CHAPTER XI.
The first thing Annie had done on arriving at her London lodging had been to take off her wedding-ring and hide it away in a corner of her desk. She had given to the landlady the name “Miss Langton,” which she had resolved to adopt for the future. These were her first steps toward cutting herself off from her past life; the next was a bolder one.
During these long weeks when she had lain ill in bed, she had pondered in her mind how she could live when she had left her husband, as she at the very beginning of her illness determined to do. One trial of the life of a governess had been enough for her, and she could not easily have re-entered it except in some sort under false pretenses. Besides, now that she had thrown herself upon her own resources, and stood once more alone in the world, her old ambitions had awakened within her, the old spirit cried out, the vague but strong consciousness of untried powers turned her thoughts to a career of art. One form of art alone seemed open to her—the stage. All that she knew, or almost all that she knew, of a theatrical life was distasteful to her, and her instinct would have led her to give herself up to writing. But she had already tried that, knew how hard it was even to get a hearing from the reading public, and cast aside the thought of literary distinction as taking too long to win.
Of course, knowing nothing about the stage, she fell into the common error of thinking that talent made itself more quickly manifest there, and utterly ignored the fact that it is about as easy for a woman of high principles, without either money or interest, to attain a good position in a London theater as for a drummer-boy to become a general. She knew she would have to wait and to work before she found her way to the front rank; but how long that weary waiting would last, or how dull that work would be, she had not the least idea. She had unbounded faith in herself, she had energy, a little patience, and she believed herself to have talent, and her heart beat fast with the thought that she was now free to measure her strength against the world.
As for the horror of her husband and the rest of the Braithwaites, if they ever came to hear of the step she had taken, why, she did not care for their opinion, and their disgust could not humiliate her. Besides, the fact of her having become an actress would effectually cut her off from them forever and prevent their trying to bring her back to them, a possibility too dreadful to be considered calmly.
For, now that they were over, yet still fresh in her mind, the trials she had suffered during those few months of married life seemed, in these first days of relief from them, even greater than they had really been. Harry seemed more brutal, more ignorant, more dissipated, Lady Braithwaite and Lilian more coldly insolent, George more selfish, Wilfred more drunken, Stephen more unkind; so that the stage held out attractions for her in the social oblivion it involved which it would have been far from having in her eyes in other circumstances.
Not once did the thought occur to Annie that she was doing wrong in thus leaving her husband without consulting him. From the first she had been too obviously his superior in judgment to set any value on his opinion, and now she only thought she was ridding him as well as herself of an intolerable burden in the simplest manner. She had tried hard to do her duty as a wife, and had succeeded only in exasperating him against her and in unwittingly irritating him to more than his customary excesses. In leaving him free she thought she was rendering him the highest service in her power; and in freeing herself she felt, with a throb of joy, that she was once more able to indulge in her old dreams of ambition and success.
But in this argument with herself she forgot one thing—namely, that she had not left Harry free. This forgetfulness was the natural result of the effacement she had suffered at Garstone Grange which had caused her to depreciate her duties as they had depreciated her rights. It did not occur to her to think that she, morally the stronger of the two, was abandoning her husband, in all the first heat of a singularly wild and passionate nature, to a life in which the innocent indulgence of the affections was no longer possible; for she looked upon him as a brute incapable of any but the lowest forms of love. As for herself, she did not think herself in danger—she was of cooler temperament and higher intellect; her imagination took fire much more readily than her heart; she had thrown herself into the prospect of a brilliant career, and the idea of leading a loveless life had few terrors for her at first, except in rare moments of depression.
But, though the future was full of charm for her, the present was not without great difficulties. How was she to enter upon her new life? She remembered that some years ago, in the old days when her father was alive, when she was still a school girl and theatrical matters had the charm of mystery, she had been with her father on one occasion when he had met and introduced to her an acquaintance of his who was a manager and an actor too, and whom she had wondered to find so exceedingly silent and grave when she remembered how he had made her laugh upon the stage. She now hit upon the bold measure of writing to him, and asking if he would see her; but a week passed, and her letter received no answer. She wrote again to his theater, and this time inclosed a stamped directed envelope, with an apology for doing so, and an earnest request for five minutes of his time. She received in reply a hasty note naming a day and hour when he could see her; and, more excited than she had ever been in her life before, she arrived at the theater at the appointed time. She had to wait a long, weary time, very much ashamed of herself, very much afraid her application would be in vain, very much wishing herself out of the group of shabby men—whom she mistook for actors—with whom she was waiting, when at last the manager came. As his eyes fell on her, she stepped forward, holding his letter and giving her maiden name.
