CHAPTER X.
The Avatar.
On the next morning all London rang with the tragic event which had taken place at Mrs. Walcot Valbry's ball.
Countess Adrian was dead. The cause of her death was clear enough. Her doctors knew that she had been long suffering from heart disease, and they had warned her that any violent exertion must prove fatal. She had danced a waltz, and a few minutes afterwards her heart had ceased to beat. This was what science declared. Science was more puzzled by the simultaneous and prolonged fainting-fit of the young American actress who was the last person to whom Countess Adrian had spoken. Countess Adrian had drawn her last breath in the giving of that kiss of fate; and Beatrice Brett, stricken by the horror of the shock, had lain unconscious ever since the dead woman's lips touched hers.
They took the girl home and laid her upon her bed. All night and all the next day Lendon watched below. Every effort to restore her proved unavailing. Doctors came and went. Mrs. Cubison wept and bemoaned Professor's Viall's absence. Cosway Keele drove down in an agony of anxiety. Newspaper people called to get the latest intelligence for the evening papers. The Duchess of Malfi's mysterious swoon was the talk of the hour. The next day, the tragedy of Countess Adrian, as one of the papers had it, in sensational type, had become a secondary affair. London could do without Countess Adrian, but it could not calmly contemplate the loss of its Duchess of Malfi. Placards were posted at the theatre. Hurried rehearsals were called, and Beatrice's understudy stepped into prominence and exulted in secret over the calamity which had given her her great opportunity. The doctors agreed that the long trance was cataleptic, and that nothing could be done but to watch and wait. The two women lay, each cold and motionless, the living, to all outward semblance, as lifeless as the dead. But there were no wreaths and crosses round Beatrice's still body, and the summer sun threw gleams through the half-drawn blinds, while Countess Adrian rested in state in a darkened chamber, with watchers and tapers at her head and feet, and the room was heavy with the scent of funeral flowers. She was very lonely in her death. No one cared much—except, indeed, Sir Donald Urquhart. She had no relations. She had very few friends. She had had many lovers, but only one was faithful to her at the last. The wreaths which heaped her bier were sent by acquaintances who shed not one tear because she was dead. Lendon brought a cluster of white roses with faint pink hearts and laid them himself between the cold hands.
From Queen Anne's Mansions he went to the house in Regent's Park. It was now the third day since Beatrice's strange seizure. As Mrs. Cubison came towards him, he asked, hoarsely "Is there any change?"
"She has moved," answered Mrs. Cubison; "her eyes look natural again. It's Inskip's doing. The Professor telegraphed us to send for Inskip. He is a professional magnetizer, you know. I tried him once for neuralgia, but being a positive myself and he being another positive, nothing came of it. He's not like the Professor—quite a common man and on a different plane altogether; but he has done Beaty good."
"And what does he think is the cause of her illness?" asked Lendon, anxiously.
"Oh! he doesn't know—they none of them do. There's no knowing how influences will affect a person that's subject to them," said Mrs. Cubison, vaguely; "and for my part I'm only thankful that Beaty doesn't take them in the same way as her mother. Inskip says that she'll soon be right again."
The relief was inexpressible. Lendon could almost have wept tears of joy. Mrs. Cubison sent him away. Inskip and the doctors had agreed that sleep was the best restorer, and she wanted to keep the house as quiet as possible. She promised to telegraph, and told him that he might come back in the evening. He went to his studio and occupied himself feverishly during the intervals of the hourly bulletins which announced Beatrice's progress. The portrait of Countess Adrian, glowing with beauty and with all the appearance of inextinguishable life, stood in mockery upon its easel, and oppressed him like a living presence. He removed the canvas and turned it with its face to the wail. The place seemed steeped in associations of the dead woman. He wandered up and down the studio. The telegrams came regularly. Beatrice breathed naturally. She had recognized her Aunt. The last bulletin told that she was sleeping a sweet healthful sleep.
The summer dusk crept up. The room was full of shadows. He could almost fancy, as he leaned back in his chair, that Countess Adrian's ghost was sitting in the place where she had been accustomed to sit, or was standing on the gallery steps as she had stood and looked down on him that day that she had questioned him so abruptly about Beatrice. The yellow-covered French novel—"The Avatar"—reminded him afresh of her. He tried to shake off the memory and walked to the window and gazed out into the twilight. As he stood, an awesome eerie feeling came over him. Suddenly he became conscious of another presence. Some one was standing beside him. He knew that it was Beatrice. He seemed to feel her soft breathing. He recognized a faint familiar perfume. He gazed—there was nothing; and yet she was there. "Beatrice," he whispered; and a voice answered in low mysterious tones, thrilling with tenderness, "Bernard." Then the presence melted, and though he saw no vanishing vision, heard no parting sound, he knew that she was gone.
