from him. Were she driven from one opera house to the next by the
jealousies of the most jealous of all artists, unable to obtain a
permanent position, she could support herself by teaching; no doubt,
too, she had a small private fortune, and the villa was hers. But that
was not the point. She was a great and a very ambitious artist. The
voice was the shortest-lived of all Nature’s gifts, and the voices
devoted to the music of Wagner had an even shorter lease than the
nightingales in the throats of the Violettas and Lucias. Something must
be done at once. On Monday he would go up to London and ask advice of
Hans Richter, who had conducted Wagner concerts with distinguished
success, and whom Styr had met many times in Bayreuth and Munich. It
must be the dream of his life to conduct a season of Wagner opera in
London, and this could be made possible only if the experiment were
privately financed. At this time Covent Garden was not a company; there
was no board of directors to consult. It could be rented by any one that
had the money to put up, so long as its traditions were not violated.
Ordham knew that with Richter behind him, it would be possible to hire
the opera house for a season—the season, were it not already disposed
of; and that Styr could obtain a leave of absence either through the
influence of her friends, or by flying into a rage and goading the
directors to break her contract. He could rely upon many of his
aristocratic and all of his artistic friends to spread the fame of Styr
before her arrival, make her the fashion, fill the house for the first
night with all that prided themselves upon being fad tasters, avid for
new sensations. Let them be manipulated to that extent and Styr would do
the rest. The English might not be able to appreciate the wonder of her
voice, might yawn miserably during those everlasting recitatives, but
they would succumb to her personality, her magic and magnetism; for to
these rare qualities no race is more susceptible; and the mere sweetness
of her voice would enchant them no matter what their lack of artistic
instinct.
And then! A triumph in London, and New York, already nibbling at Wagner,
would give him at least a season’s hearing and demand the Styr as a
matter of course. Her fortune and greater fame would be assured. Ordham,
as he strode up and down the room, had never felt so enthusiastic, so
energetic, so inspired. He could give to England what Ludwig II had
given to central Europe. He had never been sensible, save when Styr had
deliberately played upon him, of wishing to be of any use to the world;
but in these exalted moments, rattling those thin sheets of foreign
paper (a link in themselves), he felt his first real impulse toward
accomplishment, to stand for something, experienced the real awakening
of that gift for leadership which has raised him so high among men
to-day, but which, so far, had only manifested itself occasionally in an
obstinate determination to have his own way. He felt his power, saw his
future more clearly than he had ever done before.
His mind flashed to the woman who had always roused his higher and
better impulses, while other women sought to make a Lucien de Rubempré
of him; to-night she had transmitted to him out of her own stupendous
energies—Good God! what had they not accomplished?—a tingling shock.
She sent him his first opportunity to use his own energies, to taste the
delights of power. It was something of the rapture of the creative
artist that he felt on that never-to-be-forgotten night, for although no
composition took form in his quickened brain, the genius of his
personality came to life, the fires of his own peculiar gifts crackled
in a mind created for the world’s use. As he finally made his way
through the silent house to his room, he admitted with delight that he
owed those moments of temperamental rapture, this awakening of his vital
forces, which reached far beyond introducing Styr and Wagner to England,
to the mate of that secret part of him the world would never suspect.
His wife’s door was ajar, but he did not even glance at it. He made
haste to get into bed, and, with the functional regularity of youth, was
asleep in five minutes.
XLVII
A FAIRY COMET
Mabel was not a congenital liar. She had, indeed, displayed a fairly
truthful record until John Ordham came into her life. When little, she
had been duly punished for telling the fibs natural to childhood; and,
during the years that followed, those faculties with which the social
unit adapts itself automatically, and economically, to the exigencies of
the moment, had in her case been put to little strain, indulged young
beauty that she was. She was a good girl in all ways, and after turning
on the fountain of those beautiful crystal tears, or terrifying the
parent whose solitary passion she was, she had the grace to be ashamed
of herself, vowing never to repeat the offence. As she grew older, she
broke this vow less and less often.
