"No, no!" she exclaimed, with sudden bitterness and a change of voice which startled him; "it is not that. It is that I am I, and Madame Desforets is Madame Desforets. Oh, I see! I see very well that your mind is against it. And Mr. Wallace--there were two or three things in his manner which have puzzled me. He has never said yes to my proposal formally. I understand perfectly what it means; you think that I shall do the play an injury by acting it; that it is too good for me!"
Kendal felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen; the sombre pa.s.sion of her manner affected him indescribably.
"Miss Bretherton!" he cried.
"Yes, yes!" she said, almost fiercely, stopping in the path. "It"s that, I know. I have felt it almost since your first word. What power have I, if not tragic power? If a part like Elvira does not suit me, what does suit me? Of course, that is what you mean. If I cannot act Elvira, I am good for nothing--I am worse than good for nothing--I am an impostor, a sham!"
She sat down on the raised edge of the bank, for she was trembling, and clasped her quivering hands on her knees. Kendal was beside himself with distress. How had he blundered so, and what had brought this about? It was so unexpected, it was incredible.
"Do--do believe me!" he exclaimed, bending over her. "I never meant anything the least disrespectful to you; I never dreamt of it. You asked me to give you my true opinion, and my criticism applied much more to the play than to yourself. Think nothing of it, if you yourself are persuaded. You must know much better than I can what will suit you. And as for Wallace--Wallace will be proud to let you do what you will with his play."
It seemed to him that he would have said anything in the world to soothe her. It was so piteous, so intolerable to him to watch that quivering lip.
"Ah, yes," she said, looking up, a dreary smile flitting over her face, "I know you didn"t mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn"t been a fool, in Mr.
Wallace"s manner. I did see it. It"s only what every one whose opinion is worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me lately. I believe it has all been a great, great mistake."
Kendal never felt a keener hatred of the conventions which rule the relations between men and women. Could he only simply have expressed his own feeling, he would have knelt beside her on the path, have taken the trembling hands in his own, and comforted her as a woman would have done.
But as it was, he could only stand stiff and awkward before her, and yet it seemed to him as if the whole world had resolved itself into his own individuality and hers, and as if the gay river party and the bright friendly relations of an hour before were separated from the present by an impa.s.sable gulf. And, worst of all, there seemed to be a strange perversity in his speech--a fate which drove him into betraying every here and there his own real standpoint whether he would or no.
"You must not say such things," he said, as calmly as he could. "You have charmed the English public as no one else has ever charmed it. Is not that a great thing to have done? And if I, who am very fastidious and very captious, and over-critical in a hundred ways--if I am inclined to think that a part is rather more than you, with your short dramatic experience, can compa.s.s quite successfully, why, what does it matter? I may be quite wrong. Don"t take any notice of my opinion: forget it, and let me help you, if I can, by talking over the play."
She shook her head with a bitter little smile. "No, no; I shall never forget it. Your att.i.tude only brought home to me, almost more strongly than I could bear, what I have suspected a long, long time--the _contempt_ which people like you and Mr. Wallace feel for me!"
"Contempt!" cried Kendal, beside himself, and feeling as if all the criticisms he had allowed himself to make of her were recoiling in one avenging ma.s.s upon his head. "I never felt anything but the warmest admiration for your courage, your work, your womanly goodness and sweetness."
"Yes," she said, rising and holding out her hand half-unconsciously for her cloak, which she put round her as though the wood had suddenly grown cold; "admiration for me as a woman, contempt for me as an artist!
There"s the whole bare truth. Does it hold my future in it, I wonder? Is there nothing in me but this beauty that people talk of, and which I sometimes _hate_?"
She swept her hair back from her forehead with a fierce dramatic gesture.
It was as though the self in her was rising up and a.s.serting itself against the judgment which had been pa.s.sed upon it, as if some hidden force hardly suspected even by herself were beating against its bars.
