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 and Kendal 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 on
Elvira. 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 was
not vexed, 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 of
bien-etre than 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 Chateauvieux, 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 of
Elvira with 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 a
pis-aller, because the
Calliope could 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. The
engouement for 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 his
Pall Mall Gazette told him that Miss Bretherton had crossed the channel that morning,
en route for 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, 'it
was devoted 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 from
feeling--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, she
is improved? 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 Chateauvieux 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 Chateauvieux, who was at Etretat 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 Etretat 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 Etretat 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 Etretat 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:--
* * * * *
'CASA MINGHETTI 2, GRAND CANAL,
'VENICE,
August 6.
'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, Felicie, 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 to
flaner on 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 Felicie 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 on
tisane and 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,
August 7.
'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 the
dejeuner under the little acacia arbour in the centre of it. Suddenly Felicie 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 a
reputation 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 as
blases as 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.'
* * * * *
'
August 10.
'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. The
White Lady was, 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.'
* * * * *
'
August 16.
'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's
real self 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."'
* * * * *
'
August 17-19.
'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 impetuous
elan, 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 the
Nuit 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. Desforets 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 the
Francais, 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 the
stuff of 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 with
Consuelo and 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.'
* * * * *
'
August 22.
'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.
'Now, however, Isabel has asserted herself in several unexpected ways. She has refused altogether to open her autumn season with the play which had been nearly decided on before they left London--a flimsy spectacular performance quite unworthy of her. As soon as possible she will make important changes in the troupe who are to be with her, and at the beginning of September she is coming to stay three weeks with us in Paris, and, in all probability (though the world is to know nothing of it), Perrault of the Conservatoire, who is a great friend of ours, will give her a good deal of positive teaching. This last arrangement is particularly exasperating to Mr. Worrall. He regards it as sure to be known, a ridiculous confession of weakness on Isabel's part, and so on. However, in spite of his wrath and the aunt's sullen or tearful disapproval, she has stood firm, and matters are so arranged.'
* * * * *
'
Saturday night, August 25.
'This evening we persuaded her at last to give us some scenes of Juliet. How I wish you could have been here! It was one of those experiences which remain with one as a sort of perpetual witness to the poetry which life holds in it, and may yield up to one at any moment. It was in our little garden; the moon was high above the houses opposite, and the narrow canal running past our side railing into the Grand Canal was a shining streak of silver. The air was balmy and absolutely still; no more perfect setting to Shakespeare or to Juliet could have been imagined. Paul sat at a little table in front of the rest of us; he was to read Romeo and the Nurse in the scenes she had chosen, while in the background were the Worralls and Lucy Bretherton (the little crippled sister), Mr. Wallace, and myself. She did the balcony scene, the morning scene with Romeo, the scene with the nurse after Tybalt's death, and the scene of the philtre. There is an old sundial in the garden, which caught the moonbeams. She leaned her arms upon it, her eyes fixed upon the throbbing moonlit sky, her white brocaded dress glistening here and there in the pale light--a vision of perfect beauty. And when she began her sighing appeal--
"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"
--it seemed to me as if the night--the passionate Italian night--had found its voice--the only voice which fitted it.
'Afterwards I tried as much as possible to shake off the impressions peculiar to the scene itself to think of her under the ordinary conditions of the stage, to judge her purely as an actress. In the love scenes there seemed hardly anything to find fault with. I thought I could trace in many places the influence of her constant dramatic talks and exercises with Paul. The flow of passion was continuous and electric, but marked by all the simpleness, all the sweetness, all the young winsome extravagance which belong to Juliet. The great scene with the Nurse had many fine things in it; she has evidently worked hard at it line by line, and that speech of Juliet's, with its extraordinary dramatic capabilities--
"Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?"--
was given with admirable variety and suppleness of intonation. The dreary sweetness of her
"
Banished! that one word
banished!"
still lives with me, and her gestures as she paced restlessly along the little strip of moonlit path. The speech before she takes the potion was the least satisfactory of all; the ghastliness and horror of it are beyond her resources as yet; she could not infuse them with that terrible beauty which Desforets would have given to every line. But where is the English actress that has ever yet succeeded in it?
We were all silent for a minute after her great cry--
"Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, I drink to thee!"--
had died upon our ears. And then, while we applauded her, she came forward listlessly, her beautiful head drooping, and approached Paul like a child that has said its lesson badly.
'"I can't do it, that speech; I can't do it!"
'"It wants more work," said Paul; "you'll get it. But the rest was admirable. You must have worked very hard!"
'"So I have," she said, brightening at the warmth of his praise. "But Diderot is wrong, wrong, wrong! When I could once reach the feeling of the Tybalt speech, when I could once
hate him for killing Tybalt in the same breath in which I
loved him for being Romeo, all was easy; gesture and movement came to me; I learnt them, and the thing was done."
