Biddy was wistful still. "Is it the famous Honorine Carre, the great celebrity?"
"Honorine in person: the incomparable, the perfect!" said Peter Sherringham. "The first artist of our time, taking her altogether. She and I are old pals; she has been so good as to come and "say"
things--which she does sometimes still _dans le monde_ as no one else _can_--- in my rooms."
"Make her come then. We can go _there_!"
"One of these days!"
"And the young lady--Miriam, Maud, Gladys--make her come too."
Sherringham looked at Nash and the latter was bland. "Oh you"ll have no difficulty. She"ll jump at it!"
"Very good. I"ll give a little artistic tea--with Julia too of course.
And you must come, Mr. Nash." This gentleman promised with an inclination, and Peter continued: "But if, as you say, you"re not for helping the young lady, how came you to arrange this interview with the great model?"
"Precisely to stop her short. The great model will find her very bad.
Her judgements, as you probably know, are Rhadamanthine."
"Unfortunate creature!" said Biddy. "I think you"re cruel."
"Never mind--I"ll look after them," Sherringham laughed.
"And how can Madame Carre judge if the girl recites English?"
"She"s so intelligent that she could judge if she recited Chinese,"
Peter declared.
"That"s true, but the _jeune Anglaise_ recites also in French," said Gabriel Nash.
"Then she isn"t stupid."
"And in Italian, and in several more tongues, for aught I know."
Sherringham was visibly interested. "Very good--we"ll put her through them all."
"She must be _most_ clever," Biddy went on yearningly.
"She has spent her life on the Continent; she has wandered about with her mother; she has picked up things."
"And is she a lady?" Biddy asked.
"Oh tremendous! The great ones of the earth on the mother"s side. On the father"s, on the other hand, I imagine, only a Jew stockbroker in the City."
"Then they"re rich--or ought to be," Sherringham suggested.
"Ought to be--ah there"s the bitterness! The stockbroker had too short a go--he was carried off in his flower. However, he left his wife a certain property, which she appears to have muddled away, not having the safeguard of being herself a Hebrew. This is what she has lived on till to-day--this and another resource. Her husband, as she has often told me, had the artistic temperament: that"s common, as you know, among _ces messieurs_. He made the most of his little opportunities and collected various pictures, tapestries, enamels, porcelains, and similar gewgaws.
He parted with them also, I gather, at a profit; in short he carried on a neat little business as a _brocanteur_. It was nipped in the bud, but Mrs. Rooth was left with a certain number of these articles in her hands; indeed they must have formed her only capital. She was not a woman of business; she turned them, no doubt, to indifferent account; but she sold them piece by piece, and they kept her going while her daughter grew up. It was to this precarious traffic, conducted with extraordinary mystery and delicacy, that, five years ago, in Florence, I was indebted for my acquaintance with her. In those days I used to collect--heaven help me!--I used to pick up rubbish which I could ill afford. It was a little phase--we have our little phases, haven"t we?"
Mr. Nash asked with childlike trust--"and I"ve come out on the other side. Mrs. Rooth had an old green pot and I heard of her old green pot.
To hear of it was to long for it, so that I went to see it under cover of night. I bought it and a couple of years ago I overturned and smashed it. It was the last of the little phase. It was not, however, as you"ve seen, the last of Mrs. Rooth. I met her afterwards in London, and I found her a year or two ago in Venice. She appears to be a great wanderer. She had other old pots, of other colours, red, yellow, black, or blue--she could produce them of any complexion you liked. I don"t know whether she carried them about with her or whether she had little secret stores in the princ.i.p.al cities of Europe. To-day at any rate they seem all gone. On the other hand she has her daughter, who has grown up and who"s a precious vase of another kind--less fragile I hope than the rest. May she not be overturned and smashed!"
Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: "A Jewish stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry--for a person who was well born! I daresay he was a German."
"His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it up, has put in another _o_," Sherringham ingeniously suggested.
"You"re both very clever," said Gabriel, "and Rudolf Roth, as I happen to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour"s papa. But so far as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as starve--for what connexion is _not_ a misalliance when one happens to have the unaccommodating, the crushing honour of being a Neville-Nugent of Castle Nugent? That"s the high lineage of Maud"s mamma. I seem to have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had profited by his lessons. If his daughter"s like him--and she"s not like her mother--he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly to reconstruct the situation."
A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors.
Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and having caught the name of a n.o.ble residence she inquired: "Castle Nugent--where in the world"s that?"
"It"s a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!"
Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren"t sure a liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her "order," and while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions--"It must be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir"--Peter Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a short time before a.s.signed a low place to the dramatic art and had not yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre.
Which gave the speaker a further chance. "I don"t know that I understand your question; there are different ways of taking it. Do I think it"s important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don"t know what to do with their evening. It"s a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How _can_ it be--so poor, so limited a form?"
"Upon my honour it strikes me as rich and various! Do _you_ think it"s a poor and limited form, Nick?" Sherringham added, appealing to his kinsman.
"I think whatever Nash thinks. I"ve no opinion to-day but his."
This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn"t used to such responsibilities--so few people had ever tested his presence of mind by agreeing with him. "Oh I used to be of your way of feeling,"
Nash went on to Sherringham. "I understand you perfectly. It"s a phase like another. I"ve been through it--_j"ai ete comme ca._"
"And you went then very often to the Theatre Francais, and it was there I saw you. I place you now."
"I"m afraid I noticed none of the other spectators," Nash explained. "I had no attention but for the great Carre--she was still on the stage.
Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn"t rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips."
"That"s just what _I_ told her," Sherringham returned.
"She was very kind to me. She said: "_Vous me rendez des forces_.""
"That"s just what she said to me!"
"And we"ve remained very good friends."
"So have we!" laughed Sherringham. "And such perfect art as hers--do you mean to say you don"t consider _that_ important, such a rare dramatic intelligence?"
"I"m afraid you read the _feuilletons_. You catch their phrases"--Nash spoke with pity. "Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing"s more common."
"Then why have we so many shocking actors?"
"Have we? I thought they were mostly good; succeeding more easily and more completely in that business than in anything else. What could they do--those people generally--if they didn"t do that poor thing? And reflect that the poor thing enables them to succeed! Of course, always, there are numbers of people on the stage who are no actors at all, for it"s even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and vulgar than to bring down the house."
"It"s not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic effect," Sherringham declared; "and those the actor produces are among the most momentous we know. You"ll not persuade me that to watch such an actress as Madame Carre wasn"t an education of the taste, an enlargement of one"s knowledge."
"She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coa.r.s.ening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is restricted to so poor an a.n.a.lysis."
"I know the complaint. It"s all the fashion now. The _raffines_ despise the theatre," said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. "_Connu, connu_!"
"It will be known better yet, won"t it? when the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been properly a.n.a.lysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering ma.s.s, disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor, wishing to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o"clock.