It was Grace who was principal representative of the idea that Julia would be outraged by such a step; she never ceased to repeat that she had never heard of anything so "nasty." Nick would have expected this of Grace, but he felt rather bereft and betrayed when Biddy murmured to him thatsheknew—that there was really no need of their sacrificing their mother's comfort to an extravagant scruple. She intimated that if Nick would only consent to their going on with Broadwood as if nothing had happened—or rather as if everything had happened—she would answer for the feelings of the owner. For almost the first time in his life Nick disliked what Biddy said to him, and he gave her a sharp rejoinder, a taste of the general opinion that they all had enough to do to answer for themselves. He remembered afterwards the way she looked at him—startled, even frightened and with rising tears—before turning away. He held that they should judge better how Julia would take it after they had thrown up the place; and he made it his duty toarrange that his mother should formally advise her, by letter, of their intending to depart at once. Julia could then protest to her heart's content. Nick was aware that for the most part he didn't pass for practical; he could imagine why, from his early years, people should have joked him about it. But this time he was determined to rest on a rigid view of things as they were. He didn't sec his mother's letter, but he knew that it went. He felt she would have been more loyal if she had shown it to him, though of course there could be but little question of loyalty now. That it had really been written, however, very much on the lines he dictated was clear to him from the subsequent surprise which Lady Agnes's blankness didn't prevent his divining.
Julia acknowledged the offered news, but in unexpected terms: she had apparently neither resisted nor protested; she had simply been very glad to get her house back again and had not accused any of them of nastiness. Nick saw no more of her letter than he had seen of his mother's, but he was able to say to Grace—to their parent he was studiously mute—"My poor child, you see after all that we haven't kicked up such a row." Grace shook her head and looked gloomy and deeply wise, replying that he had no cause to triumph—they were so far from having seen the end of it yet. Thus he guessed that his mother had complied with his wish on the calculation that it would be a mere form, that Julia would entreat them not to be so fantastic and that he himself would then, in the presence of her wounded surprise, consent to a quiet continuance, so much in the interest—the air of Broadwood had a purity!—of the health of all of them. But since Julia jumped at their sacrifice he had no chance to be mollified: he had all grossly to persist in having been right.
At bottom probably he was a little surprised atJulia's so prompt assent. Literally speaking, it was not perfectly graceful. He was sorry his mother had been so deceived, but was sorrier still for Biddy's mistake—it showed she might be mistaken about other things. Nothing was left now but for Lady Agnes to say, as she did substantially whenever she saw him: "We're to prepare to spend the autumn at Worthing then or some other horrible place? I don't know their names: it's the only thing we can afford." There was an implication in this that if he expected her to drag her girls about to country-houses in a continuance of the fidgety effort to work them off he must understand at once that she was now too weary and too sad and too sick. She had done her best for them and it had all been vain and cruel—now therefore the poor creatures must look out for themselves. To the grossness of Biddy's misconduct she needn't refer, nor to the golden opportunity that young woman had forfeited by her odious treatment of Mr. Grindon. It was clear that this time Lady Agnes was incurably discouraged; so much so as to fail to glean the dimmest light from the fact that the girl was really making a long stay at Harsh. Biddy went to and fro two or three times and then in August fairly settled there; and what her mother mainly saw in her absence was the desire to keep out of the way of household reminders of her depravity. In fact, as turned out, Lady Agnes and Grace gathered themselves together in the first days of that month for another visit to the very old lady who had been Sir Nicholas's godmother; after which they went somewhere else—so that the question of Worthing had not immediately to be faced.
Nick stayed on in London with the obsession of work humming in his ears; he was joyfully conscious that for three or four months, in the empty Babylon, he would have ample stores of time. But towardthe end of August he got a letter from Grace in which she spoke of her situation and of her mother's in a manner that seemed to impose on him the doing of something tactful. They were paying a third visit—he knew that in Calcutta Gardens lady's-maids had been to and fro with boxes, replenishments of wardrobes—and yet somehow the outlook for the autumn was dark. Grace didn't say it in so many words, but what he read between the lines was that they had no more invitations. What, therefore, in pity's name was to become of them? People liked them well enough when Biddy was with them, but they didn't care for her mother and her, that prospecttout pur, and Biddy was cooped up indefinitely with Julia. This was not the manner in which Grace had anciently alluded to her sister's happy visits at Harsh, and the change of tone made Nick wince with a sense of all that had collapsed. Biddy was a little fish worth landing in short, scantly as she seemed disposed to bite, and Grace's rude probity could admit that she herself was not.
Nick had an inspiration: by way of doing something tactful he went down to Brighton and took lodgings, for several weeks, in the general interest, the very quietest and sunniest he could find. This he intended as a kindly surprise, a reminder of how he had his mother's and sisters' comfort at heart, how he could exert himself and save them trouble. But he had no sooner concluded his bargain—it was a more costly one than he had at first calculated—than he was bewildered and befogged to learn that the persons on whose behalf he had so exerted himself were to pass the autumn at Broadwood with Julia. That daughter of privilege had taken the place into familiar use again and was now correcting their former surprise at her crude indifference—this was infinitely characteristic of Julia—by invitingthem to share it with her. Nick wondered vaguely what she was "up to"; but when his mother treated herself to the line irony of addressing him an elaborately humble request for his consent to their accepting the merciful refuge—she repeated this expression three times—he replied that she might do exactly as she liked: he would only mention that he shouldn't feel himself at liberty to come and see her there. This condition proved apparently to Lady Agnes's mind no hindrance, and she and her daughters were presently reinstated in the very apartments they had learned so to love. This time in fact it was even better than before—they had still fewer expenses. The expenses were Nick's: he had to pay a forfeit to the landlady at Brighton for backing out of his contract. He said nothing to his mother about that bungled business—he was literally afraid; but a sad event just then reminded him afresh how little it was the moment for squandering money. Mr. Carteret drew his last breath; quite painlessly it seemed, as the closing scene was described at Beauclere when the young man went down to the funeral. Two or three weeks later the contents of his will were made public in theIllustrated London News, where it definitely appeared that he left a very large fortune, not a penny of which was to go to Nick. The provision for Mr. Chayter's declining years was remarkably handsome.
