"The old place is just the same, isn't it?" says one tall bearded man
to another, as they stand at the window of the Naval and Military
Club, and look out at the lighted streets in the grey November dusk.
The man addressed turns his keen dark eyes on his companion's face.
"The same--yes, I suppose it is. It's only people who change, you
know. Places and things haven't their excuse."
"Well, changed or not, I'm glad to be back again," says Major
Trentermain of the Twelfth. He and his friend, Colonel Carlisle,
have just returned from Burmah, and are enjoying the comforts of
club-life, the reunion with old friends, the hundred-and-one things
that, familiar enough once, have become of double value since
sacrificed for the exigencies of foreign service, and lost through
years of hard work and fierce warfare, and the myriad discomforts of
climate and life abroad.
"London is the best place in the world to enjoy life in," continues
Trentermain. "I've been looking up old friends to-day. Such
welcomes! Didn't expect to find so many in town. But the country's
beastly just now; even the hunting's spoilt by the weather."
"Old friends," echoes his companion drearily. "I wonder if I've got
any left. I feel like a Methuselah come back; it seems a lifetime
since I went abroad."
He passes his hand over his short-cut iron-grey hair, and half sighs.
He is a splendid-looking man. Tall, erect, powerful, with keen dark
eyes and a heavy drooping moustache, dark still in contrast to his
hair--a man who carries his forty-five years lightly enough, despite
hard service and trying climate. His eyes gaze out on the darkening
streets, where the lamps are shining, and his thoughts go back to
some thirteen years before, to a time of fierce joy and fiercer
suffering.
"I wonder where _she_ is now?" he thinks to himself. "Pshaw!
married, of course, long ago. I wonder I have not forgotten her.
Thirteen years of such a life as mine ought to knock all memories and
romance out of one."
He laughs a little bitterly and impatiently, and then plunges into a
discussion with his friend, which resolves itself into an arrangement
to dine and go to the theatre together afterwards.
"I have promised to look in at Vane's rooms," says Major Trentermain.
"You'll come too, won't you? He is full of some new
craze--æstheticism, he calls it. All his people have gone in for it
extensively, and he seems to be bitten with the same mania. You
really should see his rooms. Quite a study."
"Oh, yes; I'll come," answers Carlisle indifferently. He is rarely
anything else but indifferent now. Nothing rouses or interests him
except, perhaps, "big game" or hard fighting.
They go to the Gaiety. To Carlisle the performance seems idiotic in
the extreme.
"Do come away. I can't stand this trash," he mutters impatiently.
"But that's Belle Burton singing," remonstrates Trentermain, who is
more "up" to the goings on of London as it is, than his friend.
"What of that?" demands Carlisle.
"Every one's talking of her. She's----" (Then comes a mysterious
whisper.) Colonel Carlisle frowns and tugs his heavy moustache.
"Vice idealized as 'celebrity.' Umph! That's a modern definition?
Suppose I'm old-fashioned enough to look upon it as it is. Come, you
can't really care for such rubbish, Trent. It's an insult to common
sense, I think. And look at that row of vapid idiots grinning from
ear to ear--boys with the _blasé_ faces of men, and limbs like
thread-paper. Fine stuff for soldiers there!"
"That's a detachment of the Crutch and Toothpick Brigade," laughs
Trentermain; "also a new importation of society since we bade
farewell to Albion's shores. British youth don't seem to have much
backbone, eh?"
They laugh and rise and go out, to the intense disgust of a bevy of
fair ones who have been directing Parthian glances at the two
magnificent-looking men in the stalls, and drawing comparisons
between them and the "Brigade" in no way complimentary to the latter.
Once free of the theatre, they hail a hansom and are driven to the
rooms of Valentine Vane, an old comrade of their own who has retired
from the service, and is cultivating artistic tastes with
praiseworthy assiduity.
But Valentine Vane, or V.V., as his friends call him, is in a state
of pleasant excitement. He has been invited to a reception at the
house of one of the most famous leaders of the new school, and he
insists upon carrying the two officers off with him despite their
remonstrances.
