CHAPTER II.
MISS TINSEL.
It was in a magnificent theatre that Chester Harding first saw her—a theatre grand in size and tasteful in decoration. It had only lately been opened, and was one of the lions of the Golden City. Harding went there to while away an idle hour, and in order, perhaps, that he might see all there was to be seen before leaving San Francisco. His visit was one of merest chance, and no trifle had seemed lighter in all his California life than his straying that night into the Cosmopolitan Theatre.
And yet perhaps it was the turning-point in his existence. Others who were there from Bullion Flat said afterward that from that night Harding was transfigured. A blaze of chandeliers, with golden fretwork skirting the galleries and rich dark velvet framing the boxes, could hardly surprise him. Nor was there much to astonish—whatever there might be to admire—in the rows of handsomely dressed women who gave brilliancy to the audience. Neither could the drama itself, which the manager was pleased to style "a grand legendary fairy spectacle," move Harding seriously from his equilibrium. All these splendors, together with the resonant orchestra, the dazzling scenery, rich in Dutch metal and gold foil, the sanguinary and crested Baron, the villain of the play, the iridescent youth, its hero, the demons, who went through traps, vampire and other—one Blood-Red Demon with a long nose being especially conspicuous—the fairies, who brought order out of chaos—of whom the "Queen of the Fairy Bower" was the large-limbed and voluptuous principal—the "Amazonian Phalanx," who went through unheard-of manœuvres with massive tin battle axes and spears—all these failed, it must be owned, to startle Mr. Harding from his propriety. He had seen such things, or things very like them, before. And yet he was taken off his feet, to use the metaphor, and swept away captive by a very torrent of emotion excited by Miss Tinsel.
She was only a coryphée; that is, she was but one among the minor subordinates of the ballet. Her advent was accomplished as one of the "Sprites of the Silver Shower." She had to come chassezing down the stage, and she never raised her eyelids—before most demurely cast down—until she was close upon the footlights. But when those eyelids did go up it was—well, as Judge Carboy afterward used to say, it was just like sunrise over the mountains at Boone's Bar! A girl with a mass of bright hair, almost red it looked by daylight, and large gray eyes that looked as black as soot by the gas, but took on more tender hues by day—a girl with a figure that was simply perfection, and yet one who with all her archness seemed to have no vanity. She had many dainty white skirts, one above another like an artichoke, of fluffy and diaphanous texture, and although these, it cannot be denied, were perilously short, somehow Miss Tinsel did not look in the least immodest.
All the men from Bullion Flat knew it was Miss Tinsel, since the "Queen of the Fairy Bower" addressed this charming figure more than once as "Zephyrind," and a reference to the play-bill thereupon at once established her identity.
What strange magnetism there was about this girl Harding, and indeed all who looked at her, found it hard to define. Perhaps, apart from her lovely eyes and hair and her exquisite figure, it was because she always seemed to be drawing away that she proved so fascinating. Even when she advanced straight toward you she seemed for ever to retreat. By what subtle and skilful instinct of coquetry Miss Tinsel was enabled to convey this impression cannot here be explained. That she did convey it was universally admitted. It appeared, however, on inquiry, that her dramatic powers were of the slightest. Her beauty and charm were such that the manager would gladly have put her forward could he have seen his way to do so. But her success had been so moderate, when the experiment was tried, in one or two of the "walking ladies" of farces, that it was thought wisest to let her be seen as much and heard as little as possible.
When Harding last saw her that night she was going up to Paradise on one foot, the other pointing vaguely at nothing behind, the intoxicating eyes turned up with a charming simulation of pious joy, and the cherry lips curled into a smile that showed plenty of pearls below. She vanished from his gaze in a glory of red fire, amid the blare of gongs and trumpets, while the "Blood-Red Demon" went down to the bad place under the stage through a trap, and the "Queen of the Fairy Bower," with felicitous compensation, ascended to the heaven of the flies.
After this tremendous catastrophe Harding went to his hotel and reflected.