The Third Macabre Megapack (27 page)

The second tableau was the “Sacrifice of Iphigenia.” It was admirably rendered. The cold and dignified father, standing, apparently unmoved, by the pyre; the cruel faces of the attendant priests; the shrinking form of the immolated princess; the mere blank curiosity and inquiring interest of the helmeted heroes looking on, to whom this slaughter of a virgin victim was but an ordinary incident of the Achæ‘an religion—all these had been arranged by the Academical director with consummate skill and pictorial cleverness. But the group that attracted Maisie most among the components of the scene was that of the attendant maidens, more conspicuous here in their flowing white chitons than even they had been when posed as companions of the beautiful and ill-fated Hebrew victim. Two in particular excited her close attention—two very graceful and spiritual-looking girls, in long white robes of no particular age or country, who stood at the very end near the right edge of the picture. “How lovely they are, the two last on the right!” Maisie whispered to her neighbour—an Oxford undergraduate with a budding moustache. “I do so admire them!”

“Do you?” he answered, fondling the moustache with one dubious finger. “Well, now, do you know, I don’t think I do. They’re rather coarse-looking. And besides, I don’t quite like the way they’ve got their hair done up in bunches; too fashionable, isn’t it?—too much of the present day? I don’t care to see a girl in a Greek costume, with her coiffure so evidently turned out by Truefitt’s!”

“Oh, I don’t mean those two,” Maisie answered, a little shocked he should think she had picked out such meretricious faces; “I mean the two beyond them again—the two with their hair so simply and sweetly done—the ethereal-looking dark girls.”

The undergraduate opened his mouth, and stared at her in blank amazement for a moment. “Well, I don’t see ——” he began, and broke off suddenly. Something in Maisie’s eye seemed to give him pause. He fondled his moustache, hesitated and was silent.

“How nice to have read the Greek and know what it all means!” Maisie went on, after a minute. “It’s a human sacrifice, of course; but, please, what is the story?”

The undergraduate hummed and hawed. “Well, it’s in Euripides, you know,” he said, trying to look impressive, “and—er—and I haven’t taken up Euripides for my next examination. But I
think
it’s like this. Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon’s, don’t you know, and he had offended Artemis or somebody—some other Goddess; and he vowed to offer up to her the most beautiful thing that should be born that year, by way of reparation—just like Jephthah. Well, Iphigenia was considered the most beautiful product of the particular twelvemonth—don’t look at me like that, please! you—you make me nervous—and so, when the young woman grew up—well, I don’t quite recollect the ins and outs of the details, but it’s a human sacrifice business, don’t you see; and they’re just going to kill her, though I
believe
a hind was finally substituted for the girl, like the ram for Isaac; but I must confess I’ve a very vague recollection of it.” He rose from his seat uneasily. “I’m afraid,” he went on, shuffling about for an excuse to move, “these chairs are too close. I seem to be incommoding you.”

He moved away with a furtive air. At the end of the tableau one or two of the characters who were not needed in succeeding pieces came down from the stage and joined the body of spectators, as they often do, in their character-dresses—a good opportunity, in point of fact, for retaining through the evening the advantages conferred by theatrical costume, rouge, and pearl-powder. Among them the two girls Maisie had admired so much glided quietly toward her and took the two vacant seats on either side, one of which had just been quitted by the awkward undergraduate. They were not only beautiful in face and figure, on a closer view, but Maisie found them from the first extremely sympathetic. They burst into talk with her, frankly and at once, with charming ease and grace of manner. They were ladies in the grain, in instinct and breeding. The taller of the two, whom the other addressed as Yolande, seemed particularly pleasing. The very name charmed Maisie. She was friends with them at once. They both possessed a certain nameless attraction that constitutes in itself the best possible introduction. Maisie hesitated to ask them whence they came, but it was clear from their talk they knew Wolverden intimately.

After a minute the piano struck up once more. A famous Scotch vocalist, in a diamond necklet and a dress to match, took her place on the stage, just in front of the footlights. As chance would have it, she began singing the song Maisie most of all hated. It was Scott’s ballad of “Proud Maisie,” set to music by Carlo Ludovici—

“Proud Maisie is in the wood,

Walking so early;

Sweet Robin sits on the bush,

Singing so rarely.

‘Tell me, thou bonny bird,

When shall I marry me?’

‘When six braw gentlemen

Kirkward shall carry ye.’