He remained for some moments transfixed, dazed, the one thought only possessing him. She was dead, and her spirit had come to bid him farewell. He ran out into the street, hailed a hansom, and bade the driver go with all possible speed to Regent's Park. Lights were moving in the windows. The sight confirmed his despair. There was no motive now for keeping stillness. The doctor's brougham was before the house. As Lendon rushed to the door it was opened from within; the doctor came out. Lendon's lips could scarcely frame the enquiry. The physician was a friend of his and guessed the state of affairs.
"Don't distress yourself, Lendon," he said kindly. "She will do well enough now. Magnetism—charlatanism, one might say—has succeeded where our science was helpless. The passes threw her into a natural sleep of three hours. She has awakened and seems herself again. In a night or two we shall have our Duchess of Malfi on the boards once more. Let me have a form, by the way, and telegraph to let Cosway Keele know the good news."
"She is not dead?" cried Lendon, confused by the sudden revulsion.
"Not dead! I should think not. She has spoken; she has eaten. In a few days, perhaps, you may see her. For the present, I have ordered absolute quiet. I am afraid of her asking questions about Countess Adrian and reviving that terrible impression. What an extraordinary thing that was! Poor woman. She had such an intense terror of death."
Lendon shuddered as he remembered her passionate cry, "Give me life; oh, long life."
"And what a magnificent woman!" the doctor went on. "It is almost impossible to imagine so brilliant a flame could be put out in an instant—for ever. Has it ever occurred to you, Lendon, that the one great force on which the very world depends—that of human existence—falsifies all the laws of science and vanishes, leaving no trace?"
"Don't you believe in the soul, doctor?"
"The soul!" Doctor Sheriff—so he was called—shrugged his shoulders. "I believe in the vital principle; and I want to know into what sort of ethereal gas it is transmuted. Does it exhaust itself in the atmosphere? Does it enrich another organization, or does it simply go out?"
"Ah," said Lendon, "we want Maddox Challis to tell us that."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders again. "Are you one of his disciples? Did you see in the paper yesterday that he had left Damascus, and was gone to his hermit's cave in the mountains? On second thoughts, I'll call round by Cosway Keele's rooms, they are in my way. Good-by." And the doctor stepped into his brougham and drove off.
••••••
It was the day after Countess Adrian's funeral, and Lendon, with heart beating like that of the most timid undeclared lover, stood for the first time since her illness on the threshold of Beatrice's sitting-room.
He had expected some change in her. He had expected to find her with wasted body, and nerves strained by the and the shock she had undergone. He had expected her to be shy and silent, and to shrink perhaps a little from his too frank ebullition of feeling. He had pictured her as even more reticent, more virginal, than was her wont. He had determined that no demonstration on his part should jar or frighten her. He had imagined her submitting at first a little constrainedly to his caresses, and then gradually gaining confidence and satisfaction in them from their very gentleness, and at last yielding herself sweetly to his embrace, and resting contentedly in his arms like a fluttering bird in its mother's nest.
But the Beatrice who met him was not the Beatrice of his imaginings. He could not, at the first glance, tell wherein lay the subtle change, and yet from the first glance he was conscious of it. She was not resting on her sofa beneath the window, with her books around her, as he had been accustomed to see her. She was pacing the little room restlessly; her cheeks were flushed; there was an alertness in her air and gestures, and a feverish expectancy in her eyes, which seemed at once brighter, more dreamy, and less limpidly serene. She gave him an odd indefinable impression of greater physical vigour than he had ever associated with the fragile, sensitive creature, whose slender frame seemed worn by the fire of genius that burned within it. She made a glad movement towards him, and was in his arms, and he was pressing his lips on hers, and returning hot, eager, lovers' kisses. All his vague doubts and scruples fled. There was only the rapture of reunion. He was not afraid now of frightening her. She drew him to the sofa beside her, and leaned against him and looked up at him, her eyes beaming with emotion.
"Bernard," she said, "you love me—you love me! me—me—only me!"
He kissed her again and again. Never were lovers' protestations fonder.
"It is so sweet to hear those words—so sweet to feel your arms about me, to know that you are mine—all mine," she whispered. "Oh! Bernard, it has been such a long night—such a long dark night."
"You have been very ill, dearest."
She shuddered. "What happened? I don't know; I can't remember. I remember nothing except those eyes—flames that seemed to burn into my very being; and then sudden pain and darkness, intense black darkness. It seemed to me as if my body lay helpless and bound, that my soul was hovering above the earth, utterly cold, lonely, desolate. I knew that I was dead, and I hungered for the joy of life. I hungered for the joy of love. I felt that I had lost you, Bernard—that you were living and that I was wandering in black space, and oh, so cold—so cold! I craved to be with you. I yearned for you with the wildest yearning. And then it seemed to me that my soul willed with all its might and strength that it might live, and that you might love me—as I love you. And then I awoke. Say that you love me, Bernard."
"My darling, is there any need for that? Do you not know that I love you?"
