“How is Mrs. Tregonell?” asked the youth, not being given to the discussion of abstract questions, frivolous or solemn. He had a mind which could only grasp life in the concrete — an intellect that required to deal with actualities — people, coats, hats, boots, dinner, park-hack — just as little children require actual counters to calculate with.
He subsided into a chair behind Miss Courtenay, and, the box being a large one, remained there for the rest of the play — to the despair of a companion youth in the stalls, who looked up ever and anon, vacuous and wondering, and who resembled his friend as closely as a well-matched carriage-horse resembles his fellow — grooming and action precisely similar.
“What brilliant diamonds!” said Christabel, noticing a collet necklace which Psyche wore in the second act, and which was a good deal out of harmony with her Greek drapery — not by any means resembling those simple golden ornaments which patient Dr. Schliemann and his wife dug out of the hill at Hissarlik. “But, of course, they are only stage jewels,” continued Christabel; “yet they sparkle as brilliantly as diamonds of the first water.”
“Very odd, but so they do,” muttered young FitzPelham, behind her shoulder; and then, sotto voce to the Major, he said—”that’s the worst of giving these women jewels, they will wear them.”
“And that emerald butterfly on her shoulder,” pursued Christabel; “one would suppose it were real.”
“A real butterfly?”
“No, real emeralds.”
“It belonged to the Empress of the French, and was sold for three hundred and eighty guineas at Christie’s,” said FitzPelham; whereupon Major Bree’s substantial boot came down heavily on the youth’s Queen Anne shoe. “At least, the Empress had one like it,” stammered FitzPelham, saying to himself, in his own vernacular, that he had “hoofed it.”
“How do you like Stella Mayne?” he asked by-and-by, when the act was over.
“I am charmed with her. She is the sweetest actress I ever saw; not the greatest — there are two or three who far surpass her in genius; but there is a sweetness — a fascination. I don’t wonder she is the rage. I only wonder Major Bree could have deprived me of the pleasure of seeing her all this time.”
“You could stand the piece a second time, couldn’t you?”
“Certainly — or a third time. It is so poetical — it carries one into a new world!”
“Pretty foot and ankle, hasn’t she?” murmured FitzPelham — to which frivolous comment Miss Courtenay made no reply.
Her soul was rapt in the scene before her — the mystic wood whither Psyche had now wandered with her divine lover. The darkness of a summer night in the Greek Archipelago — fire-flies flitting athwart ilex and olive bushes — a glimpse of the distant starlit sea.
Here — goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity — Psyche stole with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, gazing spell-bound upon that godlike countenance — represented in actual flesh by a chubby round face and round brown eyes — and in her glad surprise letting fall a drop of oil from her lamp on Cupid’s winged shoulder — whereon the god leaves her, wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they must meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek to know his name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. In the third, poor Psyche is in ignoble bondage — a slave to Venus, in the goddess’s Palace at Cythera — a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till the god of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport of all the arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor Psyche — tearful, despairing — has to toil at the creation of the Queen of Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discovered to be all falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the arched instep under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene Psyche alternates between smiles and tears; and then at the last Cupid appears — claims his mistress, defies his mother, and the happy lovers, linked in each other’s arms, float skyward on a shaft of lime-light. And so the graceful mythic drama ends — fanciful from the first line to the last, gay and lightly touched as burlesque, yet with an element of poetry which burlesque for the most part lacks.
Christabel’s interest had been maintained throughout the performance.
“How extraordinarily silent you have been all the evening, Jessie!” she said, as they were putting on their cloaks; “surely, you like the play!”
“I like it pretty well. It is rather thin, I think; but then, perhaps, that is because I have ‘Twelfth Night’ still in my memory, as we heard Mr. Brandram recite it last week at Willis’s Rooms.”
“Nobody expects modern comedy to be as good as Shakespeare,” retorted Christabel; “you might as well find fault with the electric light for not being quite equal to the moon. Don’t you admire that exquisite creature?”
“Which of them?” asked Jessie, stolidly, buttoning her cloak.