As she had expected, he had long since forgotten her; but he asked her to follow him up-stairs, and gave her a courteous hearing at the back of the dress-circle. After some difficulty, he remembered, or said he remembered, their former meeting. He strongly advised her not to go on the stage, telling her that even great talent did not always command success, that it was a hard life, full of disappointments. Finding her resolution still firm, and for the sake of her father, with whom he had at one time been intimate, he agreed to let her make a very modest first appearance at his theater as a silent “guest.” He did not much approve of lady amateurs, even in this humble capacity, but the girl was much in earnest, her pretty pleading was so touching, that he made this small concession, scarcely doubting that, if she went through all the rehearsals, after a few nights of a suffocating dressing-room and a draughty stage, she would appear no more, cured of her unfortunate whim.
The rehearsals were a hard trial, certainly. To stand about for three or four hours on a dark stage in the company of two or three more “ladies” who would have been scarcely refined enough for her to engage as maids, and then sometimes to be dismissed without having to go through her simple duty of walking across at the back of the scene with a shabby man who by day filled the position of a bill-sticker, was not work too exciting to leave time for some unpleasant reflection. When the piece came out things were a little better. Of the three girls who dressed with her in a large, bare room which seemed miles away, up at the top of the theater, two were illiterate but inoffensive, and the third proved to be one of the merriest little creatures who ever wished to be a great actress when nature intended her for a good washer-woman.
Going home alone at night frightened her dreadfully, and she never got quite used to it. Luckily there were omnibuses which took her nearly the whole way; but the short distance she had to walk before she caught one was a nightly agony, though nobody ever took any notice of the insignificant muffled up figure.
The piece was a failure, and did not run long; but she did duty again in the same humble capacity with the same companions in the comedy which followed, hoping for an opening to something more dignified and better calculated to show off her histrionic powers, if she possessed any. The opening came. It was a very small one, merely the opportunity of saying one line as a maid-servant; but the minutes before hearing her own voice for the first time in public were fraught with a terribly intense excitement which no important part in after-times ever called up in her with the same strength.
It was a few nights after this ordeal that on returning from the theater she was seized, for the first time since leaving Garstone, with a longing to hear what was going on there—how her departure had been taken, and how William passed his time without her. So she wrote to her brother-in-law, giving, as the address for him to write to, that of a stationer whose shop she passed on her way to and from the theater. It was not that she mistrusted the boy’s word, or even his carefulness; but she did not wish to get him into trouble, as would certainly have been the case if any of the rest suspected him of knowing her real address.
In answer she got the following letter:
“My dear Annie,—I thought you were never going to keep your promise and write to me after all, and you haven’t told me much now you do write to me. For I want to know ever so much more than you say. You need not be afraid of anybody seeing your letter. For when I got it at Moss’ I took it straight back and down to the willow-pond. I read it, and fastened it under the lining of my hunting-cap. So its all rigt. There was a shindy when they new you were gone. George went to your aunt and first he scolded mother and Lil and said they ought to be ashamed of themselves and your aunt dident know where you were. And Harry you should have seen him go on. You would have thought he was a good husbend and you a bad wife if you heard him. He had been to London and sold his hunting-wach and bougt you a dimand ring which I think you would have liked but of course you were write to go away and I said so and he punched my head and I punched him back. So he dident get much good by his interferring with me. They thought I new where you were and I said if they thought I did they migt just try to make me say thats all. So they lissened to reason and Harry drinks more than ever he is as bad as Wilfred evry bit. And he is allways hanging about Green’s forge now. Susan Greens come back a pretty thing for a man married like he is now. I only tell you this becos I think you ought to know being his wife which is a great pity. They none of them know you will never come back except Lil who says you wont and that makes George very angry and one evening made Harry cry like a great baby insted of trying to find you. The place is beesly now you are gone and if I wasent going to uncle Geralds in Ireland I thing I should have to come and dig you out.“Your afecsionate brother-in-law,“William Fitzpatrick Braithwaite.“P.S.—If you could see the black and white rabit now I think you would laugh for his legs are alright but so stiff that he hops bout as if he was made of wood. Jo bit the pups tail off a fortnight ago.”
“My dear Annie,—I thought you were never going to keep your promise and write to me after all, and you haven’t told me much now you do write to me. For I want to know ever so much more than you say. You need not be afraid of anybody seeing your letter. For when I got it at Moss’ I took it straight back and down to the willow-pond. I read it, and fastened it under the lining of my hunting-cap. So its all rigt. There was a shindy when they new you were gone. George went to your aunt and first he scolded mother and Lil and said they ought to be ashamed of themselves and your aunt dident know where you were. And Harry you should have seen him go on. You would have thought he was a good husbend and you a bad wife if you heard him. He had been to London and sold his hunting-wach and bougt you a dimand ring which I think you would have liked but of course you were write to go away and I said so and he punched my head and I punched him back. So he dident get much good by his interferring with me. They thought I new where you were and I said if they thought I did they migt just try to make me say thats all. So they lissened to reason and Harry drinks more than ever he is as bad as Wilfred evry bit. And he is allways hanging about Green’s forge now. Susan Greens come back a pretty thing for a man married like he is now. I only tell you this becos I think you ought to know being his wife which is a great pity. They none of them know you will never come back except Lil who says you wont and that makes George very angry and one evening made Harry cry like a great baby insted of trying to find you. The place is beesly now you are gone and if I wasent going to uncle Geralds in Ireland I thing I should have to come and dig you out.
