PART EIGHT

Come, my mother that carried me,Make me to-night an olden spell!Try if my witch wife loves the Sea,Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me,Then hey, for heaven or ho, for hell!Circle the Cross on the midnight sand,Heap the fire and mutter the charm,Call her out to ye, soul in hand,Blind and bare to the moon she'll stand,Then out to the sea or in to my arm!Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.

Come, my mother that carried me,Make me to-night an olden spell!Try if my witch wife loves the Sea,Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me,Then hey, for heaven or ho, for hell!

Circle the Cross on the midnight sand,Heap the fire and mutter the charm,Call her out to ye, soul in hand,Blind and bare to the moon she'll stand,Then out to the sea or in to my arm!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.

I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of herdébutinFaust. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me, from my very sympathy with her.

I can see theOpéranow—the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the great, shrouding curtain.

Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch to Roger.

I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.

But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her voice had gone—it caught in her throat. She could not remember the words of theJewel Songand her stomach grew icy cold—if Roger had beenthere, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.

When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, andFaustsaw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies—they had made her put aside the big ones—she was as calm and composed as the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever heard it.

"The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a movement.

It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it, but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas would have, later. It is withMargueriteas a great English comedienne expressed it to me some years later, ofJuliet: one must be forty to play it properly—and then one is too old to play it properly!

But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years to attain—and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so fascinatingly surprising as her own.

When she stopped, fixed her great eyes uponFaustreproachfully and sang, like a sweet, truthful child,

Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle!Ni belle, ni demoiselle....

a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting—it seemed that she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with the reality she expected,as best they could. She had the sweet purity of tone—the candour, if I may so call it, often associated with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive temperaments. ButBrünhildewas the part for her, andBrünhildewas not cool and anything but inexpressive.

The onlyMargueriteI have ever seen since that resembled hers was Mme Calvé's, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside Margarita. You see, shewasyoung, shewassincere and ingenuous, shewasslender and beautiful—and she had a fresh and lovely voice, well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill. I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive chest, emitting a series ofstaccatofireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.

Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now.

So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the poor child.

"Ni belle, ni demoiselle ..."

IT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER RECALLSIT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER RECALLS

It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be!

It was after the garden love-scene that she won her recalls, over and over again. Above the great sheaf of hot-house daisies I sent up to the footlights she bowed and bowed and bowed again and smiled, and the jewels flashed on her white shoulders and the yellow braids shook at her deep, triumphant breaths, as she beamed out over us all, the wonderful, all-embracing smile of the born artist, that cannot be taught. Part of that brilliant smile came straight into my misted eyes, back in the loge, and so extraordinary is the power of such a success, so completely does that row of footlights cut off the victor from us who applaud below, that I, even I, who had literally taught this girl some of the ordinary reserves of decent society, who had found her a savage (socially speaking) only two years ago, now bowed low to her, dazed, humble as the man beside me who never saw her before.

How they pounded and cried, those amusing, sophisticated, babyish Parisians!

"Brava, la petite!" I hear the old gentleman now that turned to me in amazement, chattering like a well-preserved, middle-aged monkey; "but it is that it is an American, they tell me?Ça y est, alors!It is extraordinary, then,impayable! Je n'en reviens pas!"

"And why, Monsieur?" I asked.

"For the reason, simply, that it is well known how they are cold, those women, cold as ice, every one. But this one—Monsieur, I have seen manyMarguerites, I who speak to you, but never before has it arrived to me to envy that fatFaust!"

And I (to whom he spoke) believed him thoroughly, I assure you. Though I doubt if the portly tenor was much flattered, for he had accepted the rôle with the idea ofcarrying off the honours of the evening, and exhibited, in the event, not a little of that acrimony which is so curiously inseparable from any collection of the world's great song-birds. Ever since Music, heavenly maid, was young, she has been so notoriously at variance with her fellow-musicians as to force the uninitiated into all sorts of cynical conclusions! Such as the necessity for some kind of handicap for all these harmonies, some make-weight for these unnaturally perfect chords. And it is but due to the various artists to admit that they supply these counter-checks bravely.

