In an orchestra chair at the theater sat a stout, good-natured-looking
gentleman, iron gray where he was not bald, with a double chin
smooth-shaven between iron-gray whiskers, and beside him sat a lady
somewhat his junior in appearance, pale and invalid-like, to whom the
strong contrast of her silvery hair and her thick, dark eyebrows gave a
singular distinction; from some little attentions and neglects it could
be seen that they were husband and wife. The husband seemed tranquilly
expectant, and the wife nervously so, and as they talked together,
waiting for the curtain to rise, he spoke in a slow, rich, easy voice,
with a smile of amiable humor, while she had a more eager and sarcastic
air, which at times did not veil a real anxiety of feeling.
“And that is just where you misconceive the whole affair,” the lady was
saying.
“I don’t see,” said the gentleman.
“Why,” demanded the lady, despairingly, “can’t you imagine a woman’s
liking to triumph over people with her beauty, and yet meaning it to be
a purely æsthetic triumph?”
“No, I can’t,” said the gentleman, with placid candor.
“Well, women can,” said the lady, conclusively, and the gentleman
submitted in silence.
Presently he asked, “Isn’t she rather old for a novice?”
“She’s twenty-six, if you call that old. She’s a novice to the stage,
but she’s been an actress all her life.”
The gentleman laughed in the contented fashion of gentlemen who think
their wives are wits, and said: “I think you’re decidedly hard upon her
to-night, Susan. It seems to me you have been more merciful at times.”
“Oh, at times! I’ve never been of one mind about her half an hour
together, and I don’t expect to be hard upon her the whole evening, now.
The last day I saw her at the farm, as I’ve often told you, I pitied her
from the bottom of my heart, but before we said good-by I suspected that
I had been the subject of one of her little dramatic effects. Can’t you
imagine a person who really feels all she thinks she ought to feel at
any given time?”
“No,” said the gentleman, with cheerful resignation, “that’s beyond my
depth again.”
“Well, she’s that kind; or I’ve fancied so in my skeptical moods about
her. If she dramatizes her part to-night half as well as she used to
dramatize herself, she’ll be a great actress. But that remains to be
seen. When I first heard she was going on the stage, it seemed like a
clew to everything; she says she always wanted to be an actress; and I
felt that it was a perfect inspiration. It would give her excitement
and admiration, and it would multiply the subjects of her effects to any
extent. It always did seem a ridiculous waste that she should merely
fascinate one man at a time; she ought to have had thousands. But I’m
not so certain, now, after all, that she’s found her destiny.”
“Why?”
“Why, a stage success might be very much to her taste, while she
mightn’t at all like the trouble of making it. I think she has a real
theatrical genius, but I suppose the stage takes a great deal of
self-denial and constancy, and she’s fickle as the wind.”
“Oh, come, now, Susan, you know you said yesterday that, after all, you
did believe she had a lasting regard for William’s friend.”
“Yes, that’s a great puzzle and mystery. Perhaps it was because she had
broken with him. I didn’t infer from anything she said that their
acquaintance now was of anything but a friendly sort. I wish I had felt
authorized to ask just how it was renewed,” said the lady, regretfully.
“I wish you had. I should have liked to know. There must be something
extraordinary about her to enable her to keep him for a friend after all
that happened.”
“Oh, did I ever pretend there wasn’t something extraordinary about her?
There was everything extraordinary about her! And there are times when I
can’t help admiring a sort of moral heroism she had. I think she was
fascinated for a while with the dreadfulness of flirting with William
under the circumstances; but not one woman in a thousand would have had
the courage to do what she did when she found it was becoming serious
with him.”
“Very likely. But I have a higher opinion of women. My sense of right
and wrong has not been shaken, like some people’s, by this enchantress.
I can’t help thinking it might not have been so rough on _him_ if her
moral heroism had begun a little sooner--say before the flirtation.”
“Oh, the more I think about it, the less I pity him in that matter. He
knew perfectly well that he was doing wrong. Men ought to do right, even
if it doesn’t please women.”
The gentleman bowed his bald head in a fit of laughter. “I have no doubt
those were Eve’s very words to Adam,” he chuckled; but the lady, without
laughing, continued--
“And when the worst had come to the worst with Easton, it seems she
didn’t spare herself. She told him everything.”
“Perhaps she might have spared _him_ somewhat if she had not been quite
so frank.”
“It was her _duty_ to tell him!” rejoined the lady, sternly, “and I
honor her for doing it. She never could have gone on and married him,
with all that in her heart.”
“At any rate she didn’t go on and marry him. And I shall always contend
that she was a hardly used woman; engaging herself to a man she merely
pitied, under the mistaken impression that she was in love with him, and
then--when she found that she didn’t want his friend either--dismissing
the poor fellow with a final misgiving that perhaps she _did_ like him,
after all. I say it’s a case of unmerited suffering, if ever there was
one.”
