It was a rainy November night. A soft continuous downpour was soaking the London streets, without, however, affecting their animation or the nocturnal brightness of the capital, for the brilliance of the gas-lamps was flashed back from innumerable patches of water, and every ray of light seemed to be broken by the rain into a hundred shimmering reflections. It was the hour when all the society of which an autumnal London can boast is in the streets, hurrying to its dinner or its amusements, and when the stream of diners-out, flowing through the different channels of the west, is met in all the great thoroughfares by the stream of theatre-goers setting eastward.
The western end of D---- Street was especially crowded, and so was the entrance to a certain narrow street leading northwards from it, in which stood the new bare buildings of the
Calliope. Outside the theatre itself there was a dense mass of carriages and human beings, only kept in order by the active vigilance of the police, and wavering to and fro with kaleidoscopic rapidity. The line of carriages seemed interminable, and, after those who emerged from them had run the gauntlet of the dripping, curious, good-tempered multitude outside, they had to face the sterner ordeal of the struggling well-dressed crowd within, surging up the double staircase of the newly-decorated theatre. The air inside was full of the hum of talk, and the whole crowd had a homogeneous, almost a family air, as though the contents of one great London
salon had been poured into the theatre. Everybody seemed to know everybody else; there were politicians, and artists, and writers of books, known and unknown; there were fair women and wise women and great ladies; and there was that large substratum of faithful, but comparatively nameless, persons on whom a successful manager learns to depend with some confidence on any first night of importance.
And this was a first night of exceptional interest. So keen, indeed, had been the competition for tickets that many of those present had as vague and confused an idea of how they came to be among the favoured multitude pouring into the
Calliope as a man in a street panic has of the devices by which he has struggled past the barrier which has overthrown his neighbour. Miss Bretherton's first appearance in
Elvira had been the subject of conversation for weeks past among a far larger number of London circles than generally concern themselves with theatrical affairs. Among those which might be said to be within a certain literary and artistic circumference, people were able to give definite grounds for the public interest. The play, it was said, was an unusually good one, and the progress of the rehearsals had let loose a flood of rumours to the effect that Miss Bretherton's acting in it would be a great surprise to the public. Further, from the intellectual centre of things, it was only known that the famous beauty had returned to the scene of her triumphs; and that now, as in the season, one of the first articles of the social decalogue laid it down as necessary that you should, first of all, see her in the theatre, and, secondly, know her--by fair means if possible, if not, by crooked ones--in society.
It was nearly a quarter to eight. The orchestra had taken their places, and almost every seat was full. In one of the dress-circle boxes sat three people who had arrived early, and had for some time employed themselves in making a study of the incoming stream through their opera-glasses. They were Eustace Kendal, his sister, Madame de Chateauvieux, and her husband. The Chateauvieux had travelled over from Paris expressly for the occasion, and Madame de Chateauvieux, her gray-blue eyes sparkling with expectation and all her small delicate features alive with interest and animation, was watching for the rising of the heavy velvet curtain with an eagerness which brought down upon her the occasional mockery of her husband, who was in reality, however, little less excited than herself. It was but three weeks since they had parted with Isabel Bretherton in Paris, and they were feeling on this first night something of the anxiety and responsibility which parents feel when they launch a child upon whom they have expended their best efforts into a critical world.
As for Eustace, he also had but that afternoon arrived in London. He had been paying a long duty-visit to some aged relatives in the North, and had so lengthened it out, in accordance with the whim which had taken possession of him in Surrey, that he had missed all the preparations for
Elvira, and had arrived upon the scene only at the moment when the final
coup was to be delivered. Miss Bretherton had herself sent him a warm note of invitation, containing an order for the first night and an appeal to him to come and 'judge me as kindly as truth will let you.' And he had answered her that, whatever happened, he would be in his place in the
Calliope on the night of the 20th of November.
And now here he was, wearing outwardly precisely the same aspect of interested expectation as those around him, and all the time conscious inwardly that to him alone, of all the human beings in that vast theatre, the experience of the evening would be so vitally and desperately important, that life on the other side of it would bear the mark of it for ever. It was a burden to him that his sister suspected nothing of his state of feeling; it would have consoled him that she should know it, but it seemed to him impossible to tell her.
'There are the Stuarts,' he said, bending down to her as the orchestra struck up, 'in the box to the left. Forbes, I suppose, will join them when it begins. I am told he has been working like a horse for this play. Every detail in it, they say, is perfect, artistically and historically, and the time of preparation has been exceptionally short. Why did she refuse to begin again with the
White Lady, to give herself more time?'
