The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 3/Chapter 18
XVIII.
One day, toward the end of March of the following year, or in other words more than six months after the incident I have last had occasion to narrate, Bridget Dormer came into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at Broadwood—she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about herself, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they could remember, the head of the family had honoured Lady Agnes. Nick noted however that it had apparently been taken as a great favour, and Biddy loyally testified to the fact that her elder brother was awfully jolly and that his presence had been a pretext for tremendous fun. Nick asked her what had passed about his marriage—what their mother had said to him.
"Oh, nothing," Biddy replied; and he had said nothing to Lady Agnes and not a word to herself. This partly explained, for Nick, the awful jollity and the tremendous fun—none but cheerful topics had been produced; but he questioned his sister further, to a point which led her to say: "Oh, I dare say that before long she'll write to her."
"Who will write to whom?"
"Mamma 'll write to his wife. I'm sure he'd like it. Of course we shall end by going to see her. He was awfully disappointed at what he found in Spain—he didn't find anything."
Biddy spoke of his disappointment almost with commiseration, for she was evidently inclined this morning to a fresh and kindly view of things. Nick could share her feeling only so far as was permitted by a recognition merely general of what his brother must have looked for. It might have been snipe and it might have been bristling boars. Biddy was indeed brief, at first, about everything, in spite of the two months that had intervened since their last meeting; for he saw in a few minutes that she had something behind—something that made her gay and that she wanted to come to quickly. Nick was vaguely vexed at her being, fresh from Broadwood, so gay as that; for (it was impossible to shut one's eyes to it) what had come to pass, in practice, in regard to that rural retreat, was exactly what he had desired to avert. All winter, while it had been taken for granted that his mother and sisters were doing what he wished, they had been doing the precise contrary. He held Biddy perhaps least responsible, and there was no one he could exclusively blame. He washed his hands of the matter and succeeded fairly well for the most part in forgetting that he was not pleased. Julia Dallow herself in fact appeared to have been the most active member of the little group united to make light of his scruples. There had been a formal restitution of the place, but the three ladies were there more than ever, with the slight difference that they were mainly there with its mistress. Mahomet had declined to go any more to the mountain, so the mountain had virtually come to Mahomet.
After their long visit in the autumn Lady Agnes and her girls had come back to town; but they had gone down again for Christmas, and Julia had taken this occasion to write to Nick that she hoped very much he wouldn't refuse them all his own company for just a little scrap of the supremely sociable time. Nick, after reflection, judged it best not to refuse, and he spent three days under Mrs. Dallow's roof. The "all" proved a great many people, for she had taken care to fill the house. She was a magnificent entertainer, and Nick had never seen her so splendid, so free-handed, so gracefully practical. She was a perfect mistress of the revels; she had organized something festive for every day and for every night. The Dormers were so much in it, as the phrase was, that after all their discomfiture their fortune seemed in an hour to have come back. There had been a moment when, in extemporized charades, Lady Agnes, an elderly figure being required, appeared on the point of undertaking the part of the housekeeper at a castle, who, dropping her h's, showed sheeplike tourists about; but she waived the opportunity in favour of her daughter Grace. Even Grace had a great success. Nick of course was in the charades and in everything, but Julia was not; she only invented, directed, led the applause. When nothing else was going on Nick "sketched" the whole company: they followed him about, they waylaid him on staircases, clamouring to be allowed to sit. He obliged them, so far as he could, all save Julia, who didn't clamour; and, growing rather red, he thought of Gabriel Nash while he bent over the paper. Early in the new year he went abroad for six weeks, but only as far as Paris. It was a new Paris for him then: a Paris of the Rue Bonaparte and three or four professional friends (he had more of these there than in London); a Paris of studios and studies and models, of researches and revelations, comparisons and contrasts, of strong impressions and long discussions and rather uncomfortable economies, small cafés and bad fires and the general sense of being twenty again.
While he was away his mother and sisters (Lady Agnes now sometimes wrote to him) returned to London for a month, and before he was again established in Rosedale Road they went back for a third period to Broadwood. After they had been there five days—and this was the salt of the whole dish—Julia took herself off to Harsh, leaving them in undisturbed possession. They had remained so; they would not come up to town till after Easter. The trick was played, and Biddy, as I have mentioned, was now very content. Her brother presently learned however that the reason of this was not wholly the success of the trick; unless indeed her further ground was only a continuation of it. She was not in London as a forerunner of her mother; she was not even as yet in Calcutta Gardens. She had come to spend a week with , who had lately taken the dearest little flat in a charming new place, just put up, on the other side of the Park, with all kinds of lifts and tubes and electricities. Florence had been awfully nice to her—she had been with them ever so long at Broadwood, while the flat was being painted and prepared—and mamma had then let her, let Biddy, promise to come to her, when everything was ready, so that they might have a kind of old maids' house-warming together. If Florence could do without a chaperon now (she had two latch-keys and went alone on the top of omnibuses, and her name was in the Red Book), she was enough of a duenna for another girl. Biddy alluded, with sweet and cynical eyes, to the fine, happy stride she had thus taken in the direction of enlightened spinsterhood; and Nick hung his head, somewhat abashed and humiliated, for, modern as he had supposed himself, there were evidently currents more modern yet.
