Taken in connection with the evening before, the day formed for our friend the most complete exhibition of his young woman he had yet enjoyed. He had been at the theatre, to which the Sat.u.r.day night happened to have brought the very fullest house she had played to, and he came early to Balaklava Place, to tell her once again--he had told her half-a-dozen times the evening before--that with the excitement of her biggest audience she had surpa.s.sed herself, acted with remarkable intensity. It pleased her to hear this, and the spirit with which she interpreted the signs of the future and, during an hour he spent alone with her, Mrs. Rooth being upstairs and Basil Dashwood luckily absent, treated him to twenty specimens of feigned pa.s.sion and character, was beyond any natural abundance he had yet seen in a woman. The impression could scarcely have been other if she had been playing wild s.n.a.t.c.hes to him at the piano: the bright up-darting flame of her talk rose and fell like an improvisation on the keys. Later, the rest of the day, he could as little miss the good grace with which she fraternised with her visitors, finding always the fair word for each--the key to a common ease, the right turn to keep vanity quiet and make humility brave. It was a wonderful expenditure of generous, nervous life. But what he read in it above all was the sense of success in youth, with the future loose and big, and the action of that charm on the faculties. Miriam"s limited past had yet pinched her enough to make emanc.i.p.ation sweet, and the emanc.i.p.ation had come at last in an hour. She had stepped into her magic shoes, divined and appropriated everything they could help her to, become in a day a really original contemporary. He was of course not less conscious of that than Nick Dormer had been when in the cold light of his studio this more detached observer saw too how she had altered.
But the great thing to his mind, and during these first days the irresistible seduction of the theatre, was that she was a rare revelation of beauty. Beauty was the principle of everything she did and of the way she unerringly did it--an exquisite harmony of line and motion and att.i.tude and tone, what was at once most general and most special in her performance. Accidents and instincts played together to this end and const.i.tuted something that was independent of her talent or of her merit in a given case, and which as a value to Peter"s imagination was far superior to any merit and any talent. He could but call it a felicity and an importance incalculable, and but know that it connected itself with universal values. To see this force in operation, to sit within its radius and feel it shift and revolve and change and never fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the bewilderment of life. It transported our troubled friend from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something that had no warrant but its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the remote, the antique. It was what most made him say to himself "Oh hang it, what does it matter?" when he reflected that an _homme serieux_, as they said in Paris, rather gave himself away, as they said in America, by going every night to the same sordid stall at which all the world might stare. It was what kept him from doing anything but hover round Miriam--kept him from paying any other visits, from attending to any business, from going back to Calcutta Gardens. It was a spell he shrank intensely from breaking and the cause of a hundred postponements, confusions, and absurdities. It put him in a false position altogether, but it made of the crooked little stucco villa in Saint John"s Wood a place in the upper air, commanding the prospect; a nest of winged liberties and ironies far aloft above the huddled town. One should live at alt.i.tudes when one could--they braced and simplified; and for a happy interval he never touched the earth.
It was not that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him down--an abas.e.m.e.nt from which he escaped only because he was up so high.
We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times as a chunk of wood tied to his ankle--this through the circ.u.mstance that he made Miriam"s famous conditions, those of the public exhibition of her genius, seem small and prosaic; so that Peter had to remind himself how much this smallness was perhaps involved in their being at all. She carried his imagination off into infinite s.p.a.ces, whereas she carried Dashwood"s only into the box-office and the revival of plays that were barbarously bad. The worst was its being so open to him to see that a sharp young man really in the business might know better than he.
