Miss Bretherton

"I don"t think this will last very long," said Kendal in Wallace"s ear.

"There is something tragic in a popularity like this; it rests on something unsound, and one feels that disaster is not far off. The whole thing impresses me most painfully. She has some capacity, of course; if only the conditions had been different--if she had been born within a hundred miles of the Paris Conservatoire, if her youth had been pa.s.sed in a society of more intellectual weight,--but, as it is, this very applause is ominous, for the beauty must go sooner or later, and there is nothing else."

"You remember Desforets in this same theatre last year in _Adrienne Lecouvreur_?" said Wallace. "What a gulf between the right thing and the wrong! But come, we must do our duty;" and he drew Kendal forward towards the front of the box, and they saw the whole house on its feet, clapping and shouting, and the curtain just being drawn back to let the White Lady and the Prince appear before it. She was very pale, but the storm of applause which greeted her seemed to revive her, and she swept her smiling glance round the theatre, until at last it rested with a special gleam of recognition on the party in the box, especially on Forbes, who was outdoing himself in enthusiasm. She was called forward again and again, until at last the house was content, and the general exit began.

The instant after her white dress had disappeared from the stage, a little page-boy knocked at the door of the box with a message that "Miss Bretherton begs that Mrs. Stuart and her friends will come and see her."

Out they all trooped, along a narrow pa.s.sage, and up a short staircase, until a rough temporary door was thrown open, and they found themselves in the wings, the great stage, on which the scenery was being hastily shifted, lying to their right. The lights were being put out; only a few gas-jets were left burning round a pillar, beside which stood Isabel Bretherton, her long phantom dress lying in white folds about her, her uncle and aunt and her manager standing near. Every detail of the picture--the spot of brilliant light bounded on all sides by dim, far-reaching vistas of shadow, the figures hurrying across the back of the stage, the moving ghost-like workmen all around, and in the midst that white-hooded, languid figure--revived in Kendal"s memory whenever in after days his thoughts went wandering back to the first moment of real contact between his own personality and that of Isabel Bretherton.

CHAPTER IV

A few days after the performance of the _White Lady_, Kendal, in the course of his weekly letter to his sister, sent her a fairly-detailed account of the evening, including the interview with her after the play, which had left two or three very marked impressions upon him. "I wish,"

he wrote, "I could only convey to you a sense of her personal charm such as might balance the impression of her artistic defects, which I suppose this account of mine cannot but leave on you. When I came away that night after our conversation with her I had entirely forgotten her failure as an actress, and it is only later, since I have thought over the evening in detail, that I have returned to my first standpoint of wonder at the easy toleration of the English public. When you are actually with her, talking to her, looking at her, Forbes"s att.i.tude is the only possible and reasonable one. What does art, or cultivation, or training matter!--I found myself saying, as I walked home, in echo of him,--so long as Nature will only condescend once in a hundred years to produce for us a creature so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the G.o.ds, and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!

"That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by Sat.u.r.day morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind"s morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the _White Lady_ had originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor--namely, beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I found myself reflecting with some fierceness,--let us withhold from her a sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the human spirit.

"And then, as my mood cooled still further, I began to recall many an evening at the _Francais_ with you, and one part after another, one actor after another, recurred to me, till, as I realised afresh what dramatic intelligence and dramatic training really are, I fell into an angry contempt for our lavish English enthusiasms. Poor girl! it is not her fault if she believes herself to be a great actress. Brought up under misleading conditions, and without any but the most elementary education, how is she to know what the real thing means? She finds herself the rage within a few weeks of her appearance in the greatest city of the world.

Naturally, she pays no heed to her critics,--why should she?

"And she is indeed a most perplexing mixture. Do what I will I cannot harmonise all my different impressions of her. Let me begin again. Why is it that her acting is so poor? I never saw a more dramatic personality!

Everything that she says or does is said or done with a warmth, a force, a vivacity that make her smallest gesture and her lightest tone impress themselves upon you. I felt this very strongly two or three times after the play on Friday night. In her talk with Forbes, for instance, whom she has altogether in her toils, and whom she plays with as though he were the gray-headed Merlin and she an innocent Vivien, weaving harmless spells about him. And then, from this mocking war of words and looks, this gay camaraderie, in which there was not a sc.r.a.p of coquetry or self-consciousness, she would pa.s.s into a sudden outburst of anger as to the impertinence of English rich people--the impertinence of rich millionaires who have tried once or twice to "order" her for their evening parties as they would order their ices, or the impertinence of the young "swell about town" who thinks she has nothing to do behind the scenes but receive his visits and provide him with entertainment. And, as the quick impetuous words came rushing out, you felt that here for once was a woman speaking her real mind to you, and that with a flashing eye and curving lip, an inborn grace and energy which made every word memorable. If she would but look like that or speak like that on the stage! But there, of course, is the rub. The whole difficulty of art consists in losing your own personality, so to speak, and finding it again transformed, and it is a difficulty which Miss Bretherton has never even understood.

