Shouts of mirth came jubilantly from the Mirror Room as Davilof made his way thither one afternoon a few days later. The shrill peal of a child’s laughter rose gaily above the lower note of women’s voices, and when the accompanist opened the door it was to discover Magda completely engrossed in giving Coppertop a first dancing lesson, while Gillian sat stitching busily away at some small nether garments afflicted with rents and tears in sundry places. Every now and again she glanced up with softly amused eyes to watch her son’s somewhat unsteady efforts in the Terpsichorean art.
Coppertop, a slim young reed in his bright green knitted jersey, was clinging with one hand to a wooden bar attached to the wall which served Magda for the “bar practice” which constitutes part of every dancer’s daily work, while Magda, holding his other hand in hers, essayed to instruct him in the principle of “turning out”—that flexible turning of the knees towards the side which gives so much facility of movement.
“Point your toes sideways—so,” directed Magda. “This one towards me—like that.” She stooped and placed his foot in position. “Now, kick out! Try to kick me!”
Coppertop tried—and succeeded, greeting his accomplishment with shrieks of delight.
It was just at this moment that Davilof appeared on the scene, pausing abruptly in the doorway as he caught sight of Magda’s laughing face bent above the fiery red head. There was something very charming in her expression of eager, light-hearted abandonment to the fun of the moment.
At the sound of the opening door Coppertop wriggled out of her grasp like an eel, twisting his lithe young body round to see who the new arrival might be. His face fell woefully as he caught sight of Davilof.
“Oh, you can’tneverhave come already to play for the Fairy Lady!” he exclaimed in accents of dire disappointment.
“Fairy Lady” was the name he had bestowed upon Magda when, very early in their acquaintance, she had performed for his sole and particular benefit a maturer edition of the dance she had evolved as a child—the dance with which she had so much astonished Lady Arabella. Nowadays it figured prominently on her programmes as “The Hamadryad,” and was enormously popular.
“It’s not never three o’clock!” wailed Coppertop disconsolately, as Davilof dangled his watch in front of him.
“I think it is, small son,” interpolated Gillian, gathering together her sewing materials. “Come along. We must leave the Fairy Lady to practise now, because she’s got to dance to half the people in London to-morrow.”
“Must I really go?” appealed Coppertop, beseeching Magda with a pair of melting green eyes.
She dropped a light kiss on the top of his red curls.
“‘Fraid so, Coppertop,” she said. “You wouldn’t want Fairy Lady to dance badly and tumble down, would you?”
But Coppertop was not to be taken in so easily.
“Huh!” he scoffed. “Youcouldn’ttumble down—not never!”
“Still, you mustn’t be greedy, Topkins,” urged Magda persuasively. “Remember all the grown-up people who want me to dance to them! I can’t keep it all for one little boy.” He stared at her for a moment in silence. Suddenly he flung his arms round her slender hips, clutching her tightly, and hid his face against her skirt.
“Oh, Fairy Lady, you are so booful—so booful!” he whispered in a smothered voice. Then, with a big sigh: “But one little boy won’t be greedy.” He turned to his mother. “Come along, mummie!” he commanded superbly. And trotted out of the room beside her with his small head well up.
Left alone, Davilof and Magda smiled across at one another.
“Funny little person, isn’t he?” she said.
The musician nodded.
“Grown-ups might possibly envy the freedom of speech permitted to childhood,” he said quietly. Then, still more quietly: “‘Fairy Lady, you are so beautiful!’”
“But you’re not a child, so don’t poach Coppertop’s preserves!” retorted Magda swiftly. “Let’s get to work, Antoine. I’ll just change into my practice-kit and then I want to run through the ‘Swan-Maiden’s’ dance. You fix the lighting.”
She vanished into an adjoining room, while Davilof proceeded to switch off most of the burners, leaving only those which illumined the space in front of the great mirror. The remainder of the big room receded into a grey twilight encircling the patch of luminance.
