Miss Bretherton Part 8

'Supposing, by any chance, it were not so--supposing I were able to gather up my relation with her again and make it a really friendly one--I should take, I think, a very definite line; I should make up my mind to be of use to her. After all, it is true what she says: there are many things in me that might be helpful to her, and everything there was she should have the benefit of. I would make a serious purpose of it. She should find me a friend worth having.'

His thoughts wandered on a while in this direction. It was pleasant to see himself in the future as Miss Bretherton's philosopher and friend, but in the end the sense of reality gained upon his dreams. 'I am a fool!' he said to himself resolutely at last, 'and I may as well go to bed and put her out of my mind. The chance is over--gone--done with, if it ever existed.'

The next morning, on coming down to breakfast, he saw among his letters a handwriting which startled him. Where had he seen it before? In Wallace's hand three days ago? He opened it, and found the following note:--

'MY DEAR MR. KENDAL--You know, I think, that I am off next week--on Monday, if all goes well. We go to Switzerland for a while, and then to Venice, which people tell me is often very pleasant in August. We shall be there by the first week in August, and Mr. Wallace tells me he hears from you that your sister, Madame de Chateauvieux, will be there about the same time. I forgot to ask you yesterday, but, if you think she would not object to it, would you give me a little note introducing me to her?

All that I have heard of her makes me very anxious to know her, and she would not find me a troublesome person! We shall hardly, I suppose, meet again before I start. If not, please remember that my friends can always find me on Sunday afternoon.--Yours very truly, ISABEL BRETHERTON.'

Kendal's hand closed tightly over the note. Then he put it carefully back into its envelope, and walked away with his hands behind him and the note in them, to stare out of window at the red roofs opposite.

'That is like her,' he murmured to himself; 'I wound and hurt her: she guesses I shall suffer for it, and, by way of setting up the friendly bond again, next day, without a word, she asks me to do her a kindness!

Could anything be more delicate, more gracious!'

Kendal never had greater difficulty in fixing his thoughts to his work than that morning, and at last, in despair, he pushed his book aside, and wrote an answer to Miss Bretherton, and, when that was accomplished, a long letter to his sister. The first took him longer than its brevity seemed to justify. It contained no reference to anything but her request.

He felt a compulsion upon him to treat the situation exactly as she had done, but, given this limitation, how much cordiality and respect could two sides of letterpaper be made to carry with due regard to decorum and grammar?

When he next met Wallace, that hopeful, bright-tempered person had entirely recovered his cheerfulness. Miss Bretherton, he reported, had attacked the subject of _Elvira_ with him, but so lightly that he had no opportunity for saying any of the skilful things he had prepared.

'She evidently did not want the question seriously opened,' he said, 'so I followed your advice and let it alone, and since then she has been charming both to Agnes and me. I feel myself as much of a brute as ever, but I see that the only thing I can do is to hold my tongue about it.' To which Kendal heartily agreed.

A few days afterwards the newspapers gave a prominent place to reports of Miss Bretherton's farewell performance. It had been a great social event.

Half the distinguished people in London were present, led by royalty.

London, in fact, could hardly bear to part with its favourite, and compliments, flowers, and farewells showered upon her. Kendal, who had not meant to go at the time when tickets were to be had, tried about the middle of the week after the Oxford Sunday to get a seat, but found it utterly impossible. He might have managed it by applying to her through Edward Wallace, but that he was unwilling to do, for various reasons.

He told himself that, after all, it was better to let her little note and his answer close his relations with her for the present. Everywhere else but in the theatre she might still regard him as her friend; but there they could not but be antagonistic in some degree one to another, and not even intellectually did Kendal wish just now to meet her on a footing of antagonism.

So, when Sat.u.r.day night came, he pa.s.sed the hours of Miss Bretherton's triumph at a ministerial evening party, where it seemed to him that the air was full of her name and that half the guests were there as a _pis-aller,_ because the _Calliope_ could not receive them. And yet he thought he noticed in the common talk about her that criticism of her as an actress was a good deal more general than it had been at the beginning of the season. The little knot of persons with an opinion and reasons for it had gradually influenced the larger public. Nevertheless, there was no abatement whatever of the popular desire to see her, whether on the stage or in society. The _engouement_ for her personally, for her beauty, and her fresh pure womanliness, showed no signs of yielding, and would hold out, Kendal thought, for some time, against a much stronger current of depreciation on the intellectual side than had as yet set in.