It so happened on this particular morning Nick had drawn out of a corner his interrupted study of Gabriel Nash; for no purpose more definite (he had only been looking round the room in a rummaging spirit) than to see curiously how much or how little of it remained. It had become to his apprehension such a shadowy affair (he was sure of this, and it made him laugh) that it didn't seem worth putting away, and he left it leaning against a table, as if it had been a blank canvas or a "preparation" to be painted over. In this attitude it attracted Biddy's attention, for to her, on a second glance, it had distinguishable features. She had not seen it before and she asked whom it might represent, remarking also that she could almost guess, but not quite: she had known the original, but she couldn't name him.
"Six months ago, for a few days, it represented Gabriel Nash," Nick replied. "But it doesn't represent anybody or anything now."
"Six months ago? What's the matter with it and why don't you go on?"
"What's the matter with it is more than I can tell you. But I can't go on, because I've lost my model."
Biddy stared an instant. "Is he dead?"
Her brother laughed out at the candid cheerfulness, hopefulness almost, with which this inquiry broke from her. "He's only dead to me. He has gone away."
"Where has he gone?"
"I haven't the least idea."
"Why, have you quarrelled?" Biddy asked.
"Quarrelled? For what do you take us? Does the nightingale quarrel with the moon?"
"I needn't ask which of you is the moon," said Biddy.
"Of course I'm the nightingale. But, more literally," Nick continued, "Nash has melted back into the elements—he is part of the ambient air." Then, as even with this literalness he saw that his sister was mystified, he added: "I have a notion he has gone to India, and at the present moment is reclining on a bank of flowers in the vale of Cashmere."
Biddy was silent a minute, after which she dropped: "Julia will be glad—she dislikes him so."
"If she dislikes him, why should she be glad he's in such a delightful situation?"
"I mean about his going away; she'll be glad of that."
"My poor child, what has Julia to do with it?"
"She has more to do with things than you think," Biddy replied, with some eagerness; but she had no sooner uttered the words than she perceptibly blushed. Hereupon, to attenuate the foolishness of her blush (only it had the opposite effect), she added: "She thinks he has been a bad element in your life."
Nick shook his head, smiling. "She thinks, perhaps, but she doesn't think enough; otherwise, she would arrive at this thought—that she knows nothing whatever about my life."
"Ah, Nick," the girl pleaded, with solemn eyes, "you don't imagine what an interest she takes in it. She has told me, many times—she has talked lots to me about it." Biddy paused and then went on, with an anxious little smile shining through her gravity, as if she were trying cautiously how much her brother would take: "She has a conviction that it was Mr. Nash who made trouble between you."
"My dear Biddy," Nick rejoined, "those are thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to Nash a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have gone into him. Moreover," our young man continued, "if Julia has talked to you so much about the matter, there's no harm in my talking to you a little. When she threw me over in an hour, it was on a perfectly definite occasion. That occasion was the presence in my studio of a dishevelled actress."
"Oh Nick, she has not thrown you over!" Biddy protested. "She has not I have the proof."
Nick felt, at this direct denial, a certain stir of indignation, and he looked at his sister with momentary sternness. "Has she sent you here to tell me this? What do you mean by the proof?"
Biddy's eyes, at these questions, met her brother's with a strange expression, and for a few seconds, while she looked entreatingly into his own, she wavered there, with parted lips, vaguely stretching out her hands. The next minute she had burst into tears—she was sobbing on his breast. He said "Hallo!" and soothed her; but it was very quickly over. Then she told him what she meant by her "proof," and what she had had on her mind ever since she came into the room. It was a message from Julia, but not to say—not to say what he had asked her just before if she meant; though indeed Biddy, more familiar now, since her brother had had his arm round her, boldly expressed the hope that it might in the end come to the same thing. Julia simply wanted to know (she had instructed Biddy to sound him discreetly) if Nick would undertake her portrait; and the girl wound up this experiment in "sounding" by the statement that their beautiful kinswoman was dying to sit.
"Dying to sit?" repeated Nick, whose turn it was, this time, to feel his colour rise.
"Any time you like after Easter, when she comes up to town. She wants a full-length, and your very best, your most splendid work."