Well I suppose they would be too happy if it were all as harmonious as it sounds, and we should all (the poor songless rest of us) kill ourselves for jealousy! And if the fatFausthad really been as supremely blissful as he should have been when Margarita, with that indescribably lovely bending twist of her elastic body, drooped out of her canvas, rose-wreathed cottage window and threw her white arms about his neck in the most touching and suggestive abandon I have ever seen on the operatic stage—why, we should have been regretfully obliged to tear him to pieces, Roger and I and Walter Carter (I am afraid) and the well-preserved Frenchman!

She was not so philosophical as Goethe nor so saccharine as Gounod, our Margarita, and I don't know that I am more sentimental than another; but when the poor child in all her love and ignorance and simple intoxication with that sweet and terrible brew that Dame Nature never ceases concocting in her secret still-rooms, handed her white self over so trustfully to the plump and eagertenore robusto, a sudden disgust and fury at the imperturbable unfairness of that same inscrutable Dame washed over me like a wave and I could have wept like the silly Frenchman.

Do not be too scornful of that sad and sordid little stage story, ye rising generation—it is not for nothing that the great stupid public of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace hearts! Do not troubleyourselves to explain to me that Gretchen was but an episode in a great cosmic philosophy; I knew it once, when I was young like you. But I am nearly sixty now—worse luck!—and I see why the cosmic philosophy has been quietly buried and the episode remains immortal! And so will you some day.

It was a great success for Madame and she basked in it; she had even a compliment for Roger. In our gay little supper, afterward, we had all a kind word—an almost pathetically kind word—for Roger. Margarita herself had never been so attentive to him, so eager for his ungrudging praise, so openly affectionate with him. He was very kind, very gentle, but in a quiet way he discouraged her demonstrative sweetness and led her to talk of her professional future. In her eyes as she looked at him over her wine-glass I seemed to see something I had never seen before, a sort of frightened pity; not the terror of a child cut off by the crowd from its guardian, but rather the fear of one who sees a one-time comrade on the other side of a widening flood, and regrets and fears for him and pities his loss and loneliness, but is driven by Destiny and cannot cross over. I wondered if the others saw it too, but dared not discover.

It was not altogether a happypetit souper, you see; I often think of it when I assist at similar gatherings, and wonder to myself if in all the glory and under all the triumph there is not some dark spot unknown to us flattering guests, some tiny gulf that is growing relentlessly, though we throw in never so many flowers and jewels to fill it. The wheel turns ever, and no pleasure of ours but is built on the shifting sand of some one's pain, even as Alif told me.

We had theValentinof the opera, a dapper little Frenchman, with us (I forget his name: he had been very kind to Margarita and stood between her and the senseless jealousy of the big, handsome tenor more than once) and I heard him as we left the table remark significantly to Mme. M——i, with a glance at Roger,

"Monsieur is not artiste, then?"

"Surely that sees itself?" returned the famous teacher with a shrug.

"Un mari complaisant, alors?" said the baritone lightly.

Madame had never liked Roger, and was, moreover, a somewhat prejudiced person, but even her feelings could not prevent the irrepressible chuckle that greeted this.

"Do not think it, my friend—jamais de la vie!" she answered quickly, with a frank grimace as she caught my eye and guessed that I had overheard.

No, one could not image Roger as the "husband of his wife." It simply couldn't be supposed.

I had very little to say to him that night, myself. I felt clumsy and tactless, somehow, and certain that what I might say would be too much or too little.

It was Tip whose cheery, "How wonderfully fine she was, Roger! How proud you must be of her!" saved the day and gave us a chance to shake hands and leave them in the flower-filled coupé.

Well, after that it was all the same thing. Exercise, practice, performance, success; then sleep, and exercise again,da capo.

She was a prima donna now, our little Margarita, a successful artist, a public character. "Margarita Josépha," Madame had christened her, for twenty years ago simple American surnames found no favour with the impressario, and "cette charmante Mme. Josépha," "artiste vraiment ravissante," etc., etc., the critics called her.

AsJulietshe looked her loveliest, asMargueriteshe acted her best, asAïdashe sang most wonderfully. Indeed it was this last that captured London and gave rise to the much exaggerated affair of the Certain Royal Personage. She sangAïdatwelve times in one season (going to London from Paris) and the boys whistled the airs through the streets and the bands played from it whenever she rode in the Park. I myself saw the diamond bracelet Miss Jencks returnedto the Duke of S—— (we did not tell Roger, by mutual consent, till much later) and the Queen's pearl-set brooch when she sang at Windsor marked at least one satisfying unanimity among members of the royal family.

