CHAPTER VII.
Countess Adrian's Portrait.
Bernard Lendon was in his studio the morning after his visit to Countess Adrian, He was by way of having taken up work again, and the place was littered with sketches and unfinished landscapes, the result of his American trip. There was also on the stocks a portrait of a very handsome and fashionable woman, newly married, whose husband was a friend of his and had commissioned him to paint his bride. He was expecting its original for a sitting when a carriage drove up to the door. He waited in the full anticipation that she and no other was his visitor. He was mistaken, however. The door leading on to the gallery was opened, and the portière held aside for a lady to pass through and descend, but the lady was Countess Adrian.
She came down the stairs with composed undulating grace, raising her veil as be advanced to meet her, and she smiled as if there appeared to herself something odd and amusing in this impromptu call.
"You see, I have taken upon myself to return your visit—and very soon," she said, when the first greetings were over. "I was going to write to you as I said, but the impulse seized me to come and see you instead. I always act on impulse; so I am here to tell my business in person."
He offered her a chair, and she unwound some of her furs.
"Isn't that a dangerous creed, Countess?"
"Very likely; it has certainly not answered as a whole in my case. Let us hope that it may turn out better in detail. Well, I told you I meant to ask you to do something for me. Briefly, I am going to give you a commission, if you will accept it."
"A commission, Countess!"
"There's nothing odd in that. You take commissions to paint portraits," and she glanced at the one on the easel. "I want you to paint mine. Does that please you, or the reverse?"
"Of course, it pleases me."
"Then you will do it?"
"With the utmost pleasure."
"But I want it done quickly—a half-length. I shall sit to you every day."
"So much the better."
"Really, you are delightfully accommodating. I don't know why I imagined that you would make all manner of difficulties, but I did. I assure you I was quite nervous about making my request. But now to business, please. I am quite in serious earnest—about my dress, and the time, and everything else. It is to be given to Sir Donald Urquhart on his birthday, three weeks hence; so you see there is no time for delay."
When the preliminaries were settled, she got up and roved about the room, examining the tapestry, and making lithe discursive remarks as she went along. "You think he will like the portrait? It is so dreadfully difficult to find a present for a man like Sir Donald. That's the worst of being so rich. But you think it's a good idea?"
"If only I can do you justice."
"Oh! I am sure you will do me far more than justice: I shall be at my very best. I am certain that it is quite as necessary for the sitter to be on the alert—sympathetic, you understand—as the artist himself. And I like your portraits. Looking at that"—she stopped before the easel on which his latest work was placed—"one would almost fancy that Mrs. Jarvis had a soul. Tell me," she added, turning to him as if a new idea had struck her, "did Maddox Challis ever talk to you about the possibility of forcing one person's soul into another person's body?"
"I have a distinct recollection of hearing him speak on that subject at Sir Donald's supper-table, the first time I met you."
"Yes, I remember. Well, do you believe in it?"
"As much as I believe in this." He took up a yellow-covered French novel which was lying on a small table beside his own particular lounging-chair, and held it towards her.
She read the title—"Théophile Gautier's 'Avatar.' I know it. Odd that you should have been reading that book just before the thought came uppermost in my mind. I always say what is uppermost; that's another article of my dangerous creed. I don't know why you should be so sceptical. The theory of the Avatar is as old as the oldest religion. Haven't you ever felt, when you took laughing-gas or chloroform," she went on, "that your soul left your body?"
"Yes, I have," he answered, laughing; "and it must have gone on some pleasant excursion, for I remember, on awaking, that I felt confoundedly sorry that it had come back again."
"Oh! I think it is a frightful sensation. I can imagine nothing more horrible than the sudden knowledge that one must die—to go forth cold, naked, and grey, into blank space—to have no body, no soft warm flesh. I love my downy skin." She held out her arm as she spoke, and pushed back her sleeve and looked tenderly on the delicate velvety surface. "To have no power of animal enjoyment; to lose the pleasure of basking in sunshine, the joy of physical sense, and to be conscious all the while of one's craving and one's nothingness! Ghastly! No; give me life—life—long life!"
"Yet," said Lendon, "I have been told that death brings with it the strangest sense of peace and content."
"Not for me. It would be a very tearing apart of spirit and flesh. I should be one of those vampire-spirits one reads of—you know Sheridan Le Fanu's story?—and renew my life with human blood; or should I be strong enough, I wonder, to carry out Mr. Challis's idea, and usurp a body at the expense of some weak unfortunate soul? Mr. Lendon, how would one feel, I wonder, encased in some one else's body? Would one keep its consciousness of identity? and, if so, what an amusing sense of paradox would run through all experience; or would it be a mere confused blending of personalities—a bewildering jumble of past and present impressions—a sort of battle between spirit and flesh—a mystery without a clue? What do you think?"
