Suddenly the orchestra burst into loud music. They were playing "Queen of the Earth," he remembered later. The curtain went up. And in a blaze of light he saw Rosa Mundi.
Something within him sprang into quivering life. Something which till that moment he had never known awoke and gripped him with a force gigantic. She was robed in shimmering, transparent gold—a queen-woman, slight indeed, dainty, fairy-like—yet magnificent. Over her head, caught in a jewelled fillet, there hung a filmy veil of gold, half revealing, half concealing, the smiling face behind. Trailing wisps of golden gossamer hung from her beautiful arms. Her feet were bound with golden sandals. And on her breast were roses—golden roses.
She was exquisite as a dream. He gazed and gazed upon her as one entranced. The tumult of acclamation that greeted her swept by him unheeded. He was conscious only of a passionate desire to fling back the golden veil that covered her and see the laughing face behind. Its elusiveness mocked him. She was like a sunbeam standing there, a flitting, quivering shaft of light, too spiritual to be grasped fully, almost too dazzling for the eye to follow.
The applause died down to a dead silence. Her audience watched her with bated breath. Her dance was a thing indescribable. Courteney could think of nothing but the flashing of morning sunlight upon running water to the silver strains of a flute that was surely piped by Pan. He could not follow the sparkling wonder of her. He felt dazed and strangely exhilarated, almost on fire with this new, fierce attraction. It was as if the very soul were being drawn out of his body. She called to him, she lured him, she bewitched him.
When he had seen her before, he had been utterly out of sympathy. He had scorned her charms, had felt an almost angry contempt for young Baron's raptures. To him she had been a snake-woman, possessed of a fascination which, to him, was monstrous and wholly incomprehensible. She had worn a strange striped dress of green—tight-fitting, hideous he had deemed it. Her face had been painted. He had been too near the stage, and she had revolted him. Her dance had certainly been wonderful, sinuous, gliding, suggestive—a perfectly conceived scheme of evil. And she had thought to entrap him with it! The very memory was repulsive even yet.
But this—ah! this was different. This thing of light and air, this dancing sunbeam, this creature of the morning, exquisite in every detail, perfectly poised, swifter than thought, yet arresting at every turn, vivid as a meteor, yet beyond all scrutiny, all ocular power of comprehension, she set every nerve in him a-quiver. She seized upon his fancy and flung it to and fro, catching a million colours in her radiant flights. She made the hot blood throb in his temples. She beat upon the door of his heart. She called back his vanished youth, the passion unassuaged of his manhood. She appealed to him directly and personally. She made him realize that he was the one man who had taught—and could teach—her the meaning of life.
Then it was over. Like a glittering crystal shattered to fragments, his dream of ecstasy collapsed. The noise around him was as the roar of thundering breakers. But he sat mute in the midst of it, as one stunned.
Someone leaned over from behind and spoke to him. He was aware of a hand upon his shoulder.
"What do you think of her?" said Ellis Grant in his ear. "Superb, isn't she? Come and see her before she appears again!"
As if compelled by some power outside himself, Courteney rose. He edged his way to the end of the row and joined the great man there. The whole house was a seething turmoil of sound.