'I cannot tell you, except that she had a repugnance to it which could not be got over. I believe her associations with the play were so painful that it would have seemed an evil omen to her to begin a new season with it.'
'Was she wise, I wonder?'
'I think she did well to follow her fancy in the matter, and she herself has had plenty of time. She was working at it all the weeks she was with us, and young Harting, too, I think had notice enough. Some of the smaller parts may go roughly to-night, but they will soon fall into shape.'
'Poor Wallace!' said Kendal; 'he must be wishing it well over. I never saw a house better stocked with critics.'
'Here he is,' cried Madame de Chateauvieux, betraying her suppressed excitement in her nervous little start. 'Oh, Mr. Wallace, how do you do? and how are things going?'
Poor Wallace threw himself into his seat, looking the picture of misery so far as his face, which Nature had moulded in one of her cheerfullest moods, was capable of it.
'My dear Madame de Chateauvieux, I have no more notion than the man in the moon. Miss Bretherton is an angel, and without Forbes we should have collapsed a hundred times already, and that's about all I know. As for the other actors, I suppose they will get through their parts somehow, but at present I feel like a man at the foot of the gallows. There goes the hell; now for it.'
The sketch for the play of
Elvira had been found among the papers of a young penniless Italian who had died, almost of starvation, in his Roman garret, during those teeming years after 1830, when poets grew on every hedge and the romantic passion was abroad. The sketch had appeared in a little privately-printed volume which Edward Wallace had picked up by chance on the Paris quays. He had read it in an idle hour in a railway, had seen its capabilities, and had forthwith set to work to develop the sketch into a play. But, in developing it, he had carefully preserved the character of the original conception. It was a conception strictly of the Romantic time, and the execution of it presented very little of that variety of tone which modern audiences have learnt to expect. The play told one rapid breathless story of love, jealousy, despair, and death, and it told it directly and uninterruptedly, without any lighter interludes. Author and adapter alike had trusted entirely to the tragic force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed to. The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred de Vigny or of the school of Victor Hugo. It was, indeed, rather a dramatic love-poem than a play, in the modern sense, and it depended altogether for its success upon the two characters of Macias and Elvira.
In devising the character of Macias the Italian author had made use of a traditional Spanish type, which has its historical sources, and has inspired many a Spanish poet from the fifteenth century downwards. Macias is knight, poet, and lover; his love is a kind of southern madness which withers every other feeling in its neighbourhood, and his tragic death is the only natural ending to a career so fierce and uncontrolled. Elvira, with whom Macias is in love, the daughter of Nuno Fernandez, is embodied gentleness and virtue, until the fierce progress of her fate has taught her that men are treacherous and the world cruel. For her love had been prosperous and smooth until, by a series of events, it had been brought into antagonism with two opposing interests--those of her father and of a certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favourite of the powerful Duke of Villena. The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted against her. Perez is determined to marry her; her father is determined to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement. The intrigue devised between the two is perfectly successful. Macias is enticed away; Elvira, forced to believe that she is deserted and betrayed, is half driven, half entrapped, into a marriage with Perez; and Macias, returning to claim her against a hundred obstacles, meets the wedding party on their way back to the palace of the Duke. The rest of the play represented, of course, the struggle between the contending forces thus developed. In plan and mechanism the story was one of a common romantic type, neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of which the literary archives of the first half of the present century are full. It required all the aid that fine literary treatment could give it to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into tragedy. But fortune had been kind to it; the subject had been already handled in the Italian sketch with delicacy and a true tragic insight, and Edward Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly-trained and critical mind to bear upon his task. It could hardly have been foreseen that he would be attracted by the subject, but once at work upon it he had worked with enthusiasm.
The curtain drew up on the great hall of the Villena Palace. Everything that antiquarian knowledge could do had been brought to bear upon the surroundings of the scene; the delicate tilework of the walls and floor, the leather hangings, the tapestries, the carved wood and brass work of a Spanish palace of the fifteenth century, had been copied with lavish magnificence; and the crowded expectant house divided its attention and applause during the first scene between the beauty and elaboration of its setting and the play of the two tolerable actors who represented Elvira's father and the rival of Macias, Fernan Perez.
