The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 2/Chapter 12
XII.
It was success, Nick felt, that had made Miriam finer—the full possession of her talent and the sense of the recognition of it. There was an intimation in her presence (if he had given his mind to it) that for him too the same cause would produce the same effect—that is would show him that there is nothing like being launched in the practice of an art to learn what it may do for one. Nick felt clumsy beside a person who manifestly now had such an extraordinary familiarity with the point of view. He remembered too the inferiority that had been in his visitor—something clumsy and shabby, of quite another quality from her actual smartness, as London people would call it, her well-appointedness and her evident command of more than one manner. Handsome as she had been the year before, she had suggested provincial lodgings, bread-and-butter, heavy tragedy and tears; and if then she was an ill-dressed girl with thick hair who wanted to be an actress, she was already in a few weeks an actress who could act even at not acting. She showed what a light hand she could have, forbore to startle and looked as well for unprofessional life as Julia: which was only the perfection of her professional character.
This function came out much in her talk, for there were many little bursts of confidence as well as many familiar pauses as she sat there; and she was ready to tell Nick the whole history of her début—the chance that had suddenly turned up and that she had caught with a jump as it passed. He missed some of the details, in his attention to his own task, and some of them he failed to understand, attached as they were to the name of Mr. Basil Dashwood, which he heard for the first time. It was through Mr. Dashwood's extraordinary exertions that a hearing—a morning performance at a London theatre—had been obtained for her. That had been the great step, for it had led to the putting on at night of the play at the same theatre, in place of a wretched thing they were trying (it was no use) to keep on its feet, and to her engagement for the principal part. She had made a hit in it (she couldn't pretend not to know that); but she was already tired of it, there were so many other things she wanted to do; and when she thought it would probably run a month or two more she was in the humour to curse the odious conditions of artistic production in such an age. The play vas a simplified version of a new French piece, a thing that had taken in Paris, at a third-rate theatre, and had now, in London, proved itself good enough for houses mainly made up of ten-shilling stalls. It was Dashwood who had said it would go, if they could get the rights and a fellow to make some changes: he had discovered it at a nasty little theatre she had never been to, over the Seine. They had got the rights and the fellow who had made the changes was practically Dashwood himself; there was another man, in London, Mr. Gushmore—Miriam didn't know whether Nick would ever have heard of him (Nick hadn't), who had done some of it. It had been awfully chopped down, to a mere bone, with the meat all gone; but that was what people in London seemed to like. They were very innocent, like little dogs amusing themselves with a bone. At any rate, she had made something, she had made a figure of the woman (a dreadful idiot, really, especially in what Dashwood had muddled her into); and Miriam added, in the complacency of her young expansion: "Oh, give me fifty words, any time, and the ghost of a situation, and I'll set you up a figure. Besides, I mustn't abuse poor Yolande—she has saved us," she said.
"Yolande?"
"Our ridiculous play. That's the name of the impossible woman. She has put bread into our mouths and she's a loaf on the shelf for the future. The rights are mine."
"You're lucky to have them," said Nick, a little vaguely, troubled about his sitter's nose, which was somehow Jewish without the convex arch.
"Indeed I am. He gave them to me. Wasn't it charming?"
"He gave them—Mr. Dashwood?"
"Dear me, no; where should poor Dashwood have got them? He hasn't a penny in the world. Besides, if he had got them he would have kept them. I mean your blessed cousin."
"I see—they're a present from Peter."
"Like many other things. Isn't he a dear? If it hadn't been for him the shelf would have remained bare. He bought the play for this country and America for four hundred pounds, and on the chance: fancy! There was no rush for it, and how could he tell? And then he gracefully handed it to me. So I have my little capital. Isn't he a duck? You have nice cousins."
Nick assented to the proposition, only putting in an amendment to the effect that surely Peter had nice cousins also, and making, as he went on with his work, a tacit preoccupied reflection or two; such as that it must be pleasant to render little services like that to youth, beauty and genius (he rather wondered how Peter could afford them), and that, "duck" as he was, Miss Rooth's benefactor was rather taken for granted. Sic vos non vobis faintly murmured itself in Nick's brain. This community of interests, or at least of relations, quickened the flight of time, so that he was still fresh when the sitting came to an end. It was settled that Miriam should come back on the morrow, to enable her portrayer to make the most of the few days of the parliamentary recess; and just before she left she asked—
"Then you will come to-night?"
"Without fail. I hate to lose an hour of you."
"Then I'll place you. It will be my affair."
"You're very kind," he responded. "Isn't it a simple matter for me to take a stall? This week I suppose they're to be had."
