Mrs. Stuart, meanwhile, kept her head cool, admired all that she was expected to admire, and did it well, and never forgot that the carriage was waiting for them, and that Miss Bretherton was not to be tired. It was she who took charge of the other two, piloted them safely into the fly, carried them down the High Street, sternly refused to make a stop at Magdalen, and finally landed them in triumph to the minute at the great gate of Christchurch. Then they strolled into the quiet cathedral, delighted themselves with its irregular bizarre beauty, its unexpected turns and corners, which gave it a capricious fanciful air for all the solidity and business-like strength of its Norman framework, and as they rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern aisle—a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his dreams. In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd—an ill-tempered Flemish peasant—while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town climbed the whole height of the background. It was probably the artist's native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered his own household Lares. But the hill on which the town stood, and the mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not of Belgium, but of a dream country—of Italy, perhaps, the medieval artist's paradise.
'Happy man!' said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; 'look, he put it together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of. And there it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no getting. For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we know and what we dream.'
Miss Bretherton looked at him curiously. It was as though for the first time she connected the man himself with his reputation and his pictures, that the great artist in him was more than a name to her. She listened to him sympathetically, and looked at the window closely, as though trying to follow all he had been saying. But it struck Mrs. Stuart that there was often a bewilderment in her manner which had been strange to it on her first entrance into London. Those strong emphatic ways Kendal had first noticed in her were less frequent. Sometimes she struck Mrs. Stuart as having the air of a half-blindfold person trying to find her way along strange roads.
They passed out into the cool and darkness of the cloisters, and through the new buildings, and soon they were in the Broad Walk, trees as old as the Commonwealth bending overhead, and in front the dazzling green of the June meadows, the shining river in the distance, and the sweep of cloud-flecked blue arching in the whole.
The gentlemen were waiting for them, metamorphosed in boating-clothes, and the two boats were ready. A knot of idlers and lookers-on watched the embarkation, for on Sunday the river is forsaken, and they were the only adventurers on its blue expanse. Off they pushed, Miss Bretherton, Kendal, Mr. Stuart, and Forbes in one boat, the remaining members of the party in the other. Isabel Bretherton had thrown off the wrap which she always carried with her, and which she had gathered round her in the cathedral, and it lay about her in green fur-edged folds, bringing her white dress into relief, the shapely fall of the shoulders and all the round slimness of her form. As Kendal took the stroke oar, after he had arranged everything for her comfort, he asked her if Oxford was what she had expected.
'A thousand times better!' she said eagerly.
'You have a wonderful power of enjoyment. One would think your London life would have spoilt it a little.'
'I don't think anything ever could. I was always laughed at for it as a child, I enjoy everything.'
'Including such a day as you had yesterday? Howcanyou play theWhiteLadytwice in one day? It's enough to wear you out.'
'Oh, everybody does it. I was bound to give amatinéeto the profession some time, and yesterday had been fixed for it for ages. But I have only given threematinéesaltogether, and I shan't give another before my time is up.'
'That's a good hearing,' said Kendal. 'Do you get tired of theWhiteLady?'
'Yes,' she said emphatically; 'I am sick of her. But,' she added, bending forward with her hands clasped on her knee, so that what she said could be heard by Kendal only; 'have you heard, I wonder, what I have in my head for the autumn? Oh well, we must not talk of it now; I have no right to make it public yet. But I should like to tell you when we get to Nuneham, if there's an opportunity.'
'We will make one,' said Kendal, with an inward qualm. And she fell back again with a nod and a smile.
On they passed, in the blazing sunshine, through Iffley lock and under the green hill crowned with Iffley village and its Norman church. The hay was out in the fields, and the air was full of it. Children, in tidy Sunday frocks, ran along the towing-path to look at them; a reflected heaven smiled upon them from the river depths; wild rose-bushes overhung the water, and here and there stray poplars rose like land-marks into the sky. The heat, after a time, deadened conversation. Forbes every now and then would break out with some comment on the moving landscape, which showed the delicacy and truth of his painter's sense, or set the boat alive with laughter by some story of the unregenerate Oxford of his own undergraduate days; but there were long stretches of silence when, except to the rowers, the world seemed asleep, and the regular fall of the oars like the pulsing of a hot dream.
It was past five before they steered into the shadow of Nuneham woods. The meadows just ahead were a golden blaze of light, but here the shade lay deep and green on the still water, spanned by a rustic bridge, and broken every now and then by the stately whiteness of the swans. Rich steeply-rising woods shut in the left-hand bank, and foliage, grass, and wild flowers seemed suddenly to have sprung into a fuller luxuriance than elsewhere.
'It's too early for tea,' said Mrs. Stuart's clear little voice on the bank; 'at least, if we have it directly it will leave such a long time before the train starts. Wouldn't a stroll be pleasant first?'
Isabel Bretherton and Kendal only waited for the general assent before they wandered off ahead of the others. 'I should like very much to have a word with you,' she had said to him as he handed her out of the boat. And now, here they were, and, as Kendal felt, the critical moment was come.
'I only wanted to tell you,' she said, as they paused in the heart of the wood, a little out of breath after a bit of steep ascent, 'that I have got hold of a play for next October that I think you are rather specially interested in—at least, Mr. Wallace told me you had heard it all, and given him advice about it while he was writing it. I want so much to hear your ideas about it. It always seems to me that you have thought more about the stage and seen more acting than any one else I know, and I care for your opinion very much indeed—do tell me, if you will, what you thought ofElvira!'
'Well,' said Kendal quietly, as he made her give up her wrap to him to carry, 'there is a great deal that's fine in it. The original sketch, as the Italian author left it, was good, and Wallace has enormously improved upon it. Only—'
'Isn't it most dramatic?' she exclaimed, interrupting him; 'there are so many strong situations in it, and though one might think the subject a little unpleasant if one only heard it described, yet there is nothing in the treatment but what is noble and tragic. I have very seldom felt so stirred by anything. I find myself planning the scenes, thinking over them this way and that incessantly.'
'It is very good and friendly of you,' said Kendal warmly, 'to wish me to give you advice about it. Do you really want me to speak my full mind?'
'Of course I do,' she said eagerly; 'of course I do. I think there are one or two points in it that might be changed. I shall press Mr. Wallace to make a few alterations. I wonder what were the changes that occurred to you?'
'I wasn't thinking of changes,' said Kendal, not venturing to look at her as she walked beside him, her white dress trailing over the moss-grown path, and her large hat falling back from the brilliant flushed cheeks and queenly throat. 'I was thinking of the play itself, of how the part would really suit you.'