Presently Magda reappeared wearing a loose tunic of some white silken material, girdled at the waist, but yet leaving her with perfect freedom of limb.
Davilof watched her as she came down the long room with the feather-light, floating walk of the trained dancer, and something leaped into his eyes that was very different from mere admiration—something that, taken in conjunction with Lady Arabella’s caustic comments of a few days ago, might have warned Magda had she seen it.
But with her thoughts preoccupied by the work in hand she failed to notice it, and, advancing till she faced the great mirror, she executed a few steps in front of it, humming the motif ofThe Swan-Maidenmusic under her breath.
“Play, Antoine,” she threw at him over her shoulder.
Davilof hesitated, made a movement towards her, then wheeled round abruptly and went to the piano. A moment later the exquisite, smoothly rippling music which he had himself written for the Swan-Maiden dance purled out into the room.
The story of the Swan-Maiden had been taken from an old legend which told of a beautiful maiden and the youth who loved her.
According to the narrative, the pair were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of the evil fairy Ritmagar, and the latter, in order to punish them, transformed the maiden into a white swan, thus separating the hapless lovers for ever. Afterwards, the disconsolate youth, bemoaning the cruelty of fate, used to wander daily along the shores of the lake where the maiden was compelled to dwell in her guise of a swan, and eventually Ritmagar, apparently touched to a limited compassion, permitted the Swan-Maiden to resume her human form once a day during the hour immediately preceding sunset. But the condition was attached that she must always return to the lake ere the sun sank below the horizon, when she would be compelled to reassume her shape of a swan. Should she fail to return by the appointed time, death would be the inevitable consequence.
Every reader of fairy tales—and certainly anyone who knows anything at all about being in love—can guess the sequel. Comes a day when the lovers, absorbed in their love-making, forget the flight of time, so that the unhappy maiden returns to the shore of the lake to find that the sun has already dipped below the horizon. She falls on her knees, beseeching the witch Ritmagar for mercy, but no answer is vouchsafed, and gradually the Swan-Maiden finds herself growing weaker and weaker, until at last death claims her.
A dance, based upon this legend, had been devised for Magda in conjunction with Vladimir Ravinski, the brilliant Russian dancer, he taking the lover’s part, and the whole tragic little drama was designed to terminate with a solo dance by Magda as the dying Swan-Maiden. Davilof had written the music for it, and the dance was to be performed at the Imperial Theatre for the first time the following week.
Davilof played ever more and more softly as the dance drew to its close. The note of lament sounded with increasing insistence through the slowing ripple of the accompaniment, and at last, as Magda sank to the ground in a piteous attitude that somehow suggested both the drooping grace of a dying swan and the innocence and helplessness of the hapless maiden, the music died away into silence.
There was a little pause. Then Davilof sprang to this feet.
“By God, Magda! You’re magnificent!” he exclaimed with the spontaneous appreciation of one genuine artist for another.
Magda raised her head and looked up at him with vague, startled eyes. She still preserved the pose on which the dance had ceased, and had hardly yet returned to the world of reality from that magic world into which her art had transported her.
The burning enthusiasm in Davilof’s excited tones recalled her abruptly.
“Was it good—was it really good?” she asked a little shakily.
“Good?” he said. “It was superb!”
He held out his hands and she laid hers in them without thinking, allowing him to draw her to her feet beside him.
She stood quite still, breathing rather quickly from her recent exertions and supported by the close clasp of his hands on hers. Her lips were a little parted, her slight breast rose and fell unevenly, and a faint rose-colour glowed beneath the ivory pallor of her skin.
Suddenly Davilof’s grip tightened.
“You beautiful thing!” he exclaimed huskily. “Magda——”
The next moment, with a swift, ungoverned movement, he caught her to him and was crushing her in his arms.
“Antoine! . . . Let me go!”
But the pressure of her soft, pulsing body against his own sent the blood racing through his veins. He smothered the words with his mouth on hers, kissing her breathless with a headlong passion that defied restraint—slaking his longing for her as a man denied water may at last slake his thirst at some suddenly discovered pool.