But the long coaching of her mother and Lady Bridgminster had wrought
its inevitable work. She was merely one more victim of the disabilities
of her sex. She could not go frankly forth and woo the man to whom she
had immediately surrendered her heart; she must scheme, and wait, blow
hot and cold, demoralize her character generally. She had no cleverness
save in female craft, but she was vaguely conscious during those weeks
when Ordham wooed her with a silken rope round his neck and a padded
prod at his back, that the crystalline quality of her girl’s mind was
permanently clouding.
She had assumed, of course, that after marriage her influence would be
paramount. Had not momma ruled poppa? Was not the ascendency of the
American woman one of the truisms of the century? She rode gayly into
the breakers of generalities oblivious of the rocks beneath, whose other
name is facts.
The result of that triumphant little confession in the library had given
her self-confidence a profound shock. As time went on she found her
husband more and more of a mystery, caught blinding glimpses of wants
far beyond her comprehension, of dissimilar tastes, of an almost
world-old brain, and, in spite of his youthful ardours, of an inner
impenetrable reserve. She had almost despised him at times during the
courtship, so easy had been the game, so completely had he been deluded.
But Ordham was not a man to be despised for more than a moment at a
time, and he had won her complete respect on that fatal day in the
library when he had given her to understand that when people were so
simple as to lay their cards on the table no will but his would prevail.
But after the lachrymal attack was over (genuine enough upon this
occasion), she had reflected that the cleverest of men would be no match
for three clever women if they kept their cards out of sight. She had
lost no time calling to her aid Lady Bridgminster and her mother, and a
new campaign of gentle manipulation began. Live on the Continent she
would not; where one could never drink water and the food ruined one’s
complexion, where she must be taken in to dinner by an attaché, instead
of by a prince of the blood, where she must play fourth fiddle to old
frumps with frizzed fronts and bugles and not a tenth part of her
income. Not she. Jackie could have all the career he wanted in England.
She was enchanted at the idea of having a baby, not only because she
possessed all those charming feminine instincts which would have made
her an estimable woman had circumstances permitted, but because it
gratified her to feel one of a line, to be the indispensable connecting
link between one Bridgminster and the next. It is only the well-born
American that is deeply impressed with the antiquity of English blood,
of a descent in which figure historic names; for all these represent
what they feel they have just missed, and to capture them for their
issue is a triumph far more subtle than that experienced by the American
who belongs to the aristocracy of wealth alone. Not that Mabel was
capable of any such analysis, but her mother was; the instinct was in
her, however, and it is doubtful if she would have adored Ordham as
blindly and devoutly as she did had it not been for that long record of
his family in Burke, and the magnificence of Ordham Castle. But, to be
sure, minus these causes, and he would not have been John Ordham.
Once more he was unconsciously demonstrating the inferiority of his sex
when pitted against hers. But like many another, she forgot that there
is a psychological statute of limitations, also that it is impossible to
watch the manœuvres of an enemy whose existence is unknown. She was
pouting in bed late on Sunday night, wondering if her husband intended
to sit up until dawn again, almost hating the social triumphs that so
oddly separated them, when the door between their rooms was pushed
softly open and he entered.
She was lying in a mass of pale green satin and lace; her bedroom had
been done over and looked like Undine’s bower. Her hair, spread over the
shimmering counterpane, might have been the golden fleece. No more
enchanting vision was ever presented to a young husband; but Ordham was
suffering (slightly) from conscience, and the familiar picture did not
appeal to him. He kissed her affectionately, asked her solicitously if
she were shockingly tired, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I must not awaken you in the morning,” he remarked. “I thought it
better to run the risk to-night—to tell you that I must go up to London
for a few days. I have some business to attend to.”
“What? Business?” She sat up straight, and she was so astonished that
grievance stood off. “You never had any business in your life. You don’t
know the meaning of the word.”
“But it is time I learned. I wish to consult my solicitors in regard to
certain investments.”
“Well, I never!” She stared at him for a moment. Then she asked
plaintively: “Am I not your wife? I expect to share all your worries,
although I can’t imagine your condescending to have any.” She knew that
he disliked direct questions, but there are moments when no woman can be
diplomatic, and she finally asked him if that were his only reason for
going up to London on the eve of another house party.