'Oh, I have no doubts at all about that,' she said, but with a quick look at him; 'I always feel at once when a part will suit me, and I have fallen in love with this one. It is tragic and passionate, like theWhite Lady, but it is quite a different phase of passion. I am tired of scolding and declaiming.Elvirawill give me an opportunity of showing what I can do with something soft and pathetic. I have had such difficulties in deciding upon a play to begin my October season with, and now this seems to me exactly what I want. People prefer me always in something poetical and romantic, and this is new, and the mounting of it might be quite original.'
'And yet I doubt,' said Kendal; 'I think the part of Elvira wants variety, and would it not be well for you to have more of a change? Something with more relief in it, something which would give your lighter vein, which comes in so well in theWhite Lady, more chance?'
She frowned a little and shook her head. 'My turn is not that way. I can play a comedy part, of course—every actor ought to be able to—but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act.'
'I don't mean a pure light-comedy part, naturally, but something which would be less of a continuous tragic strain than this. Why, almost all the modern tragic plays have their passages of relief, but the texture ofElvirais so much the same throughout,—I cannot conceive a greater demand on any one. And then you must consider your company. Frankly, I cannot imagine a part less suited to Mr. Hawes than Macias; and his difficulties would react on you.'
'I can choose whom I like,' she said abruptly; 'I am not bound to Mr.Hawes.'
'Besides,' he said cautiously, changing his ground a little, 'I should have said—only, of course, you must know much better—that it is a little risky to give the British public such very serious fare as this, and immediately after theWhite Lady. The English theatre-goer never seems to me to take kindly to medievalism—kings and knights and nobles and the fifteenth century are very likely to bore him. Not that I mean to imply for a moment that the play would be a failure in point of popularity. You have got such a hold that you could carry anything through; but I am inclined to think that inElvirayou would be rather fighting against wind and tide, and that, as I said before, it would be a great strain upon you.'
'The public makes no objection to Madame Desforêts in Victor Hugo,' she answered quickly, even sharply. 'Her parts, so far as I know anything about them, are just these romantic parts, and she has made her enormous reputation out of them.'
Kendal hesitated. 'The French have a great tradition of them,' he said.'Racine, after all, was a preparation for Victor Hugo.'
'No, no!' she exclaimed, with sudden bitterness and a change of voice which startled him; 'it is not that. It is that I am I, and Madame Desforêts is Madame Desforêts. Oh, I see! I see very well that your mind is against it. And Mr. Wallace—there were two or three things in his manner which have puzzled me. He has never said yes to my proposal formally. I understand perfectly what it means; you think that I shall do the play an injury by acting it; that it is too good for me!'
Kendal felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen; the sombre passion of her manner affected him indescribably.
'Miss Bretherton!' he cried.
'Yes, yes!' she said, almost fiercely, stopping in the path. 'It's that, I know. I have felt it almost since your first word. What power have I, if not tragic power? If a part like Elvira does not suit me, what does suit me? Of course, that is what you mean. If I cannot act Elvira, I am good for nothing—I am worse than good for nothing—I am an impostor, a sham!'
She sat down on the raised edge of the bank, for she was trembling, and clasped her quivering hands on her knees. Kendal was beside himself with distress. How had he blundered so, and what had brought this about? It was so unexpected, it was incredible.
'Do—do believe me!' he exclaimed, bending over her. 'I never meant anything the least disrespectful to you; I never dreamt of it. You asked me to give you my true opinion, and my criticism applied much more to the play than to yourself. Think nothing of it, if you yourself are persuaded. You must know much better than I can what will suit you. And as for Wallace—Wallace will be proud to let you do what you will with his play.'
It seemed to him that he would have said anything in the world to soothe her. It was so piteous, so intolerable to him to watch that quivering lip.
'Ah, yes,' she said, looking up, a dreary smile flitting over her face, 'I know you didn't mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn't been a fool, in Mr. Wallace's manner. I did see it. It's only what every one whose opinion is worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me lately. I believe it has all been a great, great mistake.'
Kendal never felt a keener hatred of the conventions which rule the relations between men and women. Could he only simply have expressed his own feeling, he would have knelt beside her on the path, have taken the trembling hands in his own, and comforted her as a woman would have done. But as it was, he could only stand stiff and awkward before her, and yet it seemed to him as if the whole world had resolved itself into his own individuality and hers, and as if the gay river party and the bright friendly relations of an hour before were separated from the present by an impassable gulf. And, worst of all, there seemed to be a strange perversity in his speech—a fate which drove him into betraying every here and there his own real standpoint whether he would or no.
'You must not say such things,' he said, as calmly as he could. 'You have charmed the English public as no one else has ever charmed it. Is not that a great thing to have done? And if I, who am very fastidious and very captious, and over-critical in a hundred ways—if I am inclined to think that a part is rather more than you, with your short dramatic experience, can compass quite successfully, why, what does it matter? I may be quite wrong. Don't take any notice of my opinion: forget it, and let me help you, if I can, by talking over the play.'
She shook her head with a bitter little smile. 'No, no; I shall never forget it. Your attitude only brought home to me, almost more strongly than I could bear, what I have suspected a long, long time—thecontemptwhich people like you and Mr. Wallace feel for me!'
'Contempt!' cried Kendal, beside himself, and feeling as if all the criticisms he had allowed himself to make of her were recoiling in one avenging mass upon his head. 'I never felt anything but the warmest admiration for your courage, your work, your womanly goodness and sweetness.'
'Yes,' she said, rising and holding out her hand half-unconsciously for her cloak, which she put round her as though the wood had suddenly grown cold; 'admiration for me as a woman, contempt for me as an artist! There's the whole bare truth. Does it hold my future in it, I wonder? Is there nothing in me but this beauty that people talk of, and which I sometimeshate?'
She swept her hair back from her forehead with a fierce dramatic gesture. It was as though the self in her was rising up and asserting itself against the judgment which had been passed upon it, as if some hidden force hardly suspected even by herself were beating against its bars. Kendal watched her in helpless silence. 'Tell me,' she said, fixing her deep hazel eyes upon him, 'you owe it me—you have given me so much pain. No, no; you did not mean it. But tell me, and tell me from the bottom of your heart—that is, if you are interested enough in me—what is it I want? What is it that seems to be threatening me with failure as an artist? I work all day long, my work is never out of my head; it seems to pursue me all night. But the more I struggle with it the less successful I seem even to myself.'
Her look was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, direct truth to her.
'What you want,' he said slowly, as if the words were forced from him, 'isknowledge!London has taught you much, and that is why you are dissatisfied with your work—it is the beginning of all real success. But you want positive knowledge—the knowledge you could get from books, and the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young, and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of experience others have laid up for us.'
