A few days after the performance of theWhite Lady, Kendal, in the course of his weekly letter to his sister, sent her a fairly-detailed account of the evening, including the interview with her after the play, which had left two or three very marked impressions upon him. 'I wish,' he wrote, 'I could only convey to you a sense of her personal charm such as might balance the impression of her artistic defects, which I suppose this account of mine cannot but leave on you. When I came away that night after our conversation with her I had entirely forgotten her failure as an actress, and it is only later, since I have thought over the evening in detail, that I have returned to my first standpoint of wonder at the easy toleration of the English public. When you are actually with her, talking to her, looking at her, Forbes's attitude is the only possible and reasonable one. What does art, or cultivation, or training matter!—I found myself saying, as I walked home, in echo of him,—so long as Nature will only condescend once in a hundred years to produce for us a creature so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the gods, and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!
'That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind's morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of theWhite Ladyhad originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor—namely, beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I found myself reflecting with some fierceness,—let us withhold from her a sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the human spirit.
'And then, as my mood cooled still further, I began to recall many an evening at theFrançaiswith you, and one part after another, one actor after another, recurred to me, till, as I realised afresh what dramatic intelligence and dramatic training really are, I fell into an angry contempt for our lavish English enthusiasms. Poor girl! it is not her fault if she believes herself to be a great actress. Brought up under misleading conditions, and without any but the most elementary education, how is she to know what the real thing means? She finds herself the rage within a few weeks of her appearance in the greatest city of the world. Naturally, she pays no heed to her critics,—why should she?
'And she is indeed a most perplexing mixture. Do what I will I cannot harmonise all my different impressions of her. Let me begin again. Why is it that her acting is so poor? I never saw a more dramatic personality! Everything that she says or does is said or done with a warmth, a force, a vivacity that make her smallest gesture and her lightest tone impress themselves upon you. I felt this very strongly two or three times after the play on Friday night. In her talk with Forbes, for instance, whom she has altogether in her toils, and whom she plays with as though he were the gray-headed Merlin and she an innocent Vivien, weaving harmless spells about him. And then, from this mocking war of words and looks, this gay camaraderie, in which there was not a scrap of coquetry or self-consciousness, she would pass into a sudden outburst of anger as to the impertinence of English rich people—the impertinence of rich millionaires who have tried once or twice to "order" her for their evening parties as they would order their ices, or the impertinence of the young "swell about town" who thinks she has nothing to do behind the scenes but receive his visits and provide him with entertainment. And, as the quick impetuous words came rushing out, you felt that here for once was a woman speaking her real mind to you, and that with a flashing eye and curving lip, an inborn grace and energy which made every word memorable. If she would but look like that or speak like that on the stage! But there, of course, is the rub. The whole difficulty of art consists in losing your own personality, so to speak, and finding it again transformed, and it is a difficulty which Miss Bretherton has never even understood.
'After this impression of spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a painful impression of fatigue on Friday—fatigue and something like depression. After twenty minutes' talk she threw herself back against the iron pillar behind her, her White Lady's hood framing a face so pale and drooping that we all got up to go, feeling that it was cruelty to keep her up a minute longer. Mrs. Stuart asked her about her Sundays, and whether she ever got out of town. "Oh," she said, with a sigh and a look at her uncle, who was standing near, "I think Sunday is the hardest day of all. It is our 'at home' day, and such crowds come—just to look at me, I suppose, for I cannot talk to a quarter of them." Whereupon Mr. Worrall said in his bland commercial way that society had its burdens as well as its pleasures, and that his dear niece could hardly escape her social duties after the flattering manner in which London had welcomed her. Miss Bretherton answered, with a sort of languid rebellion, that her social duties would soon be the death of her. But evidently she is very docile at home, and they do what they like with her. It seems to me that the uncle and aunt are a good deal shrewder than the London public; it is borne in upon me by various indications that they know exactly what their niece's popularity depends on, and that it very possibly may not be a long-lived one. Accordingly, they have determined on two things: first, that she shall make as much money for the family as can by any means be made; and, secondly, that she shall find her way into London society, and secure, if possible, a greatpartibefore the enthusiasm for her has had time to chill. One hears various stories of the uncle, all in this sense; I cannot say how true they are.
'However, the upshot of the supper-party was that next day Wallace, Forbes, and I met at Mrs. Stuart's house, and formed a Sunday League for the protection of Miss Bretherton from her family; in other words, we mean to secure that she has occasional rest and country air on Sunday—her only free day. Mrs. Stuart has already wrung out of Mrs. Worrall, by a little judicious scaring, permission to carry her off for two Sundays—one this month and one next—and Miss Bretherton's romantic side, which is curiously strong in her, has been touched by the suggestion that the second Sunday should be spent at Oxford.
'Probably for the first Sunday—a week hence—we shall go to Surrey. You remember Hugh Farnham's property near Leith Hill? I know all the farms about there from old shooting days, and there is one on the edge of some great commons, which would be perfection on a May Sunday. I will write you a full account of our day. The only rule laid down by the League is that things are to be so managed that Miss Bretherton is to have no possible excuse for fatigue so long as she is in the hands of the society.
'My book goes on fairly well. I have been making a long study of De Musset, with the result that the poems seem to me far finer than I had remembered, and theConfessions d' un Enfant du Sièclea miserable performance. How was it it impressed me so much when I read it first? His poems have reminded me of you at every step. Do you remember how you used to read them aloud to our mother and me after dinner, while the father had his sleep before going down to the House?'
Ten days later Kendal spent a long Monday evening in writing the following letter to his sister:—
'Our yesterday's expedition was, I think, a great success. Mrs. Stuart was happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton's first sight of the genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her out and watching her strong naive impressions of things. Stuart, I think, was not quite happy. It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours' divorce from his briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection. The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises too muchau sérieux.