Fernan Perez, having set the intrigue on foot which is to wreck the love of Macias and Elvira, had just risen from his seat, when Wallace, who was watching the stage in a torment of mingled satisfaction and despair, touched Madame de Chateauvieux's arm.
'
Now!' he said. 'That door to the left.'
Kendal, catching the signal, rose from his seat behind Madame de Chateauvieux and bent forward. The great door at the end of the palace had slowly opened, and gliding through it with drooping head and hands clasped before her came Elvira, followed by her little maid Beatriz. The storm which greeted her appearance was such as thrilled the pulses of the oldest
habitue in the theatre. Tears came to Madame de Chateauvieux's eyes, and she looked up at her brother.
'What a scene! It is overpowering--it is too much for her! I wish they would let her go on!'
Kendal made no answer, his soul was in his eyes; he had no senses for any but one person.
She was there, within a few yards of him, in all the sovereignty of her beauty and her fame, invested with the utmost romance that circumstances could bestow, and about, if half he heard were true, to reap a great artistic, no less than a great personal triumph. Had he felt towards her only as the public felt it would have been an experience beyond the common run, and as it was--oh, this aching, intolerable sense of desire, of separation, of irremediable need! Was that her voice? He had heard that tone of despair in it before--under over-arching woods, when the June warmth was in the air! That white outstretched hand had once lain close clasped in his own; those eyes had once looked with a passionate trouble into his. Ah, it was gone for ever, nothing would ever recall it--that one quick moment of living contact! In a deeper sense than met the ear, she was on the stage and he among the audience. To the end his gray life would play the part of spectator to hers, or else she would soon have passed beyond his grasp and touch, just as Elvira would have vanished in a little while from the sight of the great audience which now hung upon her every movement.
Then from the consciousness of his own private smart he was swept out, whether he would or no, into the general current of feeling which was stirring the multitude of human beings around him, and he found himself gradually mastered by considerations of a different order altogether. Was this the actress he had watched with such incessant critical revolt six months before? Was this the half-educated girl, grasping at results utterly beyond her realisation, whom he remembered?
It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory. And yet his trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications the past history of the change. He saw how she had worked, and where; the influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he knew, to the first school of dramatic art in Europe--to the school which keeps alive from generation to generation the excellence and fame of the best French drama. He came to estimate by degrees all that she had done; he saw also all she had still to do. In the spring she had been an actress without a future, condemned by the inexorable logic of things to see her fame desert her with the first withering of her beauty. Now she had, as it were, but started towards her rightful goal, but her feet were in the great high-road, and Kendal saw before her, if she had but strength to reach it, the very highest summit of artistic success.
The end of the first act was reached; Elvira, returning from the performance of the marriage ceremony in the chapel of the palace, had emerged hand-in-hand with her husband, and, followed by her wedding train, upon the great hall. She had caught sight of Macias standing blanched and tottering under the weight of the incredible news which had just been given to him by the Duke. She had flung away the hateful hand which held her, and, with a cry, instinct with the sharp and terrible despair of youth, she had thrown herself at the feet of her lover.
When the curtain fell, Edward Wallace could have had few doubts--if he had ever cherished any--of the success of his play. He himself escaped behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over, and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Chateauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness.
'There never was a holiday turned to such good account before,' a gray-haired dramatic critic was saying to her, a man with whose keen, good-natured face London had been familiar for the last twenty years. 'What magic has touched the beauty, Madame de Chateauvieux? Last spring we all felt as though one fairy godmother at least had been left out at the christening. And now it would seem as though even she had repented of it, and brought her gift with the rest. Well, well, I always felt there was something at the bottom in that nature that might blossom yet. Most people who are younger at the trade than I would not hear of it. It was commonly agreed that her success would last just as long as the first freshness of her beauty, and no more. And
now--the English stage has laid its hold at last upon a great actress.'
Madame de Chateauvieux's smiling reply was broken by the reappearance of Wallace, round whom the buzz of congratulation closed with fresh vigour.
'How is she?' asked Madame de Chateauvieux, laying a hand on his arm. 'Tired?'
'Not the least! But, of course, all the strain is to come. It is amazing, you know, this reception. It's almost more trying than the acting. Forbes in the wings, looking on, is a play in himself!'
In another minute the hubbub had swept out again, and the house had settled into silence.