“Which of them! Oh, Jessie, you have generally such good taste. Why, Miss Mayne, of course. It is almost painful to look at the others. They are such common earthy creatures, compared with her!”
“I have no doubt she is very wonderful — and she is the fashion, which goes for a great deal,” answered Miss Bridgeman; but never a word in praise of Stella Mayne could Christabel extort from her. She — who, educated by Shepherd’s Bush and poverty, was much more advanced in knowledge of evil than the maiden from beyond Tamar — suspected that some sinister influence was to be feared in Stella Mayne. Why else had the Major so doggedly opposed their visit to this particular theatre? Why else did he look so glum when Stella Mayne was spoken about?
CHAPTER VIII.
LE SECRET DE POLICHINELLE.
The next day but one was Thursday — an afternoon upon which Mrs. Tregonell was in the habit of staying at home to receive callers, and a day on which her small drawing-rooms were generally filled with more or less pleasant people — chiefly of the fairer sex — from four to six. The three rooms — small by degrees and beautifully less — the old-fashioned furniture and profusion of choicest flowers — lent themselves admirably to gossip and afternoon tea, and were even conducive to mild flirtation, for there was generally a sprinkling of young men of the FitzPelham type — having nothing particular to say, but always faultless in their dress, and well-meaning as to their manners.
On this afternoon — which to Christabel seemed a day of duller hue and colder atmosphere than all previous Thursdays, on account of Angus Hamleigh’s absence — there were rather more callers than usual. The season was ripening towards its close. Some few came to pay their last visit, and to inform Mrs. Tregonell and her niece about their holiday movements — generally towards the Engadine or some German Spa — the one spot of earth to which their constitution could accommodate itself at this time of year.
“I am obliged to go to Pontresina before the end of July,” said a ponderous middle-aged matron to Miss Courtenay. “I can’t breathe any where else in August and September.”
“I think you would find plenty of air at Boscastle,” said Christabel, smiling at her earnestness; “but I dare say the Engadine is very nice!”
“Five thousand feet above the level of the sea,” said the matron proudly.
“I like to be a little nearer the sea — to see it — and smell it — and feel its spray upon my face,” answered Christabel. “Do you take your children with you?”
“Oh, no, they all go to Ramsgate with the governess and a maid.”
“Poor little things! And how sad for you to know that there are all those mountain passes — a three days’ journey — between you and your children.”
“Yes, it is very trying!” sighed the mother; “but they are so fond of Ramsgate; and the Engadine is the only place that suits me.”
“You have never been to Chagford?”
“Chagford! No; what is Chagford?”
“A village upon the edge of Dartmoor — all among the Devonshire hills. People go there for the fin
e bracing air. I can’t help thinking it must do them almost as much good as the Engadine.”
“Indeed! I have heard that Devonshire is quite too lovely,” said the matron, who would have despised herself had she been familiar with her native land. “But what have you done with Mr. Hamleigh? I am quite disappointed at not seeing him this afternoon.”
“He is in Scotland,” said Christabel, and then went on to tell as much as was necessary about her lover’s journey to the North.
“How dreadfully dull you must be without him!” said the lady, sympathetically, and several other ladies — notably a baronet’s widow, who had been a friend of Mrs. Tregonell’s girlhood — a woman who never said a kind word of anybody, yet was invited everywhere, and who had the reputation of giving a better dinner, on a small scale, than any other lonely woman in London. The rest were young women, mostly of the gushing type, who were prepared to worship Christabel because she was pretty, an heiress, and engaged to a man of some distinction in their particular world. They had all clustered round Mrs. Tregonell and her niece, in the airy front drawing-room, while Miss Bridgeman poured out tea at a Japanese table in the middle room, waited upon sedulously by Major Bree, Mr. FitzPelham, and another youth, a Somerset House young man, who wrote for the Society papers — or believed that he did, on the strength of having had an essay on “Tame Cats” accepted in the big gooseberry season — and gave himself to the world as a person familiar with the undercurrents of literary and dramatic life. The ladies made a circle round Mrs. Tregonell, and these three gentlemen, circulating with tea-cups, sugar-basins, and cream-pots, joined spasmodically in the conversation.
