It was success, the member for Harsh
felt, that had made her 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 how being launched in the practice
of an art makes strange and prompt revelations.
Nick felt clumsy beside a person who manifestly, now,
had such an extraordinary familiarity with the esthetic
point of view. He remembered too the clumsiness
that had been in his visitor something
silly and shabby, pert rather than proper, and of
quite another value than 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
sordid 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 these few weeks a performer who could even produce
an impression of not performing. 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 debut the chance that had suddenly
turned up and that she had caught, with a fierce leap,
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 fell to cursing the odious
conditions of artistic production in such an age.
The play was a more or less idiotised version of a
new French piece, a thing that had taken in Paris
at a third-rate theatre and was now proving itself
in London 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 place 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 if Nick had 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 thousands of little
dogs amusing themselves with a bone. At any rate
she had made something, she had made a figure, of
the woman a dreadful stick, with 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 somebody. 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’d 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 pressed it on me. So I’ve
my little capital. Isn’t he a duck?
You’ve nice cousins.”
Nick assented to the proposition,
only inserting an amendment to the effect that surely
Peter had nice cousins too, and making, as he went
on with his work, a tacit, preoccupied reflexion 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 softly sounded in his 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 Miriam should come back on the morrow, to
enable her artist to make the most of the few days
of the parliamentary recess; and just before she left
him 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
quite rose to it. “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’re engaged to.”
“Unfortunately she’s out of town.”
Miriam looked at him in the grand
manner. “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?”
“Shell know it to-morrow. I shall write
to her.”
The girl faced him again portentously.
“I see you’re afraid of her.”
But she added: “Mention my name; they’ll
give you the box at the office.”
Whether or no Nick were afraid of
Mrs. Dallow he still waved away this bounty, protesting
that he would rather take a stall according to his
wont and pay for it. Which led his guest 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,”
he had to reply. “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 rather ruefully. “I
don’t mean to say though that 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.” She got
into the hansom her host’s servant had fetched
for her, and as Nick turned back into his studio after
watching her drive away he laughed at the conception
that they were in the same “line.”
He did share, in the event, his box
at the theatre with 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 importance of 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 of having two states of mind when listening
to this philosopher; one in which he laughed, doubted,
sometimes even reprobated, failed to follow or accept,
and another in which his old friend 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. Gabriel’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 for
ever, bloom long after the rank weeds of the hour
were withered and blown away.
It was to keep Miriam Rooth in his
eye for his current work 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 had in regard to her acting 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 Carre’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 wouldn’t have guessed what Gabriel
Nash had to tell him that for this young
woman, with her tragic cast and her peculiar attributes,
her present performance, full of actuality, of light
fine indications and at moments of pointed touches
of comedy, was a rare tour de force. It
went on altogether in a register he hadn’t supposed
her to possess and in which, as he said, she didn’t
touch her capital, doing it all with her wonderful
little savings. It conveyed to him 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 extravagant transports, as they struck
him, of 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 had volumes to say about the day in Paris when
they had shown her the kindness she should never forget.
She abounded also in admiration of the portrait he
had so cleverly begun, declaring 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 more effectively said before he returned
to his place.
“No, that’s exactly what
you’re not doing,” Nash interposed with
one of his happy sagacities. “You’ve
stopped acting, you’ve reduced it to the least
that will do, you simply are you’re
just the visible image, the picture on the wall.
It keeps you wonderfully in focus. I’ve
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 herself explained
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 determined.
After they had worked more than an hour with much less
talk than the day before, Nick being extremely absorbed
and Miriam wearing in silence an air of noble compunction
for the burden imposed on 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 tape!”
she 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, 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 shy fondness of hope. They rose, however,
as he presently became conscious that the door of the
large room opposite 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 was aware Nick wished
he had posted a letter to her the night before.
He had written only that morning. There was nevertheless
genuine joy in the words with which he bounded toward
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; she only stared at the intruder,
motionless and superb. She seemed somehow in
easy possession of the place, and even at that instant
Nick noted how handsome she looked; so that he said
to himself inaudibly, in some deeper depth of consciousness,
“How I should like to paint her that way!”
Mrs. Dallow’s eyes moved for a single moment
to her friend’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” he
was all cordiality. 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, aware as soon as he had
spoken of something in his words that might have made
her laugh. She was far from laughing, however;
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 returned very quickly and without
expression. She vouchsafed no explanation of her
premature descent 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 this request gave to Miriam’s
position, directly in front of his canvas, an air
of privilege which her neglect to recognise 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 taking 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 how little she would 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 her and her own
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 say nothing and not to budge. Nick
added a remark to the effect that Julia would remember
to have had the pleasure of meeting her the year before in
Paris, that day at old Peter’s; to which Mrs.
Dallow made answer, “Ah yes,” without any
qualification, while she looked down at some rather
rusty studies on panels ranged along the floor and
resting against the base of the wall. Her discomposure
was a clear 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 that
young woman 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 the other’s
upset. 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,
only turning her eyes round and round the room as
in search of something she couldn’t find of
an escape, of 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 unconscious of how red he was. This
made Mrs. Dallow look at him while Miriam considered
them both. Julia’s eyes had a strange light
he had never seen before a flash of fear
by which he was himself frightened. “Of
course I’ll see you later,” he added in
awkward, in really misplaced gaiety while she reached
the door, which she opened herself, getting out with
no further attention 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 she 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 so little improved the
matter: “I beg a thousand pardons I
thought you were Miriam.”
Gabriel gave way and Julia the more
sharply pursued her retreat. Her carriage, a
victoria with a pair of precious heated horses,
had taken a turn up the street, but the coachman had
already seen 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 the 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. Our young
man 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 lack of delicacy.
He desired a word with Julia alone as much
alone as the two annoying 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 her corner while
he was still speaking and had flashed out to the coachman
a “Home!” which of itself set the horses
in motion. The carriage went a few yards, but
while Gabriel, with an undiscouraged bow, turned away,
Nick Dormer, his hand on the edge of the hood, moved
with it.
“You don’t like it, but
I’ll explain,” he tried to say for its
occupant alone.
“Explain what?” she asked,
still very pale and grave, but in a voice that showed
nothing. 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 she was whirled 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?” he broke out, seizing their
host by the arm to give him a particular 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 for
ever. Nick said nothing, but went back to work
with a tingle of confusion, which began to act after
he had resumed his palette as a sharp, 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 their friend.