'The reference, of course, meant that Paul had been reading to her his favourite
Paradoxe sur le Comedien, and that she had been stimulated, but not converted, by the famous contention that the actor should be the mere "cold and tranquil spectator," the imitator of other men's feelings, while possessing none of his own. He naturally would have argued, but I would not have it, and made her rest. She was quite worn out with the effort, and I do not like this excessive fatigue of hers. I often wonder whether the life she is leading is not too exciting for her. This is supposed to be her holiday, and she is really going through more brain-waste than she has ever done in her life before! Paul is throwing his whole energies into one thing only, the training of Miss Bretherton; and he is a man of forty-eight, with an immense experience, and she a girl of twenty-one, with everything to learn, and as easily excited as he is capable of exciting her. I really must keep him in check.
'Mr. Wallace, when we had sent her home across the canal--their apartment is on the other side, farther up towards the railway station--could not say enough to me of his amazement at the change in her.
'"What have you done to her?" he asked. "I can hardly recognise the old Miss Bretherton at all. Is it really not yet four months since your brother and I went to see her in the
White Lady? Why, you have bewitched her!"
'"We have done something, I admit," I said; "but the power you see developed in her now was roused in her when months ago she first came in contact with the new world and the new ideal which you and Eustace represented to her."
'There, my dear Eustace, have I given you your due? Oh, Miss Bretherton says so many kind things about you! I'll take especial pains to tell you some of them next time I write.'
* * * * *
WALLACE TO KENDAL.
'VENICE,
August 27.
'MY DEAR KENDAL--This has been a day of events which, I believe, will interest you as much as they did me. I told Madame de Chateauvieux that I should write to you to-night, and my letter, she says, must do in place of one from her for a day or two. We have been to Torcello to-day--your sister, M. de Chateauvieux, Miss Bretherton, and I. The expedition itself was delightful, but that I have no time to describe. I only want to tell you what happened when we got to Torcello.
'But first, you will, of course, know from your sister's letters--she tells me she writes to you twice a week--how absorbed we have all been in the artistic progress of Miss Bretherton. I myself never saw such a change, such an extraordinary development in any one. How was it that you and I did not see farther into her? I see now, as I look back upon her old self, that the new self was there in germ. But I think perhaps it may have been the vast disproportion of her celebrity to her performance that blinded us to the promise in her; it was irritation with the public that made us deliver an over-hasty verdict on her.
'However that may be, I have been making up my mind for some days past that the embassy on behalf of
Elvira, which I thrust upon you, and which you so generously undertook, was a blunder on my part which it would be delightful to repair, and which no artistic considerations whatever need prevent me from repairing. You cannot think how divine she was in Juliet the other night. Imperfect and harsh, of course, here and there, but still a creature to build many and great hopes upon, if ever there was one. She is shaking off trick after trick; your brother-in-law is merciless to them whenever they appear, and she is for ever working with a view to his approval, and also, I think, from two or three things she has said, with a memory of that distant standard of criticism which she believes to be embodied in you!
'M. de Chateauvieux has devoted himself to her; it is a pretty sight to see them together. Your sister and she, too, are inseparable, and Madame de Chateauvieux's quiet, equable refinement makes a good contrast to Miss Bretherton's mobility. She will never lose the imprint of her friendship with these two people; it was a happy thought which led you to bring them together.
'Well, we went to Torcello, and I watched for an opportunity of getting her alone. At last Madame de Chateauvieux gave me one; she carried off her husband, Ruskin in hand, to study the mosaics, and Miss Bretherton and I were left sitting under the outer wall of San Fosca till they should come back. We had been talking of a hundred things--not of acting at all; of the pomegranates, of which she had a scarlet mass in her lap, of the gray slumberous warmth of the day, or the ragged children who pestered us for coppers--and then suddenly, I asked her whether she would answer me a personal question: Was there any grudge in her mind towards me for anything I had said and done in London, or caused others to say and do for me?
'She was much startled, and coloured a good deal, but she said very steadily: "I feel no sort of grudge; I never had any cause." "Well, then," I went on, throwing myself down on the grass before her that I might really see her expression, "if you bear me no grudge, if you feel kindly towards me, will you help me to undo a great mistake of mine?"
'She looked at me with parted lips and eyes which seemed to be trying to find out from my face what I meant. "Will you," I said, hurrying on; "will you take from me
Elvira, and do what you like with it?" And then, do you know what happened? Her lips quivered, and I thought she was on the point of tears, but suddenly the nervousness of each of us seemed to strike the other, and we both laughed--she long and helplessly, as if she could not help herself.