‘Who makes the bridal bed,

Birdie, say truly?’

‘The grey-headed sexton

That delves the grave duly.

‘The glow-worm o’er grave and stone

Shall light thee steady;

The owl from the steeple sing,

“Welcome, Proud lady.”’”

Maisie listened to the song with grave discomfort. She had never liked it, and tonight it appalled her. She did not know that just at that moment Mrs. West was whispering in a perfect fever of apology to a lady by her side, “Oh dear! oh dear! what a dreadful thing of me ever to have permitted that song to be sung here tonight! It was horribly thoughtless! Why, now I remember, Miss Llewelyn’s name, you know, is Maisie!—and there she is listening to it with a face like a sheet! I shall never forgive myself!”

The tall, dark girl by Maisie’s side, whom the other called Yolande, leaned across to her sympathetically. “You don’t like that song?” she said, with just a tinge of reproach in her voice as she said it.

“I hate it!” Maisie answered, trying hard to compose herself.

“Why so?” the tall, dark girl asked, in a tone of calm and singular sweetness. “It is sad, perhaps; but it’s lovely—and natural!”

“My own name is Maisie,” her new friend replied, with an ill-repressed shudder. “And somehow that song pursues me through life I seem always to hear the horrid ring of the words, ‘When six braw gentlemen kirkward shall carry ye.’ I wish to Heaven my people had never called me Maisie!”

“And yet
why
?” the tall, dark girl asked again, with a sad, mysterious air. “Why this clinging to life—this terror of death—this inexplicable attachment to a world of misery? And with such eyes as yours, too! Your eyes are like mine”—which was a compliment, certainly, for the dark girl’s own pair were strangely deep and lustrous. “People with eyes such as those, that can look into futurity, ought not surely to shrink from a mere gate like death! For death is but a gate—the gate of life in its fullest beauty. It is written over the door, ‘Mors janua vitæ.’”

“What door?” Maisie asked—for she remembered having read those selfsame words, and tried in vain to translate them, that very day, though the meaning was now clear to her.

The answer electrified her: “The gate of the vault in Wolverden churchyard.”

She said it very low, but with pregnant expression.

“Oh, how dreadful!” Maisie exclaimed, drawing back. The tall, dark girl half frightened her.

“Not at all,” the girl answered. “This life is so short, so vain, so transitory! And beyond it is peace—eternal peace—the calm of rest—the joy of the spirit.”

“You come to anchor at last,” her companion added.

“But if—one has somebody one would not wish to leave behind?” Maisie suggested timidly.

“He will follow before long,” the dark girl replied with quiet decision, interpreting rightly the sex of the indefinite substantive. “Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!”

“Hush, Yolande,” the other dark girl put in, with a warning glance; “there’s a new tableau coming. Let me see, is this ‘The Death of Ophelia’? No, that’s number four; this is number three, ‘The Martyrdom of St. Agnes.’”

III

“My dear,” Mrs. West said, positively oozing apology, when she met Maisie in the supper-room, “I’m afraid you’ve been left in a corner by yourself almost all the evening!”

“Oh dear, no,” Maisie answered with a quiet smile. “I had that Oxford undergraduate at my elbow at first; and afterwards those two nice girls, with the flowing white dresses and the beautiful eyes, came and sat beside me. What’s their name, I wonder?”

“Which girls?” Mrs. West asked, with a little surprise in her tone, for her impression was rather that Maisie had been sitting between two empty chairs for the greater part of the evening, muttering at times to herself in the most uncanny way, but not talking to anybody.

Maisie glanced round the room in search of her new friends, and for some time could not see them. At last, she observed them in a remote alcove, drinking red wine by themselves out of Venetian-glass beakers. “Those two,” she said, pointing towards them. “They’re such charming girls! Can you tell me who they are? I’ve quite taken a fancy to them.”

Mrs. West gazed at them for a second—or rather, at the recess towards which Maisie pointed—and then turned to Maisie with much the same oddly embarrassed look and manner as the undergraduate’s. “Oh,
those
!” she said slowly, peering through and through her, Maisie thought. “Those—must be some of the professionals from London. At any rate—-I’m not sure which you mean—over there by the curtain, in the Moorish nook, you say—well, I can’t tell you their names! So they
must
be professionals.”

She went off with a singularly frightened manner. Maisie noticed it and wondered at it. But it made no great or lasting impression.

