Robert Orange Part 38

All, in fact, was truly enjoyable. I would not have missed the evening on any account._

Orange, it is true, had not joined the general company. But Prince d'Alchingen for reasons of his own, however, had offered the young man a seat in the one small box which had a gilded _grille_ before it and was so made that it seemed part of the ma.s.sive decoration.

"You cannot be seen," said the Prince; "I won't tell her that you are present; and I give you my word of honour that I won't tell anybody--not even my wife."

The temptation was irresistible. Robert accepted the invitation, and as he watched the play, it seemed to him that he had never known Brigit till that evening. He had seen her in dreams--yes; and talked to her in dreams, yes; but now at last she lived--a real creature. Lost in the part, she was able to throw aside the self-restraint which had given her always a cold, almost s.e.xless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred changing emotions: the youth, strength, and pa.s.sion so severely repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never come till the last hours before death--when in one look or one utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis--not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the _grille_, watched the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars.

He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing, dancing--fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age, was he to look on--with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate? His whole nature rose up in revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that a change--perhaps a terrible change--had taken place in his mind--a change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of a.n.a.lysis and reflection. Imaginative love--made up of renunciation and spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a s.p.a.ce. He was madly jealous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and uttered his lines with the most touching air of pa.s.sionate devotion. She seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that delicate, irresistible abandon--apparently unconscious and unpremeditated--which is only possible between two players who are not in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on the stage, where, as a merely a.s.sumed thing, it harmonised perfectly with its artificial surroundings--the canvas landscape, the painted trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy--a Midsummer Night's music--nothing more, perhaps something less. The very t.i.tle of the play--_The Second Surprise of Love_--carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand--and fall buried in the scars they cause.

Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more la.s.situde or such disgust of life as a month--alone with books--in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of a Kempis as they do in Schopenhauer, as they do in Lucretius, as they do in St. Bernard, as they do in Montaigne, in Marcus Aurelius, in Dante, in St. Teresa. They are, indeed, the ever-recurrent cries in human feeling, the ever-recurrent phases in human thought. Uninterrupted contentment was never yet found in any calling or state; the saints were haggard with combats; sleep, the most reposeful state we know, has its fearful sorrows, hideous terrors, pursuing uncertainties. Robert's spirit, stimulated by jealousy, played round these reflections, common enough at all times, but, as all common things, overwhelming at the first moment of their complete realisation. The original frame of his mind joined a defiance of formal precedent and an intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense with an impatience of all that makes for secrecy and an abhorrence of the subst.i.tutes which are sometimes basely, sometimes madly, accepted in default of true objects. He could not desire the star and find solace in the glow-worm--pursue Isolde and lag by the way with Moll Flanders. It was true that he had resolved to put stars and Isolde alike from his life. It was true that he had bound himself to certain fair ambitions beyond the determinations of calculation and experience. It was true that he had resolved to sacrifice this world to the next. He knew the claims which the world to come has upon us. But did he know the world he was renouncing? How that doubt opened the way to further doubts! Was he a fool for his pains? Was an enfeebling and afflicting of the natural man so necessary to the exaltation of the soul? Was the soul in itself so weak that it could only rest decently in a sick body? Could it only wish for something greater than this earth can give by being artificially saddened?

Such questions have their answers, but they do not occur very readily to young men hopelessly in love and half out of their wits with jealousy.

He might have taken refuge in prayer, but at that moment he did not want to pray. He wanted to think about himself, to be himself throughout the entire reach of his consciousness, to lose himself in the tempest of emotion which seemed to drive out, beat, and shatter every hindrance to its furious sweep. A smouldering fire is for a while got under, and yet by suppression is but thrown in, to spread more widely and deeply than before. So his fatal affection, perhaps pitilessly fought down in the first instance--a.s.serted its power--its power for evil. Not to love was not to live. He was dead while he lived. He could not find peace in an invisible world of which he did not see any more even a shadow round about him. _Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light?

even very dark, and no brightness in it?_ He did not believe that. What miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased.

Perhaps they were not happy, but if they received the punishment of wrong-doing, the wrong at least was committed out of fetters and joyously. It is not until men find themselves a.s.sailed by a strong wish that they perceive how very still and very small, all but inaudible, the still, small voice can be. A moment comes when one ceases to think--one wills, and if one is able and the will is sufficiently determined, the purpose is carried into effect. Temptations to steal, to lie, to deceive, to gamble, to excess in drink and the like cannot approach a certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller life--either in a spiritual or the human way--is implanted ineradicably in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind of apathy, the craving is there--to be aroused surely enough at some dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of disappointed love is the most critical. Calm spectators of mortal folly who have been satisfactorily married for twenty years and more, who have sons to provide for and daughters to establish, cherish a disdain of love-stories and boast that they have no patience with morbidity.

