Part 16 (1/2)
Presently these conversations were hushed, and Grisi and Mario sang! It was as much as I could do to restrain my enthusiasm and delight. I could have shouted out loud--I could almost have sung myself!
In the midst of the applause that followed that heavenly duet, a lady and gentleman came into the room, and at the sight of that lady a new interest came into my life; and all the old half-forgotten sensations of mute pain and rapture that the beauty of Madame Seraskier used to make me feel as a child were revived once more; but with a depth and intensity, in comparison, that were as a strong man's barytone to a small boy's treble.
It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy, over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook, astray for the first time in a fas.h.i.+onable London drawing-room.
A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
A l.u.s.ty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
For such was this poor scribe, and such he had been from a child, until this beautiful lady first swam into his ken.
She was so tall that her eyes seemed almost on a level with mine, but she moved with the alert lightness and grace of a small person. Her thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown, her complexion clear and pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a light bluish gray.
Her nose was short and sharp, and rather tilted at the tip, and her red mouth large and very mobile; and here, deviating from my preconceived ideal, she showed me how tame a preconceived ideal can be. Her perfect head was small, and round her long, thick throat two slight creases went parallel, to make what French sculptors call _le collier de Venus;_ the skin of her neck was like a white camellia, and slender and square-shouldered as she was, she did not show a bone. She was that beautiful type the French define as _la fausse maigre_, which does not mean a ”false, thin woman.”
She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial as I had never seen any one genial before--a person to confide in, to tell all one's troubles to, without even an introduction! When she laughed she showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and everybody around her. But there--I cannot describe her any more than one can describe a beautiful tune.
Out of those magnificent orbs kindness, kindness, kindness was shed like a balm; and after a while, by chance, that balm was shed for a few moments on me, to my sweet but terrible confusion. Then I saw that she asked my hostess who I was, and received the answer; on which she shed her balm on me for one moment more, and dismissed me from her thoughts.
Madame Grisi sang again--Desdemona's song from _Oth.e.l.lo_--and the beautiful lady thanked the divine singer, whom she seemed to know quite intimately; and I thought her thanks--Italian thanks--even diviner than the song--not that I could quite understand them or even hear them well--I was too far; but she thanked with eyes and hands and shoulders-- slight, happy movements--as well as words; surely the sweetest and sincerest words ever spoken.
She was much surrounded and made up to--evidently a person of great importance; and I ventured to ask another shy man standing in my corner who she was, and he answered--
”The d.u.c.h.ess of Towers.”
She did not stay long, and when she departed all turned dull and commonplace that had seemed so bright before she came; and seeing that it was not necessary to bid my hostess good-night and thank her for a pleasant evening, as we did in Pentonville, I got myself out of the house and walked back to my lodgings an altered man.
I should probably never meet that lovely young d.u.c.h.ess again, and certainly never know her; but her shaft had gone straight and true into my very heart, and I felt how well barbed it was, beyond all possibility of its ever being torn out of that blessed wound; might this never heal; might it bleed on forever!
She would be an ideal in my lonely life, to live up to in thought and word and deed. An instinct which I felt to be infallible told me she was as good as she was fair--
_”Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.”_
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE d.u.c.h.eSS OP TOWERS.]
And just as Madame Seraskier's image was fading away, this new star had arisen to guide me by its light, though seen but for a moment; breaking once, through a parted cloud, I knew in which portion of the heavens it dwelt and shone apart, among the fairest constellations; and ever after turned my face that way. Nevermore in my life would I do or say or think a mean thing, or an impure, or an unkind one, if I could help it.
Next day, as we walked to the Foundling Hospital for divine service, Mrs. Lintot severely deigned--under protest, as it were--to cross-examine me on the adventures of the evening.
I did not mention the d.u.c.h.ess of Towers, nor was I able to describe the different ladies' dresses; but I described everything else in a manner I thought calculated to interest her deeply--the flowers, the splendid pictures and curtains and cabinets, the beautiful music, the many lords and ladies gay.
She disapproved of them all.
Existence on such an opulent scale was unconducive to any qualities of real sterling value, either moral or intellectual. Give _her_, for one, plain living and high thinking!
”By-the-way,” she asked, ”what kind of supper did they give you?