He laid down the Monday paper with a smile of self-scorn and muttered: 'I should like to know how much she remembers by this time of the prig who lectured to her in Nuneham woods a week ago!' In the evening his _Pall Mall Gazette_ told him that Miss Bretherton had crossed the channel that morning, _en route_ for Paris and Venice. He fell to calculating the weeks which must elapse before his sister would be in Venice, and before he could hear of any meeting between her and the Bretherton party, and wound up his calculations by deciding that London was already hot and would soon be empty, and that, as soon as he could gather together certain books he was in want of, he would carry them and his proofs down into Surrey, refuse all invitations to country houses, and devote himself to his work.

Before he left he paid a farewell call to Mrs. Stuart, who gave him full and enthusiastic accounts of Isabel Bretherton's last night, and informed him that her brother talked of following the Brethertons to Venice some time in August.

'Albert,' she said, speaking of her husband, 'declares that he cannot get away for more than three weeks, and that he must have some walking; so that, what we propose at present is to pick up Edward at Venice at the end of August, and move up all together into the mountains afterwards.

Oh, Mr. Kendal,' she went on a little nervously, as if not quite knowing whether to attack the subject or not, 'it _was_ devoted of you to throw yourself into the breach for Edward as you did at Oxford. I am afraid it must have been very disagreeable, both to you and to her. When Edward told me of it next morning it made me cold to think of it. I made up my mind that our friends.h.i.+p--yours and ours--with her was over. But do you know she came to call on me that very afternoon--how she made time I don't know--but she did. Naturally, I was very uncomfortable, but she began to talk of it in the calmest way while we were having tea. "Mr.

Kendal was probably quite right," she said, "in thinking the part unsuited to me; anyhow, I asked him for his opinion, and I should be a poor creature to mind his giving it." And then she laughed and said that I must ask Edward to keep his eyes open for anything that would do better for her in the autumn. And since then she has behaved as if she had forgotten all about it. I never knew any one with less smallness about her.'

'No; she is a fine creature,' said Kendal, almost mechanically. How little Mrs. Stuart knew--or rather, how entirely remote she was from _feeling_--what had happened! It seemed to him that the emotion of that scene was still thrilling through all his pulses, yet to what ordinary little proportions had it been reduced in Mrs. Stuart's mind! He alone had seen the veil lifted, had come close to the energetic reality of the girl's nature. That Isabel Bretherton could feel so, could look so, was known only to him--the thought had pain in it, but the keenest pleasure also.

'Do you know,' said Mrs. Stuart presently, with a touch of reproach in her voice, 'that she asked for you on the last night?'

'Did she?'

'Yes. We had just gone on to the stage to see her after the curtain had fallen. It was such a pretty sight, you ought not to have missed it. The Prince had come to say good-bye to her, and, as we came in, she was just turning away in her long phantom dress with the white hood falling round her head, like that Romney picture--don't you remember?--of Lady Hamilton,--Mr. Forbes has drawn her in it two or three times. The stage was full of people. Mr. Forbes was there, of course, and Edward, and ourselves, and presently I heard her say to Edward, "Is Mr. Kendal here?

I did not see him in the house." Edward said something about your not having been able to get a seat, which I thought clumsy of him, for, of course, we could have got some sort of place for you at the last moment.

She didn't say anything, but I thought--if you won't mind my saying so, Mr. Kendal--that, considering all things, it would have been better if you had been there.'

'It seems to me,' said Kendal, with vexation in his voice, 'that there is a fate against my doing anything as I ought to do it. I thought, on the whole, it would be better not to make a fuss about it when it came to the last. You see she must look upon me to some extent as a critical, if not a hostile, influence, and I did not wish to remind her of my existence.'

'Oh well,' said Mrs. Stuart in her cheery commonsense way, 'that evening was such an overwhelming experience that I don't suppose she could have felt any soreness towards anybody. And, do you know, she _is_ improved?

I don't quite know what it is, but certainly one or two of those long scenes she does more intelligently, and even the death-scene is better,--less monotonous. I sometimes think she will surprise us all yet.'

