cloak.

“I saw no acting,” cried Lady Bell in a flurry, to render the conversation less personal. “A strolling troop, in a barn, would have managed infinitely better. This was all fudge and lampooning. I did not ask for true acting, but I expected something nearer to it from persons of refinement and education. I am going to have the real thing to-morrow.”

“Tell me where, Lady Bell,” he solicited directly.

“I am going to the play, sir, the veritable play; no wonder everybody rushes to Covent Garden and Drury Lane; though some pretend that there are private theatricals worth listening to, I should feel inclined to doubt it, after to-night. I am to have a box in company with Miss Greathead of Guy’s Cliff, who knows Mrs. Siddons—she is taking the Londoners’ hearts by storm, after they nearly broke her heart years ago.”

“How do you know that?” he asked for the mere sake of hearing her speak and detaining her a moment longer.

“Oh, I know Mrs. Siddons finely,” she sparkled back upon him, enjoying what she imagined to be his curiosity, “and perhaps some day,” she lowered her voice inadvertently and the tell-tale colour leapt up in her cheeks, “I shall tell you how she and I came to be personal friends. You have never seen her? Then you have never seen such a genius on the boards. Miss Yates is nothing to her; she eclipses Mr. Garrick himself.”

He was not caring for geniuses on the boards at that moment, however much he might care for them at another. What were the stage and its stars to Harry Fane, when Lady Bell had availed herself of his assistance, had preferred his protection to that of any man of her set at the masquerade, and when the words, “Some day I shall tell you how she and I came to be personal friends,” were ringing sweetly in his ears?