'I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago but two subjects—Jamaica and the stage—the latter taken in a somewhat narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her mind and Mrs. Stuart's more frequently into contact with each other. But I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton. Her strong womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical delight in the girl's beauty, and the little personal pride and excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the season. It is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her in the best light. Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in her turn evidently admires enormously her friend's social capabilities and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs. Stuart's kindness—an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest complaisance towards all the Stuarts' friends, and in a constant watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.
'However, here I am as usual wasting time in analysis instead of describing to you our Sunday. It was one of those heavenly days with which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty. We found a carriage waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region in some virgin continent. On either hand the gorse was thick and golden, great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist grass beneath, and over the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose into the sky in masses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle of white set in the environing blue.
'Then came the farmhouse—old, red-brick, red-tiled, casemented—everything that the aesthetic soul desires—the farmer and his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the parlour, with its last-century woodwork.
'Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch. I never knew him more racy; he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, illustrated by sketches, made in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has condescended to take this year. They range from a bishop and a royalty down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his presentation of the characteristic attitudes of each—those attitudes which, according to him, betray the "inner soul" of the bishop or the foundling—was admirable. Then he fell upon the Academy—that respected body of which I suppose he will soon be the President—and tore it limb from limb. With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at the Academy dinners of the future—supposing fortune ever exalts me again as she did this year to that august meal—I hardly know. Millais's faces, Pettie's knights, or Calderon's beauties—all fared the same. You could not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.
'Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman's cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet. She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries assigned to them. Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth's and an unutterable mawkish thing of Halford's—a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown, gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust young women in a "light which never was on sea or land." "You could count all the figures in the first," she said, "it was so lifelike, so real;" and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it. I looked at Forbes with some amusement; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of theWhite Lady, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton's liking of the worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.
'"Oh, you couldn't," he said with a groan, "you couldn't like that ballroom,—and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us! Well, there must be something in it,—there must be something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,—I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn't. I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's figures don't join in the middle, and that Forth's men and women are as flat as my hand—there isn't a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don't think I can stand it. I am all for people getting enjoyment where they can," with a defiant look at me, "and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the line somewhere. There's some art that's out of court from the beginning."
'I couldn't resist it.
'"Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is tofeel; defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms."
'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there's no denying it.
'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like—that's all I know in anything."
'"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with 'I like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'"
'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton. Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind, for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks more and her engagement at theCalliopewill be over. There are other theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet; but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency object to her having her own way. "I am wild to get to Italy," she said to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. "Sir Walter Rutherford has talked to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly," and she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. "I come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance with all sorts of horrors since I came to London—face-ache and rheumatism and colds!—I scarcely knew there were such things in the world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a naughty child!"
'"Do you know," I said, flinging myself down beside her on the grass and looking up at her, "that it's altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to feel tired; it's monstrous, it's against the natural order of things!"
'"It's London," she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that is so prettily pathetic. "I have the roar in my ears all day, and it seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I have only a few weeks more," she added, brightening, "and then by October I shall be more used to Europe—the climate and the life."
'I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton. You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and constitution relaxed by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health—there are some signs of it—what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it. I long to step in, to "have at" somebody, to stop it.
'A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises. The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing. Are Eugène de Rastignac, le Père Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds. We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.
'"Ha!" said Wallace, who is a bird-lover, "a truce to Balzac, and let us watch those nut-hatches! Miss Bretherton's quite right to prefer them to French novels."
'"French novels!" she said, withdrawing her eyes from the branch above her, and frowning a little at Wallace as she spoke. "Please don't expect me to talk about them—I know nothing about them—I have never wished to."
'Her voice had a tone almost of hauteur in it. I have noticed it before. It is the tone of the famous actress accustomed to believe in herself and her own opinion. I connected it, too, with all one hears of her determination to look upon herself as charged with a mission for the reform of stage morals. French novels and French actresses! apparently she regards them all as so many unknown horrors, standing in the way of the purification of dramatic art by a beautiful young person with a high standard of duty. It is very odd! Evidently she is the Scotch Presbyterian's daughter still, for all her profession, and her success, and her easy ways with the Sabbath! Her remark produced a good deal of unregenerate irritation in me. If she were a first-rate artist to begin with, I was inclined to reflect, this moral enthusiasm would touch and charm one a good deal more; as it is, considering her position, it is rather putting the cart before the horse. But, of course, one can understand that it is just these traits in her that help her to make the impression she does on London society and the orthodox public in general.
'Wallace and I went off after the nut-hatches, enjoying a private laugh by the way over Mrs. Stuart's little look of amazement and discomfort as Miss Bretherton delivered herself. When we came back we found Forbes sketching her—she sitting rather flushed and silent under the tree, and he drawing away and working himself at every stroke into a greater and greater enthusiasm. And certainly she was as beautiful as a dream, sitting against that tree, with the brown heather about her and the young oak-leaves overhead. But I returned in an antagonistic frame of mind, a little out of patience with her and her beauty, and wondering why Nature always blunders somewhere!
'However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of ear-shot of the rest.
'"Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read French novels if I wished to ever so much."
'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly,having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself.I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenlyI thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.
'"Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream—you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don't shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforêts, I think?—no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again. What a pity!"
'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."
'"Indeed!" I said, waiting a little curiously for what she would say next.
'"It's not that I am jealous of her," she exclaimed, with a quick proud look at me; "not that I don't believe she's a great actress; but I can't separate her acting from what she is herself. It is women like that who bring discredit on the whole profession—it is women like that who make people think that no good woman can be an actress. I resent it, and I mean to take the other line. I want to prove, if I can, that a woman may be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to hear the way people—especially men—talk about Madame Desforêts; there is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were nothing in the world but genius—and French genius!"