'Very likely,' said Kendal absently, not in reality believing a word of it, but it was impossible to dissent.

'I hope so,' exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, 'with all my heart. She has been very depressed often these last weeks, and certainly, on the whole, people have been harder upon her than they were at first. I am so glad that she and your sister will meet in Venice. Madame de Chateauvieux is just the friend she wants.'

Kendal walked home feeling the rankling of a fresh pin-point. She had asked for him, and he had not been there! What must she think, apparently, but that, from a sour, morose consistency, he had refused to be a witness of her triumph!

Oh, hostile fates!

A week later Eustace was settled in the Surrey farmhouse which had sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition. The Surrey country was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds. And under Kendal's sitting-room window a pair of tomt.i.ts, which the party had watched that May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world. One of his first walks was to that spot beyond the pond where they had made their afternoon camping-ground. The nut-hatches had fled--fled, Kendal hoped, some time before, for the hand of the spoiler had been near their dwelling, and its fragments lay scattered on the ground. He presently learnt to notice that he never heard the sharp sound of the bird's tapping beak among the woods without a little start of recollection.

Outside his walks, his days were spent in continuous literary effort. His book was in a condition which called for all his energies, and he threw himself vigorously into it. The first weeks were taken up with a long review of Victor Hugo's prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical result. It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to suit all weathers and all skies. There were sombre, wind-swept days, when the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and the bending trees, were in harmony with all the fierce tempestuous side of the great Romantic. There were others when the homely, tender, domestic aspect of the country formed a sort of framework and accompaniment to the simpler patriarchal elements in the books which Kendal had about him. Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him, and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.

He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them, and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Chateauvieux, who was at Etretat with her husband. She wrote her brother very lively, characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the little Norman town swarms in the season.

After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look restlessly at the Etretat postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public sort of existence as the Etretat life. The bathing scenes, and the fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread of naturalism, became very flat to him. He was astonished that his sister was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done so.

This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the daily post. At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his letters. But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily const.i.tutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer's shop in the village, some two miles off.

For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France began to seem to him extraordinary! However, at last, the monotony of the Etretat postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons. 'We are here for the night on some business of Paul's; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin, and two or three days later at Venice. By the way, where will the Brethertons be? I must trust to my native wits, I suppose, when I get there. She is not the sort of light to be hidden under a bushel.'

This postcard disturbed Kendal not a little, and he felt irritably that somebody had mismanaged matters. He had supposed, and indeed suggested, that Miss Bretherton should enclose his note in one of her own to his sister's Paris address, giving, at the same time, some indication of a place of meeting in Venice. But if she had not done this, it was very possible that the two women might miss each other after all. Sometimes, when he had been contemplating this possibility with disgust, he would with a great effort make himself reflect why it was that he cared about the matter so disproportionately. Why was he so deeply interested in Isabel Bretherton's movements abroad, and in the meeting which would bring her, so to speak, once more into his own world? Why! because it was impossible, he would answer himself indignantly, not to feel a profound interest in any woman who had ever shared as much emotion with you as she had with him in those moments at Nuneham, who had received a wound at your hands, had winced under it, and still had remained gracious, and kind, and womanly! 'I should be a hard-hearted brute,' he said to himself, 'if I did not feel a very deep and peculiar interest in her--if I did not desire that Marie's friends.h.i.+p should abundantly make up to her for my blundering!'

Did he ever really deceive himself into imagining that this was all? It is difficult to say. The mind of a man no longer young, and trained in all the subtleties of thought, does not deal with an invading sentiment exactly as a youth would do with all his experience to come. It steals upon him more slowly, he is capable of disguising it to himself longer, of escaping from it into other interests. Pa.s.sion is in its ultimate essence the same, wherever it appears and under whatever conditions, but it possesses itself of human life in different ways. Slowly, and certainly, the old primeval fire, the commonest, fatalest, divinest force of life, was making its way into Kendal's nature. But it was making its way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,--it found a hundred other interests in possession;--it had a strange impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with. Kendal had been accustomed to live in other men's lives. Was he only just beginning to live his own?