'Presently she looked up, with her great eyes swimming in tears, and tried to impress on me that I was speaking hastily, that I had an ideal for that play she could never promise to reach, that it was my friendship for her that made me change my mind, that there might be practical difficulties now that so many arrangements had been made, and so on. But I would not listen to her. I had it all ready; I had an actor to propose to her for Macias, and even the costumes in my mind, ready to sketch for her, if need were. Forbes, I suggested, might and would direct the setting of the piece; no one could do it with more perfect knowledge or a more exquisite taste; and for her, as we both knew, he would turn scene-painter, if necessary. And so I rambled on, soothing her shaken feeling and my own until she had let me beguile her out of her attitude of reluctance and shrinking into one at least of common interest.
'But by the time the others came back I had not got a direct consent out of her, and all the way home she was very silent. I, of course, got anxious, and began to think that my blunder had been irreparable; but, at any rate, I was determined not to let the thing linger on. So that, when the Chateauvieux asked me to stay and sup with them and her, I supped, and afterwards in the garden boldly brought it out before them all, and appealed to your sister for help. I knew that both she and her husband were acquainted with what had happened at Oxford, and I supposed that Miss Bretherton would know that they were, so that it was awkward enough. Only that women, when they please, have such tact, such an art of smoothing over and ignoring the rough places of life, that one often with them gets through a difficult thing without realising how difficult it is. M. de Chateauvieux smoked a long time and said nothing, then he asked me a great many questions about the play, and finally gave no opinion. I was almost in despair--she said so little--until, just as I was going away with
Elvira's fate still quite unsettled, she said to me with a smile and a warm pressure of the hand, "To-morrow come and see me, and I will tell you yes or no!"
'And to-day I have been to see her, and the night has brought good luck! For
Elvira, my dear Kendal, will be produced on or about the 20th November, in this year of grace, and Isabel Bretherton will play the heroine, and your friend is already plunged in business, and aglow with hope and expectation. How I wish--how we all wish--that you were here! I feel more and more penitent towards you. It was you who gave the impulse of which the results are ripening, and you ought to be here with us now, playing in the body that friend's part which we all yield you so readily in spirit. "Tell Mr. Kendal," were almost her last words to me, "that I cannot say how much I owe to his influence and his friendship. He first opened my eyes to so many things. He was so kind to me, even when he thought least of me. I hope I shall win a word of praise from him yet!" There! I trust that will rouse a little pleasant conceit in you. She meant it, and it is true. I must go off and work at many things. To-morrow or next day, after some further talk with her, I shall set off homewards, look up Forbes and begin operations. She will be in town in about three weeks from now--as you know she is going to stay first with your sister in Paris--and then we shall have hard work till about the middle of November, when I suppose the play will be produced. This will be more than a fortnight later than she intended to open, and Mr. Worrall will probably be furious over the delay, but she has developed a will of her own lately.
'
Au revoir then. You must have had a peaceful summer with your books and your heather. I wish I had anything like the same digestion for work that you have; I never saw a man get as much pleasure out of his books as you do. To me, I confess, that work is always work, and idleness a joy!
'However, no more idleness for me for a good while to come. How grand she will be in that last act!--Where were my eyes last spring?--I wish there were a chance of her seeing much that is interesting in Paris. However, flat as September generally is, she will get some Moliere at the
Francais, and your sister will take care that she sees the right people. Perrault, I hear, is to give her lessons--under the rose. Happy man!'
* * * * *
Kendal read this letter on a glowing August morning as he walked homeward along the side of the pond, where the shade of the fir-trees was a welcome protection against the rising heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of the ling, which was just out in all its first faint flush of beauty. He threw himself down among it after he had finished the sheets, and stared for long at the sunlit motionless water, his hat drawn forward over his brows. So this was the outcome of it all. Isabel Bretherton was about to become a great actress,--Undine had found her soul!
It seemed to him, as he lay there buried in the ling, that during the past three weeks he had lived through a whole drama of feeling--a drama which had its beginning, its complications, its climax. While it had been going on he had been only half-conscious of its bearings, half-conscious of himself. Wallace's letter had made him sensible of the situation, as it concerned himself, with a decisive sharpness and completeness. There was no possibility of any further self-delusion: the last defences were overcome, the last veil between himself and the pursuing force which had overtaken him had fallen, and Kendal, with a shiver of pain, found himself looking straight into the wide, hungry eyes of Love! Oh, was this love,--this sore desire, this dumb craving, this restlessness of the whole being?