'It struck me that I had got to something very much below the surface in Miss Bretherton. It was a curious outburst; I remembered how often her critics had compared her to Desforêts, greatly to her disadvantage. Was this championship of virtue quite genuine? or was it merely the best means of defending herself against a rival by the help of British respectability?
'"Mme. Desforêts," I said, perhaps a little drily, "is a riddle to her best friends, and probably to herself; she does a thousand wild, imprudent,badthings if you will, but she is the greatest actress the modern world has seen, and that's something to have done for your generation. To have moved the feelings and widened the knowledge of thousands by such delicate, such marvellous, such conscientious work as hers—there is an achievement so great, so masterly, that I for one will throw no stones at her!"
'It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her, should be trampling on Desforêts and genius. But I was conscious of my audacity. If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful business, that her acting is as good as anybody's, and that her special mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage. To have the naked, artistic view thrust upon her—that it is the actress's business toact, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her—must be repugnant to her. She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who learns a string of long words without understanding them. She walked on beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to endanger a friendship which had opened so well,—her wonderful lips opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me. It was as though she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on Providence, wishing the others were not so far off. But suddenly the tension of her mood seemed to give way. Her smile flashed out, and she turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.
'"No, we won't throw stones at her! Sheisgreat, I know, but that other feeling is so strong in me. I care for my art; it seems to me grand, magnificent!—but I think I care still more for making people feel it is work a good woman can do, for holding my own in it, and asserting myself against the people who behave as if all actresses had done the things that Madame Desforêts has done. Don't think me narrow and jealous. I should hate you and the Stuarts to think that of me. You have all been so kind to me—such good, real friends! I shall never forget this day—Oh! look, there is the carriage standing up there. I wish it was the morning and not the evening, and that it might all come again! I hate the thought of London and that hot theatre to-morrow night. Oh, my primroses! What a wretch I am! I've lost them nearly all. Look, just that bunch over there, Mr. Kendal, before we leave the common."
'I sprang to get them for her, and brought back a quantity. She took them in her hand—how unlike other women she is after all, in spite of her hatred of Bohemia!—and, raising them to her lips, she waved a farewell through them to the great common lying behind us in the evening sun. "How beautiful! how beautiful! This English country is so kind, so friendly! It has gone to my heart. Good-night, you wonderful place!"
'She had conquered me altogether. It was done so warmly—with such a winning, spontaneous charm. I cannot say what pleasure I got out of those primroses lying in her soft ungloved hand all the way home. Henceforward, I feel she may make what judgments and draw what lines she pleases; she won't change me, and I have some hopes of modifying her; but I am not very likely to feel annoyance towards her again. She is like some frank, beautiful, high-spirited child playing a game she only half understands. I wish she understood it better. I should like to help her to understand it—but I won't quarrel with her, even in my thoughts, any more!
* * * * *
'On looking over this letter it seems to me that if you were not you, and I were not I, you might with some plausibility accuse me of being—what?—in love with Miss Bretherton? But you know me too well. You know I am one of the old-fashioned people who believe in community of interests—in belonging to the same world. When I come coolly to think about it, I can hardly imagine two worlds, whether outwardly or inwardly, more wide apart than mine and Miss Bretherton's.'
During the three weeks which elapsed between the two expeditions of the 'Sunday League,' Kendal saw Miss Bretherton two or three times under varying circumstances. One night he took it into his head to go to the pit of theCalliope, and came away more persuaded than before that as an actress there was small prospect for her. Had she been an ordinary mortal, he thought the original stuff in her might have been disciplined into something really valuable by the common give and take, the normal rubs and difficulties of her profession. But, as it was, she had been lifted at once by the force of one natural endowment into a position which, from the artistic point of view, seemed to him hopeless. Her instantaneous success—dependent as it was on considerations wholly outside those of dramatic art—had denied her all the advantages which are to be won from struggle and from laborious and gradual conquest. And more than this, it had deprived her of an ideal; it had tended to make her take her own performance as the measure of the good and possible. For, naturally, it was too much to expect that she herself should analyse truly the sources and reasons of her popularity. She must inevitably believe that some, at least, of it was due to her dramatic talent in itself. 'Perhaps some of it is,' Kendal would answer himself. 'It is very possible that I am not quite fair to her. She has all the faults which repel me most. I could get over anything but this impression of bare blank ignorance which she makes upon me. And as things are at present, it is impossible that she should learn. It might be interesting to have the teaching of her! But it could only be done by some one with whom she came naturally into frequent contact. Nobody could thrust himself in upon her. And she seems to know very few people who could be of any use to her.'