But, however it was, he was at least conscious during this waiting time that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,--visions of a slender form fas.h.i.+oned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace, of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive gait! He followed that figure through scene after scene; he saw primroses in its hand, and the pale spring blue above it; he recalled it standing tense and still with blanched cheek and fixed appealing eye, while all round the June woods murmured in the breeze; he surrounded it in imagination with the pomp and circ.u.mstance of the stage, and realised it as a centre of emotion to thousands. And then from memories he would pa.s.s on to speculations, from the scenes he knew to those he could only guess at, from the life of which he had seen a little to the larger and unexplored life beyond.

And so the days went on, and though he was impatient and restless, yet indoors his work was congenial to him, and out of doors the sun was bright, and all the while a certain little G.o.d lay hidden, speaking no articulate word, but waiting with a mischievous patience for the final overthrow of one more poor mortal.

At last the old postmistress, whom he had almost come to regard as cheris.h.i.+ng a personal grudge against him, ceased to repulse him, and, after his seven years of famine, the years of abundance set in. For the s.p.a.ce of three weeks letters from Venice lay waiting for him almost every alternate morning, and the heathery slopes between the farm and the village grew familiar with the spectacle of a tall thin man in a rough tweed suit struggling, as he walked, with sheets of foreign paper which the wind was doing its best to filch away from him.

The following extracts from these letters contain such portions of them as are necessary to our subject:--

'CASA MINGHETTI 2, GRAND Ca.n.a.l,

'VENICE, _August_ 6.

'MY DEAR EUSTACE--I can only write you a very sc.r.a.ppy letter to-day, for we are just settling into our apartment, and the rooms are strewn in the most distracting way with boxes, books, and garments; while my maid, Felicie, and the old Italian woman, Caterina, who is to cook and manage for us, seem to be able to do nothing--not even to put a chair straight, or order some bread to keep us from starving--without consulting me.

Paul, taking advantage of a husband's prerogative, has gone off to _flaner_ on the Piazza, while his women-folk make life tolerable at home; which is a very unfair and spiteful version of his proceedings, for he has really gone as much on my business as on his own. I sent him--feeling his look of misery, as he sat on a packing-case in the middle of this chaos, terribly on my mind--to see if he could find the English consul (whom he knows a little), and discover from him, if possible, where your friends are. It is strange, as you say, that Miss Bretherton should not have written to me; but I incline to put it down to our old Jacques at home, who is getting more and more imbecile with the weight of years and infirmities, and is quite capable of forwarding to us all the letters which are not worth posting, and leaving all the important ones piled up in the hall to await our return. It is provoking, for, if the Bretherton party are not going to stay long in Venice, we may easily spend all our time in looking for each other; which will, indeed, be a lame and impotent conclusion. However, I have hopes of Paul's cleverness.

'And now, four o'clock! There is no help for it, my dear Eustace. I must go and instruct Caterina how not to poison us in our dinner to-night. She looks a dear old soul, but totally innocent of anything but Italian barbarities in the way of cooking. And Felicie also is well-meaning but ignorant, so, unless I wish to have Paul on my hands for a week, I must be off. This rough picnicking life, in Venice of all places, is a curious little experience; but I made up my mind last time we were here that we would venture our precious selves in no more hotels. The heat, the mosquitoes, the horrors of the food, were too much. Here we have a garden, a kitchen, a cool sitting-room; and if I choose to feed Paul on _tisane_ and milk-puddings, who is to prevent me?

'....Paul has just come in, with victory written on his brow. The English consul was of no use; but, as he was strolling home, he went into St.

Mark's, and there, of course, found them! In the church were apparently all the English people who have as yet ventured to Venice; and these, or most of them, seemed to be following in the wake of a little party of four persons--two ladies, a gentleman, and a lame girl walking with a crutch. An excited English tourist condescended to inform Paul that it was "the great English actress, Miss Bretherton," who was creating all the commotion. Then, of course, he went up to her--he was provoked that he could hardly see her in the dim light of St. Mark's--introduced himself, and described our perplexities. Of course, she had written. I expected as much. Jacques must certainly be pensioned off! Paul thought the other three very inferior to her, though the uncle was civil, and talked condescendingly of Venice as though it were even good enough to be admired by a Worrall. It is arranged that the beauty is to come and see me to-morrow if, after Caterina has operated upon us during two meals, we are still alive. Good-night, and good-bye.'