The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 3/Chapter 5
V.
"Judge for yourself when you get a chance," Nash had said; and as it turned out Sherringham was able to judge two days later, for he found his cousin in Balaklava Place on the Tuesday following his walk with Gabriel. He had not only stayed away from the theatre on the Monday evening (he regarded this as an achievement of some importance), but had not been near Miriam during the day. He had meant to absent himself from her company on Tuesday as well; a determination confirmed by the fact that the afternoon turned out wet. But when, at ten minutes to five o'clock, he jumped into a hansom and directed its course to St. John's Wood, it was precisely upon the weather that he shifted the responsibility of his behaviour.
Miriam had dined when he reached the villa, but she was lying down—she was tired—before going to the theatre. Mrs. Rooth was however in the drawing-room with three gentlemen, in two of whom the fourth visitor was not startled to recognize Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash. Dashwood appeared to have become Miriam's brother-in-arms and a second child—a fonder one—to Mrs. Rooth; it had come to Sherringhain's knowledge the last time he was in Balaklava Place that the young actor had finally moved his lodgings into the quarter, making himself a near neighbour for all sorts of convenience. "Hang his convenience!" Peter thought, perceiving that Mrs. Lovick's "Arty" was now altogether one of the family. Oh, the family—it was a queer one to be connected with; that consciousness was acute in Sherringham's breast to-day as he entered Mrs. Rooth's little circle. The room was filled with cigarette-smoke and there was a messy coffee-service on the piano, whose keys Basil Dashwood lightly touched for his own diversion. Nash, addressing the room, of course, was at one end of a little sofa, with his nose in the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease, with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o'clock in the day, but Mrs. Rooth was not dressed; there was however no want of finish in her elegant attitude—the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to let you understand) for which she used to be distinguished at Castle Nugent when the house was full. She toyed incongruously, in her unbuttoned wrapper, with a large tinsel fan which resembled a theatrical property.
It was one of the discomforts of Sherringham's situation that many of those minor matters which are, superficially at least, most characteristic of the histrionic life had power to displease him, so that he was obliged to make the effort of indulgence. He disliked besmoked drawing-rooms and irregular meals and untidy arrangements; he could suffer from the vulgarity of Mrs. Rooth's apartments, the importunate photographs (they gave on his nerves), the barbarous absence of signs of an orderly domestic life, the odd volumes from the circulating library (you could see what they were—the very covers told you—at a glance) tumbled about with cups or glasses on them. He had not waited till now to make the reflection that it was a strange thing fate should have goaded him into that sort of contact; but as he stood before Mrs. Rooth and her companions he made it perhaps more pointedly than ever. Her companions, somehow, who were not responsible, didn't keep him from making it; which was particularly odd, as they were not, superficially, in the least of Bohemian type. Almost the first thing that struck him, as it happened, in coming into the room, was the essential good looks of his cousin, who was a gentleman to the eye in a different degree from the high-collared Dashwood. Peter didn't hate him for being such a pleasant young Englishman; his consciousness was traversed rather by a fresh wave of annoyance at Julia's failure to get on with him on that substantial basis.
It was Sherringham's first encounter with Nick since his arrival in London: they had been, on one side and the other, so much taken up with their own affairs. Since their last meeting Nick had, as we know, to his kinsman's perception, really taken on a new character: he had done a fine stroke of business in a quiet way. This made him a figure to be counted with, and in just the sense in which Peter desired least to count with him. Poor Sherringham, after his summersault in the blue, was much troubled these last days; he was ravaged by contending passions; he paid, every hour, in a torment of unrest, for what was false in his position, the impossibility of being consistent, the opposition of interest and desire. Nick, his junior and a lighter weight, had settled his problem and showed no wounds: there was something impertinent and mystifying in it. He looked too innocently young and happy there, and too careless and modest and amateurish for a rival or for the genius that he was apparently going to try to be—the genius that, the other day in the studio with Biddy, Peter had got a startled glimpse of his capacity for being. Sherringham would have liked to feel that he had grounds of resentment, that Julia had been badly treated or that Nick was fatuous, for in that case he might have regarded him as offensive. But where was the offence of his merely being liked by a woman in respect to whom Peter had definitely denied himself the luxury of pretensions, especially if the offender had taken no action in the matter? It could scarcely be called culpable action to call, casually, on an afternoon when the lady was invisible. Peter, at any rate, was distinctly glad Miriam was invisible; and he proposed to himself to suggest to Nick after a little that they should adjourn together—they had such interesting things to talk about. Meanwhile Nick greeted him with candid tones and pleasant eyes, in which he could read neither confusion nor defiance. Sherringham was reassured against a danger he believed he didn't recognize and puzzled by a mystery he flattered himself he didn't mind. And he was still more ashamed of being reassured than of being puzzled.
