This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at length struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the whole of the picture.
The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon, rising in a livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator was seen a freshly-opened grave. In the foreground were two figures--one that of a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled from her coffin, wrapped as she was in her cerements of the tomb; the other that of the lover. He had propped the body against the broken hillock of the grave, and he was chanting a love-song to it which he accompanied on his lute. His face suggested the last stage of a galloping consumption, further enlivened by the fearsome light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary bats flopped and lollopped through the air, and a few sympathetic toads came out to listen to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as if they swayed and moaned to the music; and the rank weeds and grasses were mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn musician.
Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there followed a shocking inclination to laugh.
"What do you think of it?" Blanchet asked.
"No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness; just a striving after drawing-room popularity. No depth of feeling; no care for the realistic power of the scene. Pretty, pleasing--nothing more. Surface only; no depth."
"Hideous? Oh, no! Decay is loveliness; decay is the soul of really high art when you come to understand it. But there is no real decay there. That girl's face is pretty waxwork. There's no death there," and he turned half away in contempt. "That is what comes of being popular and a success. No; Delavar is done. I told him so."
"He is quite new to me," said Minola. "I never heard of him before."
"He's getting old now," Blanchet said. "He must be quite thirty. Let me see--oh, yes; fully that. He had better join the pre-Raphaelites now; or send to the Royal Academy; or hire a gallery and exhibit his pictures at a shilling a head. I fancy they would be quite a success."
Some of this conversation took place as they were making their way through the crowd with the intention of entering the drawing-room again. Minola was greatly amused, and in a manner interested. The whole thing was entirely new to her. As they passed into the corridor there were one or two vacant seats.