He had anticipated glittering spheres, which he would dutifully stanch,
the while administering the lesson that he had not yielded a jot of his
real liberty. But he answered promptly, looking straight into her
surprised but unclouded eyes: “Yes, I have another reason. Quaritch has
some rare books that I am to have a first look at.”
“We go up to London before long, now. Books will keep.”
“Not these, I am afraid. There are many in England quite as keen as I am
on first editions.”
She explored those large ingenuous orbs. Hers was not a jealous nature,
and she had been given ample opportunity to observe how little his
devoted manner and challenging eyes meant, had often laughed at the
girls who took him seriously. So the possibility of a feminine magnet in
London she rejected with disdain, but a sensation of antagonism took
possession of her. It angered her that she could not understand him
better, that he never really deferred to her, that he must be eternally
“managed.” Still more did it incense her that he was indifferently
depriving himself of several days of her society. But she could think of
no ruse to keep him at home unless she whipped up a storm, and against
this indulgence she had been warned by the doctor. As for tears, better
reserve them until the Continent threatened again. Much to his surprise,
she lay back in her pillows and said in the grand manner:
“Nothing that I could say will hold you back if you have made up your
mind to go. I never expect to have the slightest influence over you.”
“I wish you would not say such things!” He looked as uncomfortable as
she intended he should feel. “How can you? I shall be gone only four
days. Please do not make me feel a brute.”
“Four days will seem very long.”
She uttered these artistically simple words with a quiver of her little
pink mouth, which was not altogether deliberate, for although she was
determined not to be commonplace, those four days without her husband
unrolled before her in an endless procession. He felt very contrite, and
kissed her fondly; but he did not retreat from his purpose. The next
night saw him in London, enjoying himself hugely at the theatre, from
which he had been divorced for nearly three months. It so happened that
there were a number of good plays on, and Hans Richter was out of town
when he arrived. Mabel received long impassioned telegrams and brief
impassioned notes, apologies and explanations that would have hoodwinked
a wronged and suspicious wife; but the castle did not see him again for
ten days. Then he was so charming, so repentant, so indignant at a cruel
destiny, and so unfeignedly happy in being with his lovely little wife
once more, that he was not only forgiven, but Mabel, in her joy at
having him again after that dreary watch, was persuaded to move up to
London a month earlier than she had intended.
XLVIII
THE GREAT PRIZES
The hopes that rise insistent in the cold discouraging mind when the
first shock and depression have run their course have their origin, no
doubt, in the subterranean chambers of the brain; mean, when it is a
case of outraged love, that the soul is continuing its eternal struggle
for completion with another soul. These are immemorial rights, and do
not endure disintegration and change every seven years.
Margarethe had passed through many phases, not only since the night she
had heard of Ordham’s engagement, but since the beginning of her
deliberate correspondence with him. As is commonly the case, she found
more satisfaction in the writing of her own letters than in the reading
of his; although that excited, hopeful, terrified, tremulous, forlorn
waiting for the post was a new and astounding experience. Men, the
cleverest of them, are indifferent letter writers, and Ordham was no
exception. A woman lets her pen run on with a freedom and felicity which
conscious art but intensifies, the while it exercises selection and
restraint. But men are prone to say what they have to say in the fewest
possible words, rather rejecting all subjects but the essential than
wandering afield in search of others that might make their compositions
interesting.
Although Styr, in a manner, enjoyed this correspondence even more deeply
than her personal intercourse with the man who had strolled into her
inner kingdom and taken possession (for it gave her a sense of greater
intimacy, liberated her imagination), she was too wise to give alarm to
his limited amount of masculine endurance by writing him twenty pages
when she was artistically capable of packing news, gossip,
personalities, disquisitions upon books, the opera, the drama, and
politics, into ten. Nor, although she longed to write daily, did she
gratify this new passion oftener than once a week; and even so, she
cultivated a certain irregularity, that the assured appearance of a too
familiar envelope on his morning tray might not in time inspire him with
that nervous irritability which so often takes shape in ennui. Not for
nothing had she been forced to accept man as her chief study before
Wagner transposed her from life to art; but she hated these restraints,
longed to be natural. She knew, however, that, given a man of Ordham’s
temperament, only nature heightened by art could hold him, never nature
unbridled and ingenuous.
