In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible. Surely it is not necessary to choose between love and riches. One may have both, and the one all the more easily for having attained the other. It must be a fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance. It was in some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to renounce love to gain the Rhine gold. The boxes at the Metropolitan did not believe this. The spectators of the boxes could believe it still less. For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world? And yet, is the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness, of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and hurry of it? Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the dreadful loss of illusions? Else why do we take pleasure--a pleasure so deep that it touches the heart like melancholy--in the common drama of the opera? How gay and joyous is the beginning! Mirth, hilarity, entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets, the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths of despair. In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life, warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone; there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of sacrifice. How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were incentives to love and promises of happiness! Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass into Valhalla.
Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward, with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine gold?
How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater spectacle as by the less.
It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a box in the second tier--the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a little lull in the hum of conversation.
"I had heard," Morgan was saying, "that the opera was not acclimated in New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the singers--"
"Perhaps," said my wife, "that is because they do not know the airs."
"But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by the music on the stage."
"But the music, the scenery, were never before so good," I replied to these cynical observations.
"That is true. And the social side has risen with it. Do you know what an impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against the raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the cheap illusions of the stage were destroyed? They wanted to make the house positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on the painted towers and the canvas lakes."
As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican simplicity. The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next, attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire, and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic. As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered here--flowered with something of Aspasia's grace and something of the haughty coldness of Agrippina. And yet it was American. Here and there in the boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley--the long shapely neck, the sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in which the great-grandmother danced with the French officers.
"Who is that lovely creature?" asked Margaret, indicating a box opposite.
I did not know. There were two ladies, and behind them I had no difficulty in making out Henderson and--Margaret evidently had not seen him Mr. Lyon. Almost at the same moment Henderson recognized me, and signaled for me to come to his box. As I rose to do so, Mrs. Morgan exclaimed: "Why, there is Mr. Lyon! Do tell him we are here." I saw Margaret's color rise, but she did not speak.
I was presented to Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter; in the latter I recognized the beauty who had flashed by us in the Park. The elder lady inclined to stoutness, and her too youthful apparel could not mislead one as to the length of her pilgrimage in this world, nor soften the hard lines of her worldly face-lines acquired, one could see, by a social struggle, and not drawn there by an innate patrician insolence.
"We are glad to see a friend of Mr. Henderson's," she said, "and of Mr. Lyon's also. Mr. Lyon has told us much of your charming country home. Who is that pretty girl in your box, Mr. Fairchild?"
Miss Eschelle had her glass pointed at Margaret as I gave the desired information.
"How innocent!" she murmured. "And she's quite in the style--isn't she, Mr. Lyon?" she asked, turning about, her sweet mobile face quite the picture of what she was describing. "We are all innocent in these days."
"It is a very good style," I said.
"Isn't it becoming?" asked the girl, making her dark eyes at once merry and demure.
Mr. Lyon was looking intently at the opposite box, and a slight shade came over his fine face. "Ah, I see!"
"I beg your pardon, Miss Eschelle," he said, after a second, "I hardly know which to admire most, the beauty, or the wit, or the innocence of the American women."
"There is nothing so confusing, though, as the country innocence," the girl said, with the most natural air; "it never knows where to stop."
"You are too absurd, Carmen," her mother interposed; "as if the town girl did!"
"Well, mamma, there is authority for saying that there is a time for everything, only one must be in the fashion, you know."
Mr. Lyon looked a little dubious at this turn of the talk; Mr. Henderson was as evidently amused at the girl's acting. I said I was glad to see that goodness was in fashion.
"Oh, it often is. You know we were promised a knowledge of good as well as evil. It depends upon the point of view. I fancy, now, that Mr. Henderson tolerates the good--that is the reason we get on so well together; and Mr. Lyon tolerates the evil--that's the reason he likes New York. I have almost promised him that I will have a mission school."
The girl looked quite capable of it, or of any other form of devotion. Notwithstanding her persistent banter, she had a most inviting innocence of manner, almost an ingenuousness, that well became her exquisite beauty. And but for a tentative daring in her talk, as if the gentle creature were experimenting as to how far one could safely go, her innocence might have seemed that of ignorance.
It came out in the talk that Mr. Lyon had been in Washington for a week, and would return there later on.
"We had a claim on him," said Mrs. Eschelle, "for his kindness to us in London, and we are trying to convince him that New York is the real capital."
"Unfortunately," added Miss Eschelle, looking up in Mr. Lyon's face, "he visited Brandon first, and you seem to have bewitched him with your simple country ways. I can get him to talk of nothing else."
"You mean to say," Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, "that you have asked me about nothing else."
"Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no place so dangerous as the country. Now here you are protected--we put all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recogniz............