Kendal watched her in helpless silence. "Tell me," she said, fixing her deep hazel eyes upon him, "you owe it me--you have given me so much pain.
No, no; you did not mean it. But tell me, and tell me from the bottom of your heart--that is, if you are interested enough in me--what is it I want? What is it that seems to be threatening me with failure as an artist? I work all day long, my work is never out of my head; it seems to pursue me all night. But the more I struggle with it the less successful I seem even to myself."
Her look was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, direct truth to her.
"What you want," he said slowly, as if the words were forced from him, "is _knowledge!_ London has taught you much, and that is why you are dissatisfied with your work--it is the beginning of all real success. But you want positive knowledge--the knowledge you could get from books, and the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young, and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of experience others have laid up for us."
It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her.
And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster--he, one captious man of letters, against the world.
But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal"s words, instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she felt a relief in having a.n.a.lysed to the full the vague trouble which had been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.
"I am very grateful to you," she said steadily; "very. It is strange, but almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don"t look so grieved," she cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, "I am glad you told me all you thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira," she added, trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, "tell Mr. Wallace I give her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don"t you think now we had better go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet again."
She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in the descending path, and held out a hand to her to help her. She gave him her own, and he carried it impetuously to his lips.
"You are n.o.bleness itself!" he cried, from the depths of his heart. "I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer--the most incapable, clumsy idiot."
She smiled, but she could not answer. And in a few more moments voices and steps could be heard approaching, and the scene was over.
CHAPTER VI
The Sunday party separated at Paddington on the night of the Nuneham expedition, and Wallace and Eustace Kendal walked eastward together. The journey home had been very quiet. Miss Bretherton had been forced to declare herself "extremely tired," and Mrs. Stuart"s anxiety and sense of responsibility about her had communicated themselves to the rest of the party.
"It is the effect of my long day yesterday," she said apologetically to Forbes, who hovered about her with those affectionate attentions which a man on the verge of old age pays with freedom to a young girl. "It won"t do to let the public see so much of me in future. But I don"t want to spoil our Sunday. Talk to me, and I shall forget it."
Wallace, who had had his eyes about him when she and Eustace Kendal emerged from the wood in view of the rest of the party, was restless and ill at ease, but there was no getting any information, even by a gesture, from Kendal, who sat in his corner diligently watching the moonlight on the flying fields, or making every now and then some disjointed attempts at conversation with Mrs. Stuart.
At the station Miss Bretherton"s carriage was waiting; the party of gentlemen saw her and Mrs. Stuart, who insisted on taking her home, into it; the pale, smiling face bent forward; she waved her hand in response to the lifted hats, and she was gone.
"Well?" said Wallace, with a world of inquiry in his voice, as he and Kendal turned eastward.
"It has been an unfortunate business," said Kendal abruptly. "I never did a thing worse, I think, or spent a more painful half-hour."
Wallace"s face fell. "I wish I hadn"t bored you with my confounded affairs," he exclaimed. "It was too bad!"
Kendal was inclined to agree inwardly, for he was in a state of irritable reaction; but he had the justice to add aloud, "It was I who was the fool to undertake it. And I think, indeed, it could have been done, but that circ.u.mstances, which neither you nor I had weighed sufficiently, were against it. She is in a nervous, shaken state, mentally and physically, and before I had had time to discuss the point at all, she had carried it on to the personal ground, and the thing was up."
"She is deeply offended, then?"
"Not at all, in the ordinary sense; she is too fine a creature; but she talked of the "contempt" that you and I feel for her!"
"Good heavens!" cried Wallace, feeling most unjustly persuaded that his friend had bungled the matter horribly.
"Yes," said Kendal deliberately; ""contempt," that was it. I don"t know how it came about. All I know is, that what I said, which seemed to me very harmless, was like a match to a mine. But she told me to tell you that she made no further claim on _Elvira_. So the play is safe."
