"Oh I don"t, to her face."
"Ah only to mine!" laughed Biddy.
"One says that as one says "Rachel" of her great predecessor."
"Except that she isn"t so great, quite yet, is she?"
"Far from it; she"s the freshest of novices--she has scarcely been four months on the stage. But no novice has ever been such an adept. She"ll go very fast," Peter pursued, "and I daresay that before long she"ll be magnificent."
"What a pity you"ll not see that!" Biddy sighed after a pause.
"Not see it?"
"If you"re thousands of miles away."
"It is a pity," Peter said; "and since you mention it I don"t mind frankly telling you--throwing myself on your mercy, as it were--that that"s why I make such a point of a rare occasion like to-night. I"ve a weakness for the drama that, as you perhaps know, I"ve never concealed, and this impression will probably have to last me in some barren spot for many, many years."
"I understand--I understand. I hope therefore it will be charming." And the girl walked faster.
"Just as some other charming impressions will have to last," Peter added, conscious of keeping up with her by some effort. She seemed almost to be running away from him, an impression that led him to suggest, after they had proceeded a little further without more words, that if she were in a hurry they had perhaps better take a cab. Her face was strange and touching to him as she turned it to make answer:
"Oh I"m not in the least in a hurry and I really think I had better walk."
"We"ll walk then by all means!" Peter said with slightly exaggerated gaiety; in pursuance of which they went on a hundred yards. Biddy kept the same pace; yet it was scarcely a surprise to him that she should suddenly stop with the exclamation:
"After all, though I"m not in a hurry I"m tired! I had better have a cab; please call that one," she added, looking about her.
They were in a straight, blank, ugly street, where the small, cheap, grey-faced houses had no expression save that of a rueful, unconsoled acknowledgment of the universal want of ident.i.ty. They would have const.i.tuted a "terrace" if they could, but they had dolefully given it up. Even a hansom that loitered across the end of the vista turned a sceptical back upon it, so that Sherringham had to lift his voice in a loud appeal. He stood with Biddy watching the cab approach them. "This is one of the charming things you"ll remember," she said, turning her eyes to the general dreariness from the particular figure of the vehicle, which was antiquated and clumsy. Before he could reply she had lightly stepped into the cab; but as he answered, "Most a.s.suredly it is," and prepared to follow her she quickly closed the ap.r.o.n.
"I must go alone; you"ve lots of things to do--it"s all right"; and through the aperture in the roof she gave the driver her address. She had spoken with decision, and Peter fully felt now that she wished to get away from him. Her eyes betrayed it, as well as her voice, in a look, a strange, wandering ray that as he stood there with his hand on the cab he had time to take from her. "Good-bye, Peter," she smiled; and as the thing began to rumble away he uttered the same tepid, ridiculous farewell.
XLIV
At the entrance of Miriam and her mother Nick, in the studio, had stopped whistling, but he was still gay enough to receive them with every appearance of warmth. He thought it a poor place, ungarnished, untapestried, a bare, almost grim workshop, with all its revelations and honours still to come. But his visitors smiled on it a good deal in the same way in which they had smiled on Bridget Dormer when they met her at the door: Mrs. Rooth because vague, prudent approbation was the habit of her foolish face--it was ever the least danger; and Miriam because, as seemed, she was genuinely glad to find herself within the walls of which she spoke now as her asylum. She broke out in this strain to her host almost as soon as she had crossed the threshold, commending his circ.u.mstances, his conditions of work, as infinitely happier than her own. He was quiet, independent, absolute, free to do what he liked as he liked it, shut up in his little temple with his altar and his divinity; not hustled about in a mob of people, having to posture and grin to pit and gallery, to square himself at every step with insufferable conventions and with the ignorance and vanity of others. He was blissfully alone.
"Mercy, how you do abuse your fine profession! I"m sure I never urged you to adopt it!" Mrs. Rooth cried, in real bewilderment, to her daughter.
"She was abusing mine still more the other day," joked Nick--"telling me I ought to be ashamed of it and of myself."
"Oh I never know from one moment to the other--I live with my heart in my mouth," sighed the old woman.
