The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:
"Nellie was a lady—
Last night she died ..."
Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice. The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.
"Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"
Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life. I suppose they must have been some garden party—I distinctly recall the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch—and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....
"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."
"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture is safe.
Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue, to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay—younger son of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of more acres than seems quite discreet—until one is in a position to slap the lord on the shoulder!
To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of Aïda, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds from Mephistopheles with equal sang-froid, displayed an indifference to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured classes, Ennui, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of England's greatest duke—the most eligible parti in the United Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.
They sat together on the floor of a chintz-hung breakfast room, spinning peg-tops all over the polished wax, for two rainy hours before dinner (which function was delayed half an hour to please them, to the awed wonder of the lesser guests and the apoplectic amusements of the young peer's father) and were the only occupants of the great house, except three collie pups who sat with them, to see nothing odd in the performance, though Saint-Saens was come over from Paris to accompany Margarita on the piano and the princess of a royal family was dressed in her palpitating best for the best reason in the world not unconnected with the son of an historic house!