"Very pretty face," muttered the Major, looking at her through his opera-gla.s.s; "but no figure."

The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a young fawn's, was a.s.suredly of a type widely different from the two young women of the fleshly school who represented Psyche's jealous sisters. In their case there seemed just enough mind to keep those sleek, well-favoured bodies in motion. In Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any rate, an ethereal essence, a vivid beauty of expression, an electric brightness, which pa.s.ses for the soul, so predominated over the sensual, that it would have scarcely surprised one if this fragile b.u.t.terfly-creature had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated away into s.p.a.ce. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features, exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the character.

Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her companions this Psyche moved like a being from the spirit world.

"Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!"

"Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box.

"Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."

Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight from Psyche to the Major, as he grunted out his acquiescence, and the troubled expression of his face troubled her. It was plain to her all in a moment that his objection to the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection to Psyche. Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even were she the worst and vilest of her s.e.x, do to any one so remote from her orbit as Christabel Courtenay?

The play went on. Psyche spoke her graceful lines with a perfect intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of cruel inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her face; every movement was harmonious; every look lovely. She was not a startling actress; nor was there any need of great acting in the part that had been written for her. She was Psyche--the loved, the loving, pursued by jealousy, persecuted by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted, despairing--yet loving always; beautiful in every phase of her gentle life.

"Do you like the play?" asked the Major, grimly, when the curtain had fallen on the first act.

"I never enjoyed anything so much! It is so different from all other plays we have seen," said Christabel; "and Psyche--Miss Stella Mayne, is she not--is the loveliest creature I ever saw in my life."

"You must allow a wide margin for stage make-up, paint and powder, and darkened lashes," grumbled the Major.

"But I have been studying her face through my gla.s.s. It is hardly at all made up. Just compare it with the faces of the two sisters, which are like china plates, badly fired. Jessie, what are you dreaming about? You haven't a particle of enthusiasm! Why don't you say something?"

"I don't want to be an echo," said Miss Bridgeman, curtly. "I could only repeat what you are saying. I can't be original enough to say that Miss Mayne is ugly."

"She is simply the loveliest creature we have seen on the stage or off it," exclaimed Christabel, who was too rustic to want to know who Miss Mayne was, and where the manager had discovered such a pearl, as a London playgoer might have done.

"Hark!" said Jessie; "there's a knock at the door."

Christabel's heart began to beat violently. Could it be Angus? No, it was more likely to be some officious person, offering ices.

It was neither; but a young man of the languid-elegant type--one of Christabel's devoted admirers, the very youth who had told her of his having seen "Cupid and Psyche," fifteen times.

"Why this makes the sixteenth time," she said, smiling at him as they shook hands.

"I think it is nearer the twentieth," he replied; "it is quite the jolliest piece in London! Don't you agree with me?"

"I think it is--remarkably--jolly!" answered Christabel, laughing. "What odd words you have in London for the expression of your ideas--and so few of them!"

"A kind of short-hand," said the Major, "arbitrary characters. Jolly means anything you like--awful means anything you like. That kind of language gives the widest scope for the exercise of the imagination."

"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 b.u.t.terfly on her shoulder," pursued Christabel; "one would suppose it were real."

"A real b.u.t.terfly?"

"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 surpa.s.s 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 G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d 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 ign.o.ble bondage--a slave to Venus, in the G.o.ddess's Palace at Cythera--a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till the G.o.d of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring chamber of the G.o.ddess, 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."

"n.o.body 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, b.u.t.toning 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 s.e.x--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 const.i.tution could accommodate itself at this time of year.