Miss Bretherton Part 10

'_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 a.s.serted 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.'

'_Sat.u.r.day 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 ca.n.a.l running past our side railing into the Grand Ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion 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 ca.n.a.l--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 emba.s.sy 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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.