It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her. And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster—he, one captious man of letters, against the world.
But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal's words, instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she felt a relief in having analysed to the full the vague trouble which had been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.
'I am very grateful to you,' she said steadily; 'very. It is strange, but almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don't look so grieved,' she cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, 'I am glad you told me all you thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira,' she added, trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, 'tell Mr. Wallace I give her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don't you think now we had better go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet again.'
She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in the descending path, and held out a hand to her to help her. She gave him her own, and he carried it impetuously to his lips.
'You are nobleness itself!' he cried, from the depths of his heart. 'I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer—the most incapable, clumsy idiot.'
She smiled, but she could not answer. And in a few more moments voices and steps could be heard approaching, and the scene was over.
The Sunday party separated at Paddington on the night of the Nuneham expedition, and Wallace and Eustace Kendal walked eastward together. The journey home had been very quiet. Miss Bretherton had been forced to declare herself 'extremely tired,' and Mrs. Stuart's anxiety and sense of responsibility about her had communicated themselves to the rest of the party.
'It is the effect of my long day yesterday,' she said apologetically to Forbes, who hovered about her with those affectionate attentions which a man on the verge of old age pays with freedom to a young girl. 'It won't do to let the public see so much of me in future. But I don't want to spoil our Sunday. Talk to me, and I shall forget it.'
Wallace, who had had his eyes about him when she and Eustace Kendal emerged from the wood in view of the rest of the party, was restless and ill at ease, but there was no getting any information, even by a gesture, from Kendal, who sat in his corner diligently watching the moonlight on the flying fields, or making every now and then some disjointed attempts at conversation with Mrs. Stuart.
At the station Miss Bretherton's carriage was waiting; the party of gentlemen saw her and Mrs. Stuart, who insisted on taking her home, into it; the pale, smiling face bent forward; she waved her hand in response to the lifted hats, and she was gone.
'Well?' said Wallace, with a world of inquiry in his voice, as he andKendal turned eastward.
'It has been an unfortunate business,' said Kendal abruptly. 'I never did a thing worse, I think, or spent a more painful half-hour.'
Wallace's face fell. 'I wish I hadn't bored you with my confounded affairs,' he exclaimed. 'It was too bad!'
Kendal was inclined to agree inwardly, for he was in a state of irritable reaction; but he had the justice to add aloud, 'It was I who was the fool to undertake it. And I think, indeed, it could have been done, but that circumstances, which neither you nor I had weighed sufficiently, were against it. She is in a nervous, shaken state, mentally and physically, and before I had had time to discuss the point at all, she had carried it on to the personal ground, and the thing was up.'
'She is deeply offended, then?'
'Not at all, in the ordinary sense; she is too fine a creature; but she talked of the "contempt" that you and I feel for her!'
'Good heavens!' cried Wallace, feeling most unjustly persuaded that his friend had bungled the matter horribly.
'Yes,' said Kendal deliberately; '"contempt," that was it. I don't know how it came about. All I know is, that what I said, which seemed to me very harmless, was like a match to a mine. But she told me to tell you that she made no further claim onElvira. So the play is safe.'
'D—— the play!' cried Wallace vigorously, a sentiment to which perhaps Kendal's silence gave consent. 'But I cannot let it rest there. I must write to her.'
'I don't think I would, if I were you,' said Kendal. 'I should let it alone. She looks upon the matter as finished. She told me particularly to tell you that she wasnotvexed, and you may be quite sure that she isn't, in any vulgar sense. Perhaps that makes it all the worse. However, you've a right to know what happened, so I'll tell you, as far as I remember.'
He gave an abridged account of the conversation, which made matters a little clearer, though by no means less uncomfortable, to Wallace. When it was over, they were nearing Vigo Street, the point at which their routes diverged, Wallace having rooms in the Albany, and Kendal hailed a hansom.
'If I were you,' he said, as it came up, 'I should, as I said before, let the thing alone as much as possible. She will probably speak to you about it, and you will, of course, say what you like, but I'm pretty sure she won't take up the play again, and if she feels a coolness towards anybody, it won't be towards you.'
'There's small consolation in that!' exclaimed Wallace.
'Anyhow, make the best of it, my dear fellow,' said Kendal, as though determined to strike a lighter key. 'Don't be so dismal, things will look differently to-morrow morning—they generally do—there's no tremendous harm done. I'm sorry I didn't do your bidding better. Honestly, when I come to think over it, I don't see how I could have done otherwise. But I don't expect you to think so.'
Wallace laughed, protested, and they parted.
A few moments later Kendal let himself into his rooms, where lights were burning, and threw himself into his reading-chair, beside which his books and papers stood ready to his hand. Generally, nothing gave him a greater sense ofbien-êtrethan this nightly return, after a day spent in society, to these silent and faithful companions of his life. He was accustomed to feel the atmosphere of his room when he came back to it charged with welcome. It was as though the thoughts and schemes he had left warm and safe in shelter there started to life again after a day's torpor, and thronged to meet him. His books smiled at him with friendly faces, the open page called to him to resume the work of the morning—he was, in every sense, at home. Tonight, however, the familiar spell seemed to have lost its force. After a hasty supper he took up some proofs, pen in hand. But the first page was hardly turned before they had dropped on to his knee. It seemed to him as if he still felt on his arm the folds of a green, fur-edged cloak, as if the touch of a soft cold hand were still lingering in his. Presently he fell to recalling every detail of the afternoon scene,—the arching beech trees, the rich red and brown of the earth beneath, tinged with the winter sheddings of the trees, the little raised bank, her eyes as she looked up at him, the soft wisps of her golden brown hair under her hat. What superb, unapproachable beauty it was! how living, how rich in content and expression!
'Am I in love with Isabel Bretherton?' he asked himself at last, lying back on his chair with his eyes on the portrait of his sister. 'Perhaps Marie could tell me—I don't understand myself. I don't think so. And if I were, I am not a youngster, and my life is a tolerably full one. I could hold myself in and trample it down if it were best to do so. I can hardly imagine myself absorbed in a great passion. My bachelor life is a good many years old—my habits won't break up easily. And, supposing I felt the beginnings of it, I could stop it if reason were against it.'