"She bade me bring any friend I pleased," he says enthusiastically.
"Ah, when you see her! Such grace, such languor, such divine
indolence! Every attitude a poem; every look a revelation of subtle
meaning! Ah!"
"Sounds serpentine, I think," says Carlisle, _sotto voce_. "Gives
you the impression of a snake gliding about. Can't say I appreciate
the prospect."
"Of course you are as yet Philistines," continues V.V., pouring some
scent over his handkerchief as he speaks, and gently waving the
delicate cambric to disperse the fragrance. "Ah, you have much to
learn!"
"My dear fellow," says Carlisle good-humouredly, "do shut up that
nonsense, and talk rationally."
"Rational?" echoes Vane, in surprise. "Am I not that? What is there
irrational in finding delight in all that is beautiful, in wishing to
be surrounded by sweet sounds and fair objects, in striving to revive
the glories of the Hellenic age in worshipping Art as the glorious
and ennobling thing it is?"
"I am not going to say anything against art," answers Colonel
Carlisle; "but I don't think there is anything of the Greek type
about Englishmen, either physically or intellectually, leaving out of
the question the depressing influences of climate."
"Ah!" sighs Vane pityingly. "It is all new and strange to you.
Æstheticism, as interpreted by modern hierophants, is, of course,
essentially different from the Hellenic school; but its aim and
object is the same--to beautify the common things of life, to ennoble
the soul, as well as please the eye and elevate the senses."
"Well, I am not sufficiently up in the subject to understand or argue
about it," laughed the Colonel. "Perhaps after to-night----"
"Ah, yes! Wait till you see _her_!" cries Vane enthusiastically.
"She who has converts by the hundred, whose intellect is as beautiful
as the body which is its temple; to whom not only the worship but the
perception of art is a natural and exquisite impulse; whose grace,
whose mind, whose movements----"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake spare me any more 'serpentine' descriptions!"
entreats Carlisle. "I am quite ready to believe in this wonderful
high priestess of yours. Is she anything like Ellen Terry?"
"Ellen Terry is sublime also," says Vane rebukingly. "There's not
another actress on the stage could walk in those clinging draperies
of hers. Is she not a poem?"
"She _acted_ one," says the Colonel dryly. "I saw her in 'The Cup.'
I am not educated up to the appreciation of subtleties yet."
"I have met at least a dozen fair-haired girls who have all told me
they were considered 'so like Ellen Terry,'" puts in Trentermain. "I
began to think she must be a 'priestess' also."
"Ah, there are a good many changes since I was in London last," says
the Colonel. "But there, I see you are impatient to be off.
You--you don't mean to say you are going to wear _that_ flower, Vane?"
He points to a gardenia in his button-hole as he speaks.
"Yes; why not?" demands his friend in surprise.
"Oh! I thought the sunflower or the lily was only admissible," says
Carlisle gravely. "I was going to ask if it would be possible to
procure one each for Trent and myself before entering the Temple of
Art and æstheticism."
It is simply out of idle curiosity that Carlisle has accompanied Vane
and Trentermain. He expects to be terribly bored; but when they
alight at the famous house in Kensington, and everywhere he sees the
delicate subdued hues, the softly-shaded lights, the
gracefully-arranged ferns and shrubs and hot-house blossoms, the
artistic yet suitable dresses of the attendants, who move about so
unobtrusively (there is not a man-servant anywhere), the strange hush
and quietude, broken by no loud voices or discordant laughter, he
begins to think the new school is not so bad after all.
"And now for the priestess," he says in a whisper to Trent, as they
follow their friend from the tea-room, which is simply a gem. His
tall figure passes through the curtained doorway. A light like
moonlight fills all the room into which he enters. His head towers
above Vane's, and straight before him he sees a woman with a halo of
golden hair loose about her brow, with a soft, languid, serious
smile, with----
Their eyes meet. After thirteen long years of absence and
separation, Cyril Carlisle finds himself once again in the presence
of the only woman he has ever really loved.