Magda felt herself powerless as a leaf caught up in a whirlwind—swept suddenly into the hot vehemence of a man’s desire while she was yet unstrung and quivering from the emotional strain of the Swan-Maiden’s dance, every nerve of her quickened to a tingling sentience by the underlying passion of the music.
With an effort she wrenched herself out of his arms and ran from him blindly into the furthest corner of the room. She had no clear idea of making for the door, but only of getting away—anywhere—heedless of direction. An instant later she was standing with her back to the wall, leaning helplessly against the ancient tapestry that clothed it. In that dim corner of the vast room her slim figure showed faintly limned against its blurred greens and greys like that of some pallid statue.
“Go . . . go away!” she gasped.
Davilof laughed triumphantly. Nothing could hold him now. The barriers of use and habit were down irrevocably.
“Go away?” he said. “No, I’m not going away.”
He strode straight across the space that intervened between them. She watched his coming with dilated eyes. Her hands, palms downwards, were pressed hard against the woven surface of the tapestry on either side of her.
As he approached she shrank back, her whole body taut and straining against the wall. Then she bent her head and flung up her arms, curving them to shield her face. Davilof could just see the rounded whiteness of them, glimmering like pale pearl next the satin sheen of night-black hair.
With a stifled cry he sprang forward and gripped them in his strong, supple hands, drawing them down inexorably.
“Kiss me!” he demanded fiercely. “Magda, kiss me!”
She shook her head, struggling for speech.
“No!” she gasped. “No!”
She glanced desperately round, but he had her hemmed in, prisoned against the wall.
“Kiss me!” he repeated unsteadily. “You—you’d better, Magda.”
“And if I don’t?” she forced the words through her stiff lips.
“But you will!” he said hoarsely. “You will!”
There was a dangerous note in his voice. The man had got beyond the stage to be played with. In the silence of the room Magda could hear his laboured breathing, feel his heart leaping against her own soft breast crushed against his. It frightened her.
“You’ll let me go if I do?” The words seemed to run into each other in her helpless haste.
“I’ll let you go.”
“Very well.”
Slowly, reluctantly she lifted her face to his and kissed him. But the touch of her lips on his scattered the last vestige of his self-control.
“My beloved . . . Beloved!”
He seized her roughly in his arms. She felt his kisses overwhelming her, burning against her closed eyelids, bruising her soft mouth and throat.
“I love you . . . worship you——”
“Let me go!” she cried shrilly, struggling against him. “Let me go—you promised it!”
He released her, drawing slowly back, his arms falling unwillingly away from her.
“Oh, yes,” he muttered confusedly. “I did promise.”
The instant she felt his grip relax, Magda sprang forward and switched on the centre burners, flooding the room with a blaze of light, and in the sudden glare she and Davilof stood staring silently at each other.
With the springing up of the lights it was as though a spell had broken. The strained, hunted expression left Magda’s face. She wasn’t frightened any longer. Davilof was no more the man whose sudden passion had surged about her, threatening to break down all defences and overwhelm her. He was just Davilof, her accompanist, who, like half the men of her acquaintance, was more or less in love with her and who had overstepped the boundary which she had very definitely marked out between herself and him.
She regarded him stormily.
“Have you gone mad?” she asked contemptuously.
He returned her look, his eyes curiously brilliant. Then he laughed suddenly.
“Mad?” he said. “Yes, I think Iammad. Mad with love for you! Magda”—he came and stood close beside her—“don’t send me away! Don’t say you can’t care for me! You don’t love me now—but I could teach you.” His voice deepened. “I love you so much. Oh, sweetest!—Soulof me! Love is so beautiful. Let me teach you how beautiful it is!”
Magda drew back.
“No,” she said. The brief negative fell clear and distinct as a bell.