Macias was the central figure of the second act. In the great scene of explanation between himself and Elvira, after he had forced his way into her apartment, his fury of jealous sarcasm, broken by flashes of the old absolute trust, of the old tender worship, had been finely conceived, and was well rendered by the promising young actor, whom Wallace had himself chosen for the part, Elvira, overwhelmed by the scorn and despair of her lover, and, conscious of the treachery which has separated them, is yet full of a blind resolve to play the part she has assumed to the bitter end, to save her own name and her father's from dishonour, and to interpose the irrevocable barrier of her marriage vow between herself and Macias. Suddenly they are interrupted by the approach of the Duke and of Fernan Perez. Elvira throws herself between her husband and her lover, and, having captured the sword of Macias, hands it to the Duke. Macias is arrested after a tumultuous scene, and is led away, shaking off Elvira's efforts to save him with bitter contempt, and breaking loose from her with the prophecy that in every joy of the future and every incident of her wedded life, the spectre of his murdered love will rise before her, and 'every echo and every breeze repeat the fatal name, Macias.'
During the rapid give and take of this trying scene Kendal saw with a kind of incredulous admiration that Isabel Bretherton never once lost herself, that every gesture was true, every word struck home. Her extraordinary grace, her marvellous beauty were all subordinated to, forgotten almost in the supreme human passion speaking through her. Macias, in the height of his despair while he was still alone with her, had flung her his sword, declaring that he would go forth and seek his death an unarmed and defenceless man. Then, when he becomes conscious of the approach of his rival, the soldier's instinct revives in him; he calls for his sword; she refuses it, and he makes a threatening step towards her.
'
Mac. My sword, Elvira.
Elvira. Never!
Beatriz. Ah! they are here. It is too late!
Elvira. Go! No blood shall flow for me. Come no nearer--or I sheathe it in this breast.'
All the desperate energy of a loving woman driven to bay was in her attitude as she repelled Macias, whereas in the agony of her last clinging appeal to him, as his guards lead him off, every trace of her momentary heroism had died away. Faint and trembling, recoiling from every harsh word of his as from a blow, she had followed him towards the door, and in her straining eyes and seeking, outstretched hands as she watched him disappear, there was a pathos so true, so poignant, that it laid a spell upon the audience, and the curtain fell amid a breathless silence, which made the roar that almost instantly followed doubly noticeable.
But it was in the third act that she won her highest triumph. The act opened with a scene between Elvira and her husband, in which she implored him, with the humility and hopelessness of grief, to allow her to retire from the world and to hide the beauty which had wrought such ruin from the light of day. He, in whom jealousy has taken fierce root, refuses with reproach and insult, and in the full tide of her passionate reaction against his tyranny, the news is brought her by Beatriz that Fernan, in his determination to avoid the duel with Macias on the morrow, which the Duke, in accordance with knightly usage, has been forced to grant, has devised means for assassinating his rival in prison. Naturally, her whole soul is thrown into an effort to save her lover. She bribes his guards. She sends Beatriz to denounce the treachery of her husband to the Duke, and, finally, she herself penetrates into the cell of Macias, to warn him of the fate that threatens him and to persuade him to fly.
It was, indeed, a dramatic moment when the gloom of Macias's cell was first broken by the glimmer of the hand-lamp, which revealed to the vast expectant audience the form of Elvira standing on the threshold, searching the darkness with her shaded eyes; and in the great love scene which followed the first sharp impression was steadily deepened word by word and gesture after gesture by the genius of the actress. Elvira finds Macias in a mood of calm and even joyful waiting for the morrow. His honour is satisfied; death and battle are before him, and the proud Castilian is almost at peace. The vision of Elvira's pale beauty and his quick intuition of the dangers she has run in forcing her way to him produce a sudden revulsion of feeling towards her, a flood of passionate reconciliation; he is at her feet once more; he feels that she is true, that she is his. She, in a frenzy of fear, cannot succeed for all her efforts in dimming his ecstasy of joy or in awakening him to the necessity of flight, and at last he even resents her terror for him, her entreaties that he will forget her and escape.
'Great heaven!' he says, turning from her in despair, 'it was not love, it was only pity that brought her here.' Then, broken down by the awful pressure of the situation, her love resists his no longer, but rather she sees in the full expression of her own heart the only chance of reconciling him to life, and of persuading him to take thought for his own safety.
'
Elvira. See, Macias! these tears--each one is yours, is wept for you! Oh, if to soften that proud will of yours this hapless woman must needs open all her weak heart to you, if she must needs tell you that she lives only in your life and dies in your death, her lip will brace itself even to that pitiful confession! Ah me! these poor cheeks have been so blanched with weeping, they have no blushes left.'