Nick stared, not caring that he had blushed. "Is she serious?"
"Ah, Nick—serious!" Biddy reasoned tenderly. She came nearer to him, and he thought she was going to weep again. He took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes.
"It's all right, if she knows I am. But why doesn't she come like any one else? I don't refuse people! "
"Nick, dearest Nick!" she went on, with her eyes conscious and pleading. He looked into them intently—as well as she, he could play at sounding—and for a moment, between these young persons, the air was lighted by the glimmer of mutual searchings and suppressed confessions. Nick read deep, and then, suddenly releasing his sister, he turned away. She didn't see his face in that movement, but an observer to whom it had been presented might have fancied that it denoted a foreboding which was not exactly a dread, yet was not exclusively a joy.
The first thing Nick made out in the room, when he could distinguish, was Gabriel Nash's portrait, which immediately filled him with an unreasoning resentment. He seized it and turned it about; he jammed it back into its corner, with its face against the wall. This bustling transaction might have served to carry off the embarrassment with which he had finally averted himself from Biddy. The embarrassment however was all his own; none of it was reflected in the way Biddy resumed, after a silence in which she had followed his disposal of the picture:
"If she's so eager to come here (for it's here that she wants to sit, not in Great Stanhope Street—never!) how can she prove better that she doesn't care a bit if she meets Miss Rooth?"
"She won't meet Miss Rooth," Nick replied, rather dryly.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" said Biddy. She was as frank as if she had achieved a sort of victory over her companion; and she seemed to regret the loss of a chance for Mrs. Dallow to show magnanimity. Her tone made her brother laugh, but she went on, with confidence: "She thought it was Mr. Nash who made Miss Rooth come."
"So he did, by the way," said Nick.
"Well, then, wasn't that making trouble?"
"I thought you admitted there was no harm in her being here."
"Yes, but he hoped there would be."
"Poor Nash's hopes!" Nick laughed. "My dear child, it would take a cleverer head than you or me, or even Julia, who must have invented that wise theory, to say what they were. However, let us agree, that even if they were perfectly devilish my good sense has been a match for them."
"Oh, Nick, that's delightful!" chanted Biddy. Then she added, "Do you mean she doesn't come any more?"
"The dishevelled actress? She hasn't been near me for months."
"But she's in London—she's always acting? I've been away so much I've scarcely observed," Biddy explained, with a slight change of note.
"The same part, poor creature, for nearly a year. It appears that that's success, in her profession. I saw her in the character several times last summer, but I haven't set foot in her theatre since."
Biddy was silent a moment; then she suggested: "Peter wouldn't have liked that."
"Oh, Peter's likes!" sighed Nick, at his easel, beginning to work.
"I mean her acting the same part for a year."
"I'm sure I don't know; he has never written me a word."
"Nor me either," Biddy returned.
There was another short silence, during which Nick brushed at a panel. It was terminated by his presently saying: "There's one thing, certainly, Peter would like—that is simply to be here to-night. It's a great night—another great night—for the dishevelled one. She's to act Juliet for the first time."
"Ah, how I should like to see her!" the girl cried.
Nick glanced at her; she sat watching him. "She has sent me a stall; I wish she had sent me two. I should have been delighted to take you."
"Don't you think you could get another?" asked Biddy.
"They must be in tremendous demand. But who knows, after all?" Nick added, at the same moment, looking round. "Here's a chance—here's a quite extraordinary chance!"
His servant had opened the door and was ushering in a lady whose identity was indeed justly indicated in those words. "Miss Rooth!" the man announced; but he was caught up by a gentleman who came next and who exclaimed, laughing and with a gesture gracefully corrective: "No, no—no longer Miss Rooth!"
Miriam entered the place with her charming familiar grandeur, as she might have appeared, as she appeared every night, early in her first act, at the back of the stage, by the immemorial central door, presenting herself to the house, taking easy possession, repeating old movements, looking from one to the other of the actors before the footlights. The rich "Good morning" that she threw into the air, holding out her hand to Biddy Dormer and then giving her left to Nick (as she might have given it to her own brother), had nothing to tell of intervals or alienations. She struck Biddy as still more terrible, in her splendid practice, than when she had seen her before—the practice and the splendour had now something almost royal. The girl had had occasion to make her courtesy to majesties and highnesses, but the flutter those effigies produced was nothing to the way in which, at the approach of this young lady, the agitated air seemed to recognize something supreme. So the deep, mild eyes that she bent upon Biddy were not soothing, though they were evidently intended to soothe. The girl wondered that Nick could have got so used to her (he joked at her as she came), and later in the day, still under the great impression of this incident, she even wondered that Peter could. It was true that Peter apparently hadn't.