"I'll send you a box," said Miriam. "You shall do it well. There are plenty now."
"Why should I be lost, all alone, in the grandeur of a box?"
"Can't you bring your friend?"
"My friend?"
"The lady you are engaged to."
"Unfortunately she's out of town."
Miriam looked at him with a grand profundity. "Does she leave you alone like that?"
"She thought I should like it—I should be more free to paint. You see I am."
"Yes, perhaps it's good for me. Have you got her portrait?" Miriam asked.
"She doesn't like me to paint her."
"Really? Perhaps then she won't like you to paint me."
"That's why I want to be quick," laughed Nick.
"Before she knows it?"
"She'll know it to-morrow. I shall write to her."
Miriam gave him another of her special looks; then she said: "I see; you're afraid of her." And she added, "Mention my name: they'll give you the box at the theatre."
Whether or no Nick were afraid of Mrs. Dallow, he still protested against receiving this bounty from the hands of Miss Rooth—repeated that he would rather take a stall according to his wont and pay for it. This led her to declare with a sudden flicker of passion that if he didn't do as she wished she would never sit to him again.
"Ah then, you have me," returned Nick. "Only I don't see why you should give me so many things."
"What in the world have I given you?"
"Why, an idea." And Nick looked at his picture a little ruefully. "I don't mean to say I haven't let it fall and smashed it."
"Ah, an idea—that is a great thing for people in our line. But you'll see me much better from the box, and I'll send you Gabriel Nash," Miriam added, getting into the hansom which her host's servant had fetched for her. As Nick turned back into his studio after watching her drive away he laughed at the conception that they were in the same "line."
Nick shared his box at the theatre with Gabriel Nash, who talked during the entr'actes not in the least about the performance or the performer, but about the possible greatness of the art of the portraitist—its reach, its range, its fascination, the magnificent examples it had left us in the past: windows open into history, into psychology, things that were among the most precious possessions of the human race. He insisted, above all, on the interest, the richness arising from this great peculiarity of it: that, unlike most other forms, it was a revelation of two realities, the man whom it was the artist's conscious effort to reveal and the man (the interpreter) expressed in the very quality and temper of that effort. It offered a double vision, the strongest dose of life that art could give, the strongest dose of art that life could give. Nick Dormer had already become aware that he had two states of mind in listening to Gabriel Nash: one of them in which he laughed, doubted, sometimes even reprobated, and at any rate failed to follow or to accept; the other in which this contemplative genius seemed to take the words out of his mouth, to utter for him, better and more completely, the very things he was on the point of saying. Nash's saying them at such moments appeared to make them true, to set them up in the world, and to-night he said a good many, especially as to the happiness of cultivating one's own garden; growing there in stillness and freedom certain strong, pure flowers that would bloom forever, long after the rank weeds of the hour were withered and blown away.
It was to keep Miriam Rooth in his eye for his object that Nick had come to the play; and she dwelt there all the evening, being constantly on the stage. He was so occupied in watching her face (for he now saw pretty clearly what he should attempt to make of it) that he was conscious only in a secondary degree of the story she illustrated, and in regard to her acting in particular had mainly a surprised sense that she was extraordinarily quiet. He remembered her loudness, her violence in Paris, at Peter Sherringham's, her wild wails, the first time, at Madame Carré's; compared with which her present manner was eminently temperate and modern. Nick Dormer was not critical at the theatre; he believed what he saw and had a pleasant sense of the inevitable; therefore he would not have guessed what Gabriel Nash had to tell him—that for Miriam, with her tragic cast and her peculiar attributes, her present performance, full of actuality, of light, fine indications and, in parts, of pointed touches of comedy, was a rare tour de force. It went on altogether in a register that he had not supposed her to possess; in which, as he said, she didn't touch her capital, doing it wholly with her little savings. It gave him the idea that she was capable of almost anything.
In one of the intervals they went round to see her; but for Nick this purpose was partly defeated by the wonderful amiability with which he was challenged by Mrs. Rooth, whom they found sitting with her daughter and who attacked him with a hundred questions about his dear mother and his charming sisters. She maintained that that day in Paris they had shown her a kindness she should never forget. She abounded also in gracious expressions in regard to the portrait he had so cleverly begun, declaring that she was so eager to see it, however little he might as yet have accomplished, that she should do herself the honour to wait upon him in the morning, when Miriam came to sit.
"I'm acting for you to-night," the girl said to Nick, before he returned to his place.
