Trilby

Suddenly there came a loud knuckle-rapping at the outer door, and a portentous voice of great volume, and that might almost have belonged to any sex (even an angel’s), uttered the British milkman’s yodel, “Milk below!” and before anyone could say “Entrez,” a strange figure appeared, framed by the gloom of the little antechamber.

It was the figure of a very tall and fully developed young female, clad in the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier, continued netherwards by a short striped petticoat, beneath which were visible her bare white ankles and insteps, and slim, straight, rosy heels, clean cut and smooth as the back of a razor; her toes lost themselves in a huge pair of male list slippers, which made her drag her feet as she walked.

She bore herself with easy, unembarrassed grace, like a person whose nerves and muscles are well in tune, whose spirits are high, who has lived much in the atmosphere of French studios, and feels at home in it.

This strange medley of garments was surmounted by a small bare head with short, thick, wavy brown hair, and a very healthy young face, which could scarcely be called quite beautiful at first sight, since the eyes were too wide apart, the mouth too large, the chin too massive, the complexion a mass of freckles. Besides, you can never tell how beautiful (or how ugly) a face may be till you have tried to draw it.

Just as Svengali was about to knock at the Laird’s door, Trilby came downstairs from Durien’s, very unlike herself. Her eyes were red with weeping, and there were great black rings round them; she was pale under her freckles.

“Fous afez du chacrin, matemoiselle?” asked he.

She told him that she had neuralgia in her eyes, a thing she was subject to; that the pain was maddening, and generally lasted twenty-four hours.

“Perhaps I can cure you; come in here with me.”

The Laird’s ablutions (if he had indulged in any that morning) were evidently over for the day. He was breakfasting on a roll and butter, and coffee of his own brewing. He was deeply distressed at the sight of poor Trilby’s sufferings, and offered whiskey and coffee and gingernuts, which she would not touch.

Svengali told her to sit down on the divan, and sat opposite to her, and bade her look him well in the white of the eyes.

“Recartez-moi pien tans le planc tes yeux.”

Then he made little passes and counterpasses on her forehead and temples and down her cheek and neck. Soon her eyes closed and her face grew placid. After a while, a quarter of an hour perhaps, he asked her if she suffered still.

“Oh! presque plus du tout, monsieur⁠—c’est le ciel.”

In a few minutes more he asked the Laird if he knew German.

“Just enough to understand,” said the Laird (who had spent a year in Düsseldorf), and Svengali said to him in German: “See, she sleeps not, but she shall not open her eyes. Ask her.”

Svengali had a stroke of good-fortune. He played at three grand concerts with Gecko, and had a well-deserved success. He even gave a concert of his own, which made a furor, and blossomed out into beautiful and costly clothes of quite original color and shape and pattern, so that people would turn round and stare at him in the street⁠—a thing he loved. He felt his fortune was secure, and ran into debt with tailors, hatters, shoemakers, jewellers, but paid none of his old debts to his friends. His pockets were always full of printed slips⁠—things that had been written about him in the papers⁠—and he would read them aloud to everybody he knew, especially to Trilby, as she sat darning socks on the model-throne while the fencing and boxing were in train. And he would lay his fame and his fortune at her feet, on condition that she should share her life with him.

“Ach, himmel, Drilpy!” he would say, “you don’t know what it is to be a great pianist like me⁠—hein! What is your Little Billee, with his stinking oil-bladders, sitting mum in his corner, his mahlstick and his palette in one hand, and his twiddling little footle pig’s-hair brush in the other! What noise does he make? When his little fool of a picture is finished he will send it to London, and they will hang it on a wall with a lot of others, all in a line, like recruits called out for inspection, and the yawning public will walk by in procession and inspect, and say ‘damn!’ Svengali will go to London himself. Ha! ha!

“Trilby, I have asked you nineteen times, and you have refused. Trilby, once more, on Christmas night, for the twentieth time⁠—will you marry me? If not, I leave Paris tomorrow morning, and never come back. I swear it on my word of honor!”

Trilby turned very pale, and leaned her back against the wall, and covered her face with her hands.

Little Billee pulled them away.

“Answer me, Trilby!”

“God forgive me, yes!” said Trilby, and she ran downstairs, weeping.

It was now very late.

It soon became evident that Little Billee was in extraordinary high spirits⁠—in an abnormal state of excitement.

He challenged Svengali to spar, and made his nose bleed, and frightened him out of his sardonic wits. He performed wonderful and quite unsuspected feats of strength.

Then the two little pageboys each drew a silken rope, and the curtains parted and looped themselves up on each side symmetrically; and a tall female figure appeared, clad in what seemed like a classical dress of cloth of gold, embroidered with garnets and beetles’ wings; her snowy arms and shoulders bare, a gold coronet of stars on her head, her thick light brown hair tied behind and flowing all down her back to nearly her knees, like those ladies in hairdressers’ shops who sit with their backs to the plate-glass windows to advertise the merits of some particular hair-wash.

She walked slowly down to the front, her hands hanging at her sides in quite a simple fashion, and made a slight inclination of her head and body towards the imperial box, and then to right and left. Her lips and cheeks were rouged; her dark level eyebrows nearly met at the bridge of her short high nose. Through her parted lips you could see her large glistening white teeth; her gray eyes looked straight at Svengali.

Her face was thin, and had a rather haggard expression, in spite of its artificial freshness; but its contour was divine, and its character so tender, so humble, so touchingly simple and sweet, that one melted at the sight of her. No such magnificent or seductive apparition has ever been seen before or since on any stage or platform⁠—not even Miss Ellen Terry as the priestess of Artemis in the late Laureate’s play, The Cup.

The house rose at her as she came down to the front; and she bowed again to right and left, and put her hand to