Ordham’s disposition was so far from frank that although while within
her magnetic radius he had been more confidential and revealing than he
had ever been before, he could not shed his diplomatic shell with
nothing but a sheet of paper before him, headed “Dear Countess Tann.”
Moreover, with all his soul he hated letter writing, and only answered
these fascinating epistles with a reasonable promptness for the sake of
others to come. If she had tacitly agreed to write alone, he would have
been completely happy. And she, of course, wanted a running picture of
his daily life at Ordham, of the companies assembled there, of trivial
but always interesting personalities and incidents. But he could as
easily have written a book; the bare suggestion would have appalled him;
and, while making his letters as short as decency would permit, he
confined himself to a brief comment upon the literary and artistic
people invited to the castle, music, and books—he sent her many new
ones—and devoted the last page to herself, expressing his desire to see
her again, and his regret that their summer had been all too short.
Sometimes she smiled at these laborious epistles, and sometimes she
flung them across the room and stamped her foot. She had to read them
over and over to extract any comfort out of them; then, finally, she
succeeded in reading between the lines, rewrote them, in short, as women
will.
There were times when she intensely disliked him for his apostasy to
herself, his weakness in being blindly steered into a commonplace attack
of puppy love when he should have risen superior to the follies of youth
and gone unscathed till thirty, then loved some one worthy of him. She
hurled him from his pedestal and rolled him in the dirt, announcing that
he belonged there, delighted with the sense of emancipation that
permeated to her finger tips. Not even yet did her mind dwell upon the
possibility of any closer union with him; she dreamed only of the
insatiable mysterious immaterial tie; she indulged herself in attacks of
bitterness, of furious regret that he had not so ordered his life that
she might think of him always as the exceptional man, instead of seeing,
against her will, a vision of a love-sick white-faced youth, idiotically
in love with a pretty girl, then as a fatuous young husband complacent
to all the selfish whims of his bride; drifting with her on a river of
gold that threatened to rise and suffocate what energies he had. If he
must be “managed,” she was the woman for this office, for she would have
steered him to greater goals. She was a thorough woman, was Margarethe
Styr, but her saving grace was that she knew it. When she laughed at
herself, then was Ordham forgiven, excused, dusted off, and restored to
his pedestal, his sovereignty in the realm of the ideal.
When there crept into his letters—after the return of his household to
London—a tinge of sadness, deepening at times into melancholy, more
than a hint of impatience at enforced inertia, at passing opportunities;
when his polite desire to see her again began to vibrate with something
like passion, then did she understand that not only was he tiring of his
wife, but that her own letters, with their insidious but unremitting
spur to his ambitions, were reaping the harvest she had planned. It was
after one of these letters of his, longer than usual, more personal,
asserting that could he but find a decent excuse, could he but exercise
his freedom at this time without brutality, he would take the next train
for Munich, that a voice seemed to cry through her brain: “Let him
alone! Let him alone! In silence and absence men forget.” This spasm of
conscience brought her face to face with a good many possible results
that she had ignored; and as she really loved him and was fairly
consistent in her desire to see him happy and great, she delayed her
answer to this letter, half resolving to drop the correspondence.
Then, a week later, arrived a letter charged with a curious hotchpotch
of anger and jubilance, an astonished sense of semi-defeat and almost
royal triumph. He had not given her a hint of his scheme to organize a
season of Wagner opera at Covent Garden, for, although hopeful at the
first, he had met, upon his return to London, with so many objections
and difficulties, so much ignorance, prejudice, and pharisaical folly,
that he had at times despaired of attaining an object which opposition
fanned into a passion. But, calling to his aid older and more
influential men than himself, the last barrier had finally gone down,
and although he could not hire the opera house for the season, owing to
other contracts, he had succeeded in capturing it for five weeks by
depositing, as a guarantee against failure, twenty thousand pounds with
the committee he had formed. Of this guarantee he naturally made no
mention to Styr, but had he been able to conceal the fact that the
enterprise was his, a letter received in the same mail from the great
conductor would have enlightened her.