He left his chair, and began to pace up and down the room, thinking. 'And there is absolutely no sort of reason in my letting myself fall in love with Isabel Bretherton! She has never given me the smallest right to think that she takes any more interest in me than she does in hundreds of people whom she meets on friendly terms, unless it may be an intellectual interest, as Wallace imagines, and that's a poor sort of stepping-stone to love! And if it were ever possible that she should, this afternoon has taken away the possibility. For, however magnanimous a woman may be, a thing like that rankles: it can't help it. She will feel the sting of it worse to-morrow than to-day, and, though she will tell herself that she bears no grudge, it will leave a gulf between us. For, of course, she must go on acting, and, whatever depressions she may have, she must believe in herself; no one can go on working without it, and I shall always recall to her something harsh and humiliating!'
'Supposing, by any chance, it were not so—supposing I were able to gather up my relation with her again and make it a really friendly one—I should take, I think, a very definite line; I should make up my mind to be of use to her. After all, it is true what she says: there are many things in me that might be helpful to her, and everything there was she should have the benefit of. I would make a serious purpose of it. She should find me a friend worth having.'
His thoughts wandered on a while in this direction. It was pleasant to see himself in the future as Miss Bretherton's philosopher and friend, but in the end the sense of reality gained upon his dreams. 'I am a fool!' he said to himself resolutely at last, 'and I may as well go to bed and put her out of my mind. The chance is over—gone—done with, if it ever existed.'
The next morning, on coming down to breakfast, he saw among his letters a handwriting which startled him. Where had he seen it before? In Wallace's hand three days ago? He opened it, and found the following note:—
'MY DEAR MR. KENDAL—You know, I think, that I am off next week—on Monday, if all goes well. We go to Switzerland for a while, and then to Venice, which people tell me is often very pleasant in August. We shall be there by the first week in August, and Mr. Wallace tells me he hears from you that your sister, Madame de Châteauvieux, will be there about the same time. I forgot to ask you yesterday, but, if you think she would not object to it, would you give me a little note introducing me to her? All that I have heard of her makes me very anxious to know her, and she would not find me a troublesome person! We shall hardly, I suppose, meet again before I start. If not, please remember that my friends can always find me on Sunday afternoon.—Yours very truly, ISABEL BRETHERTON.'
Kendal's hand closed tightly over the note. Then he put it carefully back into its envelope, and walked away with his hands behind him and the note in them, to stare out of window at the red roofs opposite.
'That is like her,' he murmured to himself; 'I wound and hurt her: she guesses I shall suffer for it, and, by way of setting up the friendly bond again, next day, without a word, she asks me to do her a kindness! Could anything be more delicate, more gracious!'
Kendal never had greater difficulty in fixing his thoughts to his work than that morning, and at last, in despair, he pushed his book aside, and wrote an answer to Miss Bretherton, and, when that was accomplished, a long letter to his sister. The first took him longer than its brevity seemed to justify. It contained no reference to anything but her request. He felt a compulsion upon him to treat the situation exactly as she had done, but, given this limitation, how much cordiality and respect could two sides of letterpaper be made to carry with due regard to decorum and grammar?
When he next met Wallace, that hopeful, bright-tempered person had entirely recovered his cheerfulness. Miss Bretherton, he reported, had attacked the subject ofElvirawith him, but so lightly that he had no opportunity for saying any of the skilful things he had prepared.
'She evidently did not want the question seriously opened,' he said, 'so I followed your advice and let it alone, and since then she has been charming both to Agnes and me. I feel myself as much of a brute as ever, but I see that the only thing I can do is to hold my tongue about it.' To which Kendal heartily agreed.
A few days afterwards the newspapers gave a prominent place to reports of Miss Bretherton's farewell performance. It had been a great social event. Half the distinguished people in London were present, led by royalty. London, in fact, could hardly bear to part with its favourite, and compliments, flowers, and farewells showered upon her. Kendal, who had not meant to go at the time when tickets were to be had, tried about the middle of the week after the Oxford Sunday to get a seat, but found it utterly impossible. He might have managed it by applying to her through Edward Wallace, but that he was unwilling to do, for various reasons. He told himself that, after all, it was better to let her little note and his answer close his relations with her for the present. Everywhere else but in the theatre she might still regard him as her friend; but there they could not but be antagonistic in some degree one to another, and not even intellectually did Kendal wish just now to meet her on a footing of antagonism.
So, when Saturday night came, he passed the hours of Miss Bretherton's triumph at a ministerial evening party, where it seemed to him that the air was full of her name and that half the guests were there as apis-aller,because theCalliopecould not receive them. And yet he thought he noticed in the common talk about her that criticism of her as an actress was a good deal more general than it had been at the beginning of the season. The little knot of persons with an opinion and reasons for it had gradually influenced the larger public. Nevertheless, there was no abatement whatever of the popular desire to see her, whether on the stage or in society. Theengouementfor her personally, for her beauty, and her fresh pure womanliness, showed no signs of yielding, and would hold out, Kendal thought, for some time, against a much stronger current of depreciation on the intellectual side than had as yet set in.
He laid down the Monday paper with a smile of self-scorn and muttered: 'I should like to know how much she remembers by this time of the prig who lectured to her in Nuneham woods a week ago!' In the evening hisPall Mall Gazettetold him that Miss Bretherton had crossed the channel that morning,en routefor Paris and Venice. He fell to calculating the weeks which must elapse before his sister would be in Venice, and before he could hear of any meeting between her and the Bretherton party, and wound up his calculations by deciding that London was already hot and would soon be empty, and that, as soon as he could gather together certain books he was in want of, he would carry them and his proofs down into Surrey, refuse all invitations to country houses, and devote himself to his work.
Before he left he paid a farewell call to Mrs. Stuart, who gave him full and enthusiastic accounts of Isabel Bretherton's last night, and informed him that her brother talked of following the Brethertons to Venice some time in August.
'Albert,' she said, speaking of her husband, 'declares that he cannot get away for more than three weeks, and that he must have some walking; so that, what we propose at present is to pick up Edward at Venice at the end of August, and move up all together into the mountains afterwards. Oh, Mr. Kendal,' she went on a little nervously, as if not quite knowing whether to attack the subject or not, 'itwasdevoted of you to throw yourself into the breach for Edward as you did at Oxford. I am afraid it must have been very disagreeable, both to you and to her. When Edward told me of it next morning it made me cold to think of it. I made up my mind that our friendship—yours and ours—with her was over. But do you know she came to call on me that very afternoon—how she made time I don't know—but she did. Naturally, I was very uncomfortable, but she began to talk of it in the calmest way while we were having tea. "Mr. Kendal was probably quite right," she said, "in thinking the part unsuited to me; anyhow, I asked him for his opinion, and I should be a poor creature to mind his giving it." And then she laughed and said that I must ask Edward to keep his eyes open for anything that would do better for her in the autumn. And since then she has behaved as if she had forgotten all about it. I never knew any one with less smallness about her.'