I took Mary, long afterward, to hear Mme. G——i in the part Margarita made famous in London, and when the tears rolled down the child's face as poorAïda(that barbaric romanesque) dies in melody, portly though starving, and unconvincingly pale, I wished she might have seen her mother. There was a death! Nothing inAïda'slife could possibly have become her like Margarita's leaving of it, I am sure.

Roger ceased to go after the first performances, and indeed he was very busy, and crossed the ocean more than once in the American interests of his French and Englishclientèle. But whoever stopped at home or went, whoever applauded or yawned, whoever approved of the present status of the Bradley family or disapproved, one gaunt figure never left Margarita's side from the moment she left her door till she returned to it (except for the inevitable separations of the actual stage-scene, and I think she regretted the necessity for these!) This figure was Barbara Jencks's, and hers were the cool, uncompromising eyes into which the enraptured devotee gazed when he followed his card into the drawing-room, hers the strong and knuckly hands that put his flowers into water and his more valuable expressions of regard back into their velvet cases, previous to re-addressing them. She drove with Margarita, when Sue Paynter did not, and would have ridden with her, I verily believe, had not Carter and I volunteered to supply that deficiency.

It was she who received that astonished and, I fear, disappointed kiss from the German officer at Brussels, when the students drew Margarita's carriage home from the opera house after her astonishing triumph in the last act ofSiegfried. It was an absurd part for her—she had never doneElsanorElizabeth, and Mme. M——i was very angry withher. Herr M——l, the great director, spent the summer in Italy and Switzerland and was with our party nearly all of the time. Purely to please himself he taught Margarita the rôle ofBrünhildeinSiegfriedand insisted on her singing it that winter in Brussels under him. It was wonderful, and showed me what her realfortewas to be. She wasBrünhilde, she did not need to act it. How the Master himself would have revelled in her!

She was very teachable—one of the most certain indications of her great capacities. HerMargueritewas almost entirely her own, for she had not learned how to use dramatic instruction; herAïdawas almost Madame's own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not understand the character; herBrünhildewas herself, trained and assisted into the best canons of interpretation by a loyal Wagnerian. It is a short part, of course, but it showed what she could have done with the rest of it. At thirty-five she could have done the wholeRing; at forty I believe no one could have equalled her.

Carter got himself snarled hopelessly into a tangle with the government officials in Berlin (he was no diplomat, though a good fellow, and wild about Margarita, so that poor little Alice had more than one bad quarter-hour, I'm afraid) and it took Roger a great deal of Bradley influence with the American consul and a lot of patient correspondence to unravel his unlucky brother-in-law. This gave Roger a good excuse for being in and near Germany; whether he would have stayed without it, I don't know.

The work on Napoleon was done: he had laboured over it in Rome during the summer, and Margarita had been very sweet, refusing more than one invitation (at Sue Paynter's earnest request) to stay with him. But it was only too evident that she did not wholly wish to stay and that such a situation could not last long. Herr M——l kept her interested, and Seidl, whom he sent for to hear her practising forSiegfried, was most enthusiastic about her and displayedhis admiration a little too strongly for our peace of mind. His was a developing, forcing influence, and Margarita showed the effect of it wonderfully; he inspired her to her best efforts, and Mme. M——i was terribly jealous of him. Personally, I could not but feel that his undoubtedly great influence upon her mind and methods represented one of his many invaluable contributions to the musical history of America—but I speak as an observer, merely, of an American artist, not as a husband!

Roger and he had what must be confessed was a quarrel (though the newspaper accounts of a duel were, of course, absurd) over the advisability of her singing privately for a young German princeling whom Seidl was very anxious to honour—he was then introducing the Wagnerian dramas into America and had not been long director of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. It all smoothed over and we agreed to forget it, all of us, but Seidl's pride was hurt and Roger had done what I had not seen him do for fifteen years—lost his temper badly. He was not pleasant in a temper, old Roger, like all men of strong, controlled natures, and Margarita learned a lesson that day that she never forgot, I suppose. I believe if on the strength of that impression he had carried her off bodily—flung her over his saddle-bow, as it were, and ceased to respect her rights for twenty-four hours, we should all have been spared much strain and suffering. But he regretted his violence and told her so, which was fatal, or so it seemed to me. There are occasions when not to take advantage of a woman is to be unfair to her, and Margarita was very much a woman.