It must be recorded that Miriam remained invisible only a few minutes longer. Nick, as Sherringham gathered, had been about a quarter of an hour in the house, which would have given the girl, aroused from her repose, about time to array herself to come down to him. At all events she was in the room, prepared apparently to go to the theatre, very shortly after Sherringham had become sensible of how glad he was she was out of it. Familiarity had never yet cured him of a certain tremor of expectation and even of suspense in regard to her entrances; a flutter caused by the simple circumstance of her infinite variety. To say she was always acting suggests too much that she was often fatiguing; for her changing face affected this particular admirer at least not as a series of masks, but as a response to perceived differences, an intensity of sensibility, or still more as something cleverly constructive, like the shifting of the scene in a play or a room with many windows. Her incarnations were incalculable, but if her present denied her past and declined responsibility for her future, it made a good thing of the hour and kept the actual very actual. This time the actual was a bright, gentle, graceful, smiling young woman in a new dress, eager to go out, drawing on fresh gloves, who looked as if she were about to step into a carriage and (it was Gabriel Nash who thus formulated her physiognomy) do a lot of London things.
The young woman had time to spare however, and she sat down and talked and laughed and presently gave, as it seemed to Sherringham, a finer character to the tawdry little room. It was honourable enough if it belonged to her. She described herself as in a state of nervous bewilderment—exhausted, stupefied, blinded with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece (the first night was close at hand and it was going to be d'un mauvais—they would all see!), but there was no correspondence between this account of the matter and her present kindly gaiety. She sent her mother away—to "put on some clothes or something"—and, left alone with the visitors, went to a long glass between the windows, talking always to Nick Dormer, and revised and rearranged a little her own attire. She talked to Nick over her shoulder, and to Nick only, as if he were the guest to recognize and the others didn't count. She broke out immediately about his having thrown up his seat, wished to know if the strange story told her by Mr. Nash were true—that he had knocked all the hopes of his party into pie.
Nick took it in this way and gave a jocular picture of his party's ruin, the critical condition of public affairs: evidently as yet he remained inaccessible to shame or repentance. Sherringham, before Miriam's entrance, had not, in shaking hands with Nick, made even a roundabout allusion to his odd "game:" there seemed a sort of muddled good taste in being silent about it. He winced a little on seeing how his scruples had been wasted, and was struck with the fine, jocose, direct turn of his kinsman's conversation with the young actress. It was a part of her unexpectedness that she took the heavy literal view of Nick's behaviour; declared frankly, though without ill-nature, that she had no patience with his folly. She was horribly disappointed—she had set her heart on his being a great statesman, one of the rulers of the people and the glories of England. What was so useful, what was so noble? how it belittled everything else! She had expected him to wear a cordon and a star some day (and to get them very soon), and to come and see her in her loge: it would look so well. She talked like a lovely Philistine, except perhaps when she expressed surprise at hearing—she heard it from Gabriel Nash—that in England gentlemen accoutred with those emblems of their sovereign's esteem didn't so far forget themselves as to stray into the dressing-rooms of actresses. She admitted, after a moment, that they were quite right—the dressing-rooms of actresses were nasty places; but she was sorry, for that was the sort of thing she had always figured, in a corner—a distinguished man, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, admiring the smallness of a satin shoe and saying witty things. Gabriel Nash was convulsed with hilarity at this—such a vision of the British political hero. Coming back from the glass and making him give her his place on the sofa, she seated herself near Nick and continued to express her regret at his perversity.
"They all say that—all the charming women, but I shouldn't have looked for it from you," Nick replied. "I've given you such an example of what I can do in another line."