'No; she is a fine creature,' said Kendal, almost mechanically. How little Mrs. Stuart knew—or rather, how entirely remote she was fromfeeling—what had happened! It seemed to him that the emotion of that scene was still thrilling through all his pulses, yet to what ordinary little proportions had it been reduced in Mrs. Stuart's mind! He alone had seen the veil lifted, had come close to the energetic reality of the girl's nature. That Isabel Bretherton could feel so, could look so, was known only to him—the thought had pain in it, but the keenest pleasure also.
'Do you know,' said Mrs. Stuart presently, with a touch of reproach in her voice, 'that she asked for you on the last night?'
'Did she?'
'Yes. We had just gone on to the stage to see her after the curtain had fallen. It was such a pretty sight, you ought not to have missed it. The Prince had come to say good-bye to her, and, as we came in, she was just turning away in her long phantom dress with the white hood falling round her head, like that Romney picture—don't you remember?—of Lady Hamilton,—Mr. Forbes has drawn her in it two or three times. The stage was full of people. Mr. Forbes was there, of course, and Edward, and ourselves, and presently I heard her say to Edward, "Is Mr. Kendal here? I did not see him in the house." Edward said something about your not having been able to get a seat, which I thought clumsy of him, for, of course, we could have got some sort of place for you at the last moment. She didn't say anything, but I thought—if you won't mind my saying so, Mr. Kendal—that, considering all things, it would have been better if you had been there.'
'It seems to me,' said Kendal, with vexation in his voice, 'that there is a fate against my doing anything as I ought to do it. I thought, on the whole, it would be better not to make a fuss about it when it came to the last. You see she must look upon me to some extent as a critical, if not a hostile, influence, and I did not wish to remind her of my existence.'
'Oh well,' said Mrs. Stuart in her cheery commonsense way, 'that evening was such an overwhelming experience that I don't suppose she could have felt any soreness towards anybody. And, do you know, sheisimproved? I don't quite know what it is, but certainly one or two of those long scenes she does more intelligently, and even the death-scene is better,—less monotonous. I sometimes think she will surprise us all yet.'
'Very likely,' said Kendal absently, not in reality believing a word of it, but it was impossible to dissent.
'I hope so,' exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, 'with all my heart. She has been very depressed often these last weeks, and certainly, on the whole, people have been harder upon her than they were at first. I am so glad that she and your sister will meet in Venice. Madame de Châteauvieux is just the friend she wants.'
Kendal walked home feeling the rankling of a fresh pin-point. She had asked for him, and he had not been there! What must she think, apparently, but that, from a sour, morose consistency, he had refused to be a witness of her triumph!
Oh, hostile fates!
* * * * *
A week later Eustace was settled in the Surrey farmhouse which had sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition. The Surrey country was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds. And under Kendal's sitting-room window a pair of tomtits, which the party had watched that May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world. One of his first walks was to that spot beyond the pond where they had made their afternoon camping-ground. The nut-hatches had fled—fled, Kendal hoped, some time before, for the hand of the spoiler had been near their dwelling, and its fragments lay scattered on the ground. He presently learnt to notice that he never heard the sharp sound of the bird's tapping beak among the woods without a little start of recollection.
Outside his walks, his days were spent in continuous literary effort. His book was in a condition which called for all his energies, and he threw himself vigorously into it. The first weeks were taken up with a long review of Victor Hugo's prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical result. It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to suit all weathers and all skies. There were sombre, wind-swept days, when the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and the bending trees, were in harmony with all the fierce tempestuous side of the great Romantic. There were others when the homely, tender, domestic aspect of the country formed a sort of framework and accompaniment to the simpler patriarchal elements in the books which Kendal had about him. Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him, and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.
He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them, and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Châteauvieux, who was at Etretât with her husband. She wrote her brother very lively, characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the little Norman town swarms in the season.
After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look restlessly at the Etretât postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public sort of existence as the Etretât life. The bathing scenes, and the fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread of naturalism, became very flat to him. He was astonished that his sister was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done so.
This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the daily post. At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his letters. But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily constitutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer's shop in the village, some two miles off.
For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France began to seem to him extraordinary! However, at last, the monotony of the Etretât postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons. 'We are here for the night on some business of Paul's; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin, and two or three days later at Venice. By the way, where will the Brethertons be? I must trust to my native wits, I suppose, when I get there. She is not the sort of light to be hidden under a bushel.'
This postcard disturbed Kendal not a little, and he felt irritably that somebody had mismanaged matters. He had supposed, and indeed suggested, that Miss Bretherton should enclose his note in one of her own to his sister's Paris address, giving, at the same time, some indication of a place of meeting in Venice. But if she had not done this, it was very possible that the two women might miss each other after all. Sometimes, when he had been contemplating this possibility with disgust, he would with a great effort make himself reflect why it was that he cared about the matter so disproportionately. Why was he so deeply interested in Isabel Bretherton's movements abroad, and in the meeting which would bring her, so to speak, once more into his own world? Why! because it was impossible, he would answer himself indignantly, not to feel a profound interest in any woman who had ever shared as much emotion with you as she had with him in those moments at Nuneham, who had received a wound at your hands, had winced under it, and still had remained gracious, and kind, and womanly! 'I should be a hard-hearted brute,' he said to himself, 'if I did not feel a very deep and peculiar interest in her—if I did not desire that Marie's friendship should abundantly make up to her for my blundering!'
Did he ever really deceive himself into imagining that this was all? It is difficult to say. The mind of a man no longer young, and trained in all the subtleties of thought, does not deal with an invading sentiment exactly as a youth would do with all his experience to come. It steals upon him more slowly, he is capable of disguising it to himself longer, of escaping from it into other interests. Passion is in its ultimate essence the same, wherever it appears and under whatever conditions, but it possesses itself of human life in different ways. Slowly, and certainly, the old primeval fire, the commonest, fatalest, divinest force of life, was making its way into Kendal's nature. But it was making its way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,—it found a hundred other interests in possession;—it had a strange impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with. Kendal had been accustomed to live in other men's lives. Was he only just beginning to live his own?
But, however it was, he was at least conscious during this waiting time that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,—visions of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace, of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive gait! He followed that figure through scene after scene; he saw primroses in its hand, and the pale spring blue above it; he recalled it standing tense and still with blanched cheek and fixed appealing eye, while all round the June woods murmured in the breeze; he surrounded it in imagination with the pomp and circumstance of the stage, and realised it as a centre of emotion to thousands. And then from memories he would pass on to speculations, from the scenes he knew to those he could only guess at, from the life of which he had seen a little to the larger and unexplored life beyond.