Another vessel of superior knowledge--he talked, that is, as if he knew better than any one--was Gabriel Nash, who lacked no leisure for hatefully haunting Balaklava Place, or in other words appeared to enjoy the same command of his time as Peter Sherringham. The pilgrim from Paris regarded him with mingled feelings, for he had not forgotten the contentious character of their first meeting or the degree to which he had been moved to urge upon Nick Dormer"s consideration that his talkative friend was probably one of the most eminent of a.s.ses. This personage turned up now as an admirer of the charming creature he had scoffed at, and there was much to exasperate in the smooth gloss of his inconsistency, at which he never cast an embarra.s.sed glance. He practised indeed such loose license of regard to every question that it was difficult, in vulgar parlance, to "have" him; his sympathies hummed about like bees in a garden, with no visible plan, no economy in their flight. He thought meanly of the modern theatre and yet had discovered a fund of satisfaction in the most promising of its exponents; and Peter could more than once but say to him that he should really, to keep his opinions at all in hand, attach more value to the stage or less to the interesting a tress. Miriam took her perfect ease at his expense and treated him as the most abject of her slaves: all of which was worth seeing as an exhibition, on Nash"s part, of the beautifully imperturbable. When Peter all too grossly p.r.o.nounced him "d.a.m.ned"
impudent he always felt guilty later on of an injustice--Nash had so little the air of a man with something to gain. He was aware nevertheless of a certain itching in his boot-toe when his fellow-visitor brought out, and for the most part to Miriam herself, in answer to any charge of tergiversation, "Oh it"s all right; it"s the voice, you know--the enchanting voice!" Nash meant by this, as indeed he more fully set forth, that he came to the theatre or to the villa simply to treat his ear to the sound--the richest then to be heard on earth, as he maintained--issuing from Miriam"s lips. Its richness was quite independent of the words she might p.r.o.nounce or the poor fable they might subserve, and if the pleasure of hearing her in public was the greater by reason of the larger volume of her utterance it was still highly agreeable to see her at home, for it was there the strictly mimetic gift he freely conceded to her came out most. He spoke as if she had been formed by the bounty of nature to be his particular recreation, and as if, being an expert in innocent joys, he took his pleasure wherever he found it.
He was perpetually in the field, sociable, amiable, communicative, inveterately contradicted but never confounded, ready to talk to any one about anything and making disagreement--of which he left the responsibility wholly to others--a basis of harmony. Every one knew what he thought of the theatrical profession, and yet who could say he didn"t regard, its members as embodiments of comedy when he touched with such a hand the spring of their foibles?--touched it with an art that made even Peter laugh, notwithstanding his att.i.tude of reserve where this interloper was concerned. At any rate, though he had committed himself as to their general fatuity he put up with their company, for the sake of Miriam"s vocal vibrations, with a practical philosophy that was all his own. And she frankly took him for her supreme, her incorrigible adorer, masquerading as a critic to save his vanity and tolerated for his secret constancy in spite of being a bore. He was meanwhile really not a bore to Peter, who failed of the luxury of being able to regard him as one. He had seen too many strange countries and curious things, observed and explored too much, to be void of ill.u.s.tration. Peter had a sense that if he himself was in the _grandes es.p.a.ces_ Gabriel had probably, as a finer critic, a still wider range. If among Miriam"s a.s.sociates Mr. Dashwood dragged him down, the other main sharer of his privilege challenged him rather to higher and more fantastic flights. If he saw the girl in larger relations than the young actor, who mainly saw her in ill-written parts, Nash went a step further and regarded her, irresponsibly and sublimely, as a priestess of harmony, a figure with which the vulgar ideas of success and failure had nothing to do. He laughed at her "parts," holding that without them she would still be great. Peter envied him his power to content himself with the pleasures he could get; Peter had a shrewd impression that contentment wouldn"t be the final sweetener of his own repast.
Above all Nash held his attention by a constant element of easy reference to Nick Dormer, who, as we know, had suddenly become much more interesting to his kinsman. Peter found food for observation, and in some measure for perplexity, in the relations of all these clever people with each other. He knew why his sister, who had a personal impatience of unapplied ideas, had not been agreeably affected by Miriam"s prime patron and had not felt happy about the attribution of value to "such people" by the man she was to marry. This was a side on which he had no desire to resemble Julia, for he needed no teaching to divine that Nash must have found her accessible to no light--none even about himself. He, Peter, would have been sorry to have to confess he couldn"t more or less understand him. He understood furthermore that Miriam, in Nick"s studio, might very well have appeared to Julia a formidable force. She was younger and would have "seen nothing," but she had quite as much her own resources and was beautiful enough to have made Nick compare her with the lady of Harsh even if he had been in love with that benefactress--a pretension as to which her brother, as we know, entertained doubts.
Peter at all events saw for many days nothing of his cousin, though it might have been said that Nick partic.i.p.ated by implication at least in the life of Balaklava Place. Had he given Julia tangible grounds and was his unexpectedly fine rendering of Miriam an act of virtual infidelity?
In that case to what degree was the girl to be regarded as an accomplice in his defection, and what was the real nature of Miriam"s esteem for her new and (as he might be called) distinguished ally? These questions would have given Peter still more to think about had he not flattered himself he had made up his mind that they concerned Nick and his sitter herself infinitely more than they concerned any one else. That young lady meanwhile was personally before him, so that he had no need to consult for his pleasure his fresh recollection of the portrait. But he thought of this striking production each time he thought of his so good-looking kinsman"s variety of range. And that happened often, for in his hearing Miriam often discussed the happy artist and his possibilities with Gabriel Nash, and Nash broke out about them to all who might hear. Her own tone on the subject was uniform: she kept it on record to a degree slightly irritating that Mr. Dormer had been unforgettably--Peter particularly noted "unforgettably"--kind to her.
She never mentioned Julia"s irruption to Julia"s brother; she only referred to the portrait, with inscrutable amenity, as a direct consequence of this gentleman"s fortunate suggestion that first day at Madame Carre"s. Nash showed, however, such a disposition to dwell sociably and luminously on the peculiarly interesting character of what he called Dormer"s predicament and on the fine suspense it was fitted to kindle in the breast of the truly discerning, that Peter wondered, as I have already hinted, if this insistence were not a subtle perversity, a devilish little invention to torment a man whose jealousy was presumable. Yet his fellow-pilgrim struck him as on the whole but scantly devilish and as still less occupied with the prefigurement of so plain a man"s emotions. Indeed he threw a glamour of romance over Nick; tossed off toward him such illuminating yet mystifying references that they operated quite as a bait to curiosity, invested with amus.e.m.e.nt the view of the possible, any wish to follow out the chain of events. He learned from Gabriel that Nick was still away, and he then felt he could almost submit to instruction, to initiation. The loose charm of these days was troubled, however--it ceased to be idyllic--when late on the evening of the second Sunday he walked away with Nash southward from Saint John"s Wood. For then something came out.
BOOK SIX
x.x.xII
It mattered not so much what the doctors thought--and Sir Matthew Hope, the greatest of them all, had been down twice in one week--as that Mr.
Chayter, the omniscient butler, declared with all the authority of his position and his experience that Mr. Carteret was very bad indeed. Nick Dormer had a long talk with him--it lasted six minutes--the day he hurried to Beauclere in response to a telegram. It was Mr. Chayter who had taken upon himself to telegraph in spite of the presence in the house of Mr. Carteret"s nearest relation and only surviving sister, Mrs.
Lendon. This lady, a large, mild, healthy woman with a heavy tread, a person who preferred early breakfasts, uncomfortable chairs and the advertis.e.m.e.nt-sheet of the _Times_, had arrived the week before and was awaiting the turn of events. She was a widow and occupied in Cornwall a house nine miles from a station, which had, to make up for this inconvenience as she had once told Nick, a fine old herbaceous garden.
She was extremely fond of an herbaceous garden--her main consciousness was of herbaceous possibilities. Nick had often seen her--she had always come to Beauclere once or twice a year. Her sojourn there made no great difference; she was only an "Urania dear" for Mr. Carteret to look across the table at when, on the close of dinner, it was time for her to retire. She went out of the room always as if it were after some one else; and on the gentlemen"s "joining" her later--the junction was not very close--she received them with an air of gratified surprise.
Chayter honoured Nick with a regard which approached, though not improperly competing with it, the affection his master had placed on the same young head, and Chayter knew a good many things. Among them he knew his place; but it was wonderful how little that knowledge had rendered him inaccessible to other kinds. He took upon himself to send for Nick without speaking to Mrs. Lendon, whose influence was now a good deal like that of some large occasional piece of furniture introduced on a contingency. She was one of the solid conveniences that a comfortable house would have, but you couldn"t talk with a mahogany sofa or a folding screen. Chayter knew how much she had "had" from her brother, and how much her two daughters had each received on marriage; and he was of the opinion that it was quite enough, especially considering the society in which they--you could scarcely call it--moved. He knew beyond this that they would all have more, and that was why he hesitated little about communicating with Nick. If Mrs. Lendon should be ruffled at the intrusion of a young man who neither was the child of a cousin nor had been formally adopted, Chayter was parliamentary enough to see that the forms of debate were observed. He had indeed a slightly compa.s.sionate sense that Mrs. Lendon was not easily ruffled. She was always down an extraordinary time before breakfast--Chayter refused to take it as in the least admonitory--but usually went straight into the garden as if to see that none of the plants had been stolen in the night, and had in the end to be looked for by the footman in some out-of-the-way spot behind the shrubbery, where, plumped upon the ground, she was mostly doing something "rum" to a flower.
Mr. Carteret himself had expressed no wishes. He slept most of the time--his failure at the last had been sudden, but he was rheumatic and seventy-seven--and the situation was in Chayter"s hands. Sir Matthew Hope had opined even on a second visit that he would rally and go on, in rudimentary comfort, some time longer; but Chayter took a different and a still more intimate view. Nick was embarra.s.sed: he scarcely knew what he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs.
Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master was most accessible.
It was judged best that for the first day Nick should not be introduced into the darkened room. This was the decision of the two decorous nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested the barmaid emulating the nun. He was depressed and restless, felt himself in a false position, and thought it lucky Mrs. Lendon had powers of placid acceptance. They were old acquaintances: she treated him formally, anxiously, but it was not the rigour of mistrust. It was much more an expression of remote Cornish respect for young abilities and distinguished connexions, inasmuch as she asked him rather yearningly about Lady Agnes and about Lady Flora and Lady Elizabeth. He knew she was kind and ungrudging, and his main regret was for his meagre knowledge and poor responses in regard to his large blank aunts. He sat in the garden with newspapers and looked at the lowered blinds in Mr.
Carteret"s windows; he wandered round the abbey with cigarettes and lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing everything might be over. He would have liked much to see Mr. Carteret again, but had no desire that Mr. Carteret should see him. In the evening he dined with Mrs. Lendon, and she talked to him at his request and as much as she could about her brother"s early years, his beginnings of life. She was so much younger that they appeared to have been rather a tradition of her own youth; but her talk made Nick feel how tremendously different Mr. Carteret had been at that period from what he, Nick, was to-day. He had published at the age of thirty a little volume, thought at the time wonderfully clever, called _The Incidence of Rates_; but Nick had not yet collected the material for any such treatise. After dinner Mrs. Lendon, who was in merciless full dress, retired to the drawing-room, where at the end of ten minutes she was followed by Nick, who had remained behind only because he thought Chayter would expect it. Mrs. Lendon almost shook hands with him again and then Chayter brought in coffee. Almost in no time afterwards he brought in tea, and the occupants of the drawing-room sat for a slow half-hour, during which the lady looked round at the apartment with a sigh and said: "Don"t you think poor Charles had exquisite taste?"
Fortunately the "local man" was at this moment ushered in. He had been upstairs and he smiled himself in with the remark: "It"s quite wonderful, quite wonderful." What was wonderful was a marked improvement in the breathing, a distinct indication of revival. The doctor had some tea and chatted for a quarter of an hour in a way that showed what a "good" manner and how large an experience a local man could have. When he retired Nick walked out with him. The doctor"s house was near by and he had come on foot. He left the visitor with the a.s.surance that in all probability Mr. Carteret, who was certainly picking up, would be able to see him on the morrow. Our young man turned his steps again to the abbey and took a stroll about it in the starlight. It never looked so huge as when it reared itself into the night, and Nick had never felt more fond of it than on this occasion, more comforted and confirmed by its beauty.
When he came back he was readmitted by Chayter, who surveyed him in respectful deprecation of the frivolity which had led him to attempt to help himself through such an evening in such a way.
He went to bed early and slept badly, which was unusual with him; but it was a pleasure to him to be told almost as soon as he appeared that Mr.
Carteret had asked for him. He went in to see him and was struck with the change in his appearance. He had, however, spent a day with him just after the New Year and another at the beginning of March, and had then noted in him the menace of the final weakness. A week after Julia Dallow"s departure for the Continent he had again devoted several hours to the place and to the intention of telling his old friend how the happy event had been brought to naught--the advantage he had been so good as to desire for him and to make the condition of a splendid gift.
Before this, for a few days, he had been keeping back, to announce it personally, the good news that Julia had at last set their situation in order: he wanted to enjoy the old man"s pleasure--so sore a trial had her arbitrary behaviour been for a year. If she had offered Mr. Carteret a conciliatory visit before Christmas, had come down from London one day to lunch with him, this had but contributed to make him subsequently exhibit to poor Nick, as the victim of her elegant perversity, a great deal of earnest commiseration in a jocose form. Upon his honour, as he said, she was as clever and "specious" a woman--this was his odd expression--as he had ever seen in his life. The merit of her behaviour on that occasion, as Nick knew, was that she had not been specious at her lover"s expense: she had breathed no doubt of his public purpose and had had the strange grace to say that in truth she was older than he, so that it was only fair to give his affections time to mature. But when Nick saw their hopeful host after the rupture at which we have been present he found him in no state to deal with worries: he was seriously ailing, it was the beginning of worse things and not a time to put his attention to the stretch. After this excursion Nick had gone back to town saddened by his patient"s now unmistakably settled decline, but rather relieved that he had had himself to make no confession. It had even occurred to him that the need for making one at all might never come up. Certainly it wouldn"t if the ebb of Mr. Carteret"s strength should continue unchecked. He might pa.s.s away in the persuasion that everything would happen as he wished it, though indeed without enriching Nick on his wedding-day to the tune he had promised. Very likely he had made legal arrangements in virtue of which his bounty would take effect in case of the right event and in that case alone. At present Nick had a bigger, an uglier truth to tell--the last three days had made the difference; but, oddly enough, though his responsibility had increased his reluctance to speak had vanished: he was positively eager to clear up a situation over which it was not consistent with his honour to leave a shade.
The doctor had been right on coming in after dinner; it was clear in the morning that they had not seen the last of Mr. Carteret"s power of picking up. Chayter, who had waited on him, refused austerely to change his opinion with every change in his master"s temperature; but the nurses took the cheering view that it would do their charge good for Mr.
Dormer to sit with him a little. One of them remained in the room in the deep window-seat, and Nick spent twenty minutes by the bedside. It was not a case for much conversation, but his helpless host seemed still to like to look at him. There was life in his kind old eyes, a stir of something that would express itself yet in some further wise provision.
He laid his liberal hand on Nick"s with a confidence that showed how little it was really disabled. He said very little, and the nurse had recommended that the visitor himself should not overflow in speech; but from time to time he murmured with a faint smile: "To-night"s division, you know--you mustn"t miss it." There was probably to be no division that night, as happened, but even Mr. Carteret"s aberrations were parliamentary. Before Nick withdrew he had been able to a.s.sure him he was rapidly getting better and that such valuable hours, the young man"s own, mustn"t be wasted. "Come back on Friday if they come to the second reading." These were the words with which Nick was dismissed, and at noon the doctor said the invalid was doing very well, but that Nick had better leave him quiet for that day. Our young man accordingly determined to go up to town for the night, and even, should he receive no summons, for the next day. He arranged with Chayter that he should be telegraphed to if Mr. Carteret were either better or worse.
"Oh he can"t very well be worse, sir," Chayter replied inexorably; but he relaxed so far as to remark that of course it wouldn"t do for Nick to neglect the House.
"Oh the House!"--Nick was ambiguous and avoided the butler"s eye. It would be easy enough to tell Mr. Carteret, but nothing would have sustained him in the effort to make a clean breast to Chayter.
He might equivocate about the House, but he had the sense of things to be done awaiting him in London. He telegraphed to his servant and spent that night in Rosedale Road. The things to be done were apparently to be done in his studio: his servant met him there with a large bundle of letters. He failed that evening to stray within two miles of Westminster, and the legislature of his country rea.s.sembled without his support. The next morning he received a telegram from Chayter, to whom he had given Rosedale Road as an address. This missive simply informed him that Mr. Carteret wished to see him; it seemed a sign that he was better, though Chayter wouldn"t say so. Nick again accordingly took his place in the train to Beauclere. He had been there very often, but it was present to him that now, after a little, he should go only once more--for a particular dismal occasion. All that was over, everything that belonged to it was over. He learned on his arrival--he saw Mrs.