“Your afecsionate brother-in-law,
“William Fitzpatrick Braithwaite.
“P.S.—If you could see the black and white rabit now I think you would laugh for his legs are alright but so stiff that he hops bout as if he was made of wood. Jo bit the pups tail off a fortnight ago.”
This letter made Annie thoughtful. The Rubicon was passed now; she could not have gone back, even had she wished to do so, with what they would have considered the contamination of the stage upon her. But what William said about Harry caused her to ask herself for the first time whether she had not done him wrong, whether she ought not still to have stayed and continued coldly to fulfill her wifely duty to the letter, whether there had not been more selfishness than self-sacrifice in giving him back his liberty. She felt not one whit more of affection for the drunken lad who had become the ardent admirer of the blacksmith’s daughter, but this last fact was too significant not to awaken her self-reproach. She felt at the bottom of her heart an unacknowledged gladness that it was no longer in her power to go back, and in the cares of her present life she soon forgot again those of her past.
For the few shillings she received for her work at the theater were not enough to pay her modest expenses for food and lodging without her drawing upon the small sum she had brought with her from the Grange; William’s money she had resolved not to touch except in case of utmost need. So she tried her strength by living too simply, while she passed, in spite of herself, at the theater as a “rich” lady, who “came behind” for a freak. She had clothing enough to last for some time, and before the end of the summer she was lucky in being able to sell a short story; and then, after being for a few weeks out of work and in debt, and almost in danger of absolute want, she got an engagement at a salary which was just enough to live upon, but with no chance of more than a few lines to speak.
And this was her life, with now and then a hope of something better to do, followed always by disappointment and sometimes by despair for nearly three years, at the end of which time she was still appearing at a fashionable comedy theater, where she had been figuring in the programmes for some months on the last line of the list of characters, thus—“Maid, Miss Langton.”
And the brilliant future she had pictured once for herself seemed further away than ever. For she had by this time mastered some of the secrets of success on the stage. The highest success, she still knew, fell only to the highest talent; and this belief, which was directly against the creed of most of her companions, she held to the end. It was all luck, they said. It was chiefly luck, she thought too—the luck of being somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter, of having good looks and bad principles or wealthy friends, of being by chance on the right spot at the right time; and luck had been against her.
Disappointment, too, and weary, weary waiting had taken the bloom off her beauty, which was of a type depending very much on expression; and the look her face habitually wore now was that of a woman whom cares and failures and struggles with necessity had reduced to an automaton. Yet in some respects her position would not have been an unenviable one to a less ambitious woman. The conscientious care which had formerly made her a good governess, and later an almost too submissive wife to her careless husband, made her now fill her very unimportantroleswith an attention to the most trifling details which obtained for her the consideration of the authorities in the theater, although it was of course not possible that her efforts to be artistic in her representation of monosyllabic maids should attract the attention of the general public or of the critics in front. And her salary, though not high, was now sufficient to keep her in comfort, which might have been greater, had she been more economical. So that the privilege of thinking herself a martyr was almost out of her reach.
She had not quite given up hope, though it was no longer joined to bright confidence in ultimate success, when a small part was intrusted to her which enabled her to show unmistakable signs of talent. It was such a very small part, and it would so undoubtedly have improved the piece from a dramatist’s point of view to cut out the scene it was in altogether, that the critics took no notice, and the public did not seem impressed. But it drew the attention of her companions to her; and Annie, with her heart beating wildly, overheard more than one prediction that she would “get on.”
With reawakened ambition, her old high spirits came back to her; the cloud of cold reserve which closed over her in spite of herself when she was unhappy, disappeared, and for the first time Annie found pleasure in her profession. The society afforded at that time by the theater she was in, was some of the pleasantest in London. It included men and women who were among the world’s recognized pets—women of beauty and men of wit, handsome actors, and two actresses of whom Europe had acknowledged the genius. Annie felt the charm of this brilliant circle, which was indeed, as theaters so seldom are, as attractive as the outside world imagined it to be.
She was sitting in the green-room one evening, between the acts, when two of the actors came in, discussing the beauty of a lady who sat in one of the boxes nearest to the stage.
“I’m sure I’ve seen her in the Park,” said one; “and I’ve been told her name; but I forget it.”
“Is that her husband behind her—the tall man with the eye-glass?”