“I won’t take no,” he returned hotly. “I won’t take no. I want you. Good God! Don’t you understand? My love for you isn’t just a boy’s infatuation that you can dismiss with a word. It’s all of me. I worship you! Haven’t I been with you day after day, worked with you, followed your every mood—shared your very soul with you? You’re mine! Mine, because I understand you. You’ve shown me all you thought, all you felt. You couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t meant something to you.”
“Certainly you meant something to me. You meant an almost perfect accompanist. Why should you have imagined you meant more? I gave you no reason to think so.”
“No reason?”
It was as though the two short words were the key which unlocked the floodgates of some raging torrent. Magda could never afterwards recall the words he used. She only knew they beat upon her with the cruel, lancinating sharpness of hail driven by the wind.
She had treated him much as other men, evoking the love of his ardent temperament by that subtle witchery which was second nature to her and which can be such a potent weapon in the hands of a woman whose own emotions remain untouched. And now the thwarted passion of the lover and the savage anger of a man who felt himself deceived and duped broke over her in a resistless storm—an outburst so bitter and so trenchant that for the moment she remained speechless before it, buffeted into helpless, resentful silence. When he ceased, he had stripped her of every rag of feminine defence.
“Have you finished?” she asked in a stifled voice.
She made no attempt to palliate matters or to refute anything he had said. In his present frame of mind it would have been useless pointing out to him that she had treated him no differently from other men. He was a Pole, and he had caught fire where others would merely have glowed smoulderingly.
“Yes,” he rejoined sullenly. “I’ve finished.”
“So much the better.”
He regarded her speculatively.
“What are you made of, I wonder? Does it mean nothing to you that a man has given you his very best—all that he has?”
She appeared to reflect a moment.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t. There’s only one thing really means much to me—and that is my art. And Lady Arabella,” she added after a pause. “She’ll always mean a good deal.”
She sat down by the fire and held out her hands to its warmth. The slender fingers seemed almost transparent, glowing rosily in the firelight. Davilof turned to go.
“Good-bye, then,” he said curtly.
“Good-bye.” Magda nodded indifferently. Then, carelessly: “I shall want you to-morrow, Davilof—same time.”
He swung round.
“I will never play for you again. Did you imagine I should?”
She smiled at him—that slow, subtle smile of hers with its hint of mockery.
“You won’t be able to keep away,” she replied.
“I will never play for you again,” he repeated. “Never! I will teach myself to hate you.”
She shook her head lightly.
“Impossible, Davilof.”
“It’s not impossible. There’s very little difference between love and hate—sometimes. And I want all or nothing.”
“I’m afraid it must be nothing, then.”
“We shall see. But if I can’t have you,Iswear no other man shall!”
She glanced up at him, lifting her brows a little.
“Aren’t you going too far, Antoine? You can hate me, if you like, or love me—it’s a matter of indifference to me which you do. But I don’t propose to allow you to arrange my life for me. And in any case”—after a moment—“I’m not likely to fall in love—with you or anyone else.”
“You think not?” He stood looking down at her sombrely. “You’ll fall in love right enough some day. And when you do it will be all or nothing with you, too. You’re that kind. Love will take you—and break you, Magda.”
He spoke slowly, with an odd kind of tensity. To Magda it seemed almost as if his quiet speech held the gravity of prophecy, and she shivered a little.
“And when that time comes, then you’ll come back to me,” he added.
Magda threw up her head, defying him.
“You propose to be waiting round to pick up the pieces, then?” she suggested nonchalantly.
But only the sound of the closing door answered her. Davilof had gone.
Lady Arabella was in her element. She had two brilliant and unattached young men dining with her—one, Michael Quarrington, a lion in the artistic world, and the other, Antoine Davilof, who showed unmistakable symptoms of developing sooner or later into a lion in the musical world.
It was Davilof who was responsible for the artist’s presence at Lady Arabella’s dinner table. She had expressed—in her usual autocratic manner—a wish that he should be presented to her, and had determined upon the evening of the first performance ofThe Swan-Maidenas the appointed time.
Davilof appeared doubtful, and declared that Quarrington was leaving England and had already fixed the date of his departure.
