CHAPTER XIV.
THE AUTHOR AND THE ACTRESS.
I cannot count the changes of my heart,
So often has it turned away from things
Once idols of its being. They depart—
Hopes, fancies, joys, illusions, as if wings
Sprang suddenly from all old ties, to start;
Or, if they linger longer, life but brings
Weariness, hollowness, canker, soil, and stain,
Till the heart saith of pleasure, it is pain.
"How beautiful she looked! but how pale!" exclaimed Walter Maynard, who had seen Miss Churchill, the night before at the theatre; "and she is not married yet! Is it possible that she can know what it is to have the heart feed upon itself?—to dream, but not to hope? Has she found out the bitter mockery of this weary life, whose craving for happiness is only given that it may end in disappointment? But what is this to me? I must be gay—be witty: the points are not yet thrown into the dialogue in the second act. I wish I could remember some of the things I said last night; but, alas! the epigrams uttered over champagne are like the wreaths the Egyptians flung on the Nile, they float away, the gods alone know whither. Nevertheless, I must be very brilliant this morning—brilliant! with this pain in my head, and this weight at my heart," and he drew a sheet of paper towards him.
At first, he wrote slowly and languidly; but what had been a passion was now a power, and he soon obtained mastery over his subject. The light flashed in his eyes, the crimson deepened in his cheek; and, tearing the first page, he now began to write rapidly and earnestly. Strange the contrast between the writer's actual situation, and that which he creates! I have been writing all my life, and even now I do not understand the faculty of composition; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers! and yet a certain quantity of work must be completed, to meet the exigences of that poverty which has no other resource. But there is an evil beyond all this. When the iron of some settled sorrow has entered into the soul,—when some actual image is predominant even in the world of imagination, and the thoughts, do what you will, run in one only channel,—composition is then a perpetual struggle, broken by the one recurring cry, "Hast thou found me, oh! mine enemy?" Something or other is forever bringing up the one idea: it colours every day more and more the creations which were conjured up in the vain hope to escape from it.
"I cannot write to-day," becomes more and more the frequent exclamation. It is, I believe, one of those shadows which deepen on the mind as it approaches to its close. It is a new and a dreadful sensation to the poet when he first finds, that "his spirits do not come when he does call to them;" or that they will only come in one which makes him cry, "take any shape but that." It is a new sensation to be glad of any little return of power, and a most painful one.
Walter now rejoiced whenever he did a morning's work. Alas! the real was struggling with the ideal. After writing a few pages, he suddenly paused; and, pushing the papers aside, exclaimed, "What a mockery this is! I do not know myself what I write for. Money!—why should I make more than will hold this miserable alliance firm—just keep body and soul together? and sometimes I ask, is it worth even doing that? Fame!—alas! what would I now give to hope, to believe in it, as I used to do! but it is far off and cold: it lies beyond the grave. And love—it is a bitter thing to love in vain!—to feel that none will ever know the deep tenderness, the desire for sympathy, the sweet wealth of thought that is garnered in your heart. How passionately I wish to be beloved again! to pour out my whole soul, were it but for a day, and then die!"
The emotion exhausted him; for Walter had tried a frame, naturally delicate, too severely. The vigil and the revel, the hour of social excitement and that of solitary suffering, were alike doing their work. Bodily weakness mastered for a time the mind. The tears filled his eyes, and he closed them; a few moments more, and he was asleep. He had slept for about half an hour when there came a low rap at the door; this did not disturb him: and the applicant, who had a key that fitted the lock, opened, and came in without further ceremony. It was Lavinia Fenton, gaily but richly dressed; the world had gone well with her. She took off her mask and laid it on the table, together with a small basket; and, looking around, saw Walter asleep on the sofa. She bent over him for a few minutes with an expression of anxiety and tenderness, which, for the time, quite subdued the expression of her bold, though fine features. Sleep showed the change that a few months had wrought. The soft brown hair was damp, and the dew stood on the white forehead, where the blue veins were azure as a woman's. You saw the pulses beat in the clear temples, and the chest heaved with the quick throbbing of the heart. The cheek was flushed with rich unnatural crimson; but both around the mouth and eyes hung a faint dark shadow, the surest herald of disease. The hand, too, how white and emaciated it was! yet with a feverish pink inside.
The girl leaned over him—vain, coquetish, selfish; the degradation inevitable, from her position lowering even more a nature not originally of fine material; yet one spot in her heart was generous, and even pure. She loved him. Had she been beloved again, her whole being would have changed; for his sake she would have done any thing, and could have become any thing. Lavinia was clever; a coarse, shrewd kind of cleverness, quick to perceive its own interest, and unscrupulous in pursuing it. She had no delicacy, no keen feelings that got in her way. She had made great progress on the stage, was a favourite with the public, and, if not happy, was, at all events, often very well amused. Still her heart clung to Walter: she knew that he loved another, that the connexion between themselves was rather endured than solicited on his part; still she had for him a careful and disinterested tenderness, that half redeemed her faults—at least, it showed that all of good and feminine kindness was not quite extinct within her. She leaned over him, while her eyes filled with tears.
"He is dying," muttered she, in a low whisper; "he has too little of this world in him to last long in it," and she buried her face in her hands.
But it was no part of Lavinia's system to fret long over any thing: she was too selfish, perhaps we should say, too thoughtless, for prolonged sorrow. Life appeared to her too short to be wasted in unavailing regret. It is the creed of many beside our young actress. She rose softly from her knee, flung back the hair that had fallen over her face, dashed the tears, and muttered, "It is that he has not been in bed all night." She then began to make preparations for breakfast, took the fruit and cream from her basket; and it was the fragrant smoke of the coffee that roused Walter from his sleep.
It was curious to note the difference between the two whom circumstances had so thrown together; those circumstances, all that was in common to them. Lavinia—shrewd, careless, clever; ready to meet any difficulty, however humiliating, that might occur; utterly without principle; confident in that good fortune, which she scrupled at no means of attaining—was the very type of the real. Walter was the ideal—generous, high-minded, clear in perception; but sensitive, even weak, in action; or, rather, too apt to imagine a world full of lofty aims and noble impulses, and then fancying that was the world in which he had to live.