To her this supreme avowal is the only means of making him believe her report of his danger, and turn towards flight; but in him it produces a joy which banishes all thought of personal risk, and makes separation from her worse than death. When she bids him fly, he replies by one word, 'Come!' and not till she has promised to guide him to the city gates and to follow him later on his journey will he move a step towards freedom. And then, when her dear hand is about to open to him the door of his prison, it is too late. Fernan and his assassins are at hand, the stairs are surrounded, and escape is cut off. Again, in these last moments, when the locked door still holds between them and the death awaiting them, her mood is one of agonised terror, not for herself, but for him; while he, exalted far above all fear, supports and calms her.
'
Macias. Think no more of the world which has destroyed us! We owe it nothing--nothing! Come, the bonds which linked us to it are for ever broken! Death is at the door;
we are already dead! Come, and make death beautiful: tell me you love, love, love me to the end!'
Then, putting her from him, he goes out to meet his enemies. There is a clamour outside, and he returns wounded to death, pursued by Fernan and his men. He falls, and Elvira defends him from her husband with a look and gesture so terrible that he and the murderers fall back before her as though she were some ghastly avenging spirit. Then, bending over him, she snatches the dagger from the grasp of the dying man, saying to him, with a voice into which Isabel Bretherton threw a wealth of pitiful tenderness, 'There is but one way left, beloved. Your wife that should have been, that is, saves herself and you--
so!'
And in the dead silence that followed, her last murmur rose upon the air as the armed men, carrying torches, crowded round her. 'See, Macias, the torches--how they shine!
Bring more--bring more--and light--our marriage festival!'
* * * * *
'Eustace! Eustace! there, now they have let her go! Poor child, poor child! how is she to stand this night after night? Eustace, do you hear? Let us go into her now--quick, before she is quite surrounded. I don't want to stay, but I must just see her, and so must Paul. Ah, Mr. Wallace is gone already, but he described to me how to find her. This way!'
And Madame de Chateauvieux, brushing the tears from her eyes with one hand, took Kendal's arm with the other, and hurried him along the narrow passages leading to the door on to the stage, M. de Chateauvieux following them, his keen French face glistening with a quiet but intense satisfaction.
As for Kendal, every sense in him was covetously striving to hold and fix the experiences of the last half-hour. The white muffled figure standing in the turret door, the faint lamp light streaming on the bent head and upraised arm--those tones of self-forgetful passion, drawn straight, as it were, from the pure heart of love--the splendid energy of that last defiance of fate and circumstance--the low vibrations of her dying words--the power of the actress and the personality of the woman,--all these different impressions were holding wild war within him as he hastened on, with Marie clinging to his arm. And beyond the little stage-door the air seemed to be even more heavily charged with excitement than that of the theatre. For, as Kendal emerged with his sister, his attention was perforce attracted by the little crowd of persons already assembled round the figure of Isabel Bretherton, and, as his eye travelled over them, he realised with a fresh start the full compass of the change which had taken place. To all the more eminent persons in that group Miss Bretherton had been six months before an ignorant and provincial beauty, good enough to create a social craze, and nothing more. Their presence round her at this moment, their homage, the emotion visible everywhere, proved that all was different, that she had passed the barrier which once existed between her and the world which knows and thinks, and had been drawn within that circle of individualities which, however undefined, is still the vital circle of any time or society, for it is the circle which represents, more or less brilliantly and efficiently, the intellectual life of a generation.
Only one thing was unchanged--the sweetness and spontaneity of that rich womanly nature. She gave a little cry as she saw Madame de Chateauvieux enter. She came running forward, and threw her arms round the elder woman and kissed her; it was almost the greeting of a daughter to a mother. And then, still holding Madame de Chateauvieux with one hand, she held out the other to Paul, asking him how much fault he had to find, and when she was to take her scolding; and every gesture had a glow of youth and joy in it, of which the contagion was irresistible. She had thrown off the white head-dress she had worn during the last act, and her delicately-tinted head and neck rose from the splendid wedding-gown of gold-embroidered satin--vision of flowerlike and aerial beauty.
Fast as the talk flowed about her, Kendal noticed that every one seemed to be, first of all, conscious of her neighbourhood, of her dress rustling past, of her voice in all its different shades of gaiety or quick emotion.