"Do you mean my portrait? Oh, I've got it, with your name and 'M.P.' in the corner, and that's precisely why I'm content. 'M.P.' in the corner of a picture is delightful, but I want to break the mould: I don't in the least insist on your giving specimens to others. And the artistic life, when you can lead another—if you have any alternative, however modest—is a very poor business. It comes last in dignity—after everything else. Ain't I up to my eyes in it and don't I know?"
"You talk like my broken-hearted mother," said Nick.
"Does she hate it so intensely?"
"She has the darkest ideas about it—the wildest theories. I can't imagine where she gets them; partly, I think, from a general conviction that the 'æsthetic'—a horrible insidious foreign disease—is eating the healthy core out of English life (dear old English life!) and partly from the charming drawings in Punch and the clever satirical articles, pointing at mysterious depths of contamination, in the other weekly papers. She believes there's a dreadful coterie of uncannily clever and desperately refined people, who wear a kind of loose, faded uniform and worship only beauty—which is a fearful thing—that Nash has introduced me to it, that I now spend all my time in it, and that for its sweet sake I have repudiated the most sacred engagements. Poor Nash, who, so far as I can make out, isn't in any sort of society, however, bad!"
"But I'm uncannily clever," Nash interposed, "and though I can't afford the uniform (I believe you get it best somewhere in South Audley Street), I do worship beauty. I really think it's me the weekly paper means."
"Oh, I've read the articles—I know the sort!" said Basil Dashwood.
Miriam looked at him. "Go and see if the brougham's there—I ordered it early."
Dashwood, without moving, consulted his watch. "It isn't time yet—I know more about the brougham than you. I've made a rattling good arrangement for her—it really costs her nothing," the young actor continued confidentially to Sherringham, near whom he had placed himself.
"Your mother's quite right to be broken-hearted," Miriam declared, "and I can imagine exactly what she has been through. I should like to talk with her—I should like to see her." Nick broke into ringing laughter, reminding her that she had talked to him, while she sat for her portrait, in directly the opposite sense, most suggestively and inspiringly; and Nash explained that she was studying the part of a political duchess and wished to take observations for it, to work herself into the character. Miriam might in fact have been a political duchess as she sat with her head erect and her gloved hands folded, smiling with aristocratic dimness at Nick. She shook her head with stately sadness; she might have been representing Mary Stuart in Schiller's play. "I've changed since that. I want you to be the grandest thing there is—the counsellor of kings."
Peter Sherringham wondered if possibly it were not since she had met his sister in Nick's studio that she had changed, if perhaps it had not occurred to her that it would give Julia the sense of being more effectually routed to know that the woman who had thrown the bomb was one who also tried to keep Nick in the straight path. This indeed would involve an assumption that Julia might know, whereas it was perfectly possible that she mightn't and more than possible that if she should she wouldn't care. Miriam's essential fondness for trying different ways was always there as an adequate reason for any particular way; a truth which however sometimes only half prevented the particular way from being vexatious to Sherringham.
"Yet after all who is more æsthetic than you and who goes in more for the beautiful?" Nick asked. "You're never so beautiful as when you pitch into it."
"Oh, I'm an inferior creature, of an inferior sex, and I have to earn my bread as I can. I'd give it all up in a moment, my odious trade—for an inducement."
"And pray what do you mean by an inducement?" Nick demanded.
"My dear fellow, she means you—if you'll give her a permanent engagement to sit for you!" exclaimed Gabriel Nash. "What crude questions you ask!"
"I like the way she talks," Basil Dashwood broke in, "when I gave up the most brilliant prospects, of very much the same kind as Mr. Dormer's, expressly to go on the stage."
"You're an inferior creature too," said Miriam.
"Miss Rooth is very hard to satisfy," Sherringham observed. "A man of distinction, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, in the corner of her loge—she has such a personage ready made to her hand and she doesn't so much as look at him. Am I not an inducement? Have I not offered you a permanent engagement?"
"Your orders—where are your orders?" Miriam inquired with a sweet smile, getting up.
"I shall be a minister next year and an ambassador before you know it. Then I shall stick on everything that can be had."
"And they call us mountebanks!" cried the girl. "I've been so glad to see you again—do you want another sitting?" she went on, to Nick, as if to take leave of him.
