Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/807

Rh mentary Secretary to the Admiralty, into whose company he had fallen.

"What are we doing it for?" he asked the young man, whose thin person was well set off by a Tudor dress.

"Oh! don't be superior!" said the other. "I'm going to enjoy myself like a schoolboy!"

And that, indeed, seemed to be the attitude of most of the people present. And not only of the younger members of the dazzling company. What struck Ashe particularly, as he mingled with the crowd, was the alacrity of the elder men. Here was a famous lawyer already nearing the seventies, in the Lord-Chancellor red of a great ancestor; here an ex-Viceroy of Ireland with a son in the government, magnificent in an Elizabethan dress, his fair bushy hair and reddish beard shining above a doublet on which glittered a jewel given to the founder of his house by Elizabeth's own hand; next to him, a white-haired judge in the robes of Judge Gascoyne; a peer, no younger, at his side, in the red and blue of Mazarin: and showing, each and all, in their gay complacent looks a clear revival of that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which came so strangely to an end with that older world on the ruins of which Napoleon rose. So with the elder women. For this night they were young again. They had been free to choose from all the ages a dress that suited them; and the result of this renewal of a long-relinquished eagerness had been in many cases to call back a bygone self, and the tones and gestures of those years when beauty is its own chief care.

As for the young men, the young women, and the girls, the zest and pleasure of the show shone in their eyes and movements, and spread through the hall, and up the crowded staircase, like a warm contagious atmosphere. At all times, indeed, and in all countries an aristocracy has been capable of this sheer delight in its own splendor, wealth, good looks, and accumulated treasure; whether in the Venice that Petrarch visited; or in the Rome of the Renaissance Popes; in the Versailles of the Grand Monarqne; or in the Florence of to-day, which still at moments of festa reproduces in its midst all the costumes of the Cinquecento.

In this English case there was less dignity than there would have been in a Latin country, and more personal beauty; less grace perhaps, and yet a something richer and more romantic.

At the top of the stairs stood a Marquis in a dress of the Italian Renaissance, a Gonzaga who had sat for Titian, a veritable collar of the Golden Fleece round his neck, while up the marble stairs, watched by a laughing multitude above, streamed Gainsborough girls and Reynolds women, women from the courts of Elizabeth or Henri Quatre, of Maria Theresa or Marie Antoinette, the figures of Holbein and Vandyck, Florentines of the Renaissance, the youths of Carpaccio, the beauties of Titian and Veronese.

"Kitty, make haste!" cried a voice in front as Kitty began to mount the stairs. "Your quadrille is just called!"

Kitty smiled and nodded, but did not hurry her pace by a second. The staircase was not so full as it had been, and she knew well as she mounted it, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her eyes flashing greeting and challenge to those in the gallery, the diamond genius on her spear glittering above her, that she held the stage, and that the play would not begin without her.

And, indeed, her dress, her brilliance, and her beauty let loose a hum of conversation—not always friendly.

"What is she?"

"Oh, something mythological!—she's in the next quadrille." "My dear, she's Diana!—look at her bow and quiver, and the moon in her hair." "Very incorrect!—she ought to have the towered crown!" "Absurd, such a little thing to attempt Diana!—I'd back Actæon!"

The latter remark was spoken in the ear of Louis Harman, who stood in the gallery looking down. Harman shook his head. "You don't understand. She's not Greek, of course; but she's Fairy-land. A child of the Renaissance, dreaming in a wood, would have seen Artemis so,—dressed up and glittering, and fantastic—as the Florentines saw Venus. Small, too, like the fairies!—slipping through the leaves; small hounds, with jewelled collars, following her!"

He smiled at his own fancy, still watching Kitty with his painter's eyes.