“He’s crossing from Dover the very day before the one you want him to dine with you,” he told her.
But Lady Arabella swept his objections aside with regal indifference.
“Crossing, is he?” she snapped. “Well, tell him I want him to dine here and go to the show with us afterwards. He’ll cross the dayafter, you’ll find—if he crosses at all!” she wound up enigmatically.
So it came about that her two lions, the last-arrived artist and the soon-to-arrive musician, were both dining with her on the appointed evening.
Lady Arabella adored lions. Also, notwithstanding her seventy years, she retained as much original Eve in her composition as a girl of seventeen, and she adored young men.
In particular, she decided that she approved of Michael Quarrington. She liked the clean English build of him. She liked his lean, square jaw and the fair hair with the unruly kink in it which reminded her of a certain other young man—who had been young when she was young—and to whom she had bade farewell at her parents’ inflexible decree more than fifty years ago. Above all, she liked the artist’s eyes—those grey, steady eyes with their look of reticence so characteristic of the man himself.
Reticence was an asset in her ladyship’s estimation. It showed good sense—and it offered provocative opportunities for a battle of wits such as her soul loved.
“Have you seen my god-daughter dance, Mr. Quarrington?” she asked him.
“Yes, several times.”
His tone was non-committal and she eyed him sharply.
“Don’t admire dancing, do you?” she threw at him.
Quarrington regarded her with a humorous twinkle.
“And I an artist? How can you ask, Lady Arabella?”
“Well, you sounded supremely detached,” she grumbled.
“I think Mademoiselle Wielitzska’s dancing the loveliest thing I have ever seen,” he returned simply.
The old woman vouchsafed him a smile.
“Thank you,” she answered. “I enjoyed that quite as much as I used to enjoy being told I’d a pretty dimple when I was a girl.”
“You have now,” rejoined Quarrington audaciously.
Lady Arabella’s eyes sparkled. She loved a neatly turned compliment.
“Thank you again. But it’s a pity to waste your pretty speeches on an old woman of seventy.”
“I don’t,” retorted the artist gravely. “I reserve them for the young people I know of that age.”
She laughed delightedly. Then, turning to Davilof, she drew him into the conversation and the talk became general.
Later, as they were all three standing in the hall preparatory to departure, she flashed another of her sudden remarks at Quarrington.
“I understand you came to my god-daughter’s rescue in that bad fog last week?”
The quiet grey eyes revealed nothing.
“I was privileged to be some little use,” he replied lightly.
“I hardly gathered you regarded it as a privilege,” observed her ladyship drily.
The shaft went home. A fleeting light gleamed for a moment in the grey eyes. Davilof was standing a few paces away, being helped into his coat by a man-servant, and Quarrington spoke low and quickly.
“She told you?” he said. There was astonishment—resentment, almost—in his voice.
“No, no.” Lady Arabella, smiling to herself, reassured him hastily. “It was a shot in the dark on my part. Magda never confides details. She hands you out an unadorned slice of fact and leaves you to interpret it as you choose. But if you know her rather well—as I do—and can add two and two together and make five or any unlikely number of them, why, then you can fill in some of the blanks for yourself.”
She glanced at him with impish amusement as she moved towards the door.
“Come along, Davilof,” she said. “I suppose you want to hear your own music—even if Magda’s dancing no longer interests you?”
Davilof gave her his arm down the steps.
“What do you mean, miladi?” he asked. “There is no more beautiful dancing in the world.”
“Then why have you jacked up your job of accompanist? Shoes beginning to pinch a little, eh?”—shrewdly.
“You mean I grow too big for my boots? No, madame. If I were the greatest musician in Europe, instead of being merely Antoine Davilof, it could only be a source of pride to be asked to accompany the Wielitzska.”
Lady Arabella paused on the pavement, her foot on the step of the limousine.
“Then how is it that Mrs. Grey accompanies her now? She was playing for her at the Duchess of Lichbrooke’s the other evening.