On another occasion he came across her in the afternoon at Mrs. Stuart's. The conversation turned upon his sister, Madame de Châteauvieux, for whom Mrs. Stuart had a warm but very respectful admiration. They had met two or three times in London, and Madame de Châteauvieux's personal distinction, her refinement, her information, her sweet urbanity of manner, had made a great impression upon the lively little woman, who, from the lower level of her own more commonplace and conventional success in society, felt an awe-struck sympathy for anything so rare, so unlike the ordinary type. Her intimacy with Miss Bretherton had not gone far before the subject of 'Mr. Kendal's interesting sister' had been introduced, and on this particular afternoon, as Kendal entered her drawing-room, his ear was caught at once by the sound of Marie's name. Miss Bretherton drew him impulsively into the conversation, and he found himself describing his sister's mode of life, her interests, her world, her belongings, with a readiness such as he was not very apt to show in the public discussion of any subject connected with himself. But Isabel Bretherton's frank curiosity, her kindling eyes and sweet parted lips, and that strain of romance in her which made her so quickly responsive to anything which touched her imagination, were not easy to resist. She was delightful to his eye and sense, and he was as conscious as he had ever been of her delicate personal charm. Besides, it was pleasant to him to talk of that Parisian world, in which he was himself vitally interested, to any one so naive and fresh. Her ignorance, which on the stage had annoyed him, in private life had its particular attractiveness. And, with regard to this special subject, he was conscious of breaking down a prejudice; he felt the pleasure of conquering a great reluctance in her. Evidently on starting in London she had set herself against everything that she identified with the great Trench actress who had absorbed the theatre-going public during the previous season; not from personal jealousy, as Kendal became ultimately convinced, but from a sense of keen moral revolt against Madame Desforêts's notorious position and the stories of her private life which were current in all circles. She had decided in her own mind that French art meant a tainted art, and she had shown herself very restive—Kendal had seen something of it on their Surrey expedition—under any attempts to make her share the interest which certain sections of the English cultivated public feel in foreign thought, and especially in the foreign theatre. Kendal took particular pains, when they glided off from the topic of his sister to more general matters, to make her realise some of the finer aspects of the French world of which she knew so little, and which she judged so harshly; the laborious technical training to which the dwellers on the other side of the channel submit themselves so much more readily than the English in any matter of art; the intellectual conscientiousness and refinement due to the pressure of an organised and continuous tradition, and so on. He realised that a good deal of what he said or suggested must naturally be lost upon her. But it was delightful to feel her mind yielding to his, while it stimulated her sympathy and perhaps roused her surprise to find in him every now and then a grave and unpretending response to those moral enthusiasms in herself which were too real and deep for much direct expression.
'Whenever I am next in Paris, she said to him, when she perforce rose to go, with that pretty hesitation of manner which was so attractive in her, 'would you mind—would Madame de Châteauvieux,—if I asked you to introduce me to your sister? It would be a great pleasure to me.'
Kendal made a very cordial reply, and they parted knowing more of each other than they had yet done. Not that his leading impression of her was in any way modified. Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful as a woman,—had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience; but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of incompetence? After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them. Kendal was far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own person. Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding them. It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head perfectly cool on the subject of Miss Bretherton's artistic claims, but he was conscious that it was not always very easy to do—a consciousness that made him sometimes all the more recalcitrant under the pressure of her celebrity.
For it seemed to him that in society he heard of nothing but her—her beauty, her fascination, and her success. At every dinner-table he heard stories of her, some of them evident inventions, but all tending in the same direction—that is to say, illustrating either the girl's proud independence and her determination to be patronised by nobody, not even by royalty itself, or her lavish kind-heartedness and generosity towards the poor and the inferiors of her own profession. She was for the moment the great interest of London, and people talked of her popularity and social prestige as a sign of the times and a proof of the changed position of the theatre and of those belonging to it. Kendal thought it proved no more than that an extremely beautiful girl of irreproachable character, brought prominently before the public in any capacity whatever, is sure to stir the susceptible English heart, and that Isabel Bretherton's popularity was not one which would in the long run affect the stage at all. But he kept his reflections to himself, and in general talked about her no more than he was forced to do. He had a sort of chivalrous feeling that those whom the girl had made in any degree her personal friends ought, as far as possible, to stand between her and this inquisitive excited public. And it was plain to him that the enormous social success was not of her seeking, but of her relations.
One afternoon, between six and seven, Kendal was working alone in his room with the unusual prospect of a clear evening before him. He had finished a piece of writing, and was standing before the fire deep in thought over the first paragraphs of his next chapter, when he heard a knock; the door opened, and Wallace stood on the threshold.
'May I come in? It's a shame to disturb you; but I've really got something important to talk to you about. I want your advice badly.'
'Oh, come in, by all means. Here's some cold tea; will you have some? or will you stay and dine? I must dine early to-night for my work. I'll ring and tell Mason.'
'No, don't; I can't stay. I must be in Kensington at eight.' He threw himself into Kendal's deep reading-chair, and looked up at his friend standing silent and expectant on the hearth-rug. 'Do you remember that play of mine I showed you in the spring?'
Kendal took time to think.
'Perfectly; you mean that play by that young Italian fellow which you altered and translated? I remember it quite well. I have meant to ask you about it once or twice lately.'
'You thought well of it, I know. Well, my sister has got me into the most uncomfortable hobble about it. You know I hadn't taken it to any manager. I've been keeping it by me, working it up here and there. I am in no want of money just now, and I had set my heart on the thing's being really good—well written and well acted. Well, Agnes, in a rash moment two or three days ago, and without consulting me, told Miss Bretherton the whole story of the play, and said that she supposed I should soon want somebody to bring it out for me. Miss Bretherton was enormously struck with the plot, as Agnes told it to her, and the next time I saw her she insisted that I should read some scenes from it to her—'
'Good heavens! and now she has offered to produce it and play the principal part in it herself,' interrupted Kendal.
Wallace nodded. 'Just so; you see, my relations with her are so friendly that it was impossible for me to say no. But I never was in a greater fix. She was enthusiastic. She walked up and down the room after I'd done reading, repeating some of the passages, going through some of the situations, and wound up by saying, "Give it me, Mr. Wallace! It shall be the first thing I bring out in my October season—if you will let me have it." Well, of course, I suppose most people would jump at such an offer. Her popularity just now is something extraordinary, and I see no signs of its lessening. Any piece she plays in is bound to be a success, and I suppose I should make a good deal of money out of it; but then, you see, I don't want the money, and—'
'Yes, yes, I see,' said Kendal, thoughtfully; 'you don't want the money, and you feel that she will ruin the play. It's a great bore certainly.'