"You never came—you never came," said Miriam to Biddy, kindly, sadly; and Biddy recognizing the allusion, the invitation to visit the actress at home, had to explain how much she had been absent from London, and then even that her brother hadn't proposed to take her. "Very true—he hasn't come himself. What is he doing now?" Miriam asked, standing near Biddy, but looking at Nick, who had immediately engaged in conversation with his other visitor, a gentleman whose face came back to the girl. She had seen this gentleman on the stage with Miss Rooth—that was it, the night Peter took her to the theatre with Florence Tressilian. Oh, that Nick would only do something of that sort now! This desire, quickened by the presence of the strange, expressive woman, by the way she scattered sweet syllables as if she were touching the piano-keys, combined with other things to make Biddy's head swim—other things too mingled to name, admiration and fear and dim divination and purposeless pride and curiosity and resistance, the impulse to go away and the determination not to go. The actress courted her with her voice (what was the matter with her and what did she want?) and Biddy tried in return to give an idea of what Nick was doing. Not succeeding very well she was going to appeal to her brother, but Miriam stopped her, saying it didn't matter; besides, Dashwood was telling Nick something—something they wanted him to know. "We're in a great excitement—he has taken a theatre," Miriam added.
"Taken a theatre?" Biddy was vague.
"We're going to set up for ourselves. He's going to do for me altogether. It has all been arranged only within a day or two. It remains to be seen how it will answer," Miriam smiled. Biddy murmured some friendly hope, and her interlocurtess went on: "Do you know why I've broken in here to-day, after a long absence—interrupting your poor brother, taking up his precious time! It's because I'm so nervous."
"About your first night?" Biddy risked.
"Do you know about that—are you coming?" Miriam asked, quickly.
"No, I'm not coming—I haven't a place."
"Will you come if I send you one?"
"Oh, but really, it's too beautiful of you." stammered the girl.
"You shall have a box; your brother shall bring you. You can't squeeze in a pin, I'm told; but I've kept a box, I'll manage it. Only, if I do, you know, mind you come!" Miriam exclaimed, in suppliance, resting her hand on Biddy's.
"Don't be afraid! And may I bring a friend—the friend with whom I'm staying?"
Miriam looked at her. "Do you mean Mrs. Dallow?"
"No, no—Miss Tressilian. She puts me up, she has got a flat. Did you ever see a flat?" asked Biddy, expansively. "My cousin's not in London." Miriam replied that she might bring whom she liked, and Biddy broke out, to her brother: "Fancy what kindness, Nick: we're to have a box to-night, and you're to take me!"
Nick turned to her, smiling, with an expression in his face which struck her even at the time as odd, but which she understood when the sense of it recurred to her later. Mr. Dashwood interposed with the remark that it was all very well to talk about boxes, but that he didn't see where at that time of day any such luxury was to come from.
"You haven't kept one, as I told you?" Miriam demanded.
"As you told me, my dear? Tell the lamb to keep its tender mutton from the wolves!"
"You shall have one: we'll arrange it," Miriam went on, to Biddy.
"Let me qualify that statement a little, Miss Dormer," said Basil Dashwood. "We'll arrange if it's humanly possible."
"We'll arrange it even if it's inhumanly impossible—that's just the point," Miriam declared, to the girl. "Don't talk about trouble—what's he meant for but to take it? Cela s'annonce bien, you see," she continued, to Nick: "doesn't it look as if we should pull beautifully together?" And as he replied that he heartily congratulated her—he was immensely interested in what he had been told—she exclaimed, after resting her eyes on him a moment: "What will you have? It seemed simpler! It was clear there had to be some one." She explained further to Nick what had led her to come in at that moment, while Dashwood approached Biddy with civil assurances that they would see, they would leave no stone unturned, though he would not have taken it upon himself to promise.
Miriam reminded Nick of the blessing he had been to her nearly a year before, on her other first night, when she was fidgety and impatient: how he had let her come and sit there for hours—helped her to possess her soul till the evening and keep out of harm's way. The case was the same at present, with the aggravation indeed that he would understand—Dashwood's nerves as well as her own: they were a great deal worse than hers. Everything was ready for Juliet; they had been rehearsing for five months (it had kept her from going mad, with the eternity of the other piece), and he had occurred to her again in the last intolerable hours as the friend in need, the salutary stop-gap, no matter how much she bothered him. She shouldn't be turned out? Biddy broke away from Basil Dashwood: she must go, she must hurry off to Miss Tressilian with her news. Florence might make some stupid engagement for the evening: she must be warned in time. The girl took a flushed, excited leave, after having received a renewal of Miriam's pledge and even heard her say to Nick that he must now give back the stall that had been sent him—they would be sure to have another use for it.