"D---- the play!" cried Wallace vigorously, a sentiment to which perhaps Kendal"s silence gave consent. "But I cannot let it rest there. I must write to her."
"I don"t think I would, if I were you," said Kendal. "I should let it alone. She looks upon the matter as finished. She told me particularly to tell you that she was _not_ vexed, and you may be quite sure that she isn"t, in any vulgar sense. Perhaps that makes it all the worse. However, you"ve a right to know what happened, so I"ll tell you, as far as I remember."
He gave an abridged account of the conversation, which made matters a little clearer, though by no means less uncomfortable, to Wallace. When it was over, they were nearing Vigo Street, the point at which their routes diverged, Wallace having rooms in the Albany, and Kendal hailed a hansom.
"If I were you," he said, as it came up, "I should, as I said before, let the thing alone as much as possible. She will probably speak to you about it, and you will, of course, say what you like, but I"m pretty sure she won"t take up the play again, and if she feels a coolness towards anybody, it won"t be towards you."
"There"s small consolation in that!" exclaimed Wallace.
"Anyhow, make the best of it, my dear fellow," said Kendal, as though determined to strike a lighter key. "Don"t be so dismal, things will look differently to-morrow morning--they generally do--there"s no tremendous harm done. I"m sorry I didn"t do your bidding better. Honestly, when I come to think over it, I don"t see how I could have done otherwise. But I don"t expect you to think so."
Wallace laughed, protested, and they parted.
A few moments later Kendal let himself into his rooms, where lights were burning, and threw himself into his reading-chair, beside which his books and papers stood ready to his hand. Generally, nothing gave him a greater sense of _bien-etre_ than this nightly return, after a day spent in society, to these silent and faithful companions of his life. He was accustomed to feel the atmosphere of his room when he came back to it charged with welcome. It was as though the thoughts and schemes he had left warm and safe in shelter there started to life again after a day"s torpor, and thronged to meet him. His books smiled at him with friendly faces, the open page called to him to resume the work of the morning--he was, in every sense, at home. Tonight, however, the familiar spell seemed to have lost its force. After a hasty supper he took up some proofs, pen in hand. But the first page was hardly turned before they had dropped on to his knee. It seemed to him as if he still felt on his arm the folds of a green, fur-edged cloak, as if the touch of a soft cold hand were still lingering in his. Presently he fell to recalling every detail of the afternoon scene,--the arching beech trees, the rich red and brown of the earth beneath, tinged with the winter sheddings of the trees, the little raised bank, her eyes as she looked up at him, the soft wisps of her golden brown hair under her hat. What superb, unapproachable beauty it was! how living, how rich in content and expression!
"Am I in love with Isabel Bretherton?" he asked himself at last, lying back on his chair with his eyes on the portrait of his sister. "Perhaps Marie could tell me--I don"t understand myself. I don"t think so. And if I were, I am not a youngster, and my life is a tolerably full one. I could hold myself in and trample it down if it were best to do so. I can hardly imagine myself absorbed in a great pa.s.sion. My bachelor life is a good many years old--my habits won"t break up easily. And, supposing I felt the beginnings of it, I could stop it if reason were against it."
He left his chair, and began to pace up and down the room, thinking. "And there is absolutely no sort of reason in my letting myself fall in love with Isabel Bretherton! She has never given me the smallest right to think that she takes any more interest in me than she does in hundreds of people whom she meets on friendly terms, unless it may be an intellectual interest, as Wallace imagines, and that"s a poor sort of stepping-stone to love! And if it were ever possible that she should, this afternoon has taken away the possibility. For, however magnanimous a woman may be, a thing like that rankles: it can"t help it. She will feel the sting of it worse to-morrow than to-day, and, though she will tell herself that she bears no grudge, it will leave a gulf between us. For, of course, she must go on acting, and, whatever depressions she may have, she must believe in herself; no one can go on working without it, and I shall always recall to her something harsh and humiliating!"