"Colonel Carlisle, Lady Etwynde Fitz-Herbert."
He bends over her hand as she gives it. In that moment she is
calmer, more self-possessed than himself.
"I--I hope--I beg," he stammers confusedly. "I mean, I had no idea
when Vane asked me to come here that I should find myself in _your_
house."
"You are very welcome," she says, and the low, tender music of her
voice thrills him with an exquisite pain. "I--I saw your regiment
had returned. You have been away a great many years."
"A great many," he answers, his eyes sweeping over the lovely face
and figure of the queenly woman, who is so like and yet so different
to the radiant, happy girl he had left.
"You--you are very little altered," she says presently, and the great
fan of peacock's feathers in her hand trembles as she meets his
glance.
"Am I?" he says bitterly. "I should have thought the reverse; I feel
changed enough, Heaven knows."
She is silent. Her heart is beating fast, the colour comes and goes
in her face. She is thinking how glad she is she did not put on that
terra-cotta gown with its huge puffs and frills, but discarded it at
the last moment for this soft creamy robe of Indian silk, that seems
to float about her like a mist, and show all the lovely curves of her
perfect figure as she moves or stands. Cyril Carlisle thinks her
more lovely than ever. The old pain so long buried and fought
against comes back all too vividly. He knows he has never forgotten,
never ceased to love this woman; but she--how calm, how changed she
is! Again, as in the past, comes back the thought of all his love
for her had meant, of all they might have been but for his own folly,
his own sin.
"A man's passions are ever their own Nemesis," he thinks wearily, and
then her voice falls on his ear again. She is introducing him to
some one. A limp and lack-lustre "damosel," as she loves to be
called, attired in pale sage-green that makes him bilious to
contemplate; and he is fain to give this maiden his arm, and conduct
her through the rooms, and listen to her monotonous tattle of art
jargon, which seems to him the most idiotic compound of nonsense and
ignorance ever filtered through the lips of a woman--and he has heard
a good deal.
His thoughts will go back to this strange meeting.
She is not married, she is free still. Was it faithfulness to him,
or---- He thrusts the thought aside contemptuously. What folly it
seems! What woman _could_ remember for thirteen years? Besides, had
they not parted in anger? Had she not cast him aside with contempt
and fierce scorn, and bitter words that had stabbed him to the heart?
He roams about the beautiful rooms. He hears her name on every
tongue. He knows that men of science and learning are here--men of
note in the highest circles of art and literature. He is glad that
her tastes are so pure and elevated, glad that he does not find her a
mere woman of fashion, a frivolous nonentity. Again and again he
finds himself watching that fair, serene face, that exquisite figure,
which is a living embodiment of grace that may well drive all women
desperate with envy.
How calm she is! How passionless, how changed! Men speak of her
beauty, the beauty that lends itself so perfectly to this fantastic
fashion of which all her guests seem devotees, and the words turn his
blood to fire. Yet, after all, why should he mind? She is nothing
to him--nothing. He is beside her again. She does not appear to
notice his presence, but she is well enough aware of it. It lends
warmth and colour and animation to her face, it lights her great grey
eyes, and brings smiles to her lips. His heart grows bitter within
him. She must have long ago grown callous and forgotten. Does she
really forget how passionately she loved him once! Does she think of
him no more than if he were the veriest stranger in her crowded
rooms? Has she ever wept, prayed, suffered for him?
God help us, men and women both, if we could not in some way mask our
faces and conceal our feelings! Because the world sees no tears in
our eyes it does not follow they are never shed; because there are
smiles on our lips it is not a necessity that our hearts are without
suffering. When the curtain is down, when the theatre is empty and
dark, then, perhaps, the real play begins; the play that no audience
sees, that is only acted out to our own breaking, beating hearts,
unsuspected and unknown to the world around!