"How can I form an idea of what is absolutely outside experience?"
"Oh! but it need not be, Did you not hear Maddox Challis say that such an Avatar was quite possible?"
"Ah, then, we want Maddox Challis here to explain the process."
"He is quite capable of coming—in his astral form. I know that once, when his real body was in Palestine, his astral shape appeared to a friend of his in London, and, warned him of a coming danger."
"In time to avert it?"
"Yes. He never plays those pranks without a sufficient motive; but he cannot bear any allusion to that story, and will answer no questions about it. The man to whom he appeared was a changed person from that day. He had been a materialist before; now he has entered the Roman Catholic Church, and joins mortification of the flesh to the highest mysticism."
"Are you a Catholic?" asked Lendon, abruptly.
"No. Frankly, I am nothing. I own no God but nature, and I want nothing higher." There was a short silence, during which Countess Adrian examined a sketch lying on an easel near her. "I wish I knew whether I should lose my identity," she went on, reflectively, as if she were again seriously considering the possibilities of such a transformation as that to which she had alluded. "I don't respect myself in the least, Mr. Lendon. I know that there are hundreds of millions of more estimable persons; but I am not uninteresting, even to myself. I shouldn't like to give up my own identity. With all my faults and follies, and God knows they are numerous enough to wreck a dozen lives, I find myself bon camarade. We have gone through a good deal together, this Agnes Adrian and I; we should not like to part company. Mr. Lendon," she added suddenly, not waiting for him to reply; "why do we always get upon horrors? Good-by, till to-morrow!" As she went up the stairs, she stopped, and, looking down upon him, asked, "By the way, have you seen the Improvisatrice lately?"
The suddenness of the question startled Lendon. He felt that his face changed. He answered lamely that he had called upon her a few days before.
The Countess' penetrating gaze was confusing.
"She is going to play the Duchess of Malfi, I hear. Can she do it?"
"Mr. Cosway Keele at any rate thinks so."
"I know the play; it is one of the parts I have always thought I should like to act. Did you know that after my—my bouleversement"—she gave her shoulders a little shrug—"I thought of going on the stage?"
"I had never heard it," he answered; "but that goes for nothing."
"No! You were oddly ignorant about me; and I thought I was famous! Yes, I actually went to a manager. One had to do something. I was poor, with the habits and tastes of the Second Empire. I couldn't be a governess. No one would hire me as a servant. There was nothing but to be a barmaid or an actress. Well, luckily for me, an old man who had been in love with me died and left me a fortune, and so I was spared the necessity of earning my bread. But the Duchess! You came over from America with her, did you not?"
He replied that they had travelled in the same steamer.
"And you are altering the play? you see her very often, of course," she went on. Then, without waiting for his answer, said, "Shall you marry her?"
"Wouldn't it be more to the purpose to say, 'Will she marry me?'" he returned, with an awkward attempt at pleasantry. "Miss Brett is wedded to her art."
"Oh! That is nonsense. All women who do anything are wedded to their art, till the art of love proves more attractive. But are you going to marry her?"
"I have never asked her," he replied.
She was thoughtful for a moment. "Are you going to paint her then?"
"Really, Countess, I have not thought of that either."
"I always believed that was a painter's first thought when he saw a beautiful woman. And she is beautiful. Why did she faint so suddenly the other night?"
"She has a strange fancy that it was because you looked at her?"
Countess Adrian bent forward quite eagerly. "That is a curious idea."
"It is an idea which has taken possession of her. She dreads you with a superstitious and unreasoning dread. She believes that you have the evil eye. She thinks that if you chose to exert your power you could make her fail in a great part."
"Oh, I am not so wicked as that," Countess Adrian laughed softly. "She has all my good wishes for success in the Duchess of Malfi. She will succeed, I am sure of it!"
"Yes, I am sure of it also," answered Lendon.
"But, tell me," the Countess went on, "for this to me is deeply interesting. Is that exactly how she feels? She was really conscious the other night that it was my influence which affected her and made her unable to go on acting?"
"Don't you know it?" answered Lendon, almost roughly. He was jarred inexpressibly by the cool manner in which Countess Adrian appeared to weigh poor Beatrice's agonies. It reminded him somehow of the scientific interest of a vivisector. "You know that you meant to make her feel your influence that evening. Was it quite kind to experimentalize upon one so delicate, and at a moment too when she was necessarily more emotionally susceptible than at other times?"
Her face seemed to pale a little and her eyes gathered fire as they fixed themselves upon him while he spoke. "On the contrary, she ought not to have been at a disadvantage. One might have supposed her so absorbed in, and identified with, the character she was representing as to be quite impervious to any outside impressions. Come, there's an interesting and instructive problem for dramatic psychologists to squabble over. I commend it to you in your new capacity of playwright and dramatic critic."