'Well, you know, how could she help ruining it? She couldn't play the part of Elvira—you remember the plot?—even decently. It's an extremely difficult part. It would be superb—I think so, at least—in the hands of an actress who really understood her business; but Miss Bretherton will make it one long stagey scream, without any modulation, any shades, any delicacy. It drives one wild to think of it. And yet how, in the name of fortune, am I to get out of it?'
'You had thought,' said Kendal, 'I remember, of Mrs. Pearson for the heroine.'
'Yes; I should have tried her. She is not first-rate, but at least she is intelligent; she understands something of what you want in a part like that. But for poor Isabel Bretherton, and those about her, the great points in the play will be that she will have long speeches and be able to wear "medieval" dresses! I don't suppose she ever heard of Aragon in her life. Just imagine her playing a high-born Spanish woman of the fifteenth century! Can't you see her?'
'Well, after all,' said Kendal, with a little laugh, 'I should see what the public goes for mostly—that is to say, Isabel Bretherton in effective costume. No, it would be a great failure—not a failure, of course, in the ordinary sense. Her beauty, the medieval get-up, and the romantic plot of the piece, would carry it through, and, as you say, you would probably make a great deal by it. But, artistically, it would be a ghastly failure. And Hawes! Hawes, I suppose, would play Macias? Good heavens!'
'Yes,' said Wallace, leaning his head on his hands and looking gloomily out of window at the spire of St. Bride's Church. 'Pleasant, isn't it? But what on earth am I to do? I never was in a greater hole. I'm not the least in love with that girl, Kendal, but there isn't anything she asked me to do for her that I wouldn't do if I could. She's the warmest-hearted creature—one of the kindest, frankest, sincerest women that ever stepped. I feel at times that I'd rather cut my hand off than hurt her feelings by throwing her offer in her face, and yet, that play has been the apple of my eye to me for months; the thought of seeing it spoilt by clumsy handling is intolerable to me.'
'I suppose it would hurt her feelings,' said Kendal meditatively, 'if you refused?'
'Yes,' said Wallace emphatically; 'I believe it would wound her extremely. You see, in spite of all her success, she is beginning to be conscious that there are two publics in London. There is the small fastidious public of people who take the theatre seriously, and there is the large easy-going public who get the only sensation they want out of her beauty and her personal prestige. The enthusiasts have no difficulty, as yet, in holding their own against the scoffers, and for a long time Miss Bretherton knew and cared nothing for what the critical people said, but of late I have noticed at times that she knows more and cares more than she did. It seems to me that there is a little growing soreness in her mind, and just now if I refuse to let her have that play it will destroy her confidence in her friends, as it were. She won't reproach me, she won't quarrel with me, but it will go to her heart. Do, for heaven's sake, Kendal, help me to some plausible fiction or other!'
'I wish I could,' said Kendal, pacing up and down, his gray hair falling forward over his brow. There was a pause, and then Kendal walked energetically up to his friend and laid his hand on his shoulder.
'You oughtn't to let her have that play, Wallace; I'm quite clear on that. You know how much I like her. She's all you say, and more; but art is art, and acting is acting. I, at any rate, take these things seriously, and you do too. We rejoice in it for her sake; but, after all, when one comes to think of it, this popularity of hers is enough to make one despair. Sometimes I think it will throw back the popular dramatic taste for years. At any rate, I am clear that if a man has got hold of a fine work of art, as you have in that play, he has a duty to it and to the public. You are bound to see it brought out under the best possible conditions, and we all know that Miss Bretherton's acting, capped with Hawes's, would kill it, from the artistic point of view.'
'Perfectly true, perfectly true,' said Wallace. 'Well, would you have me tell her so?'
'You must get out of it somehow. Tell her that the part is one you feel won't suit her—won't do her justice.'
'Much good that would do! She thinks the part just made for her—costumes and all.'
'Well, then, say you haven't finished your revision, and you must have time for more work at it; that will postpone the thing, and she will hear of something else which will put it out of her head.'
'There are all sorts of reasons against that,' said Wallace; 'it's hardly worth while going through them. In the first place, she wouldn't believe me; in the second, she won't forget it, whatever happens, and it would only put the difficulty off a few weeks at most. I feel so stupid about the whole thing. I like her too much. I'm so afraid of saying anything to hurt her, that I can'tfinesse. All my wits desert me. I say, Kendal!'
'Well?'
Wallace hesitated, and glanced up at his friend with his most winning expression.
'Do you thinkyoucould earn my eternal gratitude and manage the thing for me? You know we're going to Oxford next Sunday, and I suppose we shall go to Nuneham, and there will be opportunities for walks, and so on. Could you possibly take it in hand? She has an immense respect for you intellectually. If you tell her that you're sure the part won't suit her, that she won't do herself justice in it; if you could lead the conversation on to it and try to put her out of love for the scheme without seeming to have a commission from me in any way, I should be indeed everlastingly obliged! You wouldn't make a mess of it, as I should be sure to do. You'd keep your head cool.'
'Well!' said Kendal, laughing, balancing himself on the table facing Wallace. 'That's a tempting prospect! But if I don't help you out you'll give in, I know; you're the softest of men, and I don't want you to give in.'
'Yes, of course I shall give in,' said Wallace, with smiling decision. 'If you don't want me to, suppose you take the responsibility. I've known you do difficult things before; you manage somehow to get your own way without offending people.'
'H'm,' said Kendal; 'I don't know whether that's flattering or not.' He began to walk up and down the room again cogitating. 'I don't mind trying,' he said at last, 'in a very gingerly way. I can't, of course, undertake to be brutal. It would be impossible for any one to treatherroughly. But there might be ways of doing it. There's time to think over the best way of doing it. Supposing, however, she took offence? Supposing, after Sunday next, she never speaks to either of us again?'
