CHAPTER XV
You’ve altered so much since I saw you! It was odds against my recognizing you at all,” declared Cora, beaming forth into conversation before Christian had fairly grasped the significance of her identity.
“I should never have believed they would make such an Englishman out of you, in just these few months. Let’s see—it was October, wasn’t it? Yes, of course—the First.” She showed her beautiful teeth in a flash of gaiety. “The pheasants weren’t the only ones that got hit that day. But bygones are bygones.... And how do you like London? How do you find it compares with Paris? I always maintain that there’s more real life here, if you know where to look for it.... But I am afraid you’re not glad to see me.”
“There you are wrong. I am glad to see you,” Christian replied, with deliberation. He made his words good by thrusting his plate back upon the table and shaking her gloved hand. There was a frank smile in his eyes.
“Get my glass filled again,” she suggested—“and-your own too—and let’s get out of the way. These people push as if they had had nothing to eat since Christmas. Of all the hogs in evening clothes, the stage-supper hog is the worst. Well, and how have you been, all this time?”
They had moved across the stage to the entrance, and paused near it in a little nook of momentary isolation. Christian made conventional answer to her query, and to other remarks of hers calling for no earnest attention, the while he concentrated his thoughts upon the fact that they were actually standing here together, talking like old friends.
It was sufficiently surprising, this fact, but even more remarkable was the satisfaction he himself was getting from it. There was no room for doubt; he really enjoyed being with her. There was no special need to concern himself with what she was saying. She hardly paused for replies, and seemed not to mind in the least the automatic character of the few which came to her. He had only to smile a little, and nod, and let his eyes glow pleasurably, and she went blithely on. The perception came suddenly to him that he had been sorry also for her. Indeed, now that he reflected upon it, had not hers been the most cruel misfortune of all? The memory of the drawn, agonized mask of a face she had shown, over the tea-table in the conservatory at Caermere, rose in his mind’s vision. He looked up at the strips of canvas and lamps above, with half-closed eyes, recalling in reverie the details of this suffering face; then he turned abruptly to confront her, and observe afresh the happy contrast she presented to-night.
Cora was looking away for the instant, and apparently conveying by lifted eyebrows and shakes of the head a message of some sort to some person on the bustling stage unknown to him. He glanced instinctively in the direction of her signal, but gained no information—and indeed realized at once that he was not in search of any. Of course, she knew everybody here, and would be exchanging nods and smiles of recognition all the evening. It occurred to him to wonder if her husband, that Captain Edward of unpleasant memory, was on the stage, but he had the power to put the thought promptly out of his mind. It was only Cora that he was interested in, and that he wanted to talk with. And here she was, once more looking into his face, and restoring by her smile his almost jocund pleasure in the situation.
He still maintained the rôle of listener, but it grew increasingly clear to him that when his turn came he would have a good deal to say, and that he would say it well. He had never spoken on familiar terms with an actress before—and the experience put him wonderfully at his ease. He felt that he could say things to her; already he delighted in the assurance of her receptivity, her immunity from starched nonsense, her genial and comforting good fellowship. As he continued to look at her, and to smile, he remembered what people always said, or rather took for granted, about ladies on the stage. The consciousness shaped itself within him that she offered a timely and felicitous compromise—a sort of bridge between those formal, “gun-metal” women of society whom he desired never to see again, and those hapless, unblest creatures of the Empire.
Presently she took his arm, and they moved round to the stalls in front, and found seats a little apart from any one else. A large number of young ladies, in white or light-hued evening dresses, were seated about in the rows before them, and Cora pointed out this one and that among them to Christian. “That is Dolly Montressor—the dancer, you know—her photos are all the rage just now. The girl in pink, over there—just turning round—she is the one who sued young Concannon for breach of promise. You must remember. Her lawyers put the bailiffs in for what she owed them, after they’d taken everything the jury gave her, and she dressed the bailiffs in livery and had them wait at the table at a big supper she gave. The little thicknosed dark man there—next but one to her—he drew a check for the supper and the bailiffs too. You see the small, thin girl with the tomato-colored hair—she didn’t bring her suit into court—one isn’t fox-headed for nothing. She settled outside at the last minute—the Lord Carmody case, you know—and no one’s ever heard a whisper of any supper she ever gave. It isn’t at all her line. She puts it all into South Africans; they say she’s good for thirty thousand pounds, if she’s got a penny. It isn’t bad, you know, on a salary of six quid, and only the pantomime season at that. Oh, there’s Peggy Wiltshire—just in the doorway. She’s the most remarkable woman in England. How old would you think she was? Forty? Why, my dear man, she was billed as a star in the old original Black Crook—just about the time I was born. She can’t be a minute under sixty. But look at her—the neck and shoulders of a girl! Isn’t it amazing! Why, she was knocking about town when your father was a youngster—and here she is still going strong.”