And so the days went on, and though he was impatient and restless, yet indoors his work was congenial to him, and out of doors the sun was bright, and all the while a certain little god lay hidden, speaking no articulate word, but waiting with a mischievous patience for the final overthrow of one more poor mortal.
At last the old postmistress, whom he had almost come to regard as cherishing a personal grudge against him, ceased to repulse him, and, after his seven years of famine, the years of abundance set in. For the space of three weeks letters from Venice lay waiting for him almost every alternate morning, and the heathery slopes between the farm and the village grew familiar with the spectacle of a tall thin man in a rough tweed suit struggling, as he walked, with sheets of foreign paper which the wind was doing its best to filch away from him.
The following extracts from these letters contain such portions of them as are necessary to our subject:—
* * * * *
'VENICE,August6.
'MY DEAR EUSTACE—I can only write you a very scrappy letter to-day, for we are just settling into our apartment, and the rooms are strewn in the most distracting way with boxes, books, and garments; while my maid, Félicie, and the old Italian woman, Caterina, who is to cook and manage for us, seem to be able to do nothing—not even to put a chair straight, or order some bread to keep us from starving—without consulting me. Paul, taking advantage of a husband's prerogative, has gone off toflâneron the Piazza, while his women-folk make life tolerable at home; which is a very unfair and spiteful version of his proceedings, for he has really gone as much on my business as on his own. I sent him—feeling his look of misery, as he sat on a packing-case in the middle of this chaos, terribly on my mind—to see if he could find the English consul (whom he knows a little), and discover from him, if possible, where your friends are. It is strange, as you say, that Miss Bretherton should not have written to me; but I incline to put it down to our old Jacques at home, who is getting more and more imbecile with the weight of years and infirmities, and is quite capable of forwarding to us all the letters which are not worth posting, and leaving all the important ones piled up in the hall to await our return. It is provoking, for, if the Bretherton party are not going to stay long in Venice, we may easily spend all our time in looking for each other; which will, indeed, be a lame and impotent conclusion. However, I have hopes of Paul's cleverness.
'And now, four o'clock! There is no help for it, my dear Eustace. I must go and instruct Caterina how not to poison us in our dinner to-night. She looks a dear old soul, but totally innocent of anything but Italian barbarities in the way of cooking. And Félicie also is well-meaning but ignorant, so, unless I wish to have Paul on my hands for a week, I must be off. This rough picnicking life, in Venice of all places, is a curious little experience; but I made up my mind last time we were here that we would venture our precious selves in no more hotels. The heat, the mosquitoes, the horrors of the food, were too much. Here we have a garden, a kitchen, a cool sitting-room; and if I choose to feed Paul ontisaneand milk-puddings, who is to prevent me?
'….Paul has just come in, with victory written on his brow. The English consul was of no use; but, as he was strolling home, he went into St. Mark's, and there, of course, found them! In the church were apparently all the English people who have as yet ventured to Venice; and these, or most of them, seemed to be following in the wake of a little party of four persons—two ladies, a gentleman, and a lame girl walking with a crutch. An excited English tourist condescended to inform Paul that it was "the great English actress, Miss Bretherton," who was creating all the commotion. Then, of course, he went up to her—he was provoked that he could hardly see her in the dim light of St. Mark's—introduced himself, and described our perplexities. Of course, she had written. I expected as much. Jacques must certainly be pensioned off! Paul thought the other three very inferior to her, though the uncle was civil, and talked condescendingly of Venice as though it were even good enough to be admired by a Worrall. It is arranged that the beauty is to come and see me to-morrow if, after Caterina has operated upon us during two meals, we are still alive. Good-night, and good-bye.'
* * * * *
'VENICE,August7.
'Well, I have seen her! It has been a blazing day. I was sitting in the little garden which separates one half of our rooms from the other, while Caterina was arranging thedéjeûnerunder the little acacia arbour in the centre of it. Suddenly Félicie came out from the house, and behind her a tall figure in a large hat and a white dress. The figure held out both hands to me in a cordial, un-English way, and said a number of pleasant things, rapidly, in a delicious voice; while I, with the dazzle of the sun in my eyes so that I could hardly make out the features, stood feeling a little thrilled by the advent of so famous a person. In a few moments, however, as it seemed to me, we were sitting, under the acacias, she was helping me to cut up the melon and arrange the figs, as if we had known one another for months, and I was experiencing one of those sudden rushes of liking which, as you know, are a weakness of mine. She stayed and took her meal with its. Paul, of course, was fascinated, and for once has not set her down as aréputation surfaite.
'Her beauty has a curious air of the place; and now I remember that her mother was Italian—Venetian actually, was it not? That accounts for it; she is the Venetian type spiritualised. At the foundation of her face, as it were, lies the face of the Burano lace-maker; only the original type has been so refined, so chiselled and smoothed away, that, to speak fancifully, only a beautiful ghost of it remains. That large stateliness of her movement, too, is Italian. You may see it in any Venetian street, and Veronese has fixed it in art.
'While we were sitting in the garden who should be announced but Edward Wallace? I knew, of course, from you that he might be here about this time, but in the hurry of our settling in I had quite forgotten his existence, so that the sight of his trim person bearing down upon us was a surprise. He and the Bretherton party, however, had been going about together for several days, so that he and she had plenty of gossip in common. Miss Bretherton's enthusiasm about Venice is of a very naive, hot, outspoken kind. It seems to me that she is a very susceptible creature. She lives her life fast, and crowds into it a greater number of sensations than most people. All this zest and pleasure must consume a vast amount of nervous force, but it makes her very refreshing to people asblasésas Paul and I are. My first feeling about her is very much what yours was. Personally, there seems to be all the stuff in her of which an actress is made; will she some day stumble upon the discovery of how to bring her own individual flame and force to bear upon her art? I should think it not unlikely, and, altogether, I feel as though I should take a more hopeful view of her intellectually than you do. You see, my dear Eustace, you men never realise how clever we women are, how fast we learn, and how quickly we catch up hints from all quarters under heaven and improve upon them. An actress so young and so sympathetic as Isabel Bretherton must still be very much of an unknown quantity dramatically. I know you think that the want of training is fatal, and that popularity will stereotype her faults. It may be so; but I am inclined to think, from my first sight of her, that she is a nature that will gather from life rather what stimulates it than what dulls and vulgarises it. Altogether, when I compare my first impressions of her with the image of her left by your letters, I feel that I have been pleasantly surprised. Only in the matter of intelligence. Otherwise it has, of course, been your descriptions of her that have planted and nurtured in me that strong sense of attraction which blossomed into liking at the moment of personal contact.'