"No, that's exactly what you are not doing," Nash interposed, with one of his intellectual superiorities. "You have stopped acting, you have reduced it to the least that will do, you simply are—you are just the visible image, the picture on the wall. It keeps you wonderfully in focus. I have never seen you so beautiful."
Miriam stared at this; then it could be seen that she coloured. "What a luxury in life to have everything explained! He's the great explainer," she said, turning to Nick.
He shook hands with her for good-night. "Well then, we must give him lots to do."
She came to his studio in the morning, but unaccompanied by her mother; in allusion to whom she simply said: "Mamma wished to come, but I wouldn't let her." They proceeded promptly to business. The girl divested herself of her hat and coat, taking the position already established for her. After they had worked for more than an hour, with much less talk than the day before, Nick being extremely absorbed and Miriam wearing in silence the kindest, most religious air of consideration for the sharp tension she imposed upon him—at the end of this period of patience, pervaded by a holy calm, our young lady suddenly got up and exclaimed, "I say, I must see it!" with which, quickly, she stepped down from her place and came round to the canvas. She had, at Nick's request, not looked at his work the day before. He fell back, glad to rest, and put down his palette and brushes.
"Ah bien, c'est tapé!" Miriam cried, as she stood before the easel. Nick was pleased with her ejaculation, he was even pleased with what he had done; he had had a long, happy spurt and felt excited and sanctioned. Miriam, retreating also a little, sank into a high-backed, old-fashioned chair that stood two or three yards from the picture, and reclined in it, with her head on one side, looking at the rough resemblance. She made a remark or two about it, to which Nick replied standing behind her and after a moment leaning on the top of the chair. He was away from his work and his eyes searched it with a kind of fondness of hope. They rose, however, as he presently became conscious that the door of the large room opposite to him had opened without making a sound and that some one stood upon the threshold. The person on the threshold was Julia Dallow.
As soon as he perceived her Nick wished he had posted a letter to her the night before. He had written only that morning. Nevertheless there was genuine joy in the words with which he bounded towards her—"Ah, my dear Julia, what a jolly surprise!"—for her unannounced descent spoke to him above all of an irresistible desire to see him again sooner than they had arranged. She had taken a step forward, but she had done no more, stopping short at the sight of the strange woman, so divested of visiting-gear that she looked half undressed, who lounged familiarly in the middle of the room and over whom Nick had been still more familiarly hanging. Julia's eyes rested on this embodied unexpectedness, and as they did so she grew pale—so pale that Nick, observing it, instinctively looked back to see what Miriam had done to produce such an effect. She had done nothing at all, which was precisely what was embarrassing; only staring at the intruder, motionless and superb. She seemed, somehow, in indolent possession of the place, and even in that instant Nick noted how handsome she looked; so that he exclaimed somewhere, inaudibly, in a region beneath his other emotions: "How I should like to paint her that way!" Mrs. Dallow transferred her eyes for a single moment to Nick's; then they turned away—away from Miriam, ranging over the room.
"I've got a sitter, but you mustn't mind that; we're taking a rest. I'm delighted to see you," said Nick. He closed the door of the studio behind her; his servant was still at the outer door, which was open and through which he saw Julia's carriage drawn up. This made her advance a little further, but still she said nothing; she dropped no answer even when Nick went on, with a sense of awkwardness: "When did you come back? I hope nothing has gone wrong. You come at a very interesting moment," he continued, thinking as soon as he had spoken that they were such words as might have made her laugh. She was far from laughing; she only managed to look neither at him nor at Miriam and to say, after a little, when he had repeated his question about her return:
"I came back this morning—I came straight here."
"And nothing's wrong, I hope?"