'Oh, Mr. Kendal,' she said, turning to him again after their first greeting--was it the magnetism of his gaze which had recalled hers?--'if you only knew what your sister has been to me! How much I owe to her and to you! It was kind of you to come to-night. I should have been so disappointed if you hadn't!'
Then she came closer to him, and said archly, almost in his ear,
'Have you forgiven me?'
'Forgiven you? For what?'
'For laying hands on Elvira, after all. You must have thought me a rash and headstrong person when you heard of it. Oh, I worked so hard at her, and all with the dread of you in my mind!'
This perfect friendly openness, this bright
camaraderie of hers, were so hard to meet!
'You have played Elvira,' he said, 'as I never thought it would be played by anybody; and I was blind from first to last. I hoped you had forgotten that piece of pedantry on my part.'
'One does not forget the turning-points of one's life,' she answered with a sudden gravity.
Kendal had been keeping an iron grip upon himself during the past hours, but, as she said this, standing close beside him, it seemed to him impossible that his self-restraint should hold much longer. Those wonderful eyes of hers were full upon him; there was emotion in them,--evidently the Nuneham scene was in her mind, as it was in his,--and a great friendliness, even gratitude, seemed to look out through them. But it was as though his doom were written in the very candour and openness of her gaze, and he rushed desperately into speech again, hardly knowing what he was saying.
'It gives me half pain, half pleasure, that you should speak of it so. I have never ceased to hate myself for that day. But you have travelled far indeed since the
White Lady--I never knew any one do so much in so short a time!'
She smiled--did her lip quiver? Evidently his praise was very pleasant to her, and there must have been something strange and stirring to her feeling in the intensity and intimacy of his tone. Her bright look caught his again, and he believed for one wild moment that the eyelids sank and fluttered. He lost all consciousness of the crowd; his whole soul seemed concentrated on that one instant. Surely she must feel it, or love is indeed impotent!
But no,--it was all a delusion! she moved away from him, and the estranging present rushed in again between them.
'It has been M. de Chateauvieux's doing, almost all of it,' she said eagerly, with a change of voice, 'and your sister's. Will you come and see me some time and talk about some of the Paris people? Oh, I am wanted! But first you must be introduced to Macias. Wasn't he good? It was such an excellent choice of Mr. Wallace's. There he is,-and there is his wife, that pretty little dark woman.'
Kendal followed her mechanically, and presently found himself talking nothings to Mr. Harting, who, gorgeous in his Spanish dress, was receiving the congratulations which poured in upon him with a pleasant mixture of good manners and natural elation. A little farther on he stumbled upon Forbes and the Stuarts, Mrs. Stuart as sparkling and fresh as ever, a suggestive contrast in her American crispness and prettiness to the high-bred distinction of Madame de Chateauvieux, who was standing near her.
'Well, my dear fellow,' said Forbes, catching hold of him, 'how is that critical demon of yours? Is he scotched yet?'
'He is almost at his last gasp,' said Kendal, with a ghostly smile, and a reckless impulse to talk which seemed to him his salvation. 'He was never as vicious a creature as you thought him, and Miss Bretherton has had no difficulty in slaying him. But that hall was a masterpiece, Forbes! How have your pictures got on with all this?'
'I haven't touched a brush since I came back from Switzerland, except to make sketches for this thing. Oh, it's been a terrible business! Mr. Worrall's hair has turned gray over the expenses of it; however, she and I would have our way, and it's all right--the play will run for twelve months, if she chooses, easily.'
Near by were the Worralls, looking a little sulky, as Kendal fancied, in the midst of this great inrush of the London world, which was sweeping their niece from them into a position of superiority and independence they were not at all prepared to see her take up; Nothing, indeed, could be prettier than her manner to them whenever she came across them, but it was evident that she was no longer an automaton to be moved at their will and pleasure, but a woman and an artist, mistress of herself and of her fate. Kendal fell into conversation on the subject with Mrs. Stuart, who was as communicative and amusing as usual, and who chattered away to him till he suddenly saw Miss Bretherton signalling to him with her arm in that of his sister.
'Do you know, Mr. Kendal,' she said as he went up to her, 'you must really take Madame de Chateauvieux away out of this noise and crowd? It is all very well for her to preach to me. Take her to your rooms and get her some food. How I wish I could entertain you here; but with this crowd it is impossible.'
'Isabel, my dear Isabel,' cried Madame de Chateauvieux, holding her, 'can't you slip away too, and leave Mr. Wallace to do the honours? There will be nothing left of you to-morrow.'