"But not as I love you. I cannot live without you. Your touch thrills me like some strange electric current. I want to be near you. Your presence seems to warm and vivify me and fill me with all kinds of wild delicious fancies. I shall think of you to-night, and you only, when I am playing the Duchess of Malfi."
"You are going to play to-night?" he asked in surprise.
"Yes, of course—and in my love scene with Antonio I shall see you—only you—and when I tell him of my love, I shall speak to you. And when I say those words, take them to your heart, for they will be for you. Don't you remember them?
'You do tremble
Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh
To fear more than to love me. Sir, be confident
What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir'"…
She drew him down to her with a seductive gesture, and her arms interlaced his neck in an impassioned embrace. But though be held her close, and kissed back the red warm lips, there ran through him a strange shiver of recoil. A feeling of trouble and terror came over him. An indescribable sort of magnetism seemed to emanate from her that excited and pained him, and turned him giddy. What did it mean? Was it possible that any show of affection from the woman he idolized could for an instant shock and repel him? And yet this fervid passion did repel him, though a moment afterwards he hated himself for the involuntary treason. Was it not she herself, his Beatrice, with the violet eyes and the golden hair and the sweet drooping mouth? and had he not welcomed so gladly any sign of effusiveness from her in the earlier days when it was he who had pleaded for her love, and it had been his lips which had timidly sought hers, and her kisses had been rare as pearls, and fresh and pure as morning dewdrops? He told himself that she was overwrought, that she had passed through a dangerous crisis, and that the joy of being restored to him sufficiently accounted for these unaccustomed transports.
Then he gave himself up to the moment's happiness, which was so strange a blending of rapture and suffering. For a little while existence seemed narrowed to a lover's dream, and then came again the throb of revulsion, He roused himself and shook his brain free of the fumes which had mounted to it. "It is time that I should go," he said. But she clung to him and drew down his lips to hers. "I love you so, I love you so," she whispered in passionate accents. "I have never known what it is to live till now; and in my love for you is my life."
Was this his Beatrice whose form trembled in his embrace, whose eyes gazed into his so strangely, whose hot arms entwined his neck so that he used gentle force to unloose their clasp?
"Good-by," he said. He loosened the arms which entwined him.
"Till to-night," she murmured; "to-night you will come back with me from the theatre. Marmy is ill—worn out, and I shall be alone. Stay for a little while with me, and let us be happy again."
"Till to-night," he answered, and left her, his whole being a tumult of misery, joy, longing, and repugnance. He walked all the way back to the studio. He felt like a man who has taken haschish and has still self-control enough left to despise himself for his weakness. His own sensations were an enigma to him. It seemed impossible that Beatrice—his tender, dignified girlish Beatrice, could have inspired him with feelings so wild and contradictory. What did it mean? he asked himself over and over again, and there was no answer to the riddle.
It was late when he got to the theatre. The excitement outside was great. Placards announcing that all available space was occupied were out over the box-office, and disappointed pleasure-seekers wore turning away in little crowds. "Reappearance of Miss Beatrice Brett after her serious illness" was announced in large letters. Many of the critics had assembled. It was supposed that Cosway Keele might hold one of his receptions "behind," to celebrate the event. Lendon pushed his way in and reached his stall. The first act was more than half over. It seemed to him that even then there was in the theatre an atmosphere of excitement and wonder. A pair of critics were whispering together over the backs of their chairs. "It is simply extraordinary," he heard one of them say as he brushed past. "The whole nature of the woman is changed." Behind him there was the same echo, "What does she mean? Is it a new reading?" muttered a man whom he knew, in the ear of his companion.
He had arrived during the Duchess' scene with Cariola in the first act, and she was saying the concluding words which Beatrice had been accustomed to deliver with an appealing pathos that was irresistible—the pathos of a proud spirit forced by the accident of birth to woo instead of being wooed, and shrinking from the sacrifice of her womanly dignity, yet daring even misconception for the sake of a pure absorbing love.
How strange! She gave those words now with a half-defiant unsexed air as of a coquette who knows the power of her wiles, and is determined, even at the cost of her fair fame, to bring the man to her feet. Then followed the scene with Antonio, in which Beatrice had always before been so tender, sweet, and womanly—so pure, that in the very faith and fortitude of her own purity she was free to come down and to defy conventionality, and bid her lover come up to her. Now—what had come over her? It was not a Duchess of Malfi, but a Catherine of Russia. It was not the unconventionality of purity, but the recklessness of passion. It was not the sister of Ferdinand, but Ferdinand's own vile and brutal reading of his sister's character. The tone and manner in which she spoke some of the lines made Lendon start and shudder.
"Awake, awake, man!
I do here put off all vain ceremony,
And only do appear to you a young widow
That claims you for her husband, and, like a widow,
I use but half a blush in't!"
With her eyes and her voice and her gesture, she stood the embodied lust of the flesh.