Miriam had mounted at a bound, in her new part, several steps in the ladder of fame, and at the climax of the London season this fact was brought home to her from hour to hour. It produced a thousand solicitations and entanglements, and she rapidly learned that to be celebrated takes up almost as much of one's own time as of other people's. Even though, as she boasted, she had reduced to a science the practice of "working" her mother—she made use of the good lady socially to the utmost, pushing her perpetually into the breach—there was many a juncture at which it was clear that she couldn't too much disoblige without hurting her cause. She made almost an income out of the photographers—their appreciation of her as a subject knew no bounds—and she supplied the newspapers with columns of characteristic copy. To the gentlemen who sought speech of her on behalf of these organs she poured forth, vindictively, floods of unscrupulous romance; she told them all different tales, and, as her mother told them others more marvellous yet, publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions, which surpassed each other in authenticity. The whole case was remarkable, was unique; for if the girl was advertised by the bewilderment of her readers she seemed to every sceptic, on his going to see her, as fine as if he had discovered her for himself. She was stillaccommodating enough, however, from time to time, to find an hour to come and sit to Nick Dormer, and he helped himself further by going to her theatre whenever he could. He was conscious Julia Dallow would probably hear of this and triumph with a fresh sense of how right she had been; but the reflexion only made him sigh resignedly, so true it struck him as being that there are some things explanation can never better, can never touch.
Miriam brought Basil Dashwood once to see her portrait, and Basil, who commended it in general, directed his criticism mainly to two points—its not yet being finished and its not having gone into that year's Academy. The young actor audibly panted; he felt the short breath of Miriam's rapidity, the quick beat of her success, and, looking at everything now from the standpoint of that speculation, could scarcely contain his impatience at the painter's clumsy slowness. He thought the latter's second attempt much better than his first, but somehow it ought by that time to be shining in the eye of the public. He put it to their friend with an air of acuteness—he had those felicities—that in every great crisis there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. He even betrayed the conviction that by putting on a spurt Nick might wind up the job and still get the Academy people to take him in. Basil knew some of them; he all but offered to speak to them—the case was so exceptional; he had no doubt he could get something done. Against the appropriation of the work by Peter Sherringham he explicitly and loudly protested, in spite of the homeliest recommendations of silence from Miriam; and it was indeed easy to guess how such an arrangement would interfere with his own conception of the eventual right place for the two portraits—the vestibule of the theatre, where every one going inand out would see them suspended face to face and surrounded by photographs, artistically disposed, of the young actress in a variety of characters. Dashwood showed superiority in his jump to the contention that so exhibited the pictures would really help to draw. Considering the virtue he attributed to Miriam the idea was exempt from narrow prejudice.
Moreover, though a trifle feverish, he was really genial; he repeated more than once, "Yes, my dear sir, you've done it this time." This was a favourite formula with him; when some allusion was made to the girl's success he greeted it also with a comfortable "This time shehasdone it." There was ever a hint of fine judgement and far calculation in his tone. It appeared before he went that this time even he himself had done it—he had taken up something that would really answer. He told Nick more about Miriam, more certainly about her outlook at that moment, than she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's impression that one by one every gage of a great career was being dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the hour. Miriam let her comrade talk only to contradict him, and contradicted him only to show how indifferently she could do it. She treated him as if she had nothing more to learn about his folly, but as if it had taken intimate friendship to reveal to her the full extent of it. Nick didn't mind her intimate friendships, but he ended by disliking Dashwood, who gave on his nerves—a circumstance poor Julia, had it come to her knowledge, would doubtless have found deplorably significant. Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She had a fuller vision of how successful success could be; she took everything as itcame—dined out every Sunday and even went into the country till the Monday morning; kept a hundred distinguished names on her lips and abounded in strange tales of the people who were making up to her. She struck Nick as less strenuous than she had been hitherto, as making even an aggressive show of inevitable laxities; but he was conscious of no obligation to rebuke her for it—the less as he had a dim vision that some effect of that sort, some irritation of his curiosity, was what she desired to produce. She would perhaps have liked, for reasons best known to herself, to look as if she were throwing herself away, not being able to do anything else. He couldn't talk to her as if he took a deep interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him primarily and essentially a pictorial object, with the nature of whose vicissitudes he was concerned—putting common charity and his personal good nature of course aside—only so far as they had something to say in her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience, twist of her life, would say most?—so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his particular purpose more precious.
When she had left him at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood, and still more on a later occasion, that of his turning back to his work after putting her into her carriage, and otherwise bare-headedly manifesting, the last time, for that year apparently, that he was to see her—when she had left him it occurred to him in the light of her quick distinction that there were deep differences in the famous artistic life. Miriam was already in a glow of glory—which, moreover, was probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he closed the door on her and took up his palette to rub it witha dirty cloth the little room in which his own battle was practically to be fought looked woefully cold and grey and mean. It was lonely and yet at the same time was peopled with unfriendly shadows—so thick he foresaw them gather in winter twilights to come—the duller conditions, the longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys. His late beginning was there and his wasted youth, the mistakes that would still bring forth children after their image, the sedentary solitude, the grey mediocrity, the poor explanations, the effect of foolishness he dreaded even from afar of in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and wait again, for a fruition which to their sense at least might well prove a grotesque anti-climax. He yearned enough over it, however it should figure, to feel that this possible pertinacity might enter into comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. That was after all in his bare studio the most collective dim presence, the one that kept him company best as he sat there and that made it the right place, however wrong—the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was attached. This was Miriam's case too, but the sharp contrast, which she showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things she got with the thing in itself.