'Yes, directly, directly! only I feel as if sleep were a thing that did not exist for me. But you must certainly go. Take her, Mr. Kendal; doesn't she look a wreck? I will tell M. de Chateauvieux and send him after you.'
She took Marie's shawl from Kendal's arm and put it tenderly round her; then she smiled down into her eyes, said a low 'good-night, best and kindest of friends!' and the brother and sister hurried away, Kendal dropping the hand which had been cordially stretched out to himself.
'Do you mind, Eustace?' said Madame de Chateauvieux, as they walked across the stage. 'I ought to go, and the party ought to break up. But it is a shame to carry you off from so many friends.'
'Mind? Why, I have ordered supper for you in my rooms, and it is just midnight. I hope these people will have the sense to go soon. Now then, for a cab.'
They alighted at the gate of the Temple, and, as they walked across the quadrangle under a sky still heavy with storm-clouds, Madame de Chateauvieux said to her brother with a sigh: 'Well, it has been a great event. I never remember anything more exciting, or more successful. But there is one thing, I think, that would make me happier than a hundred Elviras, and that is to see Isabel Bretherton the wife of a man she loved!' Then a smile broke over her face as she looked at her brother.
'Do you know, Eustace, I quite made up my mind from those first letters of yours in May, in spite of your denials, that you were very deeply taken with her? I remember quite seriously discussing the pros and cons of it with myself.'
The words were said so lightly, they betrayed so clearly the speaker's conviction that she had made a foolish mistake, that they stung Kendal to the quick. How could Marie have known? Had not his letters for the last three months been misleading enough to deceive the sharpest eyes? And yet he felt unreasonably that she ought to have known--there was a blind clamour in him against the bluntness of her sisterly perception.
His silence was so prolonged that Madame de Chateauvieux was startled by it. She slipped her hand into his arm. 'Eustace!' Still no answer. 'Have I said anything to annoy you--Eustace? Won't you let your old sister have her dreams?'
But still it seemed impossible for him to speak. He could only lay his hand over hers with a brotherly clasp. By this time they were at the foot of the stairs, and he led the way up, Madame de Chateauvieux following in a tumult of anxious conjecture. When they reached his rooms he put her carefully into a chair by the fire, made her take some sandwiches, and set the kettle to boil in his handy bachelor way, that he might make her some tea, and all the time he talked about various nothings, till at last Marie, unable to put up with it any longer, caught his hand as he was bending over the fire.
'Eustace,' she exclaimed, 'be kind to me, and don't perplex me like this.--Oh, my poor old boy, are you in love with Isabel Bretherton?'
'He drew himself to his full height on the rug, and gazed steadily into the fire, the lines of his mobile face settling into repose.
'Yes,' he said, as though to himself; 'I love her. I believe I have loved her from the first moment.'
Madame de Chateauvieux was tremblingly silent, her thoughts travelling back over the past with lightning rapidity. Could she remember one word, one look of Isabel Bretherton's, of which her memory might serve to throw the smallest ray of light on this darkness in which Eustace seemed to be standing? No, not one. Gratitude, friendship, esteem--all these had been there abundantly, but nothing else, not one of those many signs by which one woman betrays her love to another! She rose and put her arm round her brother's neck. They had been so much to one another for nearly forty years; he had never wanted anything as a child or youth that she had not tried to get for him. How strange, how intolerable, that this toy, this boon, was beyond her getting!
Her mute sympathy and her deep distress touched him, while, at the same time, they seemed to quench the last spark of hope in him. Had he counted upon hearing something from her whenever he should break silence which would lighten the veil over the future? It must have been so, otherwise why this sense of fresh disaster?
'Dear Marie,' he said to her, kissing her brow as she stood beside him, 'you must be as good to me as you can. I shall probably be a good deal out of London for the present, and my books are a wonderful help. After all, life is not all summed up in one desire, however strong. Other things are real to me--I am thankful to say. I shall live it down.'
'But why despair so soon?' she cried, rebelling against this heavy acquiescence of his and her own sense of hopelessness. 'You are a man any woman might love. Why should she not pass from the mere friendly intellectual relation to another? Don't go away from London. Stay and see as much of her as you can.'
Kendal shook his head. 'I used to dream,' he said huskily, 'of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her. Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world. But now!'
She felt the truth of his unspoken argument--of all that his tone implied. In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness. Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness.