Miss Bretherton Part 6

The conversation flowed on vigorously--Forbes guiding it, now here, now there, while Kendal presently turned away to talk in an undertone to Mrs.

Stuart, who sat next him, at the farther corner of the table from Miss Bretherton.

'Edward has told you of my escapade,' said Mrs. Stuart. 'Yes, I have put my foot in it dreadfully. I don't know how it will turn out, I am sure.

She's so set upon it, and Edward is so worried. I don't know how I came to tell her. You see, I've seen so much of her lately, it slipped out when we were talking.'

'It was very natural,' said Kendal, glad to notice from Mrs. Stuart's way of attacking the subject that she knew nothing of his own share in the matter. It would have embarra.s.sed him to be conscious of another observer. 'Oh, a hundred things may turn up; there are ways out of these things if one is determined to find them.'

Mrs. Stuart shook her head. 'She is so curiously bent upon it. She is possessed with the idea that the play will suit her better than any she has had yet. Don't you think her looking very tired? I have come to know her much better these last few weeks, and it seems absurd; but I get anxious about her. Of course, she is an enormous success, but I fancy the theatrical part of it has not been quite so great as it was at first.'

'So I hear, too,' said Kendal; 'the theatre is quite as full, but the temper of the audience a good deal flatter.'

'Yes,' said Mrs. Stuart; 'and then there is that curious little sister of hers, whom you haven't seen, and who counts for a good deal. I believe that in reality she is very fond of Isabel, and very proud of her, but she's very jealous of her too, and she takes her revenge upon her sister for her beauty and her celebrity by collecting the hostile things people say about her acting, and p.r.i.c.king them into her every now and then, like so many pins. At first Isabel was so sure of herself and the public that she took no notice--it seemed to her only what every actress must expect.

But now it is different. She is not so strong as she was when she came over, nor so happy, I think, and the criticisms tell more. She is heartily sick of the _White Lady_, and is bent upon a change, and I believe she thinks this play of Edward's is just what she wants to enable her to strengthen her hold upon the public.'

'There never was a greater delusion,' said Kendal; 'it's the last part in the world she ought to attempt. Properly speaking, unless she puts it in, there's no posing in it, none of that graceful att.i.tudinising she does so well. It's a long tragic part--a tremendous strain, and would take all the powers of the most accomplished art to give it variety and charm.'

'Oh, I know,' sighed Mrs. Stuart, 'I know. But what is to be done?'

Kendal shrugged his shoulders with a smile, feeling as hopeless as she did. The paleness of the beautiful face opposite indeed had touched his sympathies very keenly, and he was beginning to think the safety of Wallace's play not such a desperately important matter after all.

However, there was his promise, and he must go on with it. 'But I'll be hanged,' he said to himself, 'if I come within a thousand miles of hurting her feelings. Wallace must do that for himself if he wants to.'

It had been arranged that Miss Bretherton should be allowed two breaches, and two only, of the law against sight-seeing--a walk through the schools'-quadrangle, and a drive down High Street. Mr. Sartoris, who had been an examiner during the summer term, and had so crept into the good graces of the Clerk of the Schools, was sent off to suborn that functionary for the keys of the iron gates which on Sunday shut out the Oxford world from the sleepy precincts of the Bodleian. The old clerk was in a lax vacation mood, and the envoy returned key in hand. Mrs. Stuart and Forbes undertook the guidance of Miss Bretherton, while the others started to prepare the boats. It was a hot June day, and the gray buildings, with their cool shadows, stood out delicately against a pale blue sky dappled with white cloud. Her two guides led Miss Bretherton through the quadrangle of the schools, which, fresh as it was from the hands of the restorer, rose into the air like some dainty white piece of old-world confectionery. For the windows are set so lightly in the stone-work, and are so nearly level with the wall, that the whole great building has an unsubstantial card-board air, as if a touch might dint it.

'The doctrinaires call it a fault,' said Forbes indignantly, pointing out the feature to his companions. 'I'd like to see them build anything nowadays with half so much imagination and charm.'

They looked enviously at the closed door of the Bodleian, they read the Latin names of the schools just freshly painted at intervals round the quadrangle, and then Forbes led them out upon the steps in front of the Radcliffe and S. Mary's, and let them take their time a little.

'How strange that there should be anything in the world,' cried Miss Bretherton, 'so beautiful all through, so all of a piece as this! I had no idea it would be half so good. Don't, don't laugh at me, Mr. Forbes. I have not seen all the beautiful things you other people have seen. Just let me rave.'

'_I_ laugh at you!' said Forbes, standing back in the shadow of the archway, his fine lined face, aglow with pleasure, turned towards her.

'_I_, who have got Oxford in my bones and marrow, so to speak! Why, every stone in the place is sacred to me! Poetry lives here, if she has fled from all the world besides. No, no; say what you like, it cannot be too strong for me.'

Mrs. Stuart, meanwhile, kept her head cool, admired all that she was expected to admire, and did it well, and never forgot that the carriage was waiting for them, and that Miss Bretherton was not to be tired. It was she who took charge of the other two, piloted them safely into the fly, carried them down the High Street, sternly refused to make a stop at Magdalen, and finally landed them in triumph to the minute at the great gate of Christchurch. Then they strolled into the quiet cathedral, delighted themselves with its irregular bizarre beauty, its unexpected turns and corners, which gave it a capricious fanciful air for all the solidity and business-like strength of its Norman framework, and as they rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern aisle--a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his dreams. In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd--an ill-tempered Flemish peasant--while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town climbed the whole height of the background. It was probably the artist's native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered his own household Lares. But the hill on which the town stood, and the mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not of Belgium, but of a dream country--of Italy, perhaps, the medieval artist's paradise.

'Happy man!' said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; 'look, he put it together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of. And there it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no getting. For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we know and what we dream.'

Miss Bretherton looked at him curiously. It was as though for the first time she connected the man himself with his reputation and his pictures, that the great artist in him was more than a name to her. She listened to him sympathetically, and looked at the window closely, as though trying to follow all he had been saying. But it struck Mrs. Stuart that there was often a bewilderment in her manner which had been strange to it on her first entrance into London. Those strong emphatic ways Kendal had first noticed in her were less frequent. Sometimes she struck Mrs. Stuart as having the air of a half-blindfold person trying to find her way along strange roads.

They pa.s.sed out into the cool and darkness of the cloisters, and through the new buildings, and soon they were in the Broad Walk, trees as old as the Commonwealth bending overhead, and in front the dazzling green of the June meadows, the s.h.i.+ning river in the distance, and the sweep of cloud-flecked blue arching in the whole.

The gentlemen were waiting for them, metamorphosed in boating-clothes, and the two boats were ready. A knot of idlers and lookers-on watched the embarkation, for on Sunday the river is forsaken, and they were the only adventurers on its blue expanse. Off they pushed, Miss Bretherton, Kendal, Mr. Stuart, and Forbes in one boat, the remaining members of the party in the other. Isabel Bretherton had thrown off the wrap which she always carried with her, and which she had gathered round her in the cathedral, and it lay about her in green fur-edged folds, bringing her white dress into relief, the shapely fall of the shoulders and all the round slimness of her form. As Kendal took the stroke oar, after he had arranged everything for her comfort, he asked her if Oxford was what she had expected.

'A thousand times better!' she said eagerly.

'You have a wonderful power of enjoyment. One would think your London life would have spoilt it a little.'

'I don't think anything ever could. I was always laughed at for it as a child, I enjoy everything.'

'Including such a day as you had yesterday? How _can_ you play the _White Lady_ twice in one day? It's enough to wear you out.'

'Oh, everybody does it. I was bound to give a _matinee_ to the profession some time, and yesterday had been fixed for it for ages. But I have only given three _matinees_ altogether, and I shan't give another before my time is up.'

'That's a good hearing,' said Kendal. 'Do you get tired of the _White Lady_?'

'Yes,' she said emphatically; 'I am sick of her. But,' she added, bending forward with her hands clasped on her knee, so that what she said could be heard by Kendal only; 'have you heard, I wonder, what I have in my head for the autumn? Oh well, we must not talk of it now; I have no right to make it public yet. But I should like to tell you when we get to Nuneham, if there's an opportunity.'

'We will make one,' said Kendal, with an inward qualm. And she fell back again with a nod and a smile.

On they pa.s.sed, in the blazing suns.h.i.+ne, through Iffley lock and under the green hill crowned with Iffley village and its Norman church. The hay was out in the fields, and the air was full of it. Children, in tidy Sunday frocks, ran along the towing-path to look at them; a reflected heaven smiled upon them from the river depths; wild rose-bushes overhung the water, and here and there stray poplars rose like land-marks into the sky. The heat, after a time, deadened conversation. Forbes every now and then would break out with some comment on the moving landscape, which showed the delicacy and truth of his painter's sense, or set the boat alive with laughter by some story of the unregenerate Oxford of his own undergraduate days; but there were long stretches of silence when, except to the rowers, the world seemed asleep, and the regular fall of the oars like the pulsing of a hot dream.

It was past five before they steered into the shadow of Nuneham woods.

