BELGRAVIA APRIL 1868 DEAD-SEA FRUIT A Nobel BY THE AUTHOR OF “LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," ETC. I CHAPTER XXVI. "INFINITE RICHES IN A LITTLE ROOM." DREW aside the portière and looked into the room. She was there -Carlitz--nestling in a deep easy-chair, with that perfect arm— whose rounded line was accentuated by the tight-fitting sleeve of her violet-silk dress-flung above her head in an attitude expressive of weariness. She was not alone. In a chair almost as comfortable as her own sat a portly gentleman of middle age, upon whose handsome countenance good-nature had set a stamp unmistakable even by the shallowest observer. This gentleman was happily no stranger to me. I had met him in London, and knew him as the guide, philosopher, friend, and financial agent of Madame Carlitz; at once the Mazarin and the Colbert of that fair despot. "The divinity arched her eyebrows in lazy surprise as I crossed the threshold. 'I really believe it is someone we know, H.,' she said to her friend with delightful insolence. “Mr. H. received me with more cordiality. I had seen a good deal of him in London during the previous season. E. T. and he were sworn allies. H. had been lieutenant in a regiment of the line, and, after wasting a small patrimony, had sold his commission and turned stage-player. His intimates called him Captain H. and Gentleman H., and he was a man who in the whole of his careless career had neither lost a friend nor made an enemy. To Madame Carlitz he was invaluable. The divinity had of late years taken it into her splendid mind to set up a temple of her own, whereby the little Sheppard's-alley Theatre, the most battered old wooden box that ever held a metropolitan audience, had been transformed, at the cost of some thousands, VOL. V. K into a fairy temple of cream-coloured panelling, and white-satin, hangings, powdered with golden butterflies; and was now known to the fashionable world, whose carriages and cabs blocked Sheppard's-alley and overflowed into Wild's-corner, as the Royal Bonbonnière Operahouse. "Here Carlitz had sung and acted in delicious little operettas imported from her native shores, to the delight of the world in generalalways excepting those stupid people, the builders and decorators and upholsterers who had effected the transformation that made Sheppard'salley and Wild's-corner the haunt of rank and fashion, and who had not received any pecuniary reward for their labours. To keep these people at bay, or, it is possible, to reduce their claims to something like reason, Madame Carlitz employed my friend H., who of all men was best adapted to pour oil upon the stormy ocean of a creditor's mind. He was the enchantress's alter ego, opening and sifting her letters, arranging her starring engagements, choosing her pieces, managing her theatre, and receiving, with imperturbable temper, the torrents of her wrath when she was pleased to be angry. Nor were the proprieties outraged by an alliance so pure. H. was one of those men who are by nature fatherly-nay, almost motherly-in their treatment of women. No scandal had ever tarnished his familiar name. He had that tender, half-quixotic gallantry which is never allied with vice. He was the idol of old women and children, the pride of a doting mother, and the sovereign lord of a commonplace little woman whom he had taken for his wife. "It was to this gentleman that I owed my right to approach Madame Carlitz. E. T. had obtained my admission to the side-scenes of the Bonbonnière, and had induced H. to present me to the lovely manageress, who was unapproachable as royalty. My introduction obtained for me only some ten minutes' converse with the presiding genius of the temple; but so supreme an honour was even this small privilege, that E. T. hastened to borrow a couple of hundred from me while my gratitude was yet warm. "It will be seen, therefore, that I had little justification for intruding on the lady now, beyond the loneliness of the country in which I found her, and the primitive habits there obtaining. "After I had been a second time presented by H.-the lady having quite forgotten my presentation in Sheppard's-alley-madame received me with more warmth than she had deigned to evince for me in the greenroom of the Bonbonnière. These hills are so dreadfully dreary, and we are so glad to see anyone who can give us news,' she said with agreeable candour. "And then H. explained how it fell out that I met them there. Madame had been knocked-up with the season-six new operettas, the lovely prima donna singing in two pieces every night, and never disappointing her public, which master this fair Carlitz served faith fully and constantly throughout her career-and the doctors had ordered change of scene and quiet-no Switzerland, no Italy, no German spa, but a sheltered hermitage far from the busy haunts of men and the halting-places of stage-coaches. "On hearing this, E. T. had offered his mountain-shanty-poor accommodation, but scenery and air unmatchable in any other spot of earth. Madame Carlitz had been enraptured by the idea. E. T.'s hut was the place of places. She felt herself refreshed and invigorated by the very thought of the mountains and the sea. She would wait for no preparations, no fuss. She would take her own maid, and a couple of women for the house-servants in those mountain-districts must be such barbarous creatures-and Parker her butler, and a page or so, and a dozen or two trunks, and her favourite dogs, and her own particular phaeton and ponies, and her piano, and nothing more. Mr. and Mrs. H. must of course go with her, to keep house, and to write to people in London, and prevent the possibility of her being pursued by bills and tiresome letters, and so on. "H. consented to this, and arranged the journey with infinite patience and good-humour, suppressing the unnecessary adjuncts of the convoy, and reducing the luggage to limits that were almost within. the bounds of reason.. All this he told me, as we strolled on the lawn before dinner. 'She-well, she very nearly swore at me when I told her she mustn't bring her piano,' said Mr. H.; 'a concert grand, you know, about seven feet long. And then she stood out for bringing her man Parker, the greatest thief and scoundrel in Christendom; and the ponies, and a groom, who sits behind her when she drives; but I fought my ground inch by inch, sir, and here we are. Madame has her own maid, and her lap-dogs; I have hired a stout country girl for the kitchen, and we do the rest of the housework ourselves. And, egad, madame likes it. She dusts and arranges the rooms, and so forth, with her own hands, and sings and dances about the house more deliciously than ever she sang or danced on the boards of the Bonbonnière. She has developed a genius for cooking: puts on a big holland apron, and tosses an omelet, or fries a dish of trout, with the art of a Vatel, and the grace of a Hebe. I never knew half her fascination until we came here; and I think, if her London admirers could see her, they would be more madly in love with her than ever.' "They invited me to dine. Mrs. H. made her appearance before dinner-a most amiable inanity, fat, fair, and thirty, with innocent flaxen curls, blue ribbons in her cap, and a babified simpering face; the sort of woman whose presence at a dinner-table, or in a drawingroom, one can only remember by perpetual mental effort. Happily she did not demand much attention, but was content to sit still and simper at her husband's jokes and madame's agreeable rattle.' 6 "We talked of everything and everybody. The divine Carlitz, who in her audience-chamber at the Bonbonnière had received me with such chilling courtesy, was now cordial and familiar as friendship itOur conversation developed innumerable points of sympathy between us: mutual likings, mutual antipathies-all of the most frivolous kind, for the world of Estelle Carlitz was a world of trifles; a universe of cashmere-shawls, pug-dogs, airy ballads, dainty pony carriages, diamonds, and strawberries and cream. I have since heard that beneath that snowy breast, whereon bright gems seemed to shine with intenser brightness, there beat a heart full of generous pity for her own sex, though hard as adamant for ours. "To me, upon this particular evening, in this lonely mountainretreat, she was delightful. The dinner was excellent-simplicity itself, but served with a rustic grace that might have charmed Savarin or Alvanly. In my own eyrie the cuisine had been a lamentable failure; and the fact that it was so, may have somewhat contributed to the causes of that ever-increasing weariness of spirit which had been my portion in these mountain regions. At five-and-twenty a man can endure a good deal in this way. I was no gourmet, though I had lived amongst men who, in the old Roman days, would have known by the flavour of their turbot whether it had been caught between the two bridges of Tiber-men who discussed the menu of a dinner with a solemnity that would have sufficed for the forming of a Cabinet, and arranged the importation of a truffled turkey or a Strasburg pie with as much care as might have attended the dismission of a secret emissary to the Jacobite court at Rome in the days of the first two Georges. "H. dozed after dinner, worn out by a long morning's fishing; while Madame Carlitz and I trifled with our modest dessert, and slandered our London acquaintance. Between us we seemed to know everyone. The lady's knowledge of the great world was chiefly secondhand, it must be confessed, but she told me many facts relating to my intimate acquaintance that were quite new to me, and which might have made my hair stand on end, had I not happily outlived that period in which the secret records of our friends' lives have power either to shock or to astonish. "Nothing could present a more piquant contrast to my poor C.'s plaintive looks and tones, and ill-concealed unhappiness, than the elegant vivacity of this most fascinating Carlitz. And to have found her thus remote from her usual surroundings, sequestered, unexpected, as mountain sylph, lent a positive enchantment to the whole affair. "We went out on to the lawn in the tender moonlight, while Mrs. H. made tea for us at a pretty lamp-lit table, and that most amiable and inconsiderately-considerate H. slept on serenely in his comfortable chintz-covered easy-chair. We went out into that divine intoxicating light. The ripple of the waves sounded softly afar. deep cleft in the mountain revealed a glimpse of moonlit water, and around and about us fell the shadows of the mighty hills. 'It is like a scene in an opera,' cried Madame Carlitz. "And it was evident the scene awakened no higher emotion in her mind. 'If such a set were only manageable at the Bonbonnière! But we have not enough depth for this kind of thing. That is what we want, you see-depth.' 6 'Yes,' I answered almost sadly, that is what we want-depth.' The moonlight effect is only a question of green gauzes, and lamps at the wing. I think, by the bye, we make our moonlights a little too green. I wonder whether Mr. Fresko has ever seen the moon. He spends all his evenings in the theatre, smoking and drinking beer in his painting-room, or hanging about the side-scenes, smelling intolerably of stale tobacco. I really doubt if he has ever seen this kind of thing. But I can't afford to change him for a better painter. His interiors are exquisite. He was painting a tapestried drawing-room, after Boucher, when I left London—a scene that will enchant you next season. The draperies are to be blue watered silk-real silk, you know; and folding-doors at the back will open into a garden of real exotics, if I can get my florist to supply them; but he is rather an impracticable sort of person, who is always wanting sums on account.' 'And the piece?' I asked. 'O, the piece is a pretty-enough little trifle,' the lady replied with supreme carelessness; 'The Marquis of Yesterday, a vaudeville of the Pompadour period, adapted from Scribe. Of course, I am to play Pompadour.' "On this I would fain have become more sentimental. The mountain light, the deep mysterious shadows, the glimpse of oceanall invited to that dreamy sentimentality which is of earth's transient intoxications the most delightful. But Madame Carlitz was not sentimentally inclined. To shine, to astonish, to enchant-these to her were but too easy. The melting mood was out of her line. And though she fooled me by her charming air of sympathy, I felt, even in the hour of my delusion, a vague sense that it was all stage-play, and that the looks and tones which thrilled my senses, and almost touched that finer sense I had been taught to call my soul, were the same looks and tones which the dramatic critics praised in the finished actress of the Bonbonnière. "Have I any right to be angry with her if she was all falsehood, when there was so little reality in my own fade sentimentality and hackneyed flatteries? No; I am not angry. I encountered the enchantress but a few nights ago in society, and said to myself wonderingly, 'Once I almost loved you.' "H. awoke, and smiled upon us with his genial smile, as we returned to the pretty lamp-lit room. 'Have you two children been rehearsing the balcony scene in the |