“Magda didn’t tell you, then?”
“No, she didn’t; or I’d not be wasting my breath in asking you. I asked her, and she said you had taken to playing wrong notes.”
A faint smile curved the lips above the small golden beard.
“Then it must be true. Undoubtedly I played wrong notes, miladi.”
“Very careless of you, I’m sure.” Under the garish light of a neighbouring street-lamp her keen old eyes met his significantly. “Or—very imprudent, Davilof. You need the tact of the whole Diplomatic Service to deal with Magda. And you ought to know it.”
“True, miladi. But I was not designed for diplomacy, and a man can only use the weapons heaven has given him.”
“I wouldn’t have suggested heaven as invariably the source of your inspirations,” retorted Lady Arabella. And hopped into the car.
They arrived at the Imperial Theatre to find Mrs. Grey already seated in Lady Arabella’s box. Someone else was there, too—old Virginie, with her withered-apple cheeks and bright brown, bird-like eyes, still active and erect and very little altered from the Virginie of ten years before. Just as she had devoted herself to Diane, so now she devoted herself to Diane’s daughter, and no first performance of a new dance of the Wielitzska’s took place without Virginie’s presence somewhere in the house. To-night, Lady Arabella had invited her into her box and Virginie was a quivering bundle of excitement. She rose from her seat at the back of the box as the newcomers entered.
“Sit down, Virginie.” Lady Arabella nodded kindly to the Frenchwoman. “And pull your chair forward. You’ll see nothing back there, and there is plenty of room for us all.”
“Merci, madame. Madame est bien gentille.” Virginie’s voice was fervent with ecstatic gratitude as she resumed her seat and waited expectantly for Magda’s appearance.
Other dances, performed principally by lesser lights of the company and affording only a briefly tantalising glimpse of Magda herself, preceded the chief event of the evening. But at last the next item on the programme read asThe Swan-Maiden (adapted from an Old Legend), and a tremour of excitement, a sudden hush of eager anticipation, rippled through the audience like wind over grass.
Slowly the heavy silken curtains drew to either side of the stage, revealing a sunlit glade. In the background glimmered the still waters of a lake, while at the foot of a tree, in an attitude of tranquil repose, lay the Swan-Maiden—Magda. One white, naked arm was curved behind her head, pillowing it, the other lay lightly across her body, palm upward, with the rosy-tipped fingers curled inwards a little, like a sleeping child’s. She looked infinitely young as she lay there, her slender, pliant limbs relaxed in untroubled slumber.
Lady Arabella, with Quarrington sitting next to her in the box, heard the quick intake of his breath as he leaned suddenly forward.
“Yes, it has quite a familiar look,” she observed. “Reminds me of your ‘Repose of Titania.’”
His eyes flickered inquiringly over her face, but it was evident that hers had been merely a chance remark. The old lady had obviously no idea as to who it was who had posed for the Titania of the picture. That was one of the “slices of fact” which Magda had omitted to hand out when recounting her adventure in the fog to her godmother. Quarrington leaned back in his chair satisfied.
“It’s not unlike,” he agreed carelessly.
Then the entrance of Vladimir Ravinski, the lovelorn youth of the legend, riveted his attention on the stage.
The dance which followed was exquisite. The Russian was a beautiful youth, like a sun-god with his flying yellow locks and glorious symmetry of body, and thepas de deuxbetween him and Magda was a thing to marvel at—sweeping through the whole gamut of love’s emotion, from the first shy, delicate hesitancy of worshipping boy and girl to the rapturous abandon of mated lovers.
Then across the vibrant, pulsating scene fell the deadly shadow of the witch Ritmagar. The stage darkened, the violins in the orchestra skirled eerily in chromatic showers of notes, and the hunched figure of Ritmagar approaching menaced the lovers. A wild dance followed, the lovers now kneeling and beseeching the evil fairy to have pity on them, now rushing despairingly into each other’s arms, while the witch’s own dancing held all of threat and malevolence that superb artistry could infuse into it.