"Aren"t you quiet about the great thing--about my personal behaviour?"
Miriam smiled. "My improprieties are all of the mind."
"I don"t know what you _call_ your personal behaviour," her mother objected.
"You would very soon if it were not what it is."
"And I don"t know why you should wish to have it thought you"ve a wicked mind," Mrs. Rooth agreeably grumbled.
"Yes, but I don"t see very well how I can make you understand that. At any rate," Miriam pursued with her grand eyes on Nick, "I retract what I said the other day about Mr. Dormer. I"ve no wish to quarrel with him on the way he has determined to dispose of his life, because after all it does suit me very well. It rests me, this little devoted corner; oh it rests me! It"s out of the row and the dust, it"s deliciously still and they can"t get at me. Ah when art"s like this, _a la bonne heure_!" And she looked round on such a presentment of "art" in a splendid way that produced amus.e.m.e.nt on the young man"s part at its contrast with the humble fact. Miriam shone upon him as if she liked to be the cause of his mirth and went on appealing to him: "You"ll always let me come here for an hour, won"t you, to take breath--to let the whirlwind pa.s.s? You needn"t trouble yourself about me; I don"t mean to impose on you in the least the necessity of painting me, though if that"s a manner of helping you to get on you may be sure it will always be open to you. Do what you like with me in that respect; only let me sit here on a high stool, keeping well out of your way, and see what you happen to be doing. I"ll tell you my own adventures when you want to hear them."
"The fewer adventures you have to tell the better, my dear," said Mrs.
Rooth; "and if Mr. Dormer keeps you quiet he"ll add ten years to my life."
"It all makes an interesting comment on Mr. Dormer"s own quietness, on his independence and sweet solitude," Nick observed. "Miss Rooth has to work with others, which is after all only what Mr. Dormer has to do when he works with Miss Rooth. What do you make of the inevitable sitter?"
"Oh," answered Miriam, "you can say to the inevitable sitter, "Hold your tongue, you brute!""
"Isn"t it a good deal in that manner that I"ve heard you address your comrades at the theatre?" Mrs. Rooth inquired. "That"s why my heart"s in my mouth."
"Yes, but they hit me back; they reply to me--_comme de raison_--as I should never think of replying to Mr. Dormer. It"s a great advantage to him that when he"s peremptory with his model it only makes her better, adds to her expression of gloomy grandeur."
"We did the gloomy grandeur in the other picture: suppose therefore we try something different in this," Nick threw off.
"It _is_ serious, it _is_ grand," murmured Mrs. Rooth, who had taken up a rapt att.i.tude before the portrait of her daughter. "It makes one wonder what she"s thinking of. Beautiful, commendable things--that"s what it seems to say."
"What can I be thinking of but the tremendous wisdom of my mother?"
Miriam returned. "I brought her this morning to see that thing--she had only seen it in its earliest stage--and not to presume to advise you about anything else you may be so good as to embark on. She wanted, or professed she wanted, terribly to know what you had finally arrived at.
She was too impatient to wait till you should send it home."
"Ah send it home--send it home; let us have it always with us!" Mrs.
Rooth engagingly said. "It will keep us up, up, and up on the heights, near the stars--be always for us a symbol and a reminder!"
"You see I was right," Miriam went on; "for she appreciates thoroughly, in her own way, and almost understands. But if she worries or distracts you I"ll send her directly home--I"ve kept the carriage there on purpose. I must add that I don"t feel quite safe to-day in letting her out of my sight. She"s liable to make dashes at the theatre and play unconscionable tricks there. I shall never again accuse mamma of a want of interest in my profession. Her interest to-day exceeds even my own.
She"s all over the place and she has ideas--ah but ideas! She"s capable of turning up at the theatre at five o"clock this afternoon to demand the repainting of the set in the third act. For myself I"ve not a word more to say on the subject--I"ve accepted every danger, I"ve swallowed my fate. Everything"s no doubt wrong, but nothing can possibly be right.
Let us eat and drink, for to-night we die. If you say so mamma shall go and sit in the carriage, and as there"s no means of fastening the doors (is there?) your servant shall keep guard over her."