I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this last mystic value struck him as requiring for its full operation no adjunct whatever—as being in its own splendour a summary of all adjuncts and apologies. I have related that the great collections, the National Gallery and the Museum, were sometimes rather a series of dead surfaces to him; but the sketch I have attempted of him will have been inadequate if it fails to suggest that there were other days when, as he strolled through them, he plucked right and left perfect nosegays of reassurance. Bentas he was on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he judged it better for long periods not to haunt the earlier masters, whose conditions had been so different—later he came to see that it didn't matter much, especially if one kept away; but he was liable to accidental deflexions from this theory, liable in particular to feel the sanctity of the great portraits of the past. These were the things the most inspiring, in the sense that while generations, while worlds had come and gone, they seemed far most to prevail and survive and testify. As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different worlds, knowing so many secrets the particular world didn't, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible thread on which the pearls of history were strung.
Miriam notified her artist that her theatre was to close on the tenth of August, immediately after which she was to start, with the company, on a tremendous tour of the provinces. They were to make a lot of money, but they were to have no holiday, and she didn't want one; she only wanted to keep at it and make the most of her limited opportunities for practice; inasmuch as at that rate, playing but two parts a year—and such parts: she despised them!—she shouldn't have mastered the rudiments of her trade before decrepitude would compel her to lay it by. The first time she came to the studio after her visitwith Dashwood she sprang up abruptly at the end of half an hour, saying she could sit no more—she had had enough and to spare of it. She was visibly restless and preoccupied, and though Nick had not waited till now to note that she had more moods in her list than he had tints on his palette he had never yet seen her sensibility at this particular pitch. It struck him rather as a waste of passion, but he was ready to let her go. She looked round the place as if suddenly tired of it and then said mechanically, in a heartless London way, while she smoothed down her gloves, "So you're just going to stay on?" After he had confessed that this was his dark purpose she continued in the same casual, talk-making manner: "I daresay it's the best thing for you. You're just going to grind, eh?"
"I see before me an eternity of grinding."
"All alone by yourself in this dull little hole? Youwillbe conscientious, youwillbe virtuous."
"Oh my solitude will be mitigated—I shall have models and people."
"What people—what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before the glass.
"Well, no one so good as you."
"That's a prospect!" the girl laughed—"for all the good you've got out of me!"
"You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you—I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman occupation. You can't do much to them besides."
"Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them."
"Cruel—that's too much," he objected.
"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's over it's over: it kills yourinterest in them. After you've finished them you don't like them any more at all."
"Surely I likeyou," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his picture with his hands in his pockets.
"We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"—and she smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight your work—I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here—I speak from the point of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say—rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur. Haven't you any confrères—fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don't they come near you?"
"I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"
"Well,I've got confrères, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does your sister never come near you any more," she asked, "or is it only the fear of meeting me?"
He was aware of his mother's theory that Biddy was constantly bundled home from Rosedale Road at the approach of improper persons: she was as angry at this as if she wouldn't have been more so had her child suffered exposure; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was nearer the truth. He reminded her that he had already told her—he hadbeen careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was avoided—that his sister was now most of the time in the country, staying with an hospitable relation.
"Oh yes," the girl rejoined to this, "with Mr. Sherringham's sister, Mrs.—what's her name? I always forget." And when he had pronounced the word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal—he hated to talk of Julia by any name and didn't know what business Miriam had with her—she went on: "That's the one—the beauty, the wonderful beauty. I shall never forget how handsome she looked the day she found me here. I don't in the least resemble her, but I should like to have a try at that type some day in a comedy of manners. But who the devil will write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The danger would be, no doubt, that I should push herà la charge."
Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if she should have the bad taste—which she seemed trembling on the brink of—to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question and himself he should dislike her beyond remedy. It would show him she was a coarse creature after all. Her good genius interposed, however, as against this hard penalty, and she quickly, for the moment at least, whisked away from the topic, demanding, since they spoke of comrades and visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she hadn't heard of for so many days.
"I think he's tired of me," said Nick; "he hasn't been near me either. But after all it's natural—he has seen me through."
"Seen you through? Do you mean," she laughed, "seen through you? Why you've only just begun."
"Precisely, and at bottom he doesn't like to see me begin. He's afraid I shall do something."
She wondered—as with the interest of that. "Do you mean he's jealous?"
"Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that's just the discomfort for him—he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely: he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects, belong to a lower plane, for which one must doubtless be tolerant and indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and trifles. Indeed he'll probably tell me frankly the next time I see him that he can't but feel that to come down to small questions of action—to the small prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice—is for the superior person really a fatal descent. One may be inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend to be interesting. 'Il en faut comme ça,' but one doesn't haunt them. He'll do his best for me; he'll come back again, but he'll come back sad, and finally he'll fade away altogether. Hell go off to Granada or somewhere."
"The simplifications of practice?" cried Miriam. "Why they're just precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without them?"
"What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not superior persons. We're awful Philistines."
"I'll be one withyou," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?"
"Yes, he has a weakness for giving up—he'll go with you as far as that. But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's gross."
"He's an idiot—n'en parlons plus!" she dropped, gathering up her parasol but lingering.
"Ah I stick to him," Nick said. "He helped me at a difficult time."
"You ought to be ashamed to confess it."
"Oh youarea Philistine!" Nick returned.
"Certainly I am," she declared, going toward the door—"if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like in patient obscurity while I'm pitchforked into themêléeand into the most improbable fame—all on the back of a solitarycheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days—do you see that?—to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall have had—five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one notcare much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?"
"Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad."
"I meangood, you know—there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Miriam tapped him—he was near her at the door—with her parasol.
"I scarcely know what to say to you," he logically pleaded, "for certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast."
"I'm too clever—I'm a humbug."
"That's the way I used to be," said Nick.
She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly; after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly—rather as if he had been a fine view or an interesting object—to his face. "Ah, the pride of that—the sense of purification! He 'used' to be forsooth! Poor me! Of course you'll say, 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to produce compared with the rot you have.' So it's all right. Become great in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more at the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, "Poor Mr. Sherringham—withthat!" she wailed.
"Oh I'll finish it—it will be very decent," Nick said.
"Finish it by yourself?"
"Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London."
"Never, never, never again."
He wondered. "Why you've made me the most profuse offers and promises."