The bees hummed among the heather, every now and then a little brown-streaked lizard rustled faintly beside him, a pair of kingfishers flashed across the pond. But he saw and heard nothing, responsive as every sense in him commonly was to the details of the wild life about him. His own miserable reverie absorbed him. What was it that had made the charm of those early weeks in July immediately after his parting with her? What was it which had added zest to his work, and enchantment to the summer beauty of the country, and, like a hidden harmony dimly resonant within him, had kept life tuneful and delightful? He could put words to it now. It had been nothing less than a settled foresight, a deep conviction, of
Isabel Bretherton's failure! What a treachery! But yes,--the vision perpetually before his eyes had been the vision of a dying fame, a waning celebrity, a forsaken and discrowned beauty! And from that abandonment and that failure he had dimly foreseen the rise and upspringing of new and indescribable joy. He had seen her, conscious of defeat and of the inexorable limits of her own personality, turning to the man who had read her truly and yet had loved her, surely, from the very beginning, and finding in his love a fresh glory and an all-sufficient consolation. This had been the inmost truth, the centre, the kernel of all his thought, of all his life. He saw it now with sharp distinctness,--now that every perception was intensified by pain and longing.
Then, as he went over the past, he saw how this consciousness had been gradually invaded and broken up by his sister's letters. He remembered the incredulous impatience with which he had read the earlier ones. So, Marie thought him mistaken! 'Isabel Bretherton would be an actress yet'--'she had genius, after all'--'she was learning, growing, developing every day.' Absurd!
He, had been able to keep his critical estimate of the actress and his personal admiration of the woman separate from one another. But evidently Marie's head had been confused, misled, by her heart. And then, little by little, his incredulity had yielded, and his point of view had changed. Instead of impatience of Marie's laxity of judgment, what he had been fiercely conscious of for days was jealousy of Paul de Chateauvieux--jealousy of his opportunities, his influence, his relation towards that keen sweet nature. That, too, had been one of his dreams of the future,--the dream of tutoring and training her young unformed intelligence. He had done something towards it; he had, as it were, touched the spring which had set free all this new and unexpected store of power. But, if he had planted, others had watered, and others would reap. In this great crisis of her fortunes he had been nothing to her. Other voices and other hands had guided and directed her. Her kindly, grateful messages only stung and tortured him. They seemed to him the merest friendly commonplace. In reality her life had passed out of his ken; her nature had flowered into a new perfection, and he had not been there to see or to help. She would never connect him with the incidents or the influences which had transformed existence to her, and would probably irrevocably change the whole outline of her future. Once he had wounded and startled her, and had despaired for awhile of undoing the impression made upon her. But now he felt no quick anxiety, no fear how things might turn, only a settled flat consciousness of division, of a life that had once been near to his swept away from him for ever, of diverging roads which no kindly fate would ever join again.
For, by the end of this time of solitary waiting, his change of attitude was complete. It was evident to him that his anticipation of her failure, potent as it had been over his life, had never been half so real, half so vivid, as this new and strange foreboding of her true success. Marie must be right. He had been a mere blind hair-splitting pedant, judging Isabel Bretherton by principles and standards which left out of count the inborn energy, the natural power of growth, of such a personality as hers. And the more he had once doubted the more he now believed. Yes, she would be great--she would make her way into that city of the mind, in which he himself had made his dwelling-place; she, too, would enter upon the world's vast inheritance of knowledge. She would become, if only her physical frame proved equal to the demands upon it, one of that little band of interpreters, of ministers of the idea, by whom the intellectual life of a society is fed and quickened. Was he so lost in his own selfish covetous need as not to rejoice?
Oh, but she was a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her! Do what he would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from him. Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher grew weaker in him, and the man's claim fiercer. Before him perpetually were two figures of a most human and practical reality. He saw a great actress, absorbed in the excitement of the most stimulating of lives, her power ripening from year to year, her fame growing and widening with time; and beside this brilliant vision he saw himself, the quiet man of letters, with the enthusiasms of youth behind him, the calm of middle-age before him. What possible link could there be between them?
At last Wallace's letter cleared still further the issues of the conflict; or rather, it led to Kendal's making a fatalist compact with himself. He was weary of the struggle, and it seemed to him that he must somehow or other escape from the grip in which his life was held. He must somehow deaden this sense, this bitter sense of loss, if it were only by postponing the last renunciation. He would go back to his work and force himself not to hate it. It was his only refuge, and he must cling to it for dear life. And he would not see her again till the night of the first performance of
Elvira. She would be in London in a month's time, but he would take care to be out of reach. He would not meet those glorious eyes or touch that hand again till the die was cast,--upon the fate of
Elvira he staked his own. The decision brought him a strange kind of peace, and he went back to his papers and his books like a man who has escaped from the grasp of some deadly physical ill into a period of comparative ease and relief.