"Just as you are now--be so good as to remain so; sitting just that way--leaning back with a smile in your eyes and one hand on the sofa beside you and supporting you a little. I shall stick a flower into the other hand--let it lie in your lap just as it is. Keep that thing on your head--it"s admirably uncovered: do you call such an unconsidered trifle a bonnet?--and let your head fall back a little. There it is--it"s found. This time I shall really do something, and it will be as different as you like from that other crazy job. Here we go!" It was in these irrelevant but earnest words that Nick responded to his sitter"s uttered vagaries, of which her charming tone and countenance diminished the superficial acerbity. He held up his hands a moment, to fix her in her limits, and in a few minutes had a happy sense of having begun to work.
"The smile in her eyes--don"t forget the smile in her eyes!" Mrs. Rooth softly chanted, turning away and creeping about the room. "That will make it so different from the other picture and show the two sides of her genius, the wonderful range between them. They"ll be splendid mates, and though I daresay I shall strike you as greedy you must let me hope you"ll send this one home too."
She explored the place discreetly and on tiptoe, talking twaddle as she went and bending her head and her eyegla.s.s over various objects with an air of imperfect comprehension that didn"t prevent Nick"s private recall of the story of her underhand, commercial habits told by Gabriel Nash at the exhibition in Paris the first time her name had fallen on his ear. A queer old woman from whom, if you approached her in the right way, you could buy old pots--it was in this character that she had originally been introduced to him. He had lost sight of it afterwards, but it revived again as his observant eyes, at the same time that they followed his active hand, became aware of her instinctive, appraising gestures.
There was a moment when he frankly laughed out--there was so little in his poor studio to appraise. Mrs. Rooth"s wandering eyegla.s.s and vague, polite, disappointed, bent back and head made a subject for a sketch on the instant: they gave such a sudden pictorial glimpse of the element of race. He found himself seeing the immemorial Jewess in her hold up a candle in a crammed back shop. There was no candle indeed and his studio was not crammed, and it had never occurred to him before that she was a grand-daughter of Israel save on the general theory, so stoutly held by several clever people, that few of us are not under suspicion. The late Rudolf Roth had at least been, and his daughter was visibly her father"s child; so that, flanked by such a pair, good Semitic presumptions sufficiently crowned the mother. Receiving Miriam"s sharp, satiric shower without shaking her shoulders she might at any rate have been the descendant of a tribe long persecuted. Her blandness was beyond all baiting; she professed she could be as still as a mouse. Miriam, on the other side of the room, in the tranquil beauty of her att.i.tude--"found"
indeed, as Nick had said--watched her a little and then declared she had best have been locked up at home. Putting aside her free account of the dangers to which her mother exposed her, it wasn"t whimsical to imagine that within the limits of that repose from which the Neville-Nugents never wholly departed the elder lady might indeed be a trifle fidgety and have something on her mind. Nick presently mentioned that it wouldn"t be possible for him to "send home" his second performance; and he added, in the exuberance of having already got a little into relation with his work, that perhaps this didn"t matter, inasmuch as--if Miriam would give him his time, to say nothing of her own--a third and a fourth masterpiece might also some day very well struggle into the light. His model rose to this without conditions, a.s.suring him he might count upon her till she grew too old and too ugly and that nothing would make her so happy as that he should paint her as often as Romney had painted the celebrated Lady Hamilton. "Ah Lady Hamilton!" deprecated Mrs. Rooth; while Miriam, who had on occasion the candour of a fine acquisitiveness, wished to know what particular reason there might be for his not letting them have the picture he was now beginning.
"Why I"ve promised it to Peter Sherringham--he has offered me money for it," Nick replied. "However, he"s welcome to it for nothing, poor chap, and I shall be delighted to do the best I can for him."
Mrs. Rooth, still prowling, stopped in the middle of the room at this, while her daughter echoed: "He offered you money--just as we came in?"
"You met him then at the door with my sister? I supposed you had--he"s taking her home," Nick explained.
"Your sister"s a lovely girl--such an aristocratic type!" breathed Mrs.
Rooth. Then she added: "I"ve a tremendous confession to make to you."