"Yes, but they were made in ignorance and I've backed out of them. I'm capricious too—faites la part de ça. I see it wouldn't do—I didn't know itthen. We're too far apart—Iam, as you say, a Philistine." And as he protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith she added: "You'll find other models. Paint Gabriel Nash."
"Gabriel Nash—as a substitute for you?"
"It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her—"paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb."
It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: "The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?"
"Oh in you. I don't know anything about 'her.'"
"But that wouldn't be the effect," he argued with the same supervening candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed."
"The usual law?"
"Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general truth. In the case you speak of," he said, "I should probably make a shocking picture."
"And fall in love with her again? Then for God's sake risk the daub!" Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria.
She had guessed happily in saying to him that to offer to paint Gabriel Nash would be the way to get rid of that visitant. It was with no such invidious purpose indeed that our young man proposed to his intermittent friend to sit; rather, as August was dusty in the London streets, he had too little hope that Nash would remain in town at such a time to oblige him. Nick had no wish to get rid of his private philosopher; he liked his philosophy, and though of course premeditated paradox was the light to read him by he yet had frequently and incidentally an inspired unexpectedness. He remained in Rosedale Road the man who most produced by his presence the effect of company. All the other men of Nick's acquaintance, all his political friends, represented, often very communicatively, their own affairs, their own affairs alone; which when they did it well was the most their host could ask of them. But Nash had the rare distinction that he seemed somehow to figurehisaffairs, the said host's, and to show an interest in them unaffected by the ordinary social limitations of capacity. This relegated him to the class of high luxuries, and Nick was well aware that we hold our luxuries by a fitful and precarious tenure. If a friend without personal eagerness was one of the greatest of these it would be evident to the simplest mind that by the law of distribution of earthly boonssuch a convenience should be expected to forfeit in duration what it displayed in intensity. He had never been without a suspicion that Nash was too good to last, though for that matter nothing had yet confirmed a vague apprehension that his particular manner of breaking up or breaking down would be by his wishing to put so fresh a recruit in relation with other disciples.
That would practically amount to a catastrophe, Nick felt; for it was odd that one could both have a great kindness for him and not in the least, when it came to the point, yearn for a view of his personal extensions. His originality had always been that he appeared to have none; and if in the first instance he had introduced his bright, young, political prodigy to Miriam and her mother, that was an exception for which Peter Sherringham's interference had been mainly responsible. All the same, however, it was some time before Nick ceased to view it as perhaps on the awkward books that, to complete his education as it were, Gabriel would wish him to converse a little with spirits formed by a like tonic discipline. Nick had an instinct, in which there was no consciousness of detriment to Nash, that the pupils, possibly even the imitators, of such a genius would be, as he mentally phrased it, something awful. He could be sure, even Gabriel himself could be sure, of his own reservations, but how could either of them be sure of those of others? Imitation is a fortunate homage only in proportion as it rests on measurements, and there was an indefinable something in Nash's doctrine that would have been discredited by exaggeration or by zeal. Providence happily appeared to have spared it this ordeal; so that Nick had after months still to remind himself how his friend had never pressed on his attention the least little group of fellow-mystics, never offered to producethem for his edification. It scarcely mattered now that he was just the man to whom the superficial would attribute that sort of tail: it would probably have been hard, for example, to persuade Lady Agnes or Julia Dallow or Peter Sherringham that he was not most at home in some dusky, untidy, dimly-imagined suburb of "culture," a region peopled by unpleasant phrasemongers who thought him a gentleman and who had no human use but to be held up in the comic press—which was, moreover, probably restrained by decorum from touching upon the worst of their aberrations.
Nick at any rate never ran his academy to earth nor so much as skirted the suburb in question; never caught from the impenetrable background of his life the least reverberation of flitting or of flirting, the fainting esthetic ululation. There had been moments when he was even moved to anxiety by the silence that poor Gabriel's own faculty of sound made all about him—when at least it reduced to plainer elements (the mere bald terms of lonely singleness and thrift, of the lean philosophic life) the mystery he could never wholly dissociate from him, the air as of the transient and occasional, the likeness to curling vapour or murmuring wind or shifting light. It was, for instance, a symbol of this unclassified state, the lack of all position as a name in cited lists, that Nick in point of fact had no idea where he lived, would not have known how to go and see him or send him a doctor if he had heard he was ill. He had never walked with him to any door of Gabriel's own, even to pause at the threshold, though indeed Nash had a club, the Anonymous, in some improbable square, of which he might be suspected of being the only member—one had never heard of another—where it was vaguely understood letters would some day or other find him. Fortunately he pressed with nosharpness the spring of pity—his whole "form" was so easy a grasp of the helm of consciousness, which he would never let go. He would never consent to any deformity, but would steer his course straight through the eventual narrow pass and simply go down over the horizon.
He in any case turned up Rosedale Road one day after Miriam had left London; he had just come back from a fortnight in Brittany, where he had drawn refreshment from the tragic sweetness of—well, of everything. He was on his way somewhere else—was going abroad for the autumn but was not particular what he did, professing that he had come back just to get Nick utterly off his mind. "It's very nice, it's very nice; yes, yes, I see," he remarked, giving a little, general, assenting sigh as his eyes wandered over the simple scene—a sigh which for a suspicious ear would have testified to an insidious reaction.
Nick's ear, as we know, was already suspicious; a fact accounting for the expectant smile—it indicated the pleasant apprehension of a theory confirmed—with which he returned: "Do you mean my pictures are nice?"
"Yes, yes, your pictures and the whole thing."
"The whole thing?"
"Your existence in this little, remote, independent corner of the great city. The disinterestedness of your attitude, the persistence of your effort, the piety, the beauty, in short the edification, of the whole spectacle."