The meadows just ahead were a golden blaze of light, but here the shade lay deep and green on the still water, spanned by a rustic bridge, and broken every now and then by the stately whiteness of the swans. Rich steeply-rising woods shut in the left-hand bank, and foliage, gra.s.s, and wild flowers seemed suddenly to have sprung into a fuller luxuriance than elsewhere.

'It's too early for tea,' said Mrs. Stuart's clear little voice on the bank; 'at least, if we have it directly it will leave such a long time before the train starts. Wouldn't a stroll be pleasant first?'

Isabel Bretherton and Kendal only waited for the general a.s.sent before they wandered off ahead of the others. 'I should like very much to have a word with you,' she had said to him as he handed her out of the boat. And now, here they were, and, as Kendal felt, the critical moment was come.

'I only wanted to tell you,' she said, as they paused in the heart of the wood, a little out of breath after a bit of steep ascent, 'that I have got hold of a play for next October that I think you are rather specially interested in--at least, Mr. Wallace told me you had heard it all, and given him advice about it while he was writing it. I want so much to hear your ideas about it. It always seems to me that you have thought more about the stage and seen more acting than any one else I know, and I care for your opinion very much indeed--do tell me, if you will, what you thought of _Elvira!_'

'Well,' said Kendal quietly, as he made her give up her wrap to him to carry, 'there is a great deal that's fine in it. The original sketch, as the Italian author left it, was good, and Wallace has enormously improved upon it. Only--'

'Isn't it most dramatic?' she exclaimed, interrupting him; 'there are so many strong situations in it, and though one might think the subject a little unpleasant if one only heard it described, yet there is nothing in the treatment but what is n.o.ble and tragic. I have very seldom felt so stirred by anything. I find myself planning the scenes, thinking over them this way and that incessantly.'

'It is very good and friendly of you,' said Kendal warmly, 'to wish me to give you advice about it. Do you really want me to speak my full mind?'

'Of course I do,' she said eagerly; 'of course I do. I think there are one or two points in it that might be changed. I shall press Mr. Wallace to make a few alterations. I wonder what were the changes that occurred to you?'

'I wasn't thinking of changes,' said Kendal, not venturing to look at her as she walked beside him, her white dress trailing over the moss-grown path, and her large hat falling back from the brilliant flushed cheeks and queenly throat. 'I was thinking of the play itself, of how the part would really suit you.'

'Oh, I have no doubts at all about that,' she said, but with a quick look at him; 'I always feel at once when a part will suit me, and I have fallen in love with this one. It is tragic and pa.s.sionate, like the _White Lady_, but it is quite a different phase of pa.s.sion. I am tired of scolding and declaiming. _Elvira_ will give me an opportunity of showing what I can do with something soft and pathetic. I have had such difficulties in deciding upon a play to begin my October season with, and now this seems to me exactly what I want. People prefer me always in something poetical and romantic, and this is new, and the mounting of it might be quite original.'

'And yet I doubt,' said Kendal; 'I think the part of Elvira wants variety, and would it not be well for you to have more of a change?

Something with more relief in it, something which would give your lighter vein, which comes in so well in the _White Lady_, more chance?'

She frowned a little and shook her head. 'My turn is not that way. I can play a comedy part, of course--every actor ought to be able to--but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act.'

'I don't mean a pure light-comedy part, naturally, but something which would be less of a continuous tragic strain than this. Why, almost all the modern tragic plays have their pa.s.sages of relief, but the texture of _Elvira_ is so much the same throughout,--I cannot conceive a greater demand on any one. And then you must consider your company. Frankly, I cannot imagine a part less suited to Mr. Hawes than Macias; and his difficulties would react on you.'

'I can choose whom I like,' she said abruptly; 'I am not bound to Mr.

Hawes.'

'Besides,' he said cautiously, changing his ground a little, 'I should have said--only, of course, you must know much better--that it is a little risky to give the British public such very serious fare as this, and immediately after the _White Lady_. The English theatre-goer never seems to me to take kindly to medievalism--kings and knights and n.o.bles and the fifteenth century are very likely to bore him. Not that I mean to imply for a moment that the play would be a failure in point of popularity. You have got such a hold that you could carry anything through; but I am inclined to think that in _Elvira_ you would be rather fighting against wind and tide, and that, as I said before, it would be a great strain upon you.'

'The public makes no objection to Madame Desforets in Victor Hugo,' she answered quickly, even sharply. 'Her parts, so far as I know anything about them, are just these romantic parts, and she has made her enormous reputation out of them.'

Kendal hesitated. 'The French have a great tradition of them,' he said.

'Racine, after all, was a preparation for Victor Hugo.'