Love--which put them into being and keeps the earth in existence--seems to all such a silly malady peculiar to the sentimental in early youth.

So they put the First Cause--in one of its many manifestations--in the waste-paper basket, asking each other what will become of Charles if he cannot find a rich wife, and poor Alice, if she cannot entrap a suitable husband. But there are others who look on life with some hope of understanding it truly, in part, at any rate, and these know, perhaps by experience, perhaps by sympathy, that whereas bodily disturbances may pa.s.s away leaving little or no effect upon the general health, all mental tumults are perpetual in their consequences: they never die out entirely, and they live, sometimes with appalling energy, sometimes with gnawing listlessness, to the end of an existence. Robert, in the judgment of his intellect and his senses, had found his ideal. Brigit did not belong to "the despised day of small things"; she was the woman of his imagination--the well-beloved, and having gained her, was he to say--Farewell? It seemed so. Meanwhile, the graceful, swaying dialogue rippled between the players on the stage; the smiling audience, hushed with interest, gazed at the delightful beings before them; the exquisite Marquise had uttered her two last speeches--

"_Je ne croyois pas l'amitie si dangereuse._"

and--

"_Je ne me mele plus de rien!_"

Lubin brought the performance to an end by the final utterance--

"_Allons de la joie!_"

The curtain fell--to rise again a dozen times. Orange did not hear the door of the box being opened. Prince d'Alchingen came in and put a hand on the young man's shoulder.

"Would you like to see her?" he whispered. "I can arrange it. No one need know."

But the training of a lifetime and constant habits of thought were stronger still than any mood.

"No," said Robert, shortly, "I won't see her. I must get back to London at once."

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Prince looked at him in astonishment.

"You can't get to London to-night," said he; "there are no trains."

"I can walk."

"It is thirty-five miles."

"I am accustomed to long walks."

"At any rate you will have some supper first--in my little breakfast-room. Don't refuse, because I want you to meet Castrillon."

"Castrillon! I should like to meet Castrillon."

"Then I will tell him. You and he can take supper together. He doesn't want to join the big party. He has the artist's detestation of the chattering mob. How well he plays! And what a triumph for--Madame!"

"A great triumph."

"This corridor leads to my tiny cupboard--the merest cupboard! Follow me." They went through several doors and up several small staircases till they reached a small apartment furnished in old blue damask, heavily fringed with tarnished gold and silver decorations.

"A few souvenirs of my hereditary castle in Alberia," explained the Prince; "they relieve my sense of exile."

He walked across the floor and tapped on what appeared to be a portion of the wall.

"We are here," said he.

The secret door was opened, and Castrillon, still wearing his costume as the Chevalier, joined them. If one may believe Prince d'Alchingen's account of this unfortunate meeting, the young men greeted each other with composure. D'Alchingen declares that he studied Orange to the depths of his soul, and he does him the justice to say that he did not make a movement or utter a word which denoted the least emotion. There was not any sort of alteration in his countenance, and he led the conversation with a tranquillity and a gaiety really enchanting. When the supper was served, His Excellency had no hesitation in leaving the rivals together--so convinced was he that they would remain on good terms.

"M. de Castrillon," said Orange, when the Prince had gone, "I cannot sit down at supper with you. We have to settle an old score."

Castrillon bowed:

"I am here to learn your wishes. I have heard from several sources that you wished to see me. If you have anything to say, pray say it quickly, because--I have an appointment with Mrs. Parflete."

"Will you do me the favour to leave that lady's name out of the discussion?"

"I see no reason why I should do you favours, M. de Hausee. But I am quite ready to atone for my indifference by any course of action which could satisfy the most scrupulous delicacy."

"There is but one course of action open to us."

"I shall be happy to have the honour of meeting you on your own terms.

But," he added, contemptuously, "we are both wasting our time over a worthless woman. She was seen leaving your lodgings on Wednesday last. I have just heard this. And I received, before the play began this evening, a letter from her fixing a _rendez-vous_ for two o'clock. If you doubt me I can show you the letter. I am as much disappointed as you are. She has fooled us both. Before G.o.d I could have sworn she was a religious and modest woman."

His chagrin was so genuine that it was impossible to doubt his good faith.

"It is a lie," said Orange; "she was never at my lodgings."

"I don't call _you_ a liar, M. de Hausee, but I can prove my words, whereas it might be difficult to prove yours. I can show you the letter."

"She never wrote it."

Castrillon sat on the edge of the table, and poured out some wine.

"That is what I said," he replied, "when I read it. So long as we are going to fight, let it be because we hate each other, and not because we have both been deceived by the same prude."

"In other words," said Orange, quietly, "you wish to drive a good bargain, knowing that whether you utter one insult or twenty, I can but fight you once."

"_A l'outrance_, however," answered Castrillon, dipping a biscuit into the gla.s.s.