'Oh!' said Wallace, wincing, 'I should give up the play at once if she really took it to heart. She attaches one to her. I feel towards her as though she were a sister—only more interesting, because there's the charm of novelty.'
Kendal smiled. 'Miss Bretherton hasn't got to that yet with me. Sisters, to my mind, are as interesting as anybody, and more so. But how on earth, Wallace, have you escaped falling in love with her all this time?'
'Oh, I had enough of that last year,' said Wallace abruptly, rising and looking for his overcoat, while his face darkened; 'it's an experience I don't take lightly.'
Kendal was puzzled; then his thoughts quickly put two and two together. He remembered a young Canadian widow who had been a good deal at Mrs. Stuart's house the year before; he recalled certain suspicions of his own about her and his friend—her departure from London and Wallace's long absence in the country. But he said nothing, unless there was sympathy in the cordial grip of his hand as he accompanied the other to the door.
On the threshold Wallace turned irresolutely. 'It will be a risk next Sunday,' he said; 'I'm determined it shan't be anything more. She is not the woman, I think, to make a quarrel out of a thing like that.'
'Oh no,' said Kendal; 'keep your courage up. I think it may be managed.You give me leave to handleElviraas I like.'
'Oh heavens, yes!' said Wallace; 'get me out of the scrape any way you can, and I'll bless you for ever. What a brute I am never to have asked after your work! Does it get on?'
'As much as any work can in London just now. I must take it away with me somewhere into the country next month. It doesn't like dinner-parties.'
'Like me,' said Wallace, with a shrug.
'Nonsense!' said Kendal; 'you're made for them. Good-night.'
'Good-night. It's awfully good of you.'
'What? Wait till it's well over!'
Wallace ran down the stairs and was gone. Kendal walked back slowly into his room and stood meditating. It seemed to him that Wallace did not quite realise the magnificence of his self-devotion. 'For, after all, it's an awkward business,' he said to himself, shaking his head over his own temerity. 'How I am to come round a girl as frank, as direct, as unconventional as that, I don't quite know! But she ought not to have that play; it's one of the few good things that have been done for the English stage for a long time past. It's well put together, the plot good, three or four strongly marked characters, and some fine Victor Hugoish dialogue, especially in the last act. But there is extravagance in it, as there is in all the work of that time, and in Isabel Bretherton's hands a great deal of it would be grotesque: nothing would save it but her reputation and the get-up, and that would be too great a shame. No, no; it will not do to have the real thing swamped by all sorts of irrelevant considerations in this way. I like Miss Bretherton heartily, but I like good work, and if I can save the play from her, I shall save her too from what everybody with eyes in his head would see to be a failure!'
It was a rash determination. Most men would have prudently left the matter to those whom it immediately concerned, but Kendal had a Quixotic side to him, and at this time in his life a whole-hearted devotion to certain intellectual interests, which decided his action on a point like this. In spite of his life in society, books and ideas were at this moment much more real to him than men and women. He judged life from the standpoint of the student and the man of letters, in whose eyes considerations, which would have seemed abstract and unreal to other people, had become magnified and all-important. In this matter of Wallace and Miss Bretherton he saw the struggle between an ideal interest, so to speak, and a personal interest, and he was heart and soul for the ideal. Face to face with the living human creature concerned, his principles, as we have seen, were apt to give way a little, for the self underneath was warm-hearted and impressionable, but in his own room and by himself they were strong and vigorous, and would allow of no compromise.
He ruminated over the matter during his solitary meal, planning his line of action. 'It all depends,' he said to himself, 'on that,—if what Wallace says about her is true, if my opinion has really any weight with her, I shall be able to manage it without offending her. It's good of her to speak of me as kindly as she seems to do; I was anything but amiable on that Surrey Sunday. However, I felt then that she liked me all the better for plain-speaking; one may be tolerably safe with her that she won't take offence unreasonably. What a picture she made as she pulled the primroses to pieces—it seemed all up with one! And then her smile flashing out—her eagerness to make amends—to sweep away a harsh impression—her pretty gratefulness—enchanting!'
On Saturday, at lunch-time, Wallace rushed in for a few minutes to say that he himself had avoided Miss Bretherton all the week, but that things were coming to a crisis. 'I've just got this note from her,' he said despairingly, spreading it out before Kendal, who was making a scrappy bachelor meal, with a book on each side of him, at a table littered with papers.
'Could anything be more prettily done? If you don't succeed to-morrow,Kendal, I shall have signed the agreement before three days are over!'
It was indeed a charming note. She asked him to fix any time he chose for an appointment with her and her business manager, and spoke with enthusiasm of the play. 'It cannot help being a great success,' she wrote; 'I feel that I am not worthy of it, but I will do my very best. The part seems to me, in many respects, as though it had been written for me. You have never, indeed, I remember, consented in so many words to let me haveElvira. I thought I should meet you at Mrs. Stuart's yesterday, and was disappointed. But I am sure you will not say me nay, and you will see how grateful I shall be for the chance your work will give me.'
'Yes, that's done with real delicacy,' said Kendal. Not a word of the pecuniary advantages of her offer, though she must know that almost any author would give his eyes just now for such a proposal. Well, we shall see. If I can't make the thing look less attractive to her without rousing her suspicions, and if you can't screw up your courage to refuse—why, you must sign the agreement, my dear fellow, and make the best of it; you will find something else to inspire you before long.'
'It's most awkward,' sighed Wallace, as though making up his perplexed mind with difficulty. 'The great chance is that by Agnes's account she is very much inclined to regard your opinion as a sort of intellectual standard; she has two or three times talked of remarks of yours as if they had struck her. Don't quote me at all, of course. Do it as impersonally as you can—'
'If you give me too many instructions,' said Kendal, returning the letter with a smile, 'I shall bungle it. Don't make me nervous. I can't promise you to succeed, and you mustn't bear me a grudge if I fail.'
