The Tournament Ball at Damory Court that night was more than an event. The old mansion was an irresistible magnet. The floor of its yellow parlor was known to be of delectable hugeness. Its gardens were a legend. The whole place, moreover, was steeped in the very odor of old mystery and new romance. Small wonder that to this particular affair the elect—the major was the high custodian of the rolls, his decisions being as the laws of the Medes and Persians—came gaily from the farthest county line, and the big houses of the neighborhood were crammed with over-night guests. By half past nine o’clock the phalanx of chaperons decreed by old custom had begun to arrive, and the great iron gate at the foot of the drive—erect and rustless now—saw an imposing processional of carriages. These passed up a slope as radiant with the fairy light of paper lanterns as a Japanese thoroughfare in festival season. The colored bulbs swung moon-like from tree and shrub, painting their rainbow lusters on grass and driveway. Under the [Pg 310]high gray columns of the porch and into the wide door, framed in its small leaded panes that glowed with the merry light within, poured a stream of loveliness: in carriage-wraps of light tints, collared and edged with fur or eider, or wide-sleeved mandarin coats falling back from dazzling throats and arms, hair swathed with chiffon against the night dews, and gallantly cavaliered by masculine black and white. These from their tiring-rooms overflowed presently, garbed like dreams, to make obeisance to the dowagers and then to drift through flower-lined corridors, the foam on recurrent waves of discovery. Behind the rose-bower in the hall, which shielded a dozen colored musicians—violins, cello, guitars and mandolins—came premonitory chirps and shivers, which presently wove into the low and dreamy melody of Carry me back to old Virginia. Around the walls of the yellow parlor, chairs stood two deep, occupied, or preempted by fan or gloves or lacy handkerchief. The floor, newly waxed, gleamed in the candle-light like beaten moonbeams. At its farther end was a low dais covered by a thin Persian prayer-rug, where a single great tapestried chair of dull gold waited throne-like, flanked on either side by the chaperons, ladies of honor to the queen to come. Promptly as the clock in the hall chimed ten, the music merged into a march. Doors on opposite [Pg 311]sides of the upper hall swung wide and down the broad staircase came, with slow step, a stately procession: two heralds in fawn-colored doublets with scroll and trumpets wound with flowers, behind them the Queen of Beauty, her finger-tips resting lightly in the hand of the Knight of the Crimson Rose, and these followed by as brave a concourse of lords and ladies as ever graced castle-hall in the gallant days “when knighthood was in flower.”