Well, well, it's all over now, and we have no need to regret that we did not try a different way. It may be we should have had to pay a greater price—for nothing lacks its price-mark on life's counter, more's the pity, and if we are deceived by long credit-accounts, the more fools we!

I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisianboulevardier, with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child—how such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her, for did she not invent an entirely newMarguerite? And the Republic of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!

Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taughther, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it—both for love—who shall say?

When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint, unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny, jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.

There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters, but Oxford shall defy them forever.

The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, aninstrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:

"Nellie was a lady—Last night she died ..."

Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice. The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell,My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"

Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life. I suppose they must have been some garden party—I distinctly recall the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch—and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearlin pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."

"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture is safe.

Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue, to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay—younger son of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of more acres than seems quite discreet—until one is in a position to slap the lord on the shoulder!

To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings ofAïda, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds fromMephistopheleswith equalsang-froid, displayed anindifference to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured classes,Ennui, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of England's greatest duke—the most eligiblepartiin the United Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.

They sat together on the floor of a chintz-hung breakfast room, spinning peg-tops all over the polished wax, for two rainy hours before dinner (which function was delayed half an hour to please them, to the awed wonder of the lesser guests and the apoplectic amusements of the young peer's father) and were the only occupants of the great house, except three collie pups who sat with them, to see nothing odd in the performance, though Saint-Saens was come over from Paris to accompany Margarita on the piano and the princess of a royal family was dressed in her palpitating best for the best reason in the world not unconnected with the son of an historic house!

Du Maurier drew a picture of it forPunchin his very best manner (it went the length and breadth of England) and then, at Roger's grave request, withdrew it from the all-but-printed page and gracefully presented him with it. It was wonderfully characteristic of both of them and prettily done on both sides, to my old-fashioned way of thinking.

Well, it was after that top-spinning that Margarita and the Fortunate Youth jumped up carelessly, kicked away the tops, and raced each other to the noble music room, a magnificent gallery, all oak and Romneys and Lelys, and there the Fortunate Youth sat down at the piano (Saint-Saens standing amused in the curve of it) and began to play the accompaniment of one of Tosti's great popular waltz-songs. It is no longer in favour, your waltz-song, though I have lived through a sufficient number of musical fashions to bereasonably certain of its return to power, some day, but then it was at its height, and subalterns hummed them to military bands, from Simla to Quebec, and soft eyes dropped under those subalterns' right shoulders and soft hearts melted as the chorus was repeated by request, and the dawn found them still dancing—bless the happy days!

Now Providence had seen fit (displaying thus an astonishing lack of socialistic wisdom and an altogether regrettable tendency to give to those to whom much had already been given) to bestow upon this Fortunate Youth enough musical ability to have made the fortune of a pair of Blind Toms, so that he could play any and all instruments, instinctively, apparently, and almost equally well. He played also by ear, with the greatest ease, the most complicated harmonies, and could accompany anybody's singing or playing of anything whatever—if he happened to be in the mood for it.

"It is a thousand pities that one could not have found him in the gutter, that boy," as M. Saint-Saens confided to me, "it would have been of service to him!"

Which remark, being overheard, scandalised many good British souls horribly and caused the youth to blush with perfectly ingenuous and modest pleasure.

He sat down at the great Steinway and ran his long white fingers loosely over the keys, and said to Margarita, while the butler gazed in agony at his mistress, and the other guests, all arrayed for one of the climaxes of one of England's most temperamental importations from the kitchens of France, stood divided between interest and foreboding,

"I say, Mrs. Bradley, can you sing'Bid me Good-bye and Go'?I'm awfully fond of that."

"I can sing it if it is here," said Margarita placidly, "why not?"

"Oh, it's safe to be here," he answered easily, and sure enough, it was there, in a cabinet close by.

Well, it was banal enough, heaven knows—how else couldit have been popular? Lincoln was not a musician, so far as I know, but he knew that one can't fool all the people all the time! And the good Tosti, however light he may ring nowadays, had one little bit of information not always at the disposal of modern song-writers—he understood how to write for the human voice. Which has always seemed to me a very valuable acquisition, if one happens to be in the song-writing trade.