Nick laughed a little ruefully. "How near to having had enough of me you must be when you speak of me as edifying!" Nash changed colour slightly at this; it was the first time in his friend's remembrance that he had given a sign of embarrassment. "Vous allez me lâcher, I see it coming; andwho can blame you?—for I've ceased to be in the least spectacular. I had my little hour; it was a great deal, for some people don't even have that. I've given you your curious case and I've been generous; I made the drama last for you as long as I could. You'll 'slope,' my dear fellow—you'll quietly slope; and it will be all right and inevitable, though I shall miss you greatly at first. Who knows whether without you I shouldn't still have been 'representing' Harsh, heaven help me? You rescued me; you converted me from a representative into an example—that's a shade better. But don't I know where you must be when you're reduced to praising my piety?"
"Don't turn me away," said Nash plaintively; "give me a cigarette."
"I shall never dream of turning you away; I shall cherish you till the latest possible hour. I'm only trying to keep myself in tune with the logic of things. The proof of how I cling is that precisely I want you to sit to me."
"To sit to you?" With which Nick could fancy his visitor a little blank.
"Certainly, for after all it isn't much to ask. Here we are and the hour's peculiarly propitious—long light days with no one coming near me, so that I've plenty of time. I had a hope I should have some orders: my younger sister, whom you know and who's a great optimist, plied me with that vision. In fact we invented together a charming little sordid theory that there might be rather a 'run' on me from the chatter (such as it was) produced by my taking up this line. My sister struck out the idea that a good many of the pretty ladies would think me interesting and would want to be done. Perhaps they do, but they've controlled themselves, for I can't say the run has commenced. They haven'teven come to look, but I daresay they don't yet quite take it in. Of course it's a bad time—with every one out of town; though you know they might send for me to come and do them at home. Perhaps they will when they settle down. A portrait-tour of a dozen country-houses for the autumn and winter—what do you say to that for the ardent life? I know I excruciate you," Nick added, "but don't you see how it's in my interest to try how much you'll still stand?"
Gabriel puffed his cigarette with a serenity so perfect that it might have been assumed to falsify these words. "Mrs. Dallow will send for you—vous allez voir ça," he said in a moment, brushing aside all vagueness.
"She'll send for me?"
"To paint her portrait; she'll recapture you on that basis. She'll get you down to one of the country-houses, and it will all go off as charmingly—with sketching in the morning, on days you can't hunt, and anything you like in the afternoon, and fifteen courses in the evening; there'll be bishops and ambassadors staying—as if you were a 'well-known,' awfully clever amateur. Take care, take care, for, fickle as you may think me, I can read the future: don't imagine you've come to the end of me yet. Mrs. Dallow and your sister, of both of whom I speak with the greatest respect, are capable of hatching together the most conscientious, delightful plan for you. Your differences with the beautiful lady will be patched up and you'll each come round a little and meet the other halfway. The beautiful lady will swallow your profession if you'll swallow hers. She'll put up with the palette if you'll put up with the country-house. It will be a very unusual one in which you won't find a good north room where you can paint. You'll go about with her and do all herfriends, all the bishops and ambassadors, and you'll eat your cake and have it, and every one, beginning with your wife, will forget there's anything queer about you, and everything will be for the best in the best of worlds; so that, together—you and she—you'll become a great social institution and every one will think she has a delightful husband; to say nothing of course of your having a delightful wife. Ah my dear fellow, you turn pale, and with reason!" Nash went lucidly on: "that's to pay you for having tried to make me let you have it. You have it then there! I may be a bore"—the emphasis of this, though a mere shade, testified to the first personal resentment Nick had ever heard his visitor express—"I may be a bore, but once in a while I strike a light, I make things out. Then I venture to repeat, 'Take care, take care.' If, as I say, I respectces damesinfinitely it's because they will be acting according to the highest wisdom of their sex. That's the sort of thing women do for a man—the sort of thing they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying. There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep—the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing," Nash continued, "then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer the virtue of the individual, it's that of the wondrous sex."
"You're so remarkable that, more than ever, I must paint you," Nick returned, "though I'm so agitated by your prophetic words that my hand trembles and I shall doubtless scarcely be able to hold my brush. Look how I rattle my easel trying to put it into position. I see it all there just as youshow it. Yes, it will be a droll day, and more modern than anything yet, when the conscience of women makes out good reasons for men's not being in love with them. You talk of their goodness and cleverness, and it's certainly much to the point. I don't know what else they themselves might do with those graces, but I don't see what man can do with them but be fond of them where he finds them."
"Oh you'll do it—you'll do it!" cried Nash, brightly jubilant.
"What is it I shall do?"
"Exactly what I just said; if not next year then the year after, or the year after that. You'll go halfway to meet her and she'll drag you about and pass you off. You'll paint the bishops and become a social institution. That is, you'll do it if you don't take great care."
"I shall, no doubt, and that's why I cling to you. You must still look after me," Nick went on. "Don't melt away into a mere improbable reminiscence, a delightful, symbolic fable—don't if you can possibly help it. The trouble is, you see, that you can't really keep hold very tight, because at bottom it will amuse you much more to see me in another pickle than to find me simply jogging down the vista of the years on the straight course. Let me at any rate have some sort of sketch of you as a kind of feather from the angel's wing or a photograph of the ghost—to prove to me in the future that you were once a solid sociable fact, that I didn't invent you, didn't launch you as a deadly hoax. Of course I shall be able to say to myself that you can't have been a fable—otherwise you'd have a moral; but that won't be enough, because I'm not sure you won't have had one. Some day you'll peep in here languidly and find me in such an attitude of piety—presenting my bent back to you as I niggle over some interminable botch—thatI shall give cruelly on your nerves and you'll just draw away, closing the door softly. You'll be gentle and considerate about it and spare me, you won't even make me look round. You'll steal off on tiptoe, never, never to return."
Gabriel consented to sit; he professed he should enjoy it and be glad to give up for it his immediate foreign commerce, so vague to Nick, so definite apparently to himself; and he came back three times for the purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment, for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had neverseenhis subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty—what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there—except that he couldn't catch them—which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it most. He was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely so—silent, restless, gloomy, dim, as if on the test the homage of a directer attention than he had ever had gave him less pleasure than he would have supposed. He had been willing tojudge of this in good faith; but frankly he rather suffered. He wasn't cross, but was clearly unhappy, and Nick had never before felt him contract instead of expanding.