"Oh, no—everything's all right," she replied very quickly and without expression. She vouchsafed no explanation of her premature return and took no notice of the seat Nick offered her; neither did she appear to hear him when he begged her not to look yet at the work on the easel—it was in such a dreadful state. He was conscious, as he phrased it, that his request gave to Miriam's position directly in front of his canvas an air of privilege which her neglect to recognize in any way Mrs. Dallow's entrance or her importance did nothing to correct. But that mattered less if the appeal failed to reach Julia's intelligence, as he judged, seeing presently how deeply she was agitated. Nothing mattered in face of the sense of danger which took possession of him after she had been in the room a few moments. He wanted to say: "What's the difficulty? Has anything happened?" but he felt that she would not like him to utter words so intimate in presence of the person she had been rudely startled to find between them. He pronounced Miriam's name to Mrs. Dallow and Mrs. Dallow's to Miriam, but Julia's recognition of the ceremony was so slight as to be scarcely perceptible. Miriam had the air of waiting for something more before she herself made a sign; and as nothing more came she continued to be silent and not to budge. Nick added a remark to the effect that Mrs. Dallow would remember to have had the pleasure of meeting Miss Rooth the year before—in Paris, that day, at her brother Peter's; to which Mrs. Dallow rejoined, "Ah, yes," without any qualification, while she looked down at some rather rusty studies, on panels, which were ranged along the floor, resting against the base of the wall. Her agitation was evidently a pain to herself; she had had a shock of extreme violence, and Nick saw that as Miriam showed no symptom of offering to give up her sitting her stay would be of the briefest. He wished Miriam would do something—say she would go, get up, move about; as it was she had the appearance of watching from her point of vantage Mrs. Dallow's discomfiture. He made a series of inquiries about Julia's doings in the country, to two or three of which she gave answers monosyllabic and scarcely comprehensible, while she turned her eyes round and round the room as if she were looking for something she couldn't find for an escape, for something that was not Miriam. At last she said it was at the end of a very few minutes:
"I didn't come to stay—when you're so busy. I only looked in to see if you were here. Good-bye."
"It's charming of you to have come. I'm so glad you've seen for yourself how well I'm occupied," Nick replied, not unaware that he was very red. This made Mrs. Dallow look at him, while Miriam considered them both. Julia's eyes had something in them that he had never seen before—a flask of fright by which he was himself frightened. "Of course I'll see you later," he added, laughing awkwardly, while she reached the door, while she opened it herself and got off without a good-day to Miriam. "I wrote to you this morning—you've missed my letter," he repeated behind her, having already given her this information. The door of the studio was very near that of the house, but before Mrs. Dallow had reached the street the visitors' bell was set ringing. The passage was narrow and she kept in advance of Nick, anticipating his motion to open the street-door. The bell was tinkling still when, by the action of her own hand, a gentleman on the step stood revealed.
"Ah my dear, don't go!" Nick heard pronounced in quick, soft dissuasion and in the now familiar accents of Gabriel Nash. The rectification followed more quickly still, if that were a rectification which scarcely improved the matter: "I beg a thousand pardons. I thought you were Miriam."
Gabriel gave way, and Mrs. Dallow dashed out of the house. Her carriage, a victoria with a pair of horses who had got hot, had taken a turn up the street, but the coachman had already perceived his mistress and was rapidly coming back. He drew near; not so fast however but that Gabriel Nash had time to accompany Mrs. Dallow to the edge of the pavement with an apology for the freedom into which he had blundered. Nick was at her other hand, waiting to put her into her carriage and freshly disconcerted by the encounter with Nash, who somehow, as he stood making Julia an explanation that she didn't listen to, looked less eminent than usual, though not more conscious of difficulties. Nick coloured deeper and watched the footman spring down as the victoria drove up; he heard Nash say something about the honour of having met Mrs. Dallow in Paris. Nick wanted him to go into the house; he damned inwardly his want of delicacy. He desired a word with Julia alone—as much alone as the two inconvenient servants would allow. But Nash was not too much discouraged to say: "You came for a glimpse of the great model? Doesn't she sit? That's what I wanted too, this morning—just a look, for a blessing on the day. Ah, but you, madam—"
Julia had sprung into the carriage while he was still speaking and had flashed out to the coachman a "Home!" which of itself set the vehicle in motion. The carriage went a few yards, but while Gabriel, with a magnificent bow, turned away, Nick Dormer, with his hand on the edge of the hood, moved with it.
"You don't like it, but I'll explain," he said, laughing and in a low tone.
"Explain what?" Mrs. Dallow asked, still very pale and grave, but showing nothing in her voice. She was thinking of the servants. She could think of them even then.
"Oh, it's all right. I'll come in at five," Nick returned, gallantly jocular, while the carriage rolled away.
Gabriel had gone into the studio and Nick found him standing in admiration before Miriam, who had resumed the position in which she was sitting.
"Lord, she's good to-day! Isn't she good to-day?" Nash broke out, seizing Nick by the arm to give him a certain view. Miriam looked indeed still handsomer than before, and she had taken up her attitude again with a splendid sphinx-like air of being capable of keeping it forever. Nick said nothing, but he went back to work with a tingle of confusion, which proved in fact, when he resumed his palette, to be a sharp and, after a moment, a delightful stimulus. Miriam spoke never a word, but she was doubly grand, and for more than an hour, till Nick, exhausted, declared he must stop, the industrious silence was broken only by the desultory discourse of Gabriel Nash.