"As many as you'll give me—I shall be grateful for all," Nick answered. "I should like to do you as you are at present. You're totally different from the woman I painted—you're wonderful."
"The Comic Muse!" laughed Miriam. "Well, you must wait till our first nights are over—I'm sur les dents till then. There's everything to do, and I have to do it all. That fellow's good for nothing—for nothing but domestic life," and she glanced at Basil Dashwood. "He hasn't an idea—not one that you'd willingly tell of him, though he's rather useful for the stables. We've got stables now—or we try to look as if we had: Dashwood's ideas are de cette force. In ten days I shall have more time."
"The Comic Muse? Never, never," Sherringham protested. "You're not to go smirking through the age and down to posterity—I'd rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents. That's what you look like when you look best."
"That's consoling—when I've just bought a new bonnet! I forgot to tell you just now that when you're an ambassador you may propose anything you like," Miriam went on. "But excuse me if I make that condition. Seriously speaking, come to me glittering with orders and I shall probably succumb. I can't resist stars and garters. Only you must, as you say, have them all. I don't like to hear Mr. Dormer talk the slang of the studio—like that phrase just now: it is a fall to a lower state. However, when one is low one must crawl, and I'm crawling down to the Strand. Dashwood, see if mamma's ready. If she isn't I decline to wait; you must bring her in a hansom. I'll take Mr. Dormer in the brougham; I want to talk with Mr. Dormer; he must drive with me to the theatre. His situation is full of interest." Miriam led the way out of the room as she continued to chatter, and when she reached the house-door, with the four men in her train, the carriage had just drawn up at the garden-gate. It appeared that Mrs. Rooth was not ready, and the girl, in spite of a remonstrance from Nick, who had the sense of usurping the old lady's place, repeated her injunction that she should be brought on in a cab. Miriam's companions accompanied her to the gate, and she insisted upon Nick's taking his seat in the brougham and taking it first. Before she entered she put out her hand to Sherringham and, looking up at him, held his own kindly. "Dear old master, aren't you coming to-night? I miss you when you're not there."
"Don't go—don't go—it's too much," Nash interposed.
"She is wonderful," said Basil Dashwood, regarding her admiringly; "she has gone into the rehearsals, tooth and nail. But nothing takes it out of her."
"Nothing puts it into you, my dear!" Miriam returned. Then she went on, to Sherringham: "You're the faithful one—you're the one I count on." He was not looking at her; his eyes travelled into the carriage, where they rested on Nick Dormer, established on the further seat with his face turned toward the further window. He was the one, faithful or no, counted on or no, whom a charming woman had preferred to carry off, and there was a certain triumph for him in that fact; but it pleased Sherringham to imagine that his attitude was a little foolish. Miriam discovered something of this sort in Sherringham's eyes; for she exclaimed abruptly: "Don't kill him—he doesn't care for me!" With this she passed into the carriage, which rolled away.
Sherringham stood watching it a moment, till he heard Basil Dashwood again beside him. "You wouldn't believe what I made him do it for—a little fellow I know."
"Good-bye; take good care of Mrs. Rooth," said Gabriel Nash, waving a cheerful farewell to the young actor. He gave a smiling survey of the heavens and remarked to Sherringham that the rain had stopped. Was he walking, was he driving, should they be going in the same direction? Sherringham cared little about his direction and had little account of it to give; he simply moved away in silence, with Gabriel at his side. Gabriel was partly an affliction to him; indeed the fact that he had assumed a baleful fascination made him only a deeper affliction. Sherringham moreover did him the justice to observe that he could hold his peace occasionally: he had for instance this afternoon taken little part in the conversation in Balaklava Place. Peter greatly disliked to talk to him of Miriam, but he liked Nash to talk of her and he even liked him to say such things as he might contradict. He was not however moved to contradict an assertion dropped by his companion, disconnectedly, at the end of a few minutes, to the effect that she was after all the most good-natured creature alive. All the same, Nash added, it wouldn't do for her to take possession of an organization like Nick's; and he repeated that for his part he would never allow it. It would be on his conscience to interfere. To which Sherringham replied disingenuously that they might all do as they liked—it didn't matter a button to him. And with an effort to carry off that comedy he changed the subject.