"After this impression of spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a painful impression of fatigue on Friday--fatigue and something like depression. After twenty minutes" talk she threw herself back against the iron pillar behind her, her White Lady"s hood framing a face so pale and drooping that we all got up to go, feeling that it was cruelty to keep her up a minute longer. Mrs. Stuart asked her about her Sundays, and whether she ever got out of town. "Oh," she said, with a sigh and a look at her uncle, who was standing near, "I think Sunday is the hardest day of all. It is our "at home" day, and such crowds come--just to look at me, I suppose, for I cannot talk to a quarter of them." Whereupon Mr.

Worrall said in his bland commercial way that society had its burdens as well as its pleasures, and that his dear niece could hardly escape her social duties after the flattering manner in which London had welcomed her. Miss Bretherton answered, with a sort of languid rebellion, that her social duties would soon be the death of her. But evidently she is very docile at home, and they do what they like with her. It seems to me that the uncle and aunt are a good deal shrewder than the London public; it is borne in upon me by various indications that they know exactly what their niece"s popularity depends on, and that it very possibly may not be a long-lived one. Accordingly, they have determined on two things: first, that she shall make as much money for the family as can by any means be made; and, secondly, that she shall find her way into London society, and secure, if possible, a great _parti_ before the enthusiasm for her has had time to chill. One hears various stories of the uncle, all in this sense; I cannot say how true they are.

"However, the upshot of the supper-party was that next day Wallace, Forbes, and I met at Mrs. Stuart"s house, and formed a Sunday League for the protection of Miss Bretherton from her family; in other words, we mean to secure that she has occasional rest and country air on Sunday--her only free day. Mrs. Stuart has already wrung out of Mrs.

Worrall, by a little judicious scaring, permission to carry her off for two Sundays--one this month and one next--and Miss Bretherton"s romantic side, which is curiously strong in her, has been touched by the suggestion that the second Sunday should be spent at Oxford.

"Probably for the first Sunday--a week hence--we shall go to Surrey. You remember Hugh Farnham"s property near Leith Hill? I know all the farms about there from old shooting days, and there is one on the edge of some great commons, which would be perfection on a May Sunday. I will write you a full account of our day. The only rule laid down by the League is that things are to be so managed that Miss Bretherton is to have no possible excuse for fatigue so long as she is in the hands of the society.

"My book goes on fairly well. I have been making a long study of De Musset, with the result that the poems seem to me far finer than I had remembered, and the _Confessions d" un Enfant du Siecle_ a miserable performance. How was it it impressed me so much when I read it first? His poems have reminded me of you at every step. Do you remember how you used to read them aloud to our mother and me after dinner, while the father had his sleep before going down to the House?"

Ten days later Kendal spent a long Monday evening in writing the following letter to his sister:--

"Our yesterday"s expedition was, I think, a great success. Mrs. Stuart was happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton"s first sight of the genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her out and watching her strong naive impressions of things. Stuart, I think, was not quite happy. It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours" divorce from his briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection.

The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises too much _au serieux._

"I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers" end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago but two subjects--Jamaica and the stage--the latter taken in a somewhat narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her mind and Mrs. Stuart"s more frequently into contact with each other. But I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton. Her strong womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical delight in the girl"s beauty, and the little personal pride and excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the season. It is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her in the best light. Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in her turn evidently admires enormously her friend"s social capabilities and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs.

Stuart"s kindness--an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest complaisance towards all the Stuarts" friends, and in a constant watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.

"However, here I am as usual wasting time in a.n.a.lysis instead of describing to you our Sunday. It was one of those heavenly days with which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty. We found a carriage waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region in some virgin continent. On either hand the gorse was thick and golden, great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist gra.s.s beneath, and over the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose into the sky in ma.s.ses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle of white set in the environing blue.

"Then came the farmhouse--old, red-brick, red-tiled, cas.e.m.e.nted--everything that the aesthetic soul desires--the farmer and his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the parlour, with its last-century woodwork.

"Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch. I never knew him more racy; he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, ill.u.s.trated by sketches, made in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has condescended to take this year. They range from a bishop and a royalty down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his presentation of the characteristic att.i.tudes of each--those att.i.tudes which, according to him, betray the "inner soul" of the bishop or the foundling--was admirable. Then he fell upon the Academy--that respected body of which I suppose he will soon be the President--and tore it limb from limb. With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at the Academy dinners of the future--supposing fortune ever exalts me again as she did this year to that august meal--I hardly know. Millais"s faces, Pettie"s knights, or Calderon"s beauties--all fared the same. You could not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.

"Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman"s cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet. She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries a.s.signed to them. Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth"s and an unutterable mawkish thing of Halford"s--a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown, gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust young women in a "light which never was on sea or land." "You could count all the figures in the first," she said, "it was so lifelike, so real;"

and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it.

I looked at Forbes with some amus.e.m.e.nt; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of the _White Lady_, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton"s liking of the worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.

""Oh, you couldn"t," he said with a groan, "you couldn"t like that ballroom,--and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us! Well, there must be something in it,--there must be something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,--I daresay there is; we"re so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a sc.r.a.p of taste, if both of them weren"t as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it"s really not a matter of opinion; I a.s.sure you it isn"t. I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford"s figures don"t join in the middle, and that Forth"s men and women are as flat as my hand--there isn"t a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don"t think I can stand it. I am all for people getting enjoyment where they can," with a defiant look at me, "and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the line somewhere. There"s some art that"s out of court from the beginning."

"I couldn"t resist it.

""Don"t listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I wouldn"t let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to _feel_; defend your feeling against him! It"s worth more than his criticisms."

"Forbes"s eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his s.h.a.ggy white brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there"s no denying it.

""Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like--that"s all I know in anything."

""It"s all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with "I like" and "I don"t like," then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to "I like" and "I don"t like.""

"The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its sh.o.r.es fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.

Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind, for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks more and her engagement at the _Calliope_ will be over. There are other theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet; but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency object to her having her own way. "I am wild to get to Italy," she said to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. "Sir Walter Rutherford has talked to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly," and she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. "I come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance with all sorts of horrors since I came to London--face-ache and rheumatism and colds!--I scarcely knew there were such things in the world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a naughty child!"

""Do you know," I said, flinging myself down beside her on the gra.s.s and looking up at her, "that it"s altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to feel tired; it"s monstrous, it"s against the natural order of things!"

""It"s London," she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that is so prettily pathetic. "I have the roar in my ears all day, and it seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I have only a few weeks more," she added, brightening, "and then by October I shall be more used to Europe--the climate and the life."

"I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton.

You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and const.i.tution relaxed by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health--there are some signs of it--what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it. I long to step in, to "have at" somebody, to stop it.

"A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises. The woman from the keeper"s cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac"s method of character-drawing. Are Eugene de Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.

We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.

""Ha!" said Wallace, who is a bird-lover, "a truce to Balzac, and let us watch those nut-hatches! Miss Bretherton"s quite right to prefer them to French novels."

""French novels!" she said, withdrawing her eyes from the branch above her, and frowning a little at Wallace as she spoke. "Please don"t expect me to talk about them--I know nothing about them--I have never wished to."

"Her voice had a tone almost of hauteur in it. I have noticed it before.

It is the tone of the famous actress accustomed to believe in herself and her own opinion. I connected it, too, with all one hears of her determination to look upon herself as charged with a mission for the reform of stage morals. French novels and French actresses! apparently she regards them all as so many unknown horrors, standing in the way of the purification of dramatic art by a beautiful young person with a high standard of duty. It is very odd! Evidently she is the Scotch Presbyterian"s daughter still, for all her profession, and her success, and her easy ways with the Sabbath! Her remark produced a good deal of unregenerate irritation in me. If she were a first-rate artist to begin with, I was inclined to reflect, this moral enthusiasm would touch and charm one a good deal more; as it is, considering her position, it is rather putting the cart before the horse. But, of course, one can understand that it is just these traits in her that help her to make the impression she does on London society and the orthodox public in general.

"Wallace and I went off after the nut-hatches, enjoying a private laugh by the way over Mrs. Stuart"s little look of amazement and discomfort as Miss Bretherton delivered herself. When we came back we found Forbes sketching her--she sitting rather flushed and silent under the tree, and he drawing away and working himself at every stroke into a greater and greater enthusiasm. And certainly she was as beautiful as a dream, sitting against that tree, with the brown heather about her and the young oak-leaves overhead. But I returned in an antagonistic frame of mind, a little out of patience with her and her beauty, and wondering why Nature always blunders somewhere!

"However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of ear-shot of the rest.

""Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don"t want to pretend to what I haven"t got. I don"t know French, and I can"t read French novels if I wished to ever so much."

"What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly, having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself.

I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.

""Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream--you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It"s the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don"t shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it"s acting, or painting, or writing. You"ve never seen Desforets, I think?--no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again.

What a pity!"

"Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."