The three weeks of La Reine Blanche's London engagement were drawing to
a close.
She had achieved a brilliant success. Her beauty and her genius were the
themes of every tongue.
Her admirers were legion. She had a score of wealthy and titled lovers.
It was even said that a noble and well-known duke had proposed to marry
her, and met with a cold and haughty refusal.
The managers of the theater where she was playing tried to secure her
for another month. It would be worth a fortune to them, they said, and
they allowed her to make her own terms.
To their consternation she utterly declined a longer engagement and
announced her intention to retire from the stage.
The managers were astounded. What! retire from the stage in the zenith
of her fame, with all her gifts of youth, beauty and genius. It was too
dreadful. Yet in spite of their remonstrances she persevered. She
canceled at a tremendous cost an engagement she had made with a Parisian
manager. A whisper was circulated and began to gain credence that the
beautiful _tragedienne_ was about to enter a convent and take the veil
for life.
She did not deny it when people questioned her, but she would not tell
the reason why she was about to take such a strange step.
She only smiled sadly when they remonstrated with her, but she would
never tell why she was about to immure herself, with all her gifts of
beauty, youth and genius, in a living tomb.
But there was one thing that was palpable to all who saw her off the
stage and divested of the trickery of paint and cosmetics. La Reine
Blanche was fading like the frailest summer flower. The lily bloomed on
her cheek instead of the rose.
Under her large, blue eyes lay purple shadows, darker and deeper than
those cast by the drooping lashes. A look of patient suffering crept
about the corners of her lips and hid in her eyes. Her smiles were
sadder and more pathetic than sighs, her form grew slighter and more
ethereal in its perfect grace, her step lost its lightness and
elasticity. Some said that the beautiful actress was dying of a broken
heart, others said that she was falling into a consumption.
She heard these things and made no outward sign, but inwardly she said
to herself:
"They are both right and wrong. I am dying because I have nothing left
to live for. I have toiled and hoped for years. I have studied and
practiced to get money to carry me over the wide world in search of the
one true heart that was mine only, and now that I have found it I have
had to give it away. I cannot endure it; I am not strong enough. There
is nothing left me but to die!"
She thought of some sorrowful lines she had somewhere read and
mournfully repeated them:
"Much must be borne which is hard to bear,
Much given away which it were sweet to keep.
God helps us all! who need indeed His care;
And yet I know the Shepherd loves His sheep."
Those flying rumors and reports only served to make Madame De Lisle more
popular. She was the rage. She played to densely packed houses every
night.
Flowers rained upon her. The costliest gifts of jewels and rare
_bric-a-brac_ were sent to her from such unknown sources that she could
neither refuse nor send them back as she would otherwise have done.
There was always a great throng of people waiting to see her step into
the carriage every night.
But in all that throng La Reine Blanche never saw but one face. There
was one man who always held the same position beside her carriage door.
He never spoke to her, he never touched her, but stood there patiently
every night, thrilled to the depths of his soul if the hem of her
perfumed robe but brushed him in passing.
Some weird fascination utterly beyond her power of resistance always
impelled her to meet his glance, and the fire in his beautiful, dark
eyes; the passionate love, the terrible pain, the bitter reproach were
killing her slowly but surely.
And Lawrence Ernscliffe was going mad. He had no life, no thought, no
hope outside the beautiful woman whom he had claimed for his wife, and
who had so coldly denied him.
He haunted her like her own shadow. Go where she would she saw him, look
where she would she met only the eyes of the man she loved and to whom
she belonged by the dearest tie on earth.
He forgot Sydney utterly, or if he ever remembered her it was only with
scorn. Her terrible sin had placed her beyond the pale of his tenderness
forever. No reasoning, no sophistry could have convinced him that the
beautiful actress was not his own wife whom he had lost in the very
moment that made her his bride.
He could not have explained himself. He did not understand at all the
mysterious chance which had brought it about, yet he knew in his own
heart that the woman whom he had seen in her coffin once had been
restored to life again, and that the only bar to their happiness now was
Sydney, whom he had married through a simple impulse of pity.