* * * * *
'August10.
'This afternoon we have been out in the gondola belonging to this modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his boy to convey us to the Lido. I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about her Jamaica career. She made us all laugh with her accounts of the blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences at the Kingston theatre revelled. She seems generally to have played the Bandit's Daughter, the Smuggler's Wife, or the European damsel carried off by Indians, or some other thrilling elemental personage of the kind. TheWhite Ladywas, apparently, her first introduction to a more complicated order of play. It is extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, how little positive dramatic knowledge she must have! She knows some Shakespeare, I think—at least, she mentions two or three plays—and I gather from something she. said that she is now making the inevitable study of Juliet that every actress makes sooner or later; but Sheridan, Goldsmith, and, of course, all the French people, are mere names to her. When I think of the minute exhaustive training our Paris actors go through, and compare it with such a state of nature as hers, I am amazed at what she has done! For, after all, you know, she must be able to act to some extent; she must know a great deal more of her business than you and I suspect, or she could not get on at all.'
* * * * *
'August16.
'It is almost a week, I see, since I wrote to you last. During that time we have seen a great deal more of Miss Bretherton, sometimes in company with her belongings, sometimes without them, and my impressions of her have ripened very fast. Oh, my dear Eustace, you have been hasty,—all the world has been hasty! Isabel Bretherton'srealself is only now coming to the front, and it is a self which, as I say to myself with astonishment, not even your keen eyes have ever seen—hardly suspected even. Should I, myself a woman, have been as blind to a woman's capabilities, I wonder? Very likely! These sudden rich developments of youth are often beyond all calculation.
'Mr. Wallace's attitude makes me realise more than I otherwise could the past and present condition of things. He comes and talks to me with amazement of the changes in her tone and outlook, of the girl's sharpening intellect and growing sensitiveness, and as he recalls incidents and traits of the London season—confessions or judgments or blunders of hers, and puts them beside the impression which he sees her to be making on Paul and myself—I begin to understand from his talk and his bewilderment something of the real nature of the case. Intellectually, it has been "the ugly duckling" over again. Under all the crude, unfledged imperfection of her young performance, you people who have watched her with your trained critical eyes seem to me never to have suspected the coming wings, the strange nascent power, which is only now asserting itself in the light of day.
'"What has Eustace been about?" said Paul to me last night, after we had all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had been describing to me his talk with her. "He ought to have seen farther ahead. That creature is only just beginning to live—and it will be a life worth having! He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody. Of course we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant—yes, she is certainly ignorant,—though not so much as I imagined. But as for natural power and delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!"
'"I don't know that Eustace did question them," I said; "he thought simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her, and never would have because of her popularity."
'To which Paul replied that, as far as he could make out, nobody thought more meanly of her popularity than she did, and he has been talking a great deal to her about her season.
'"I never saw a woman at a more critical or interesting point of development," he exclaimed at last, striding up and down, and so absorbed in the subject that I could have almost laughed at his eagerness. "Something or other, luckily for her, set her on the right track three months ago, and it is apparently a nature on which nothing is lost. One can see it in the way in which she takes Venice: there isn't a scrap of her—little as she knows about it—that isn't keen and interested and wide-awake!"
'"Well, after all," I reminded him as he was settling down to his books, "we know nothing about her as an actress."
'"We shall see," he said; "I will find out something about that too before long."'
* * * * *
'August17-19.
'And so he has!
'Paul has been devoting himself more and more to the beauty, Mr. Wallace and I looking on with considerable amusement and interest; and this afternoon, finding it intolerable that Miss Bretherton has not even a bowing acquaintance with any of his favourite plays, Augier, Dumas, Victor Hugo, or anything else, he has been reading aloud to us in the garden, running on from scene to scene and speech to speech, translating as he went—she in rapt attention, and he gesticulating and spouting, and, except for an occasional queer rendering that made us laugh, getting on capitally with his English. She was enchanted; the novelty and the excitement of it absorbed her; and every now and then she would stop Paul with a little imperious wave of her hand, and repeat the substance of a speech after him with an impetuousélan, an energy, a comprehension, which drew little nods of satisfaction out of him, and sometimes produced a strong and startling effect upon myself and Mr. Wallace. However, Mr. Wallace might stare as he liked; the two people concerned were totally unconscious of the rest of us, until at last, after the great death-scene in theNuit Blanche, Paul threw down the book almost with a sob, and she, rising in a burst of feeling, held out her white arms towards an imaginary lover, and with extraordinary skill and memory repeated the substance of the heroine's last speeches:—
'"Achille, beloved! my eyes are dim—the mists of death are gathering. O Achille! the white cottage by the river—the nest in the reeds—your face and mine in the water—the blue heaven below us in the stream—O joy, quick! those hands, those lips! But listen, listen! it is the cruel wind rising, rising: it chills me to the bone, it chokes, it stifles me! I cannot see the river, and the cottage is gone, and the sun. O Achille, it is dark, so dark! Gather me close, beloved!—closer, closer! O death is kind—tender, like your touch! I have no fears—none!"
'She sank back into her chair. Anything more pathetic, more noble than her intonation of those words, could not have been imagined. Desforêts herself could not have spoken them with a more simple, a more piercing tenderness. I was so confused by a multitude of conflicting feelings—my own impressions and yours, the realities of the present position and the possibilities of her future—that I forgot to applaud her. It was the first time I had had any glimpse at all of her dramatic power, and, rough and imperfect as the test was, it seemed to me enough. I have not been so devoted to theFrançais, and to some of the people connected with it, for ten years, for nothing! One gets a kind of insight from long habit which, I think, one may trust. Oh, you blind Eustace, how could you forget that for a creature so full of primitive energy, so rich in thestuffof life, nothing is irreparable! Education has passed her by. Well, she will go to find her education. She will make a teacher out of every friend, out of every sensation. Incident and feeling, praise and dispraise, will all alike tend to mould the sensitive plastic material into shape. So far she may have remained outside her art; the art, no doubt, has been a conventional appendage, and little more. Training would have given her good conventions, whereas she has only picked up bad and imperfect ones. But no training could have given her what she will evidently soon develop for herself, that force and flame of imagination which fuses together instrument and idea in one great artistic whole. She has that imagination. You can see it in her responsive ways, her quick sensitive emotion. Only let it be roused and guided to a certain height, and it will overleap the barriers which have hemmed it in, and pour itself into the channels made ready for it by her art.
