THE CHILLINGHAM BALL.
“I am afraid it is no mistake—I do love him—I know myself at last; but I will not do myself dishonour, I will not let myself be jealous, ill-tempered, or mean, if I can help it.”
Mary Pembroke was seated at her dressing-table, looking full at the mirror, as if she would read through her own eyes straight down into her soul. She was not gifted with fine or over-sensitive feelings, or she might have followed up these words spoken in her heart, by laying out a map of her future life, all desolate and waste, as a poor disappointed maiden’s life would seem to be, until the picture had become too much for endurance, and she had buried her face in her hands and wept passionately over a future before which the eye of faith veils itself in silence and humility. She did not do this—she merely wiped two large tears from her eyes, and smoothed carefully the soft braids of her brown hair.
“I will not do myself dishonour,” she said, “nor show that I am only a fair weather Christian.”
She rose then, and knelt herself down by the white coverlid of her tiny bed, and asked for strength, meaning to use it.
It was the morning of the Chillingham ball, and in the days which preceded the railroad age, when neighbourhoods were confined in fixed circles, this was an event of vital importance to the society which looked upon Chillingham as its central town. For years past that society had computed time by its Chillingham balls, as the Greeks by Olympiads. No young lady was considered to have reached a marriageable age, until she had made her first appearance there, and woe to her aching heart as the years went by, if they still compelled her to appear there unmarried, for there was a dreadful reckoning kept against her on the side seats where the dowagers rested, dowagers who well remembered her first appearance, when she must have been eighteen, at least.
Dread as the ordeal was, and willingly as many would have avoided it, it is not to be wondered at if mothers led their children there for the first time with aching and anxious hearts, judging from their knowledge of the banking-book at home how little provision would be left for them when the bread-winner’s hand should have ceased to work, and knowing that this appearance would test the world’s opinion of them. Good children, they are perhaps educated to make careful housekeepers and dutiful wives; but what will the world say of them, they wonder, as they glance round the room with a slight sinking of the heart, lest when they have brought out the daughters they love so well for a little innocent amusement, they may be suspected of bringing their wares to market.
With feelings as keen as any other mothers, Mrs. Pembroke had looked forward to Mary’s second appearance; and, until the last few days, she had anticipated a little triumph which should renew the days of her own youth. Mr. Pembroke was one of the chief solicitors in the town, and one whose well-tested probity had caused him to be received where his birth and connections would otherwise not have entitled him to notice. Some two or three years before, he had taken Arthur Sandford as a working partner, looking upon him as a young man of merit and industry; but very lately the connection between them had undergone a change. A relative had died, leaving Arthur Sandford a fortune, of which he might have had just expectations, but which he had never been foolish enough to reckon upon, and his place in the firm became a very different one. From that time Mrs. Pembroke had fancied she detected a change in his atteutions to Mary. For years his attachment to her seemed certain, and youth upon her side, and uncertain prospects upon his, seemed to far-seeing friends the only obstacles to their marriage. During these days of happy intimacy, Mary had not cared to ask the question, which she had so bravely set herself to answer that day, nor had she noted the change her mother had detected until the last week, when a circumstance had assured her at once of her own state of feeling, and the necessity of conquering it.
Isabella Vaughan—her mother’s niece, and the daughter of a rich London merchant—had come to spend the Christmas with them, bringing with her London fashions and small-talk, and enough of her father’s money displayed in dress and jewellery to set Chillingham talking of her wit and beauty, although she was not quite so good-looking as Mary thought her. She was older than Mary, and more assured in her manners, and she had evidently set herself to make a conquest of the talented young solicitor, whose new house on the other side of the town was beginning to make people talk. Now, properly, Arthur Sandford should have shown himself indifferent to the London beauty, but he did not; he fell into the snare as readily as the silly fish seizes the well-baited hook. On some pretence or other, he was constantly at the house, and always the gentleman in attendance on the well-fledged coquette; and yet with a measure of his old caution, too, for he contrived to keep Mary always in their near neighbourhood.
As the Chillingham ball approached, wonderful garments had made their appearance by coach from London for Isabella, while Mary’s more modest toilet was doomed to disappointment.
“Mary,” Mrs. Pembroke had said to her, “your papa confesses to a slight embarrassment in money matters just now, and has asked me to be very careful. I know he never says what is not true, or denies us what he can spare,—dear child, can you do without a new dress for the ball?”