Christabel owned to finding a certain emptiness in life without her lover. She did not parade her devotion to him, but was much too unaffected to pretend indifference.
“We went to the theatre on Tuesday night,” she said.
“Oh, how could you!” cried the oldest and most gushing of the three young ladies. “Without Mr. Hamleigh?”
“That was our chief reason for going. We knew we should be dull without him. We went to the Kaleidoscope, and were delighted with Psyche.”
All three young ladies gushed in chorus. Stella Mayne was quite too lovely — a poem, a revelation, and so on, and so on. Lady Cumberbridge, the baronet’s widow, pursed her lips and elevated her eyebrows, which, on a somewhat modified form, resembled Lord Thurlow’s, but said nothing. The Somerset House young man stole a glance at FitzPelham, and smiled meaningly; but the amiable FitzPelham was only vacuous.
“Of course you have seen this play,” said Mrs. Tregonell, turning to Lady Cumberbridge. “You see everything, I know?”
“Yes; I make it my business to see everything — good, bad, and indifferent,” answered the strong-minded dowager, in a voice which would hardly have shamed the Lord Chancellor’s wig, which those Thurlow-like eyebrows so curiously suggested. “It is the sole condition upon which London life is worth living. If one only saw the good things, one would spend most of one’s evening at home, and we don’t leave our country places for that. I see a good deal that bores me, an immense deal that disgusts me, and a little — a very little — that I can honestly admire.”
“Then I am sure you must admire ‘Cupid and Psyche,’” said Christabel.
“My dear, that piece, which I am told has brought a fortune to the management, is just one of the things that I don’t care to talk about before young people. I look upon it as the triumph of vice: and I wonder — yes, very much wonder — that you were allowed to see it.”
There was an awfulness about the dowager’s tone as she uttered these final sentences, which out-Thurlowed Thurlow. Christabel shivered, hardly knowing why, but heartily wishing there had been no such person as Lady Cumberbridge among her aunt’s London acquaintance.
“But, surely there is nothing improper in the play, dear Lady Cumberbridge,” exclaimed the eldest gusher, too long in society to shrink from sifting any question of that kind.
“There is a great deal that is improper,” replied the dowager, sternly.
“Surely not in the language: that is too lovely?” urged the gusher. “I must be very dense, I’m afraid, for I really did not see anything objectionable.”
“You must be very blind, as well as dense, if you didn’t see Stella Mayne’s diamonds,” retorted the dowager.
“Oh, of course I saw the diamonds. One could not help seeing them.”
“And do you think there is nothing improper in those diamonds, or their history?” demanded Lady Cumberbridge, glaring at the damsel from under those terrific eyebrows. “If so, you must be less experienced in the ways of the world than I gave you credit for being. But I think I said before that this is a question which I do not care to discuss before young people — even advanced as young people are in their ways and opinions now-a-days.”
The maiden blushed at this reproof; and the conversation, steered judiciously by Mrs. Tregonell, glided on to safer topics. Yet calmly as that lady bore herself, and carefully as she managed to keep the talk among pleasant ways for the next half-hour, her mind was troubled not a little by the things that had been said about Stella Mayne. There had been a curious significance in the dowager’s tone when she expressed surprise at Christabel having been allowed to see this play. That significant tone, in conjunction with Major Bree’s marked opposition to Belle’s wish upon this one matter, argued that there was some special reason why Belle should not see this actress. Mrs. Tregonell, like all quiet people, very observant, had seen the Somerset House young man’s meaning smile as the play was mentioned. What was this peculiar something which all these people had in their minds? and of which she, Christabel’s aunt, to whom the girl’s welfare and happiness were vital, knew nothing.
