Chapter XIV: Fascination

Mrs. Mordaunt very kindly came, into my room, while I was dressing, to know how I had enjoyed my first ball. I did not seem to be able to tell her anything about it, except that the room was beautiful, and that I danced a great deal.

“And you had pleasant partners?”

“Only one,” I was going to say, but checked myself when I remembered Lady Horatia’s solemn commands. “Yes, pretty well; everybody was very kind to me, and the Duke himself was most attentive.”

“Ah, well, you are a lucky girl to be thus launched forth in the best society. Lady Horatia will not come down to breakfast, and Mr. Mordaunt and I had ours with little Miss Somerton and her governess, and Lady Horatia thought you would like to have yours up here; and there is a letter for you--I think from Aunt Jane.”

The letter I had long been anxiously expecting! Yet somehow, now that I held it in my hand, I felt that whatever she said would not be of much use; in fact, I half dreaded the good influence she had exerted over me, and I was not impatient to read it. So I finished dressing very leisurely, and satisfied dear, good Mrs. Mordaunt’s curiosity as far as I could about the details of the ball and my partners.

“And was not our nephew, Sir Alfred Rivers there?” she inquired, for I had purposely avoided his name.

“Yes, and I danced with him twice, I believe,” said I, with well-assumed indifference. “And I find he is to dine here to-day,” I added, as I put the finishing stroke to the braids of my hair. I longed to ask her whether he was engaged to be married, or what Lady Horatia could have meant, but I shrank from saying anything that would betray the strange interest I felt about him. I remembered hearing Mr. Mordaunt complain that his nephew was wild, and gambled, and that all the women in London were making up to him; but in my present perverse state of mind all this, even the vice of gambling, seemed to increase his fascination.

After breakfast I remembered that I had not yet read Aunt Jane’s letter, and wondered, with a kind of startled self-reproach, at the change which had come over me in the last six weeks, since I wrote to her. When I had sent that letter to her I felt as if she were the only person in the world who could help me, and as if all my future life would depend upon the advice her answer would contain.

Just as I was beginning to read it, the little Brownie came skipping into my room, to see I had my breakfast all right; and she brought a roll of music in her hand, which she told me was sent her by Sir Alfred, for me to look over.

“And he sent a message to me,” she added, with an arch smile, “to beg that I would make you try them over. So come down to the piano directly; there will be no one in the drawing-room for the next two hours.” And she took hold of my hand and led me downstairs.

They were the duets and songs he had mentioned the night before, “Amor possente nome,” in Armida, and one in Zoraide, in which the words he warbled in the conservatory began,

“Ah, nati e ver noi siamo sol per amarci ognor.”

Now these words, and the tones of his splendid voice, still sounded in my ears, and filled me with a kind of wild, intoxicating joy. I sang over my parts in a kind of ecstasy of delight, while the little Brownie stood on a chair, leaning over the end of the piano, and gazing in my face with evidently wondering admiration.

“Oh! go on; it is better than anything at the Opera!” she said, when I came to the solo of Armida’s part.

She was a very odd and original child, and so susceptible of impressions produced by the sentiments uttered in music, that she kept up a kind of graceful action all the time, clasping her hand with an imploring look at the pathetic parts, and raising them in wild triumph at the exulting, joyful passages; then, at some plaintive phrases, the tears ran down her little cheeks.

“I must come down to hear you sing them with Sir Alfred,” she said. “I shall be very good all day, then Madame Perier will let me steal down into the next room, where nobody will see me.”

“But I am not at all sure of singing them with him,” I said. “On the contrary, I am sure I shall not.”

“Why?” she inquired, while her large eyes looked wonderingly into mine with an expression that made me think that I was annoyed at the idea of not singing with him. But with the fine tact I afterwards found she possessed, she made no observation, except to take my hand in both hers, and raise it to her lips, with a kind of winning gentleness and reverence which was very charming. “I must go and do my lessons now, but you will sing to me again to-morrow if--if I don’t hear you to-night? Mamma will be down soon,” she added, as she ran out of the room.

I hastily gathered up the music when I heard this, as I did not want her to see that I had been practising Sir Alfred’s songs, and took them upstairs to my room. In fact, I almost shrank from seeing her, from feeling conscious of the longing I had to sing them with him, and to disobey her mysterious commands.

I then remembered Aunt Jane’s letter; and having no further excuse for delay, I sat down deliberately to read it. Such a letter! Years afterwards the words dwelt in my mind; and at times of my greatest perversity and error, they haunted me with a warning like the writing on the wall of Babylon, that would not be hidden from my eyes--the kind advice, the warning against the very same rebellious frame of mind into which I now felt conscious I had fallen! I read it through, gasping, with a feeling of horror at myself, half wishing that I had not read it.

Aunt Jane seemed to foresee so plainly my exact position and particular temptations. Yet she could not have known that I was coming to Lady Horatia’s, or that I should have met such a person as Sir Alfred.