When the party broke up, about midnight or a little later, Maisie went along the corridor to her own bedroom. At the end, by the door, the two other girls happened to be standing, apparently gossiping.

“Oh, you’ve not gone home yet?” Maisie said, as she passed, to Yolande.

“No, we’re stopping here,” the dark girl with the speaking eyes answered.

Maisie paused for a second. Then an impulse burst over her. “Will you come and see my room?” she asked, a little timidly.

“Shall we go, Hedda?” Yolande said, with an inquiring glance at her companion.

Her friend nodded assent. Maisie opened the door, and ushered them into her bedroom.

The ostentatiously opulent fire was still burning brightly, the electric light flooded the room with its brilliancy, the curtains were drawn, and the shutters fastened. For a while the three girls sat together by the hearth and gossiped quietly. Maisie liked her new friends—their voices were so gentle, soft, and sympathetic, while for face and figure they might have sat as models to Burne-Jones or Botticelli. Their dresses, too, took her delicate Welsh fancy; they were so dainty, yet so simple. The soft silk fell in natural folds and dimples. The only ornaments they wore were two curious brooches of very antique workmanship—as Maisie supposed—somewhat Celtic in design, and enamelled in blood-red on a gold background. Each carried a flower laid loosely in her bosom. Yolande’s was an orchid with long, floating streamers, in colour and shape recalling some Southern lizard; dark purple spots dappled its lip and petals. Hedda’s was a flower of a sort Maisie had never before seen—the stem spotted like a viper’s skin, green flecked with russet-brown, and uncanny to look upon; on either side, great twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled after the fashion of a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. Something weird and witch-like about flowers and dresses rather attracted Maisie; they affected her with the half-repellent fascination of a snake for a bird; she felt such blossoms were fit for incantations and sorceries. But a lily-of-the-valley in Yolande’s dark hair gave a sense of purity which assorted better with the girl’s exquisitely calm and nun-like beauty.

After a while Hedda rose. “This air is close,” she said. “It ought to be warm outside tonight, if one may judge by the sunset. May I open the window?”

“Oh, certainly, if you like,” Maisie answered, a vague foreboding now struggling within her against innate politeness.

Hedda drew back the curtains and unfastened the shutters. It was a moonlit evening. The breeze hardly stirred the bare boughs of the silver birches. A sprinkling of soft snow on the terrace and the hills just whitened the ground The moon lighted it up, falling full upon the Hall; the church and tower below stood silhouetted in dark against a cloudless expanse of starry sky in the background. Hedda opened the window. Cool, fresh air blew in, very soft and genial, in spite of the snow and the lateness of the season. “What a glorious night!” she said, looking up at Orion overhead. “Shall we stroll out for a while in it?”

If the suggestion had not thus been thrust upon her from outside, it would never have occurred to Maisie to walk abroad in a strange place, in evening dress, on a winter’s night, with snow whitening the ground; but Hedda’s voice sounded so sweetly persuasive, and the idea itself seemed so natural now she had once proposed it, that Maisie followed her two new friends on to the moonlit terrace without a moment’s hesitation.

They paced once or twice up and down the gravelled walks. Strange to say, though a sprinkling of dry snow powdered the ground under foot, the air itself was soft and balmy. Stranger still, Maisie noticed, almost without noticing it, that though they walked three abreast, only one pair of footprints—her own—lay impressed on the snow in a long trail when they turned at either end and re-paced the platform. Yolande and Hedda must step lightly indeed; or perhaps her own feet might be warmer or thinner shod, so as to melt the light layer of snow more readily.

The girls slipped their arms through hers. A little thrill coursed through her. Then, after three or four turns up and down the terrace, Yolande led the way quietly down the broad flight of steps in the direction of the church on the lower level. In that bright, broad moonlight Maisie went with them undeterred; the Hall was still alive with the glare of electric lights in bedroom windows; and the presence of the other girls, both wholly free from any signs of fear, took off all sense of terror or loneliness. They strolled on into the churchyard. Maisie’s eyes were now fixed on the new white tower, which merged in the silhouette against the starry sky into much the same grey and indefinite hue as the older parts of the building. Before she quite knew where she was, she found herself at the head of the worn stone steps which led into the vault by whose doors she had seen old Bessie sitting. In the pallid moonlight, with the aid of the greenish reflection from the snow, she could just read the words inscribed over the portal, the words that Yolande had repeated in the drawing-room, “Mors janua vitæ.”