Lendon immediately--that his old friend had continued to pick up. He had expressed a strong and a perfectly rational desire to talk with his expected visitor, and the doctor had said that if it was about anything important they should forbear to oppose him. "He says it"s about something very important," Mrs. Lendon remarked, resting shy eyes on him while she added that she herself was now sitting with her dear brother.
She had sent those wonderful young ladies out to see the abbey. Nick paused with her outside Mr. Carteret"s door. He wanted to say something rather intimate and all soothing to her in return for her homely charity--give her a hint, for which she was far from looking, that practically he had now no interest in her brother"s estate. This was of course impossible; her lack of irony, of play of mind, gave him no pretext, and such a reference would be an insult to her simple discretion. She was either not thinking of his interest at all, or was thinking of it with the tolerance of a nature trained to a hundred decent submissions. Nick looked a little into her mild, uninvestigating eyes, and it came over him supremely that the goodness of these people was singularly pure: they were a part of what was cleanest and sanest and dullest in humanity. There had been just a little mocking inflexion in Mrs. Lendon"s pleasant voice; but it was dedicated to the young ladies in the black uniforms--she could perhaps be humorous about _them_--and not to the theory of the "importance" of Nick"s interview with her brother. His arrested desire to let her know he was not greedy translated itself into a vague friendliness and into the abrupt, rather bewildering words: "I can"t tell you half the good I think of you." As he pa.s.sed into Mr. Carteret"s room it occurred to him that she would perhaps interpret this speech as an acknowledgment of obligation--of her good nature in not keeping him away from the rich old man.
x.x.xIII
The rich old man was propped up on pillows, and in this att.i.tude, beneath the high, spare canopy of his bed, presented himself to Nick"s picture-seeking vision as a figure in a clever composition or a "story."
He had gathered strength, though this strength was not much in his voice; it was mainly in his brighter eyes and his air of being pleased with himself. He put out his hand and said, "I daresay you know why I sent for you"; on which Nick sank into the seat he had occupied the day before, replying that he had been delighted to come, whatever the reason. Mr. Carteret said nothing more about the division or the second reading; he only murmured that they were keeping the newspapers for him.
"I"m rather behind--I"m rather behind," he went on; "but two or three quiet mornings will make it all right. You can go back to-night, you know--you can easily go back." This was the only thing not quite straight that Nick found in him--his making light of his young friend"s flying to and fro. The young friend sat looking at him with a sense that was half compunction and half the idea of the rare beauty of his face, to which, strangely, the waste of illness now seemed to have restored something of its youth. Mr. Carteret was evidently conscious that this morning he shouldn"t be able to go on long, so that he must be practical and concise. "I daresay you know--you"ve only to remember," he continued.
"I needn"t tell you what a pleasure it is to me to see you--there can be no better reason than that," was what Nick could say.
"Hasn"t the year come round--the year of that foolish arrangement?"
Nick thought a little, asking himself if it were really necessary to disturb his companion"s earnest faith. Then the consciousness of the falsity of his own position surged over him again and he replied: "Do you mean the period for which Mrs. Dallow insisted on keeping me dangling? Oh _that"s_ over!" he almost gaily brought out.
"And are you married--has it come off?" the old man asked eagerly. "How long have I been ill?"
"We"re uncomfortable, unreasonable people, not deserving of your interest. We"re not married," Nick said.
"Then I haven"t been ill so long?" his host quavered with vague relief.
"Not very long--but things _are_ different," he went on.
The old man"s eyes rested on his--he noted how much larger they appeared. "You mean the arrangements are made--the day"s at hand?"
"There are no arrangements," Nick smiled. "But why should it trouble you?"
"What then will you do--without arrangements?" The inquiry was plaintive and childlike.
"We shall do nothing--there"s nothing to be done. We"re not to be married--it"s all off," said poor Nick. Then he added: "Mrs. Dallow has gone abroad."
The old man, motionless among his pillows, gave a long groan. "Ah I don"t like that."
"No more do I, sir."
"What"s the matter? It was so good--so good."
"It wasn"t good enough for Julia," Nick declared.