"Well, well," I said, "it"s all the same--they might have. You see, she pays these things the great compliment of taking them seriously--and literally. And they wouldn"t work, Miss Jencks, some of them, if one tried them, you know. Just consider the labour unions for one thing: suppose Roger were to pay off his workmen on that principle--they"d fling his money in his face."
[Ill.u.s.tration: HE SKETCHED HER IN CHARCOAL, DRESSED (HE WOULD HAVE IT) IN BLACK]
"Then what would you say to the Prodigal Son?" she shot at me defiantly.
"I say that it"s very beautiful and that I"m old enough to hope it may be true," I told her, "but for heaven"s sake, Miss Jencks, don"t try Mrs. Bradley with it--not just now, at any rate!"
Then there was her guitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood, curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old p.a.w.n shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as a _tour de force_ it is remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness--an unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.
Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita"s foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that Puck of all painters, even as he had intended, and we were forced to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and he knew it. And Jimmie"s dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological moment for selling out had arrived, for he"d never go any higher! And we"re all gra.s.s, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and there"s no doubt of it, my brothers.
But how she used to sing _O sole mio_, with that sweet, piercing Italian cry, a real _cri du coeur_ (except for the trifling fact that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his voice most easily into what Mme. M----i used to call "ze frront of ze face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her "heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously, intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!
The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!
Go to--there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and both were the same as yours.
I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes, they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there, that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures.
Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his sh.e.l.l or a bird its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now--the room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman, with a woman"s need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness pushed to an arrogance of physical purity.
My mother"s bedroom was her own as definitely as her blue-veined, pointed hands; Sue Paynter"s, into which I went once to lift out her little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one"s else in the world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley"s, in its clear whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a sense of her impenetrable character.
But not so Margarita"s. It was furnished and decorated in grey-blue tints, because I had suggested this. It had odd touches of greyish rose, because Whistler had insisted on it. It was fitted with old mahogany, because Roger liked this and collected it here and there.
But of all the personality that her father-lover had known how to build into his home of exile, there was absolutely none.
Was it because there were no work-baskets, spilling lace and bits of ribbon, no photographs, no keepsakes, hideous perhaps, but dear for what they represent, no worn girlhood"s books, no shamefaced toys, lingering from the nursery, no litter of any other member of her family? Perhaps. Mme. Modjeska, then, and even now one of the greatest actresses on our stage, called it an unwomanly room, but I am not quite sure that this is precisely what she meant.
No, the most vivid impression the room could make upon me was one that brings a reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably, Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowy _peignoir_, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a thin navy-blue necktie.
"Is that yours?" she demanded tragically of her husband.
"Why, yes, I believe it is," said Roger, with the grave politeness that years of intimacy could never take from him.
"I found it _on my dressing-table_!" she thundered, and her voice echoed like an angry vault, "_on--my--dressing-table_!"
She dropped it like a toad at his feet, swept us all with the lightning of her eyes, coldly, distastefully, and swam up the stairs, an avenging G.o.ddess, deaf to Roger"s matter-of-fact apology, blind to Miss Jencks"s deprecating blushes. As for me, so under the spell of that voice have I always been, that I swear I thought her hardly used--the darling vixen!
PART EIGHT
IN WHICH THE RIVER RUSHES INTO PERILOUS RAPIDS
Come, my mother that carried me, Make me to-night an olden spell!
Try if my witch wife loves the Sea, Or she"ll choose the waves or she"ll choose for me, Then hey, for heaven or ho, for h.e.l.l!
Circle the Cross on the midnight sand, Heap the fire and mutter the charm, Call her out to ye, soul in hand, Blind and bare to the moon she"ll stand, Then out to the sea or in to my arm!
_Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden._
CHAPTER XXVII
WE BRING OUR PEARL TO MARKET
I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her _debut_ in _Faust_. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me, from my very sympathy with her.
I can see the _Opera_ now--the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the great, shrouding curtain.
Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to regulate her children"s enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch to Roger.
I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.
But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her voice had gone--it caught in her throat. She could not remember the words of the _Jewel Song_ and her stomach grew icy cold--if Roger had been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.
When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and _Faust_ saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little b.u.t.terflies--they had made her put aside the big ones--she was as calm and composed as the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever heard it.
"The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a movement.
It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it, but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas would have, later. It is with _Marguerite_ as a great English comedienne expressed it to me some years later, of _Juliet_: one must be forty to play it properly--and then one is too old to play it properly!
But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years to attain--and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so fascinatingly surprising as her own.
When she stopped, fixed her great eyes upon _Faust_ reproachfully and sang, like a sweet, truthful child,
_Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle!
Ni belle, ni demoiselle...._
a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting--it seemed that she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with the reality she expected, as best they could. She had the sweet purity of tone--the candour, if I may so call it, often a.s.sociated with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive temperaments. But _Brunhilde_ was the part for her, and _Brunhilde_ was not cool and anything but inexpressive.
The only _Marguerite_ I have ever seen since that resembled hers was Mme Calve"s, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside Margarita. You see, she _was_ young, she _was_ sincere and ingenuous, she _was_ slender and beautiful--and she had a fresh and lovely voice, well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill.
I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on ma.s.sive chest, emitting a series of _staccato_ fireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.
Such performances const.i.tuted Roger"s main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now.
So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature"s crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the poor child.
_"Ni belle, ni demoiselle ..."_
[Ill.u.s.tration: IT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER RECALLS]
It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be!