Robert Orange Part 11

She ran toward the little animal, who was shivering, pathetic and grotesque, in a military cap and red petticoat trimmed with yellow braid. The dog, which was a young pug with excellent points, gave Brigit, after many entreaties, his paw. She addressed the monkey in Italian, and laughed till she cried at its absurdities. Robert looked on, consumed by a sensation which he recognised, with much shame, as jealousy. He thought the pug dull and the monkey revolting. Yet she kissed one, and showered heavenly smiles on both.

"I did not know that you were so fond of animals," he said, as they walked to the hotel for lunch.

"I am not," she answered frankly, "as a rule. But when I am with you I feel so happy that I want to kiss everything--the ground, and the trees, and chairs, and poodle dogs, and the whole world!"

"Then why not--me?"

She looked at him, blushed a little, and waited some moments before she replied.

"I don't know," she said at last. "It must be because I am not in the habit of doing so. I am not accustomed to you yet. I keep thinking 'I shall wake up in a minute and he will be miles away.' Can't you understand? So I am pretending to myself all the time that you are not really here."

"I see."

"No, dearest, you don't quite understand; and you are a little disappointed in me because I seem--I must seem--rather flippant. I daren't be serious--I daren't. I daren't believe that I am your wife."

"But why not?"

She shook her head, and her whole face became clouded by the old, terrible, unnatural sadness which he knew so much better than her laughter.

"I am not used to joy," she said. "Perhaps, if we ever get to Heaven, our first impulse will be to run back again to Purgatory, where we are more at home!"

"You have too much wit, darling, to be happy anywhere!"

"No! no! I don't ask to be conventionally happy, but I want you always.

That is all ... you, always, on any terms--on a rag-heap, in a storm, with jackals howling at us!"

"What a picture!"

"My idea of unalloyed bliss, or, at least, the only one I have ever permitted myself. I can even believe that might be realised." A smile hovered again about her lips, but she looked steadily ahead, as though she were still resolved not to rea.s.sure herself, by any too-frequent glances, of his much-loved presence.

The peculiar tenderness of her voice was in itself a charm against ill-humour. A rush of bitter self-reproach told Robert that his dissatisfaction had been the inevitable result of too many blessings on a base nature. He tried to speak; he watched instead, with a desperate, eager gaze, the play of her expressive features.

"I wonder," she said, "what our life is to be? Not that I wish to pry into the future, but, for some reason, I can never feel settled. Every morning is a surprise. I think, too, about your character ... your career. Have I helped you, or have I been a hindrance? I am perverse, capricious--not an angel. No human influence can help me very much. I must depend on the discipline of G.o.d. Oh, if I could know all that He wants me to do!"

"Most of us have that desire, Brigit. At least it is better to be d.a.m.ned, in the world's opinion, trying to do the will of G.o.d than saved--doing nothing! One has to take a good many chances--even the chance of displeasing Him--if it comes to a crisis."

"Many people would call that reckless."

"Let them call it anything," said the young man; "names do not matter.

The ghastly, unspeakable dread is to be timorous, halting, the creature of indecision."

"We are too much alike," she sighed. "Oh, Robert, if we did not suffer horribly within ourselves when we do wrong, I believe we should both defy every law in the world! I am a born rebel."

More than a note of her mother's insolence was in the speech, but the whole spirit of the dead actress seemed to possess Brigit for that moment. Her being rippled, as it were, with the new disturbance, just as a pond will tremble to its edges at the mere dip of a swallow's wing.

The artistic hatred of all restraint and the wild desire of liberty were the imperious pa.s.sions of her heart--more vehement than any other feeling--even her love for Orange.

"I could fight," she said, "a visible devil, but this struggle with moods and tastes is deadening."

"What are the moods and tastes?" he asked.

"I cannot describe them well. But music calls me; I hear it trilling, and sobbing, and whispering everywhere; and sometimes it is so loud and so beautiful that I wonder why every one else doesn't stop to listen.

They never do. So I sing back my answer. It is silent singing. You would only wonder why I was so quiet all at once."

"But I have heard you sing."

"Not with my real voice, Robert. It is stronger than it used to be."

She checked herself and hesitated, stopped by a sudden scruple--a sort of delicacy. She thought nothing at all of her beauty and never of her fortune; but in giving Robert her voice, and the nameless ambitions which enveloped it, she was conscious that she had made, in some way, a renunciation.

"Say what you were going to say, dearest?"

"I cannot forget," she exclaimed desperately, "that mama was an actress.

And I remember some of the nights at the theatre.... I liked the theatre.... I believe I could act.... I have learned the whole of _Phedre_ and the whole of _Juliet_. That is why I live."

This avowal of her secret over-ruling instinct set free the sanguine strength which circ.u.mstances had imprisoned, but could not destroy, in her character. The constant effort of hiding from all observation the irrepressible yearnings of a talent that would not be denied, had given her that quality of mysteriousness, of dreamy habits of thought, of languor, which, even to Robert, had looked as though she might find this earth too rough to live on. But the despair which comes from fighting, unsuccessfully, the world, is not that appearance of weakness which is the result of fighting--more or less effectively--one's own energy. In this latter issue the beaten foe joins forces obediently enough with the conqueror, till at last the opposing elements are directed, whether for good or evil, by one will.