The tale unfolded itself with the inevitableness of preordained catastrophe.
Ritmagar declines to be appeased. She raises her claw-like hand, pointing a crooked finger at the lovers, and with a clash of brazen sound and the dull thrumming of drums the whole scene dissolves into absolute darkness. When the darkness lifts once more, the stage is empty save for a pure white swan which sails slowly down the lake and disappears. . . . Followed a solo dance by Ravinski in which he gave full vent to the anguish of the bereft lover, while now and again the swan swam statelily by him. At length the witch appeared once more and, yielding to his impassioned entreaties, declared that the Swan-Maiden might reassume her human form during the hour preceding sunset, and Magda—the Swan-Maiden released from enchantment for the time being—came running in on the stage.
This love-duet was resumed and presently, when the lovers had made their exit, Ritmagar was seen gleefully watching while the red sun dropped slowly down the sky, sinking at last below the rim of the lake.
Then a low rumble of drums muttered as she stole from the stage, the personification of vindictive triumph, and all at once the great concourse of people in the auditorium seemed to strain forward, conscious that the climax of the evening, the wonderful solo dance by the Wielitzska, was about to begin.
The moon rose on the left, and Magda, a slim white figure in her dress which cleverly suggested the plumage of a swan, floated on to the stage with that exquisite, ethereal lightness of movement which only toe-dancing—and toe-dancing of the most perfectly finished quality—seems able to convey. It was as though her feet were not touching the solid earth at all. The feather-light drifting of blown petals; the swaying grace of a swan as it glides along the surface of the water; the quivering, spirit-like flight of a butterfly—it seemed as though all these had been caught and blended together by the dancer.
The heavier instruments of the orchestra were silenced, but the rippling music of the strings wove and interwove a dreaming melody, unutterably sweet and appealing, as the Swan-Maiden, bathed in pallid moonlight, besought the invisible Ritmagar for mercy, praying that she might not die even though the sun had set. . . . But there comes no answer to her prayers. A sombre note of stern denial sounds in the music, and the Swan-Maiden yields to utter despair, drooping slowly to earth. Just as Death himself claims her, her lover, demented with anguish, comes rushing to her side, and turning towards him as she lies dying upon the ground, she yields to his embrace with a last gesture of passionate surrender.
Slowly the heavy curtains swung together, hiding the limp, lifeless body of the Swan-Maiden and the despairing figure of her lover as he knelt beside her, and after a breathless pause, the great audience, carried away by the tragic drama of the dance, its passion and its pathos, broke into a thunder of applause that rolled and reverberated through the theatre.
Again and again Magda and her partner were called before the curtain, the former laden with the sheafs of flowers which had been handed up on to the stage. But the audience refused to be satisfied until at last Magda appeared alone, standing very white and slender under the blaze of lights, a faint suggestion of fatigue in the poise of her lissome figure.
Instantly the applause broke out anew—thunderous, overwhelming. Magda smiled, then held out her arms in a little disarming gesture of appeal, touching in its absolute simplicity. It was as though she said: “Dear people, I love you all for being so pleased, but I’m very, very tired. Please, won’t you let me go?”
So they let her go, with one final round of cheers and clapping, and then, as the curtains fell together once more and the orchestra slid unobtrusively into theentr’actemusic, a buzz of conversation arose.
Michael Quarrington turned and spoke to Davilof as they stood together.
“This will be my last memory of England for some time to come. Mademoiselle Wielitzska is very wonderful. As much actress as dancer—and both rather superlatively.”
There was an odd note in Quarrington’s voice, as if he were forcibly repressing some less measured form of words.
Davilof glanced at him sharply.
“You think so?” he said curtly.
The musician’s hazel eyes were burning feverishly. One hand was clenched on the back of the chair from which he had just risen; the other hung at his side, the fingers opening and shutting nervously.
Quarrington smiled.
“Don’t you?”