She determined to take the most immediate and direct way of knowing all that was to be known, by questioning that peripatetic chronicle of fashionable scandal, Lady Cumberbridge. This popular personage knew a great deal more than the Society papers, and was not constrained like those prints to disguise her knowledge in Delphic hints and dark sayings. Lady Cumberbridge, like John Knox, never feared the face of man, and could be as plain-spoken and as coarse as she pleased.
“I should so like to have a few words with you by-and-by, if you don’t mind waiting till these girls are gone,” murmured Mrs. Tregonell.
“Very well, my dear; get rid of them as soon as you can, for I’ve some people coming to dinner, and I want an hour’s sleep before I put on my gown.”
The little assembly dispersed within the next quarter of an hour, and Christabel joined Jessie in the smaller drawing-room.
“You can shut the folding-doors, Belle,” said Mrs. Tregonell, carelessly. “You and Jessie are sure to be chattering; and I want a quiet talk with Lady Cumberbridge.”
Christabel obeyed, wondering a little what the quiet talk would be about, and whether by any chance it would touch upon the play last night. She, too, had been struck by the significance of the dowager’s tone; and then it was so rarely that she found herself excluded from any conversation in which her aunt had part.
“Now,” said Mrs. Tregonell, directly the doors were shut, “I want to know why Christabel should not have been allowed to see that play the other night?”
“What!” cried Lady Cumberbridge, “don’t you know why?”
“Indeed no. I did not go with them, so I had no opportunity of judging as to the play.”
“My dear soul,” exclaimed the deep voice of the dowager, “it is not the play — the play is well enough — it is the woman! And do you really mean to tell me that you don’t know?”
“That I don’t know what?”
“Stella Mayne’s history?”
“What should I know of her more than of any other actress? They are all the same to me, like pictures, which I admire or not, from the outside. I am told that some are women of fashion who go everywhere, and that it is a privilege to know them; and that some one ought hardly to speak about, though one may go to see them; whi
le there are others — —”
“Who hover like stars between two worlds,” said Lady Cumberbridge. “Yes, that’s all true. And nobody has told you anything about Stella Mayne?”
“No one!”
“Then I’m very sorry I mentioned her name to you. I dare say you will hate me if I tell you the truth: people always do; because, in point of fact, truth is generally hateful. We can’t afford to live up to it.”
“I shall be grateful to you if you will tell me all that there is to be told about this actress, who seems in some way to be concerned — —”
“In your niece’s happiness? Well, no, my dear, we will hope not. It is all a thing of the past. Your friends have been remarkably discreet. It is really extraordinary that you should have heard nothing about it; but, on reflection, I think it is really better you should know the fact. Stella Mayne is the young woman for whom Mr. Hamleigh nearly ruined himself three years ago.”
Mrs. Tregonell turned white as death.
Her mind had not been educated to the acceptance of sin and folly as a natural element in a young man’s life. In her view of mankind the good men were all Bayards — fearless, stainless; the bad were a race apart, to be shunned by all good women. To be told that her niece’s future husband — the man for whose sake her whole scheme of life had been set aside, the man whom Christabel and she had so implicitly trusted — was a fashionable libertine — the lover of an actress — the talk of the town — was a revelation that changed the whole colour of life.
“Are you sure that this is true?” she asked, falteringly.
“My dear creature, do I ever say anything that isn’t true? There is no need to invent things. God knows the things people do are bad enough, and wild enough, to supply conversation for everybody. But this about Hamleigh and Stella Mayne is as well known as the Albert Memorial. He was positively infatuated about her; took her off the stage: she was in the back row of the ballet at Drury Lane, salary seventeen and sixpence a week. He lived with her in Italy for a year; then they came back to England, and he gave her a house in St. John’s Wood; squandered his money upon her; had her educated; worshipped her, in fact; and, I am told, would have married her, if she had only behaved herself. Fortunately, these women never do behave themselves: they show the cloven-foot too soon; our people only go wrong after marriage. But I hope, my dear, you will not allow yourself to be worried by this business. It is all a thing of the past, and Hamleigh will make just as good a husband as if it had never happened; better, perhaps, for he will be all the more able to appreciate a pure-minded girl like your niece.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 697