'A grudge! No, I should think not. By the way, have you heard from Agnes about the trains to-morrow?'
'Yes, Paddington, 10 o'clock, and there is an 8.15 train back from Culham. Mrs. Stuart says we're to lunch in Balliol, run down to Nuneham afterwards, and leave the boats there, to be brought back.'
'Yes, we lunch with that friend of ours—I think you know him—Herbert Sartoris. He has been a Balliol don for about a year. I only trust the weather will be what it is to-day.'
The weather was all that the heart of man could desire, and the party met on the Paddington platform with every prospect of another successful day. Forbes turned up punctual to the moment, and radiant under the combined influence of the sunshine and of Miss Bretherton's presence; Wallace had made all the arrangements perfectly, and the six friends found themselves presently journeying along to Oxford, at that moderated speed which is all that a Sunday express can reach. The talk flowed with zest and gaiety; the Surrey Sunday was a pleasant memory in the background, and all were glad to find themselves in the same company again. It seemed to Kendal that Miss Bretherton was looking rather thin and pale, but she would not admit it, and chattered from her corner to Forbes and himself with the mirth andabandonof a child on its holiday. At last the 'dreaming spires' of Oxford rose from the green, river-threaded plain, and they were at their journey's end. A few more minutes saw them alighting at the gate of the new Balliol, where stood Herbert Sartoris looking out for them. He was a young don with a classical edition on hand which kept him up working after term, within reach of the libraries, and he led the way to some pleasant rooms overlooking the inner quadrangle of Balliol, showing in his well-bred look and manner an abundant consciousness of the enormous good fortune which had sent him Isabel Bretherton for a guest. For at that time it was almost as difficult to obtain the presence of Miss Bretherton at any social festivity as it was to obtain that of royalty. Her Sundays were the objects of conspiracies for weeks beforehand on the part of those persons in London society who were least accustomed to have their invitations refused, and to have and to hold the famous beauty for more than an hour in his own rooms, and then to enjoy the privilege of spending five or six long hours on the river with her, were delights which, as the happy young man felt, would render him the object of envy to all at least of his fellow-dons below forty.
In streamed the party, filling up the book-lined rooms and startling the two old scouts in attendance into an unwonted rapidity of action. Miss Bretherton wandered round, surveyed the familiar Oxford luncheon-table, groaning under the time-honoured summer fare, the books, the engravings, and the sunny, irregular quadrangle outside, with its rich adornings of green, and threw herself down at last on to the low window-seat with a sigh of satisfaction.
'How quiet you are! how peaceful! how delightful it must be to live here! It seems as if one were in another world from London. Tell me what that building is over there; it's too new, it ought to be old and gray like the colleges we saw coming up here. Is everybody gone away—"gone down" you say? I should like to see all the learned people walking about for once.'
'I could show you a good many if there were time,' said young Sartoris, hardly knowing however what he was saying, so lost was he in admiration of that marvellous changing face. 'The vacation is the time they show themselves; it's like owls coming out at night. You see, Miss Bretherton, we don't keep many of them; they're in the way in term time. But in vacation they have the colleges and the parks and the Bodleian to themselves, and you may study their ways, and their spectacles, and their umbrellas, under the most favourable conditions.'
'Oh yes,' said Miss Bretherton, with a little scorn, 'people always make fun of what they are proud of. But I mean to believe that you arealllearned, and that everybody here works himself to death, and that Oxford is quite, quite perfect!'
'Did you hear what Miss Bretherton was saying, Mrs. Stuart?' said Forbes, when they were seated at luncheon. 'Oxford is perfect, she declares already; I don't think I quite like it: it's too hot to last.'
'Am I such a changeable creature, then?' said Miss Bretherton, smiling at him. 'Do you generally find my enthusiasms cool down?'
'You are as constant as you are kind,' said Forbes, bowing to her; 'I am only like a child who sighs to see a pleasure nearing its highest point, lest there should be nothing so good afterwards.'
'Nothing so good!' she said, 'and I have only had one little drive through the streets. Mr. Wallace, are you and Mrs. Stuart really going to forbid me sight-seeing?'
'Of course!' said Wallace emphatically. 'That's one of the fundamental rules of the society. Our charter would be a dead letter if we let you enter a single college on your way to the river to-day.'
'The only art, my dear Isabel,' said Mrs. Stuart, 'that you will be allowed to study to-day, will be the art of conversation.'
'And a most fatiguing one, too!' exclaimed Forbes; 'it beats sight-seeing hollow. But, my dear Miss Bretherton, Kendal and I will make it up to you. We'll give you an illustrated history of Oxford on the way to Nuneham. I'll do the pictures, and he shall do the letterpress. Oh! the good times I've had up here—much better than he ever had'—nodding across at Kendal, who was listening. 'He was too proper behaved to enjoy himself; he got all the right things, all the proper first-classes and prizes, poor fellow! But, as for me, I used to scribble over my note-books all lecture-time, and amuse myself the rest of the day. And then, you see, I was up twenty years earlier than he was, and the world was not as virtuous then as it is now, by a long way.'
Kendal was interrupting, when Forbes, who was in one of his maddest moods, turned round upon his chair to watch a figure passing along the quadrangle in front of the bay-window.
'I say, Sartoris, isn't that Camden, the tutor who was turned out of Magdalen a year or two ago for that atheistical book of his, and whom you took in, as you do all the disreputables? Ah, I knew it!
"By the pricking of my thumbsSomething wicked this way comes."
That's not mine, my dear Miss Bretherton; it's Shakespeare's first, Charles Lamb's afterwards. But look at him well—he's a heretic, a real, genuine heretic. Twenty years ago it would have been a thrilling sight; but now, alas! it's so common that it's not the victim but the persecutors who are the curiosity.'