"So you want to go on the stage," said Orange quietly.

She turned to him and saw, with anguish, the deep amazement his words had not expressed.

"No," she said, "no. I have you instead. I want to devote myself to you--to exist for you."

"Oh, don't you see, my dear child, that this is a kind of--of pity--of anything you like, except the one thing----"

"I adore you, Robert. Oh, I can't get at what I want to say! Any talk about love always sounds very stilted or hollow. I only know that I want to live intensely in all that concerns you; that just to think of you makes me perfectly happy. When I said that learning _Phedre_ and _Juliet_ was the reason I lived, I was thinking of the time when I had no right to think of you. Of course I loved you always, from the beginning. It began at Chambord when I first met you. I very seldom say these things, and it is better that they should remain unsaid for the most part. But you must never doubt me, and I feel to-day, in spite of all we know about each other and all we have suffered, that you are doubting me now. You fear I don't know my own mind. Isn't this the trouble?"

The intuition which comes to men and women through suffering has always the certain sharpness of a surgeon's knife. It may be a rea.s.surance to have the inmost thought plucked at by some loving spirit, and yet it is seldom that the touch can be given without inflicting agony. Orange could not reply at once. In his resolve to be unselfish--to put aside that personal equation which was nothing less than his whole nature--he had to steel his heart to her, contradicting painfully, by curt, unfelt phrases, the promptings of a soul turned in upon itself, desolate and confused.

"I have been selfish and thoughtless," he said abruptly; "a missed vocation is irreplaceable and it is also indestructible. You hear the echo of the call as long as you live--perhaps afterwards. At your age you could feel, but you could not wholly understand your talents. If you had told me all this before----"

She laughed with real joyousness and clung more closely to his arm.

"I didn't tell you," she exclaimed, "because you would have said just what you are saying now. You are the one. All the rest is a means of forgetting you. It is something resembling happiness to be alone in the turmoil of the world with one unspoilt illusion. This illusion in my case is a little idea that I could be a great actress--perhaps! Don't look grave, Robert. It makes you sad when I talk this way."

"Those who can be disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the failure of a half-belief. I learnt that long ago. But I hate the very word in your mouth. Woe to us both if we cannot be resolute now. I could have waited--had I seen any reason to wait. Time could make no difference in my love. As it is, I have stolen you from yourself. But now I have stolen you I will keep you. I cannot--cannot give you back again to anything or anybody."

He spoke with that almost mocking tenderness which dissembles its pa.s.sion. At the practical difficulty which now confronted him, all that was merely romantic and speculative in his soul took flight, as birds that are frightened from a quiet orchard by the yelp of dogs. He became aware that he was bitterly independent of the joys he had once found in the mere spectacle of the exterior world--the play of light and shade, the changing visions of the sky, the charm of the earth. His own thoughts were now the sole realities, and the dulness which suddenly came over his vision for outward things seemed to render it the more acute and concentrated for the things of the mind. As distant hills and tree tops show most distinctly before a storm, so every possibility which can arise from a conflict of duties stood out with a decisive clearness for his consideration. He had married in haste a child-bride.

There was no blinking the fact. She had the strenuous religious fibre, and with it real Bohemian blood. She was also at the yielding age, when a dominant influence could do much to divert or modify every natural trait. He could not doubt that he had this power over her then. How far, and to what purpose, should he exert it? For himself he wished to discourage any hankering on her part for public life, and, most of all, public life behind the footlights, under an artificial sky. No one knew better than he that there are certain things of love, of n.o.bility, of temperament, of pride, in certain lives which the world at large would rather calumniate than comprehend. People in general clung to their opinions not because they were true, but because they were their own, and among pretty general opinions--particularly in the year 1869--there was a strong prejudice against handsome young women who went on the stage. It was not in him to consider--even as an egoistic reflection to be put aside--how far Brigit's project, carried into action, could effect his own political career. His apprehensions were all for her and her own content.

"Promise me," he said, "that you will always tell me when the acting mood comes over you. Never fight it, never try to resist it, give it the liberty to die, but also the right to live. There is an old Hindoo proverb: 'Find the flower which can bloom in the silence that follows--not that which precedes--the storm.' This applies perfectly to a talent or a vocation. If the mood is there, in spite of fatigue, or discouragement, or other claims--happiness for that matter--you may depend that it is the ruling motive of your life and not to be vanquished. You must follow the bent or you will suffer--suffer till you die of it."

"How? in what way?"

"Either in your vanity or your conscience; either by the world's judgment on your conduct or by your own estimate of your conduct. You have no vanity, so the world doesn't count. But you have a conscience, and that counts for all!"

He had not calculated, and he could not have foreseen, the effect of his words. Her eyes filled with tears.

"My dearest," she said, "don't you see how trivial everything is to me in comparison with you? But I dare not love you so much as I can! So I encourage other enthusiasms--out of fear. Sometimes it seems as though the extraordinary, impossible ideal would be to have you with me for ever, and be an actress as well. But that is out of the question. And if I had my choice--if I could be as great as Rachel or Mrs. Siddons, or live with you on my dear rag-heap, with the jackals howling--do you think that I would hesitate, that I could hesitate?"

"If I believed you I should be a dreadful c.o.xcomb!"