Miss Bretherton Part 11

For, by the end of this time of solitary waiting, his change of att.i.tude was complete. It was evident to him that his antic.i.p.ation 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.

CHAPTER VII

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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 ma.s.s 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 mult.i.tude 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 h.o.m.ogeneous, 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 compet.i.tion for tickets that many of those present had as vague and confused an idea of how they came to be among the favoured mult.i.tude 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 circ.u.mference, 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-gla.s.ses. 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 a.s.sociations 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 h.e.l.l; 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 bra.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tude 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 G.o.dmother 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sa.s.sinating 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.