She was infinitely touched. If resentments had lingered in her mind,
they were swept out, and they never returned. She knew—who better than
she?—what all this had meant to that indolent nature, steeped in
self-indulgence. For the first time in his life he had really exerted
himself, worked to accomplish an object, and not for himself, but for
her. He wrote with enthusiasm of being the means of educating his
country musically with her assistance, and there was no doubt that he
assumed this responsibility in all sincerity, but he dwelt upon it too
emphatically, in his desire to save her from any sense of obligation.
The deeper tenderness of her nature was stirred; it was the first
poignant sweetness in an affair that had already given her far more joy
than sorrow, pleasure than disappointment. Moreover, there was a new and
a very keen delight in the gratitude she was forced to render to this
noble but torpid nature, which she had revealed to itself, to be the
first object of his energies.
But she hesitated some time before she accepted the formal offer to sing
in London from the first of May until the seventh of June. She vowed
anew to spare Ordham the certain disaster of materializing their bond,
and herself as well. But this offer arrived very opportunely in her
affairs. The King came no more to Munich, summoned her no more to his
castles; and although, owing to her popularity with the public, and the
still potent shadow of Ludwig, the opera house cabal might not dare to
compass her sudden dismissal, they contrived that she sing less and
less, gave her the worst support of which that admirable company was
capable. Their object, of course, was to wean the public by degrees, to
insinuate that the Styr had grown capricious, indifferent to her once
beloved Munich, was losing health and nursing her voice; to tickle the
Bavarian love of variety with as many _Gasts_ as they could command, to
press against her cold resistance until she lost control of her furious
temper and flung her contract in the face of the _intendant_.
This she had no mind to do, and her will was as strong as theirs
combined; but she was worn with the unremitting silent struggle, the
countless mortifications; she knew that the death or deposition of the
King would push her hard against the wall, battling for the supreme
position she had held so easily. Now, through the influence of Princess
Nachmeister, or the Queen-mother, she could obtain the signature
necessary for a leave of absence. Then, London conquered, she knew that
Munich would clamour for her return, and, with or without the support of
the King, her position would be impregnable for a long time to come. For
the matter of that it must be the first step in that greater career
which her ambition had never ceased to picture. She had written to
Damrosch several months since, but had received the reply she had
expected: the artists were already engaged for the first Wagner season
in New York; but it was expressed in a tone of sharp regret that she had
written too late—even, perhaps, for that projected second season, were
the experiment a success; but she had not the least doubt that did she
create a furore in the most musically indifferent of all cities, to
which, however, New York bent the knee, a place during the second season
would be made for her as a matter of course.
And after London, she also would be invited to sing in every capital in
Europe, with the possible exception of Paris; although to be sure she
might sing to the public that still visited their hatred of Germany upon
Wagner, in such rôles as Dido, Aida, Fidelio, Donna Anna, Katharine, in
_The Taming of the Shrew_, and even the Countess, in _The Marriage of
Figaro_; for after all these years of daily vocalization, besides her
stage experience, there was little she could not do with her voice, and
it would be interesting to prove that she could subdue that tremendous
organ to pure melody. She was not even sure that she should not attempt
Carmen, as a tour de force; and she could act it! Great God, how she
could act it! She had only to conjure up Ordham’s marriage in all its
details.
And how she should revel in the conquest of New York, look down with
serenity or laughter from the unassailable position of the season’s idol
upon the mire that had nurtured her, and upon the good respectable
people that held their skirts so high, shuddering at the mere
acknowledgment of the horrors upon which they danced, or lived their
comfortable lives. She wanted no social recognition from that great
city, where so many proud names covered secrets little less appalling
than her own; but to dominate where she had once shrunk far from the
limelight, to be crowned where she had been despised!—little she cared
for the sleuths of the press. Their revelations would but excite the
public the more, for that public almost resents the reflection of their
own necessary virtues in a great prima donna, her failure to indulge the
rights of genius.