"It is a problem that does not interest me," he answered coldly.
"But I know what does interest you; and that is—Miss Beatrice Brett. I don't know what you mean by asking if it was kind of me to experimentalize in that way. I never thought of it. I won't admit anything as to my motives. In the first place you have no right to assume that I had any malevolent intention."
"I don't assume it. I only ask you to be merciful in future. Of course, Miss Brett's dread of you is only an imagination. It seems almost absurd to discuss it seriously, but imagination may work great havoc with a nervous system so highly wrought as hers."
Countess Adrian had reached the gallery and was standing a little above him, as leaning against the balustrade she looked down on him with a grave and yet satisfied smile.
"Yes," she said, "it does seem absurd to discuss seriously a merely elementary experiment in occultism. I am rather ashamed of it. It was an experiment. I wanted to see what it was possible to do when one concentrated one's will-power upon a person susceptible to magnetism."
Lendon could have imagined that she was experimentalizing at this moment upon himself, so deep and steady was her gaze. Nevertheless, he felt curiously unaffected by it.
"Why did you choose Miss Brett as a subject?" he asked.
"Because I thought she seemed a likely one; and then everyone's attention was drawn to her. Tell her though that she need not be afraid, I will not do it again."
"Thank you." He laughed a little awkwardly. "Apart from any interest I may feel in Miss Brett, I have very strong interest in the fate of the Duchess of Malfi. But tell me, Countess, do you go about the world choosing like another 'She' whom you will 'blast' with your eyes? Oughtn't I to take this as a warning to a rash artist who is so venturesome as to try and paint those same dangerous orbs?"
She dropped her gaze at once and flushed again as rosily as a girl.
"You know quite well that my eyes are not dangerous to you. It annoys me when you take that sneering cynical tone. I shall not tell you any more of my occult experiments."
With these words she left him.
It must be owned that, during those mornings in the week which were devoted to the portrait, Lendon found Countess Adrian a very agreeable companion. She was certainly a delightful object of contemplation; and she had not walked the world so freely without acquiring ideas sufficiently bold and varied to keep a listener's mind pleasantly on the stretch. Her frankness was amazing. She seemed to want to convey to Lendon that he of all beings was the one whom she most desired should know her in her heights and depths and with all possible extenuating explanations. She appeared to wish to disarm any outside criticism which might reach him, by giving him first her own version of various episodes in her somewhat adventurous career. She had a pictorial way of relating things, and put into her accounts of herself a richness of colour and a mysterious suggestiveness of complex motive that threw a rosy glow of poetry and romance over all that she told of her actions and moods.
He was more than ever impressed by the tropical luxuriance of her temperament. Her audacity had something of the unconsciousness of childhood, and there seemed truth in her remark upon herself that, in spite of her many experiences, she was at bottom absolutely natural.
She had the ways of a woman at war with society; but her manner clearly indicated that she considered the challenge had not been laid down on her part. "Do circumstances make temperament, or does temperament make circumstances?" was one of the riddles she propounded. Her moods were quite incalculable. Sometimes she would come to the studio and pose with an air of chastened sweetness worthy of a Madonna, while her speech was gentle and tender as the murmurs of a cooing dove. At other times she paced the room like a caged lioness, as if she needed some vent for her fiery and impetuous energy; and as under these conditions serious work was out of the question, she would propose that he should walk with her along the Embankment, or cross the bridge to the Battersea region, and tramp the Park till she was subdued and conventional again. Sometimes she had all the dignity of a great lady pure and simple; sometimes she would smoke a cigarette, and toss off her little glass of cognac with the unrestraint of a cocotte. Yet through all these chameleon changes she was always herself, racy, original, daring, refined, and altogether brilliant, with that nameless shadow of sadness, that not too obtrusive touch of the sensuous, which increased her bewildering charm.
It struck him as curious that her talk so often touched on mystic subjects. He wondered where she had got her curious lore. She told him once that, if he had ever lived in Paris, he would not be surprised that her taste ran in that direction; for that not only were Professor Charcot's experiments carried on in private life in certain sections of society, but that the modern medical school numbered many an aspiring dabbler in black magic. She laughed off his questions as to whether she had tampered with the forbidden knowledge, and said that she had always gone on the principle of putting out feelers in every direction. What was life worth if you must be bound down to one narrow groove of experience? She liked to sip every variety of beverage, and this was only one phase of her character. When he knew her better, he would discover that she was equally at home as a sportswoman, a woman of letters, and a butterfly of society. Still he noticed that there were two subjects which were always obtruding themselves in her conversation—so-called occultism and Maddox Challis. "He is the only person in the world that I am afraid of," she said once, "and I am afraid of him because he knows me too well. Don't misunderstand me," she added laughing, as Lendon looked at her, perplexed as to her meaning; "I don't want to convey in a roundabout fashion that I am a secret murderess, and that I have a mysterious crime on my conscience of which Maddox Challis only possesses the key. I have never done anything half as bad as the evil deeds for which the world already gives me the credit."