So when Margarita, with a quick glance at the obvious little melody, put her hands behind her back like a school-girl—she was dressed in a tight, plain little jacket and skirt of English tweeds, with stiff white collar and cuffs and thick-soled boots, and what used to be called an "Alpine hat"—and began to sing, to a slow waltz rhythm, one might not have expected much: indeed, the youth hummed audaciously with her, at first, and the other men, not one of whom was within many degrees of nonentity, beat time carelessly.

"Isthere a singlejoyor painThat I mayneverknow?"

Stop a bit! What caught at your heart and worried you, Colonel, and stabbed a little under your D. S. O.? Were you quite fair to that lovely, high-spirited creature you married, all those years ago?

"Takeback your love, it is in vain ..."

Ah, Lady Mary, you are a good twelve stone nowadays, but when that poor younger cousin gave you that look in the garden and the roses crawled over the old dial in the moonlight, you were slighter, and crueler!

"Bidme good-byeandgo!"

It was a waltz, oh, yes, but it was a very Dance of Death to those of us who had any parting to look back to, that changed our life—and we could never go back again and make it better; never any more. That was what cut so,and Margarita, dark and slim like a plain brown nightingale, who leaves plumage to the raucous peacock because it matters so little what she, the real queen of us all, wears—Margarita spelled it out remorselessly, to the tune of a mess-room waltz, and told us that youth is only once and so sweet and for so little time! And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich, clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of it as only spendthrift youth can.

"Youdo notloveme, no!Bidme good-byeand go ..."

Cruel Margarita, how could you make the tears splash down the cheeks of the poor little princess, who knew what was expected of her and had no greater sin on her conscience than a tiny lock of her yellow hair always warm, now, in the breast of a ridiculous second cousin on a sheep-ranch in far Dakota, U. S. A.?

"Good-bye, good-bye, 'tis better so ..."

They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British, each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the throat to the top of thecorsagewhich America has not to give her daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has bewitched us with it, has our Margarita.

But strongest and clearest of all, keen in light and dense in shadow like a Rembrandt, I see that extraordinary night in Trafalgar Square, that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are—for they were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people—dead and dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square Icould not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her.

We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.

It had been a dull, damp day—the kind of day that tried Margarita terribly in England, for she was much under the influence of the weather, andle beau tempsbrought out her plumage like her Mexican parrot in Whistler's portrait. Looking back at it all, too, I seem to feel, though with no definite reason for it, that she was perturbed and excited about something known only to herself, for she was strangely irritable on our walk, contradicted me fiercely, inquired testily who Nelson might be, then chid me for a dry old schoolmaster, when I told her, and such like flighty vagaries, inseparable, I believed, from her sex in general and her temperament in particular. If I have never taken the trouble to defend myself from the accusation of thinking The Pearl perfect in her somewhat spoiled relations with her best friends at this period of her life, it is because I have always considered that such people as are too inelastic in their views of human nature to realise that Margarita merely exhibitedles défauts de ses qualités(as who of us does not, at one time or another?) are unworthy even my argumentative powers, which are not great, as I perfectly understand.

So she unsheathed her sharp little female claws and patted me mercilessly with them, and contrived to make me seem to myself a tactless, blundering fool to her heart's content that night, striding easily beside me, meanwhile, like a boy, though she had refused to change her high-heeled bronze slippers for more sensible footgear and carried the unreasonablylong train of her black lace dinner gown over her arm. Roger did not care for her in black, and she seldom wore it, but had ordered this a few days ago from the great Worth, who then ruled those fortunate ladies who could afford to number themselves among his subjects with a sway he has since, I am assured, been forced to divide among other monarchs—the only monarchs left now to a Republic that has never denied that one divine succession through all her revolutions. For that monarchy Paris never will singça ira; for that principle she knows no cynicism; that wonderful juggernaut, the Fashion, shall never rumble across channel, it seems!