It was all accordingly as if a trap had been laid for him, and our young man asked himself if it were really fair. At the same time there was something richly rare in such a relation between the subject and the artist, and Nick was disposed to go on till he should have to stop for pity or for shame. He caught eventually a glimmer of the truth underlying the strangeness, guessed that what upset his friend was simply the reversal, in such a combination, of his usual terms of intercourse. He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new to him to be himself interpreted and—as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be—interpreted all ironically. From being outside of the universe he was suddenly brought into it, and from the position of a free commentator and critic, an easy amateurish editor of the whole affair, reduced to that of humble ingredient and contributor. It occurred afterwards to Nick that he had perhaps brought on a catastrophe by having happened to throw off as they gossiped or languished, and not alone without a cruel intention, but with an impulse of genuine solicitude: "But, my dear fellow, what will you do when you're old?"
"Old? What do you call old?" Nash had replied bravely enough, but with another perceptible tinge of irritation. "Must I really remind you at this time of day that that term has no application to such a condition as mine? It only belongs to you wretched people who have the incurable superstition of 'doing'; it's the ignoble collapse you prepare for yourselves when you cease to be able to do. For me there'll be no collapse, no transition, no clumsy readjustmentof attitude; for I shall onlybe, more and more, with all the accumulations of experience, the longer I live."
"Oh I'm not particular about the term," said Nick. "If you don't call it old, the ultimate state, call it weary—call it final. The accumulations of experience are practically accumulations of fatigue."
"I don't know anything about weariness. I live freshly—it doesn't fatigue me."
"Then you need never die," Nick declared.
"Certainly; I daresay I'm indestructible, immortal."
Nick laughed out at this—it would be such fine news to some people. But it was uttered with perfect gravity, and it might very well have been in the spirit of that gravity that Nash failed to observe his agreement to sit again the next day. The next and the next and the next passed, but he never came back.
True enough, punctuality was not important for a man who felt that he had the command of all time. Nevertheless his disappearance "without a trace," that of a personage in a fairy-tale or a melodrama, made a considerable impression on his friend as the months went on; so that, though he had never before had the least difficulty about entering into the play of Gabriel's humour, Nick now recalled with a certain fanciful awe the special accent with which he had ranked himself among imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last, balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless, and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple. Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary spirit—thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, a purple rim of mystery to an horizon now so dreadfully let down. The mysteryat any rate remained; another shade of purple in fact was virtually added to it. Nick had the prospect, for the future, of waiting to see, all curiously, when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further diversion—it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a second unfinished thing on his hands—of imagining in the portrait he had begun an odd tendency to fade gradually from the canvas. He couldn't catch it in the act, but he could have ever a suspicion on glancing at it that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little—for all the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale—and making the surface indistinct and bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral of the Hawthorne tale would be that his personage would come back in quaint confidence on the day his last projected shadow should have vanished.
One day toward the end of March of the following year, in other words more than six months after Mr. Nash's disappearance, Bridget Dormer came into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at Broadwood—she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about her small subterraneous self, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they could remember, the head of the family had honoured their common parent. Nick noted indeed that this demonstration had apparently been taken as a great favour, and Biddy loyally testified to the fact that her elder brother was awfully jolly and that his presence had been a pretext for tremendous fun. Nick accordingly asked her what had passed about his marriage—what their mother had said to him.
"Oh nothing," she replied; and Percy had said nothing to Lady Agnes and not a word to herself. This partly explained, for his junior, the consequent beatitude—none but cheerful topics had been produced; but he questioned the girl further—to a point which led her to say: "Oh I daresay that before long she'll write to her."
"Who'll write to whom?"
"Mamma'll write to Percy's wife. I'm sure he'd like it. Of course we shall end by going to see her. He was awfully disappointed at what he found in Spain—he didn't find anything."
Biddy spoke of his disappointment almost with commiseration, for she was evidently inclined this morning to a fresh and kindly view of things. Nick could share her feeling but so far as was permitted by a recognition merely general of what his brother must have looked for. It might have been snipe and it might have been bristling boars. Biddy was indeed brief at first about everything, in spite of all the weeks that had gone since their last meeting; for he quickly enough saw she had something behind—something that made her gay and that she wanted to come to quickly. He was vaguely vexed at her being, fresh from Broadwood, so gay as that; for—it was impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact—what had practically come to pass in regard to that rural retreat was exactly what he had desired to avert. All winter, while it had been taken for granted his mother and sisters were doing what he wished, they had been doing precisely what he hated. He held Biddy perhaps least responsible, and there was no one he could exclusively blame. He washed his hands of the matter and succeeded fairly well, for the most part, in forgetting he was not pleased. Julia herself in truth appeared to have been the most active member of the little group united to make light of his decencies. There had been a formal restitution of Broadwood, but the three ladies were there more than ever, with the slight difference that they were mainly there with its mistress. Mahomet had declined to go any more to the mountain, so the mountain had virtually come to Mahomet.
After their long visit in the autumn Lady Agnes and her girls had come back to town; but they hadgone down again for Christmas and Julia had taken this occasion to write to Nick that she hoped very much he wouldn't refuse them all his own company for just a little scrap of the supremely sociable time. Nick, after reflexion, judged it best not to refuse, so that he passed, in the event, four days under his cousin's roof. The "all" proved a great many people, for she had taken care to fill the house. She took the largest view of hospitality and Nick had never seen her so splendid, so free-handed, so gracefully active. She was a perfect mistress of the revels; she had arranged some ancient bravery for every day and for every night. The Dormers were so much in it, as the phrase was, that after all their discomfiture their fortune seemed in an hour to have come back. There had been a moment when, in extemporised charades, Lady Agnes, an elderly figure being required, appeared on the point of undertaking the part of the housekeeper at a castle, who, dropping herh's, showed sheeplike tourists about; but she waived the opportunity in favour of her daughter Grace. Even Grace had a great success; Grace dropped herh's as with the crash of empires. Nick of course was in the charades and in everything, but Julia was not; she only invented, directed, led the applause. When nothing else was forward Nick "sketched" the whole company: they followed him about, they waylaid him on staircases, clamouring to be allowed to sit. He obliged them so far as he could, all save Julia, who didn't clamour; and, growing rather red, he thought of Gabriel Nash while he bent over the paper. Early in the new year he went abroad for six weeks, but only as far as Paris. It was a new Paris for him then; a Paris of the Rue Bonaparte and three or four professional friends—he had more of these there than in London; a Paris of studios and studies and models, of researches andrevelations, comparisons and contrasts, of strong impressions and long discussions and rather uncomfortable economies, small cafés, bad fires and the general sense of being twenty again.