'There, at least, you have my strong impression. It is, in many ways, at variance with some of my most cherished principles; for both you and I are perhaps inclined to overrate the value of education, whether technical or general, in its effect on the individuality. And, of course, a better technical preparation would have saved Isabel Bretherton an immense amount of time; would have prevented her from contracting a host of bad habits—all of which she will have to unlearn. But the root of the matter is in her; of that I am sure; and whatever weight of hostile circumstance may be against her, she will, if she keeps her health—as to which I am sometimes, like you, a little anxious—break through it all and triumph.
'But if you did not understand her quite, you have enormously helped her; so much I will tell you for your comfort. She said to me yesterday abruptly—we were alone in our gondola, far out on the lagoon—"Did your brother ever tell you of a conversation he and I had in the woods at Nuneham about Mr. Wallace's play?"
'"Yes," I answered with outward boldness, but a little inward trepidation; "I have not known anything distress him so much for a long time. He thought you had misunderstood him."
'"No," she said quietly, but as it seemed to me with an undercurrent of emotion in her voice; "I did not misunderstand him. He meant what he said, and I would have forced the truth from him, whatever happened. I was determined to make him show me what he felt. That London season was sometimes terrible to me. I seemed to myself to be living in two worlds—one a world in which there was always a sea of faces opposite to me, or crowds about me, and a praise ringing in my ears which was enough to turn anybody's head, but which after a while repelled me as if there was something humiliating in it; and then, on the other side, a little inner world of people I cared for and respected, who looked at me kindly, and thought for me, but to whom as an actress I was just of no account at all! It was your brother who first roused that sense in me; it was so strange and painful, for how could I help at first believing in all the hubbub and the applause?"
'"Poor child!" I said, reaching out my hand for one of hers. "Did Eustace make himself disagreeable to you?"
'"It was more, I think," she answered, as if reflecting, "the standard he always seemed to carry about with him than anything connected with my own work. At least, of course, I mean before that Nuneham day. Ah, that Nuneham day! It cut deep."
'She turned away from me, and leant over the side of the boat, so that I could not see her face.
'"You forced it out of Eustace, you know," I said, trying to laugh at her, "you uncompromising young person! Of course, he flattered himself that you forgot all about his preaching the moment you got home. Men always make themselves believe what they want to believe."
'"Why should he want to believe so?" she replied quickly. "I had half foreseen it, I had forced it from him, and yet I felt it like a blow! It cost me a sleepless night, and some—well, some very bitter tears. Not that the tears were a new experience. How often, after all that noise at the theatre, have I gone home and cried myself to sleep over the impossibility of doing what I wanted to do, of moving those hundreds of people, of making them feel, and of putting my own feeling into shape! But that night, and with my sense of illness just then, I saw myself—it seemed to me quite in the near future—grown old and ugly, a forgotten failure, without any of those memories which console people who have been great when they must give up. I felt myself struggling against such a weight of ignorance, of bad habits, of unfavourable surroundings. How was I ever to get free and to reverse that judgment of Mr. Kendal's? My very success stood in my way, How was 'Miss Bretherton' to put herself to school?"
'"But now," I said to her warmly, "you have got free; or, rather, you are on the way to freedom."
'She thought a little bit without speaking, her chin resting on her hand, her elbow on her knee. We were passing the great red-brown mass of the Armenian convent. She seemed to be drinking in the dazzling harmonies of blue and warm brown and pearly light. When she did speak again it was very slowly, as though she were trying to give words to a number of complex impressions.
'"Yes," she said; "it seems to me that I am different; but I can't tell exactly how or why. I see all sorts of new possibilities, new meanings everywhere: that is one half of it! But the other, and the greater, half is—how to make all these new feelings and any new knowledge which may come to me tell on my art." And then she changed altogether with one of those delightful swift transformations of hers, and her face rippled over with laughter. "At present the chief result of the difference, whatever it may be, seems to be to make me most unmanageable at home. I am for ever disagreeing with my people, saying I can't do this and I won't do that. I am getting to enjoy having my own way in the most abominable manner." And then she caught my hand, that was holding hers, between both her own, and said half laughing and half in earnest—
'"Did you ever realise that I don't know any single language besides my own—not even French? That I can't read any French book or any French play?"
'"Well," I said, half laughing too, "it is very astonishing. And you know it can't go on if you are to do what I think you will do. French you positively must learn, and learn quickly. I don't mean to say that we haven't good plays and a tradition of our own; but for the moment France is the centre of your art, and you cannot remain at a distance from it! The French have organised their knowledge; it is available for all who come. Ours is still floating and amateurish—"
'And so on. You may imagine it, my dear Eustace; I spare you any more of it verbatim. After I had talked away for a long time and brought it all back to the absolute necessity that she should know French and become acquainted with French acting and French dramatic ideals, she pulled me up in the full career of eloquence, by demanding with a little practical air, a twinkle lurking somewhere in her eyes—
'"Explain to me, please; how is it to be done?"
'"Oh," I said, "nothing is easier. Do you know anything at all?"
'"Very little. I once had a term's lessons at Kingston."
'"Very well, then," I went on, enjoying this little comedy of a neglected education; "get a French maid, a French master, and a novel: I will provide you withConsueloand a translation to-morrow."
'"As for the French maid," she answered dubiously, shaking her head, "I don't know. I expect my old black woman that I brought with me from Jamaica would ill-treat her—perhaps murder her. But the master can be managed and the novel. Will none of you laugh at me if you see me trailing a French grammar about?"
'And so she has actually begun to-day. She makes a pretence of keeping her novel and a little dictionary and grammar in a bag, and hides them when any one appears. But Paul has already begun to tease her about her new and mysterious occupation, and I foresee that he will presently spend the greater part of his mornings in teaching her. I never saw anybody attract him so much; she is absolutely different from anything he has seen before; and, as he says, the mixture of ignorance and genius in her—yes, genius; don't be startled!—is most stimulating to the imagination.'
* * * * *
'August22.
'During the last few days I have not been seeing so much of Miss Bretherton as before. She has been devoting herself to her family, and Paul and I have been doing our pictures. We cannot persuade her to take any very large dose of galleries; it seems to me that her thoughts are set on one subject—and one subject only—and while she is in this first stage of intensity, it is not likely that anything else will have a chance.
'It is amusing to study the dissatisfaction of the uncle and aunt with the turn things have taken since they left London. Mr. Worrall has been evidently accustomed to direct his niece's life from top to bottom—to choose her plays for her, helped by Mr. Robinson; to advise her as to her fellow-actors, and her behaviour in society; and all, of course, with a shrewd eye to the family profit, and as little regard as need be to any fantastical conception of art.