I had derided myself for a sentimentalist and spinner of fine theories when I had thought I detected a little defiance in her first assumption of this midnight black robe, with its startling corals on her arm and neck, and the foreign-looking comb behind her high-dressed hair, the whole bringing out markedly that continental strain that amused Whistler (naughty Jimmie!) and displeased Roger. But when she appeared in it that night determined on a dinner where most of the guests were highly distasteful to Roger, who had congratulated himself on a quiet evening at home; when she had dragged him to it at the risk of losing his only train and teased him shamefully all through it by the most ridiculous flirtation with one of the worstrouésof Europe (Margarita was so fundamentally honest and so thoroughly attached to her husband that such performances could only be doubly painful to him, since they were obviously intended maliciously) when she sent him off before the long dinner's close without any but the most casualadieuxand without the remotest intention of accompanying him, I was uncomfortably forced to the conclusion that this long-trained, inky dress was a veritable devil's livery, that she had put it on deliberately and that there would be no stopping her till the mood was off.

And now I find myself about to write a most unjustifiablething, in view of the possibility of these idle memories falling somehow, sometime, somewhere, into the hands of that ubiquitous Young Person to whom all print is free as air in these enlightened days. In America it has been the rule, to suppress such print as could not brave this freedom; in France, to suppress such Young Persons as could! There is something to be said for both methods, and each has, perhaps, its defects; the one producing more stimulating Young Persons, the other enjoying more virile prose.

Be that as it may, I am quite aware that my duty to the youth of Anglo Saxondom should lead me to state, sadly but firmly, that such conduct as Margarita displayed on the night in question could have had but one result—that of filling me, her friend and admirer, with a grieved displeasure and disgust; that her unwomanly carelessness as to the feelings of others and her wanton disregard of the wishes and comfort of those who should have been dearest to her lowered her in my estimation and greatly detracted from her charm in my eyes. But I am not writing particularly for the Young Person and candour compels me to state that she was quite as interesting to me as ever! I didn't think she had treated Roger very handsomely—true; but Roger had known that he was marrying a delicious vixen when he married Margarita, you see, and if I had begun to lecture her, there were too many others who would have been only too delighted to relieve her of my society. She abused her power sometimes, I admit it—but then, she had the power! And oh, the balm she kept for the wounds she gave!

As I have said, I have not the remotest idea of how or why we confronted Nelson and the Lions, I cannot by any effort of memory see us arriving or leaving; but I see myself pausing in my lecture on English history, as a lighted transparency, a straggling crowd and a band bear down upon us suddenly out of nowhere. It is a poor, vicious sort of crowd, the gutter-sweepings of London; pale, stunted lads, haggard,idle slatterns, a handful of women of the street, a trio of tawdry flower girls. Around the band, which turns out to be only a big drum and a clattering tambourine, a group of men and women in a vaguely familiar uniform, the women in ugly coal-scuttle bonnets.

"What is that, Jerry?" says Margarita.

"That is the Salvation Army—let's get along," I answer.

But she will not, for she is curious, and I resign myself to the inevitable and wait. Their crude appeals are symbols born of a deep knowledge of the human heart they fight to win—gleaming light and rhythmic drum: the first groping of savagery, the last pinnacle of the most highly organised religious spectacle the world has yet elaborated. They gather near the fountain, they group about their lighted banner, and a drawling cockney voice afflicts the air. I can see the circle now—they form in the classic amphitheatre that knows no century nor country; a humpback pushing a barrow of something before him stops near us; a woman, coughing frightfully, leans on it, muttering to herself, staring at Margarita's scarf-wrapped head.

The cockney's address begins, "O my brothers ..." but I do not attend: I want to get Margarita out of the growing crowd, listless, but lifted for a moment from their sordid treadmill of existence by the light and the muffled, rhythmic crush and the high-pitched sing-song. They must have followed for a long way, for they are churnings from the very dregs of London and alien to Trafalgar Square, and the officer on his beat looks at them suspiciously enough.

"Won't you give us a song, lieutenant?" says the speaker suddenly, "pipe h'up there, friends—many a sinner's saved his soul with a song—w'y not some o' you? Are you ready, lieutenant?"

I can see her so plainly, the pretty, worn little creature; pale as death and in no condition for street singing, evidently, but plucky and borne along by the very zeal of the Crusaders. The other woman, who cannot sing, shakes the tambourine,a great, burly fellow, some rescued navvy, thuds at the drum, and her sweet, thin little voice rises, shrill, but wonderfully appealing, through the night.

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