While he was away his mother and sisters—Lady Agnes now sometimes wrote to him—returned to London for a month, and before he was again established in Rosedale Road they went back for a third course of Broadwood. After they had been there five days—and this was the salt of the whole feast—Julia took herself off to Harsh, leaving them in undisturbed possession. They had remained so—they wouldn't come up to town till after Easter. The trick was played, and Biddy, as I have mentioned, was now very content. Her brother presently learned, however, that the reason of this was not wholly the success of the trick; unless indeed her further ground were only a continuation of it. She was not in London as a forerunner of her mother; she was not even as yet in Calcutta Gardens. She had come to spend a week with Florry Tressilian, who had lately taken the dearest little flat in a charming new place, just put up, on the other side of the Park, with all kinds of lifts and tubes and electricities. Florry had been awfully nice to her—had been with them ever so long at Broadwood while the flat was being painted and prepared—and mamma had then let her, let Biddy, promise to come to her, when everything was ready, so that they might have a happy old maids' (for theywere, old maids now!) house-warming together. If Florry could by this time do without a chaperon—she had two latchkeys and went alone on the top of omnibuses, and her name was in the Red Book—she was enough of a duenna for another girl. Biddy referred with sweet cynical eyes to the fine happy stride she had thus taken in the direction of enlightened spinsterhood; and Nick hung his head, immenselyabashed and humiliated, for, modern as he had fatuously supposed himself, there were evidently currents more modern yet.
It so happened that on this particular morning he had drawn out of a corner his interrupted study of Gabriel Nash; on no further curiosity—he had only been looking round the room in a rummaging spirit—than to see how much or how little of it remained. It had become to his view so dim an adumbration—he was sure of this, and it pressed some spring of melancholy mirth—that it didn't seem worth putting away, and he left it leaning against a table as if it had been a blank canvas or a "preparation" to be painted over. In this posture it attracted Biddy's attention, for on a second glance it showed distinguishable features. She had not seen it before and now asked whom it might represent, remarking also that she could almost guess, yet not quite: she had known the original but couldn't name him.
"Six months ago, for a few days, it represented Gabriel Nash," Nick replied. "But it isn't anybody or anything now."
"Six months ago? What's the matter with it and why don't you go on?"
"What's the matter with it is more than I can tell you. But I can't go on because I've lost my model."
She had an almost hopeful stare. "Is he beautifully dead?"
Her brother laughed out at the candid cheerfulness, hopefulness almost, with which this inquiry broke from her. "He's only dead to me. He has gone away."
"Where has he gone?"
"I haven't the least idea."
"Why, have you quarrelled?"—Biddy shone again.
"Quarrelled? For what do you take us? Docs the nightingale quarrel with the moon?"
"I needn't ask which of you is the moon," she said.
"Of course I'm the nightingale. But, more literally," Nick continued, "Nash has melted back into the elements—he's part of the great air of the world." And then as even with this lucidity he saw the girl still mystified: "I've a notion he has gone to India and at the present moment is reclining on a bank of flowers in the vale of Cashmere."
Biddy had a pause, after which she dropped: "Julia will be glad—she dislikes him so."
"If she dislikes him why should she be glad he's so enviably placed?"
"I mean about his going away. She'll be glad of that."
"My poor incorrigible child," Nick cried, "what has Julia to do with it?"
"She has more to do with things than you think," Biddy returned with all her bravery. Yet she had no sooner uttered the words than she perceptibly blushed. Hereupon, to attenuate the foolishness of her blush—only it had the opposite effect—she added: "She thinks he has been a bad element in your life."
Nick emitted a long strange sound. "She thinks perhaps, but she doesn't think enough; otherwise she'd arrive at this better thought—that she knows nothing whatever about my life."
"Ah brother," the girl pleaded with solemn eyes, "you don't imagine what an interest she takes in it. She has told me many times—she has talked lots to me about it." Biddy paused and then went on, an anxious little smile shining through her gravity as if from a cautious wonder as to how much he would take: "She has a conviction it was Mr. Nash who made trouble between you."
"Best of little sisters," Nick pronounced, "thoseare thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have got into him. Moreover," our young man continued, "if Julia has talked to you so much about the matter there's no harm in my talking to you a little. When she threw me over in an hour it was on a perfectly definite occasion. That occasion was the presence in my studio of a dishevelled, an abandoned actress."
"Oh Nick, she has not thrown you over!" Biddy protested. "She has not—I've proof."
He felt at this direct denial a certain stir of indignation and looked at the girl with momentary sternness. "Has she sent you here to tell me this? What do you mean by proof?"
Biddy's eyes, at these questions, met her brother's with a strange expression, and for a few seconds, while she looked entreatingly into them, she wavered there with parted lips and vaguely stretched out her hands. The next minute she had burst into tears—she was sobbing on his breast. He said "Hallo!" and soothed her; but it was very quickly over. Then she told him what she meant by her proof and what she had had on her mind ever since her present arrival. It was a message from Julia, but not to say—not to say what he had questioned her about just before; though indeed, more familiar now that he had his arm round her, she boldly expressed the hope it might in the end come to the same thing. Julia simply wanted to know—- she had instructed her to sound him discreetly—if Nick would undertake her portrait; and she wound up this experiment in "sounding" by the statement that their beautiful kinswoman was dying to sit.
"Dying to sit?" echoed Nick, whose turn it was this time to feel his colour rise.