'I don't know that,' said young Sartoris. 'We liberals are by no means the cocks of the walk that we were a few years ago. You see, now we have got nothing to pull against, as it were. So long as we had two or three good grievances, we could keep the party together and attract all the young men. We were Israel going up against the Philistines, who had us in their grip. But now, things are changed; we've got our own way all round, and it's the Church party who have the grievances and the cry. It is we who are the Philistines and the oppressors in our turn, and, of course, the young men as they grow up are going into opposition.'
'And a very good thing, too!' said Forbes. 'It's the only thing that prevents Oxford becoming as dull as the rest of the world. All your picturesqueness, so to speak, has been struck out of the struggle between the two forces. The Church force is the one that has given you all your buildings and your beauty, while, as for you liberals, who will know such a lot of things that you're none the happier for knowing—well, I suppose you keep the place habitable for the plain man who doesn't want to be bullied. But it's a very good thing the other side are strong enough to keep you in order.'
The conversation flowed on vigorously—Forbes guiding it, now here, nowthere, while Kendal presently turned away to talk in an undertone to Mrs.Stuart, who sat next him, at the farther corner of the table from MissBretherton.
'Edward has told you of my escapade,' said Mrs. Stuart. 'Yes, I have put my foot in it dreadfully. I don't know how it will turn out, I am sure. She's so set upon it, and Edward is so worried. I don't know how I came to tell her. You see, I've seen so much of her lately, it slipped out when we were talking.'
'It was very natural,' said Kendal, glad to notice from Mrs. Stuart's way of attacking the subject that she knew nothing of his own share in the matter. It would have embarrassed him to be conscious of another observer. 'Oh, a hundred things may turn up; there are ways out of these things if one is determined to find them.'
Mrs. Stuart shook her head. 'She is so curiously bent upon it. She is possessed with the idea that the play will suit her better than any she has had yet. Don't you think her looking very tired? I have come to know her much better these last few weeks, and it seems absurd; but I get anxious about her. Of course, she is an enormous success, but I fancy the theatrical part of it has not been quite so great as it was at first.'
'So I hear, too,' said Kendal; 'the theatre is quite as full, but the temper of the audience a good deal flatter.'
'Yes,' said Mrs. Stuart; 'and then there is that curious little sister of hers, whom you haven't seen, and who counts for a good deal. I believe that in reality she is very fond of Isabel, and very proud of her, but she's very jealous of her too, and she takes her revenge upon her sister for her beauty and her celebrity by collecting the hostile things people say about her acting, and pricking them into her every now and then, like so many pins. At first Isabel was so sure of herself and the public that she took no notice—it seemed to her only what every actress must expect. But now it is different. She is not so strong as she was when she came over, nor so happy, I think, and the criticisms tell more. She is heartily sick of theWhite Lady, and is bent upon a change, and I believe she thinks this play of Edward's is just what she wants to enable her to strengthen her hold upon the public.'
'There never was a greater delusion,' said Kendal; 'it's the last part in the world she ought to attempt. Properly speaking, unless she puts it in, there's no posing in it, none of that graceful attitudinising she does so well. It's a long tragic part—a tremendous strain, and would take all the powers of the most accomplished art to give it variety and charm.'
'Oh, I know,' sighed Mrs. Stuart, 'I know. But what is to be done?'
Kendal shrugged his shoulders with a smile, feeling as hopeless as she did. The paleness of the beautiful face opposite indeed had touched his sympathies very keenly, and he was beginning to think the safety of Wallace's play not such a desperately important matter after all. However, there was his promise, and he must go on with it. 'But I'll be hanged,' he said to himself, 'if I come within a thousand miles of hurting her feelings. Wallace must do that for himself if he wants to.'
It had been arranged that Miss Bretherton should be allowed two breaches, and two only, of the law against sight-seeing—a walk through the schools'-quadrangle, and a drive down High Street. Mr. Sartoris, who had been an examiner during the summer term, and had so crept into the good graces of the Clerk of the Schools, was sent off to suborn that functionary for the keys of the iron gates which on Sunday shut out the Oxford world from the sleepy precincts of the Bodleian. The old clerk was in a lax vacation mood, and the envoy returned key in hand. Mrs. Stuart and Forbes undertook the guidance of Miss Bretherton, while the others started to prepare the boats. It was a hot June day, and the gray buildings, with their cool shadows, stood out delicately against a pale blue sky dappled with white cloud. Her two guides led Miss Bretherton through the quadrangle of the schools, which, fresh as it was from the hands of the restorer, rose into the air like some dainty white piece of old-world confectionery. For the windows are set so lightly in the stone-work, and are so nearly level with the wall, that the whole great building has an unsubstantial card-board air, as if a touch might dint it.
'The doctrinaires call it a fault,' said Forbes indignantly, pointing out the feature to his companions. 'I'd like to see them build anything nowadays with half so much imagination and charm.'
They looked enviously at the closed door of the Bodleian, they read theLatin names of the schools just freshly painted at intervals round thequadrangle, and then Forbes led them out upon the steps in front of theRadcliffe and S. Mary's, and let them take their time a little.
'How strange that there should be anything in the world,' cried Miss Bretherton, 'so beautiful all through, so all of a piece as this! I had no idea it would be half so good. Don't, don't laugh at me, Mr. Forbes. I have not seen all the beautiful things you other people have seen. Just let me rave.'
'Ilaugh at you!' said Forbes, standing back in the shadow of the archway, his fine lined face, aglow with pleasure, turned towards her. 'I, who have got Oxford in my bones and marrow, so to speak! Why, every stone in the place is sacred to me! Poetry lives here, if she has fled from all the world besides. No, no; say what you like, it cannot be too strong for me.'