“Nice young fellow that,” he observed as Peter went out of the box. “What a pair he and Miss Silvia make, hey? He’s black and she’s fair, and he’s a clever fellow and won’t have a penny, and I wish I was his age. Do you know his father? He’s a rum ’un.”
These remarkable statements were addressed in a loud, hoarse whisper to Mrs. Wardour, and were, of course, perfectly audible to Silvia. Then he turned to the girl.
“I’ve been asking your mother to elope with me,” he said, “so I hope you didn’t overhear. Now I’m going to talk to you and she mustn’t listen. You’re perfectly delicious, my dear, you and your golden hair, and that little foot that’s kicking me. Let it go on kicking; I like it. Wonder how Peter’s getting on with my missus. Peep round the corner, Miss Silvia, and see if she looks like going off with him. There are several topping girls in that box, but she’s the pick of them, bless her heart. What! Here’s your mother getting up and leaving me. More friends coming in! I never saw such a lot of friends. Why, it’s Ella! I’m in luck to-night. And there’s May Trentham only one chair away. Look at her profile against the light. Did you ever see anything so perfect? Looks rather like the head on a postage-stamp, but don’t say I said so.”
Lord Poole was now satisfactorily engaged in his usual evening occupation of getting as many girls and pretty women round him as possible, while Mrs. Trentham was performing a similar office with regard to every young man who came into the box. Her pansy face was growing sillier than ever as she kept telling them all to go and talk to somebody else. The object of these two middle-aged magnets was precisely similar: one wanted to attract to itself all the men, the other all the women; but there was an infinite divergence in their methods. May Trentham, pretending to be young, kept asserting how old she was; Lord Poole, pretending to be old, could not conceal the fact of how young, he was. He, again, was not thinking one atom about himself, but was entirely absorbed in his collection of sirens; she was thinking exclusively about herself, and was only anxious that every one in the house should turn green with envy at her galaxy of adorers.... Then Ella Thirlmere and a friend or two joined the group, and he returned blatantly, fatuously, delightfully to the opera.
“Well, now, I do feel like Parsifal,” he said. “Here I am in the middle of such flower-maidens, any of whom could give a couple of furlongs in a mile to those on the stage and come romping home in a canter. Look at Ella now: there’s a picture for you! Why, my gracious, here’s Winifred, too! Come and tell us all about it, Winifred; how many hearts, not reckoning mine, have you broken to-ight? Look at that hair of hers! Did anybody ever see hair like that? I never did, and I’ve seen a lot in my time. May Trentham, too! Do you wonder that all the young men go swarming round her? I’m sure I don’t, and I’d join the swarm myself if I wasn’t so blissfully situated just where I am. Haven’t enjoyed an evening so much for years. Wish this interval would last till Doomsday, and then we’d all go up to heaven together! St. Peter would let me in without a question when he saw whom I’d brought along with me.”
Among the people who had drifted in at the end of the act was Philip Beaumont, whom Mrs. Trentham had instantly rendered adhesive by her voluble commands to go back to Nellie Heaton at once. Nellie, however, had very designedly sent him here, for she had become aware by a glimpse, a sound (an instinct, perhaps even more) that Peter was in the box next door, and her dispatch of her lover there would certainly signify to Peter that she wished him to take the chair now vacant by her and resume the talk in the window that had taken place that afternoon. Somehow that talk had made for itself an anchorage uncomfortable to her consciousness; it had been like a fishbone in her throat. She had taken gulps of her fiancé, so to speak, in order to dislodge it; but she had not succeeded in swallowing it. She had tried to divert her attention from it; had pounced with fixed claws on the opera in front of her; had jotted down in her memory, with the fell example of Lady Poole as an object-lesson, a quantity of ways of behaviour and of the presentation of yourself to others which were undesirable when you were fifty or seventy or whatever Lady Poole happened to be. You must be quiet and calm when you had tottered up to those hoary altitudes; you must leave your hair to turn any colour it chose.... You mustn’t wriggle and snort, for whereas wriggling in the young might exhibit (quite advantageously) a graceful litheness, it suggested in the old that a galvanic battery had been unexpectedly applied to the knees and the elbows and the middle part of the person. But there was something remote about these gleanings of knowledge; they might prove to be nutritious (and possibly palatable) if preserved and remembered for thirty or forty years; at the present moment they were not of sufficiently arresting a quality to divert her mind from this fishbone of her interview with Peter.... There had been a harshness, a crudity in it; there had been, to her mind, a certain hostility in it; there had been also a certain hunger in it, an emptiness that ached. He had clearly pronounced that their relationship—the bond, in fact, of which she had spoken—must be changed by her engagement, and, though she would have combated that with wit and good sense, some internal fibre of her throbbed, vibrated to the truth of it. She wanted to convince Peter (and even more to convince herself) that the old bond, the old relationship, still flowered and had lost no petal of its fragrance.
She had not to wait long for his entry; Philip had barely left the box before Peter appeared in the doorway, and she applauded his quickness in answering the signal she had waved to him in the ejection of the other. He was silhouetted there for a moment as he spoke to someone in the corridor outside, cool and crisp and complete. Peter was always like that; nature had applied to him some extra polish, some exquisite finish, which detached him from all others in the moist or dusty crowd. Adorable though that was, the thought came to the girl that, above all else, she wanted to disturb and disarrange that. Peter excited and dishevelled. Peter enthusiastic. Peter undetached and clinging was perhaps the real Peter.... A clamorous, turbulent Peter....
He looked round as he entered; he clearly saw her, and as clearly disregarded the obvious movement of her hand to the vacant seat which Philip had just quitted. Though that rejection—that “cut” you might call it, considering their friendship—was in no way premeditated, it was, when he saw Nellie beckoning as with proprietorship, or so it struck him, quite deliberate. He had given no thought to it before, and apparently gave no further thought now, for he instantly placed himself next Lady Poole, beside whom there was another empty seat. There was a great green feather nodding a welcome from her violent hair; it matched her green shoes and the large slabs of false emerald with which her dress was hazardously held together. She was quite as absurd as her husband, and had a witty poison under her tongue, which she sprayed profusely over most subjects of discussion. But her poison hurt nobody, since nobody ever believed a word she said. She was, in fact, as harmless as a serpent, and certainly not as wise as a dove.
The serpent aspect showed its innocuous fangs.
“Monster,” she said to Peter. “Sit down and tell me at once what’s going on next door. Whom’s my Christopher flirting with?”