"At any moment you like after Easter, when she comes up. She wants a full-length and your very best, your most splendid work."
Nick stared, not caring that he had blushed. "Is she serious?"
"Ah Nick—serious!" Biddy reasoned tenderly. She came nearer again and he thought her again about to weep. He took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes.
"It's all right if she knowsIam. But why doesn't she come like any one else? I don't refuse people!"
"Nick, dearest Nick!" she went on, her eyes conscious and pleading. He looked into them intently—as well as she could he play at sounding—and for a moment, between these young persons, the air was lighted by the glimmer of mutual searchings and suppressed confessions. Nick read deep and then, suddenly releasing his sister, turned away. She didn't see his face in that movement, but an observer to whom it had been presented might have fancied it denoted a foreboding that was not exactly a dread, yet was not exclusively a joy.
The first thing he made out in the room, when he could distinguish, was Gabriel Nash's portrait, which suddenly filled him with an unreasoning rancour. He seized it and turned it about, jammed it back into its corner with its face against the wall. This small diversion might have served to carry off the embarrassment with which he had finally averted himself from Biddy. The embarrassment, however, was all his own; none of it was reflected in the way she resumed, after a silence in which she had followed his disposal of the picture:
"If she's so eager to come here—for it's here shewants to sit, not in Great Stanhope Street, never!—how can she prove better that she doesn't care a bit if she meets Miss Rooth?"
"She won't meet Miss Rooth," Nick replied rather dryly.
"Oh I'm sorry!" said Biddy. She was as frank as if she had achieved a virtual victory, and seemed to regret the loss of a chance for Julia to show an equal mildness. Her tone made her brother laugh, but she went on with confidence: "She thought it was Mr. Nash who made Miss Rooth come."
"So he did, by the way," said Nick.
"Well then, wasn't that making trouble?"
"I thought you admitted there was no harm in her being here."
"Yes, buthehoped there'd be."
"Poor Nash's hopes!" Nick laughed. "My dear child, it would take a cleverer head than you or me, or even Julia, who must have invented that wise theory, to say what they were. However, let us agree that even if they were perfectly fiendish my good sense has been a match for them."
"Oh Nick, that's delightful!" chanted Biddy. Then she added: "Do you mean she doesn't come any more?"
"The dishevelled actress? She hasn't been near me for months."
"But she's in London—she's always acting? I've been away so much I've scarcely observed," Biddy explained with a slight change of note.
"The same silly part, poor creature, for nearly a year. It appears that that's 'success'—in her profession. I saw her in the character several times last summer, but haven't set foot in her theatre since."
Biddy took this in; then she suggested; "Peter wouldn't have liked that."
"Oh Peter's likes—!" Nick at his easel, beginning to work, conveniently sighed.
"I mean her acting the same part for a year."
"I'm sure I don't know; he has never written me a word."
"Nor me either," Biddy returned.
There was another short silence, during which Nick brushed at a panel. It ended in his presently saying: "There's one thing certainly Peterwouldlike—that is simply to be here to-night. It's a great night—another great night—for the abandoned one. She's to act Juliet for the first time."
"Ah how I should like to see her!" the girl cried.
Nick glanced at her; she sat watching him. "She has sent me a stall; I wish she had sent me two. I should have been delighted to take you."
"Don't you think you could get another?" Biddy quavered.
"They must be in tremendous demand. But who knows after all?" Nick added, at the same moment looking round. "Here's a chance—here's quite an extraordinary chance!"
His servant had opened the door and was ushering in a lady whose identity was indeed justly reflected in those words. "Miss Rooth!" the man announced; but he was caught up by a gentleman who came next and who exclaimed, laughing and with a gesture gracefully corrective: "No, no—no longer Miss Rooth!"
Miriam entered the place with her charming familiar grandeur—entered very much as she might have appeared, as she appeared every night, early in her first act, at the back of the stage, by the immemorial middle door. She might exactly now have been presenting herself to the house, taking easy possession, repeating old movements, looking from one to the other of the actors before the footlights.The rich "Good-morning" she threw into the air, holding out her right hand to Biddy and then giving her left to Nick—as she might have given it to her own brother—had nothing to tell of intervals or alienations. She struck Biddy as still more terrible in her splendid practice than when she had seen her before—the practice and the splendour had now something almost royal. The girl had had occasion to make her curtsey to majesties and highnesses, but the flutter those effigies produced was nothing to the way in which at the approach of this young lady the agitated air seemed to recognise something supreme. So the deep mild eyes she bent on Biddy were not soothing, though for that matter evidently intended to soothe. Biddy wondered Nick could have got so used to her—he joked at her as she loomed—and later in the day, still under the great impression of this incident, she even wondered that Peter could have full an impunity. It was true that Peter apparently didn't quite feel one.
"You never came—you never came," Miriam said to her kindly and sadly; and Biddy, recognising the allusion, the invitation to visit the actress at home, had to explain how much she had been absent from London and then even that her brother hadn't proposed to take her.
"Very true—he hasn't come himself. What's he doing now?" asked Miss Rooth, standing near her young friend but looking at Nick, who had immediately engaged in conversation with his other visitor, a gentleman whose face came back to the girl. She had seen this gentleman on the stage with the great performer—that was it, the night Peter took her to the theatre with Florry Tressilian. Oh that Nick would only do something of that sort now! This desire, quickened by the presence of the strange, expressive woman, by the way she scattered sweetsyllables as if she were touching the piano-keys, combined with other things to make our young lady's head swim—other things too mingled to name, admiration and fear and dim divination and purposeless pride and curiosity and resistance, the impulse to go away and the determination to (as she would have liked fondly to fancy it) "hold her ground." The actress courted her with a wondrous voice—what was the matter with the actress and what did she want?—and Biddy tried in return to give an idea of what Nick was doing. Not succeeding very well she was about to appeal to her brother, but Miriam stopped her with the remark that it didn't signify; besides, Dashwood was telling Nick something—something they wanted him to know. "We're in a great excitement—he has taken a theatre," Miriam added.