The eyes of the two men met, and Michael became suddenly conscious that the other was struggling in the grip of some strong emotion. He could even sense its atmosphere of antagonism towards himself.
“I think”—Davilof spoke with slow intensity—“I think she’s a soulless piece of devil’s mechanism.” And turning abruptly, he swung out of the box, slamming the door behind him.
Quarrington frowned. With his keen perceptions it was not difficult for him to divine what lay at the back of Davilof’s bitter criticism. The man was in love—hopelessly in love with the Wielitzska. Probably she had turned him down, as she had turned down better men than he, but he had been unable to resist the bitter-sweet temptation of watching her dance, and throughout the evening had almost certainly been suffering the torments of the damned.
The artist smiled a little grimly to himself, remembering the many evenings he, too, had spent at the Imperial Theatre, drawn thither by the magnetism of a white, slender woman with night-black hair, whose long, dark eyes haunted him perpetually, even coming between him and his work.
And then, just as he had made up his mind to go away, first to Paris and afterwards to Spain or perhaps even further afield, and thus set as many miles of sea and land as he could betwixt himself and the “kind of woman he had no place for,” fate had played him a trick and sent her out of the obscurity of the fog-ridden street straight to his very hearth and home, so that the fragrance and sweetness and charm of her must needs linger there to torment him.
He thought he could make a pretty accurate guess at the state of Davilof’s feelings, and was ironically conscious of a sense of fellowship with him.
Lady Arabella’s sharp voice cut across his reflections.
“I don’t care for this next thing,” she said, flicking at her programme. “Mrs. Grey and I are going round to see Magda. Will you come with us?”
Quarrington had every intention of politely excusing himself. Instead of which he found himself replying:
“With pleasure—if Mademoiselle Wielitzska won’t think I’m intruding.”
Lady Arabella chuckled.
“Well, she intruded on you that day in the fog, didn’t she? So you’ll be quits.” She glanced impatiently round the box. “Where on earth has Davilof vanished to? Has he gone up in flame?”
Michael laughed involuntarily.
“Something of the kind, I fancy,” he replied. “Anyway, he departed rather hurriedly.”
“Poor Antoine!” Gillian spoke with a kind of humorous compassion. “He has a temperament. I’m glad I haven’t.”
“You have the best of all temperaments, Mrs. Grey,” answered Michael, as they both followed Lady Arabella out of the box.
She looked at him inquiringly.
“The temperament that understands other people’s temperaments,” he added.
“How do you know?” she asked, smiling.
Lady Arabella was prancing on ahead down the corridor, and for the moment Michael and Gillian were alone.
“We artists learn to look for what lies below the surface. If your work is sincere, you find when you’ve finished a portrait that the soul of the sitter has revealed itself unmistakably.”
Gillian nodded.
“I’ve been told you’ve an almost diabolical genius for expressing just what a man or woman is really like—in character, I mean—in your portraits.”
“I can’t help it,” he said simply. “It comes—it reveals itself—if you paint sincerely.”
“And do you—always paint sincerely?”
He laughed.
“I try to. Though once I got hauled over the coals pretty sharply for doing so. My sitter happened to be a pretty society woman, possessed of about as much soul as would cover a threepenny-bit, and when I’d finished her portrait she simply turned and rent me. ‘I wanted a taking picture,’ she informed me indignantly, ‘not the bones of my personality laid bare for public inspection.’”
They were outside Magda’s dressing-room by this time, and Virginie, who had flown to her nurseling the moment the dance was at an end, opened the door in response to Lady Arabella’s preemptory knock. Gillian paused a moment before entering the room.
“Yours is a wonderful gift of perception,” she said quietly. “It ought to make you—very merciful.”
Michael looked at her swiftly. Her eyes seemed to be asking something of him—entreating. But before he could speak Lady Arabella’s voice interposed remorselessly.
“Come in, you two; and for goodness’ sake shut the door. There’s draught enough to waft one to heaven.”
There was no choice but to obey, and silently Quarrington followed Mrs. Grey into the room.