“Don’t know, I’m sure. Should think not.”
The other laughed.
“She is the handsomest woman we have had in front for a long time—much better-looking than any of the professional beauties. Perhaps she is a professional beauty—eh?”
“No—too good-looking.”
It was the other’s turn to laugh; and, when they were called on to the stage, they were still criticising the unknown fair one and anxious for another view of her.
Annie’s curiosity was excited, and, contrary to her custom of devoting her attention entirely to what was going on on the stage, she managed, on her next appearance to say a few lines, to get an opportunity of looking toward the box the two speakers had indicated. And she gave one of the slightest, most imperceptible of starts, for the lady was Lilian, exquisitely dressed and looking handsomer than ever. Annie could not see the face of the man behind her in her glance at the box; but she was anxious to know who it was, and later in the evening she was satisfied; for a young actor named Gerald Gibson told another in her hearing that the lady was Mrs. Falconer, that he had been to a dance at her house two nights before, and that “the tall man with the eye-glass,” who was one of the other occupants of the box, was a Colonel Richardson, who had just returned from abroad.
All this filled Annie with excitement and anxiety. Had Lilian recognized her? Who were the other people in the box? Had Colonel Richardson really only just returned from abroad? These and other questions concerning her sister-in-law and the rest of her husband’s family kept her awake that night in a fever of newly awakened interest in the Braithwaites. The remembrance of her life at Garstone occupied her very little now, the long, solitary hours of daylight, when she was not engaged in rehearsal, she filled by writing, her old taste for which had revived to console her for her otherwise monotonous life. After the exchange of a few letters with William, she had heard no more from him, and it was now more than two years since she had received his last. During all this time no news had reached her, of her husband or his family. She had said of late bitterly to herself that, if they had cared to do so, they would have found her out long ago, and she had begun to wonder whether she would ever see any of them again, when this unexpected, yet most natural event, showed her again the one of all the Braithwaites whom she least cared to see.
Annie liked Gerald Gibson, as everybody in the theater did—a grave, quiet, thoughtful-looking man, whose reserved manners impressed those around him with respect, even though it was often merely the result of his having nothing in particular to say. He might have been the son of a cheesemonger, but he was as perfect a gentleman not only in look and manner, but in mind, as if he had been the son of a duke. Annie knew, though she had known him only a few weeks, that she could speak without reserve to him. On the evening after she had seen Lilian, therefore, she found an opportunity, when they were on the stage together, but not immediately concerned in the business of the scene, of alluding to the beauty who had made such a sensation among them the night before.
“I think I heard you say you were fortunate enough to know her, Mr. Gibson,” said she, her interest peeping out from under the indifferent words.
“I don’t know her well. I was introduced to her about ten days ago, and somebody got me a card for an ‘At home’ at her house.”
“She is very beautiful, ain’t she?”
“Yes, very, for those who admire massive beauty.”
“Then don’t you admire her?”
“Yes; but I have seen women I admire more.”
“I don’t like such frosty enthusiasm. Is she nice, pleasant, amiable?”
“I don’t think ‘amiable’ is quite the word for that type of woman. But she is very brilliant, very charming.”
“I used to know her once before she was married,” said Annie in a low voice. “I am glad to hear she is happy.”
“I am scarcely able to judge of that. Ladies act so well, even when they are not on the stage, and they are often charming when at heart they are very miserable; so the novelists say.”
“You don’t think she is miserable, do you?” asked Annie, anxiously.
“Indeed I have no reasons for thinking so. She seems to have everything she can want, beauty, wealth, position, a good husband.”
“Then Mr. Falconer is nice?”
“He is generally popular, I believe; but I have scarcely seen him.”
“Ah!” escaped suddenly from Annie’s lips. She thought those last words significant.
She could not bring the conversation round to Colonel Richardson now without exciting his suspicions, so she merely asked him not to mention that she had ever known Mrs. Falconer.
“I wish to remainperduto my old friends until I have got on—if I ever do get on,” she added, sadly.
“You will get on, Miss Langton. How can you doubt it!”
“How can I do anything but doubt it? I have waited so long, and seem no nearer the end.”
“But you must be nearer the end.”
“Ah—but what end?”
She turned away with a little shrug of the shoulders, and his eyes followed her with interest. She was not massive and he found more attraction in her face than in those of all the professional beauties.
A few evenings later, as he was leaving the theater when his share of the performance was over, he saw Miss Langton in front of him walking down the quiet street where the stage-door was. A gentleman standing on the opposite pathway crossed over and raised his hat to her. Gerald Gibson saw her start, stop, hesitate, and finally put out her hand. Gerald passed them, but neither noticed him; and he recognized the gentleman as Colonel Richardson, whom he had met at Mrs. Falconer’s.
“That was the reason of her interest in Mrs. Falconer then!” thought Gerald.