"Why, then?" he asked.
"Why? I am going to tell you something. There's a little old lady in London whom I know, and who has clairvoyant eyes—the clearest, most penetrating blue eyes, which seem to be looking far, far into space. So, in fact, they are. They have a terrible power, those eyes; and I always avoid that old lady. The odd thing is that she is quite simple and unsophisticated, and doesn't seem in the least to realise what a terror she might be to some people, and what a help to others. If she were here now, she could tell you that you were surrounded by a crowd of bodiless beings, and she would describe them to you. Perhaps they might be good spirits who prompt you to good actions and sweet and gracious thoughts, or they might be very evil ones—and then she would turn very pale and shudder, and go away from you as soon as she could without actual rudeness. Once she paid a visit to Monte Carlo, and she described the galerie behind the rows of players invisible to everybody but herself. These people were the spirits of suicides mostly; and some had their throats gaping, and some had part of their faces and heads blown away, and were bespattered with blood, and some had the marks of strangulation, and others were only greedy and excited with the passion for play. They hang on the croupier's call as eager and as fascinated as the living themselves, and would stretch out their hands gloatingly over the gold. They would whisper in the ear of some player, and the payer seemed to be obeying the invisible prompters, who would often laugh with the most execrable grimaces when the stake was raked in, as though they were glad of the ill-fortune, and they would stoop and whisper again and again, till the player, goaded to desperation, doubled and doubled, and lost and lost. Well, who would play at Monte Carlo if they could see what that little old lady saw? Maddox Challis is like that. He sees within and without, but he is not simple and unsophisticated like the little old lady. He knows the power he possesses, and he says nothing. He bides his time. He only looks at you, and pays courtly compliments, and lets you know by his eyes that he knows. I dare say that, while he is smoking cigarettes, at this present moment, in the courtyard of his house at Damascus, he is perfectly well aware that you and I are talking about him here."
Lendon felt an odd reluctance to tell Beatrice of that conversation with Countess Adrian which had reference to herself, and of Countess Adrian's promise that she would not again experimentalize, as she had done, upon the memorable occasion at Mrs. Walcot Valbry's. There were several reasons for his disinclination to open up the subject. The rehearsals of "The Duchess of Malfi" were in their full swing. Brain, nerves, and energies of every one in the theatre were concentrated upon what was felt would be either an enormous success or an ignominious failure. Cosway Keele was terribly anxious. The tragic atmosphere of mediæval Italy seemed to pervade the Dionysion. The actors were frightfully nervous, and among themselves prophesied disaster. Theatrical people are famous for superstitions, and the fact was commented upon direfully that the stage cat—that friendly familiar, without which it is supposed that no theatre can be lucky—had died during the first week of the rehearsals. There were other minor portents of ill. Even the scene-shifters moved about as if overwhelmed by a weight of care. As for Beatrice herself, she lived in her part. She was no longer Beatrice Brett; she was the Duchess of Malfi. She was not the young American actress about to make an ambitious venture which should raise her to giddy heights of success, or send her tottering down to join the crowd of failures. She was not the Beatrice who lay on the sofa in her little study, and looked out on the trees in Regent's Park. She was not the Beatrice who paced the boards of the Dionysion, or waited at the wings for her cue, or stood patiently under the hands of designer and dressmaker. This was not Regent's Park. This was not the Dionysian, It was a stately Italian palace, and outside, the roses and the orange-trees were in bloom, and the poor Princess of court etiquette, impatient of her brother's jealous surveillance, waited and watched for the hour when she should steal forth to meet her lowly-born husband-lover. She had no thought for the common things of London life. She had forgotten even her terror of Countess Adrian, since for the time Countess Adrian had disappeared from her horizon. And why should Lendon rouse the morbid fancy, and even, in reassuring her, remind her anew of the slumbering dread, and perhaps revive all her superstitions fancies? And then, again, he had a feeling of suppressed irritation at the mere notion that she was so far in Countess Adrain's power. It annoyed him to think that this girl, who was his ideal of all that was pure and perfect, should be at the mercy, as it were, of a woman of whom the world spoke slightingly. It was only in association with Beatrice that the thought of Countess Adrian's antecedents vexed him. He would have taken her part loyally against her traducers as he would that of a trusted comrade. In his own mind, and even hitherto in speaking of her to Beatrice, he had maintained that she was a wronged and maligned woman. But a man may entertain all these sentiments about a certain woman and yet be unwilling that she should exercise an unaccountable influence over the one woman dearest to him.