“Oh, it’s all very well to talk! But how do you reconcile such
contradictions?”
“I don’t. But I’m certain of one thing: she wasn’t trying any of her
little dramatic effects on you when she called yesterday and made you
her confidante.” The gentleman here laughed so loud that the sound of
his own voice alarmed him. He looked round, and saw that the seats about
them were rapidly filling up, and he fell to studying his play-bill with
conscious zeal.
By and by he turned again to his wife, and whispered, “I don’t think
William’s peace of mind was permanently affected by his romance with
your friend; he appeared to be in good spirits the other day when I saw
him in New York, and was taking a good deal of interest in the fine
arts, I fancied, from his behavior to your little protégée.”
“William has been very polite and very good; I shall always feel
grateful to him for his kindness to her. He must have found it difficult
at first; she’s very odd and doesn’t invite attention, though of course
she’s glad of it, at heart. Yes, it was very, very considerate, and I
shall take it as the greatest favor that William could have done me.”
“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t seem to be regarding the affair in the
light of a self-sacrifice. Suppose he had rather lost the sense of it’s
being a favor to you?”
“I should like that all the better.”
Those who remember the impression made among people who knew of her, by
the announcement that Mrs. Farrell was going upon the stage, will recall
the curiosity which attended her appearance in Boston, after her debut
in a Western city, where she had played a season. There is always
something vastly pitiable in the first attempts of a woman to please the
public from the stage; this is especially the case if she is not to the
theater born, and confronts in her audience the faces she has known in
the world; and her audience may have felt a peculiar forlornness in Mrs.
Farrell’s position: at any rate it showed itself the kindest of houses,
and seized with eager applause every good point of her performance. Her
beauty in itself was almost sufficient to achieve success for her. It
had never appeared to greater advantage. During the first two acts, it
seemed to prosper from moment to moment, under all those admiring eyes,
like the immediate gift of Heaven, as if she were inspired to be more
and more beautiful by her consciousness of her beauty’s power; and
whether she walked or sat, or only stirred in some chosen posture amid
the volume of her robes, she expressed a grace that divinely fascinated.
Her girlish presence enabled her to realize that Juliet to many whose
sensitive ideal refused the robust pretensions of more mature actresses;
she might have played the part well or not, but there could be no
question but she looked it. She had costumed it with a splendor which
the modern taste might have accused of overdressing, but which was not
discordant with a poetic sense of the magnificence of mediæval Verona.
Her Juliet was no blond, Gretchen-like maiden in blue and white, but an
impassioned southern girl in the dark reds and rich greens that go well
with that beauty; she might have studied her dress from that of some
superb patrician in a canvas of Cagliari. But with her beauty, her
grace, and her genius for looking and dressing the character, her
perfect triumph ended; there was something perplexingly indefinite in
the nature or the cause of her failure, at those points where she
failed. To some she simply appeared unequal to a sustained imagination
of the character. Others thought her fatigued by the physical effort,
which must be a very great one. Perhaps no one was of a very decided
mind about her performance.
“It was good, yes--and it wasn’t good, either,” said one of those
critical spirits, rather commoner in Boston than elsewhere, who analyze
and refine and re-refine and shrink from a final impression, with a
perseverance that leaves one in doubt whether they have any opinion
about the matter. “I should say she had genius, yes; genius for
something-- I don’t know; I suppose the drama. I dare say I saw her
without the proper perspective; I was crowded so close to her by what
I’d heard of her off the stage, don’t you know. I don’t think the part
was well chosen; and yet she did some things uncommonly well; all that
passionate lovemaking of the first part was magnificent; but there was
some detracting element, even there-- I don’t know what; I suppose she
didn’t let you think enough of Juliet; you couldn’t help thinking how
very charming _she_ was, herself; she realized the part the wrong way.
There was inspiration in it, and I should say study; yes, there was a
good deal of study; but, after all, it wasn’t so much art as it was
nature and artifice. It wanted smoothness, unity; perhaps that might
come, by and by. She had a very kind house; you know what our audiences
usually are; they wouldn’t turn the thumb down, but they’d make an
unlucky gladiator _wish_ they would. But they were very good to her,
last night, and applauded her hits like a little man. She didn’t seem to
have given _herself_ a fair chance. Perhaps she wasn’t artistically
large enough for the theater. I shouldn’t have said, at first, that she
was particularly suggestive of the home circle; very likely, if I’d met
her off the stage, I should have pronounced her too theatrical; and yet
there was a sort of appealing domesticity about her, after
all--especially in her failures. It’s a pity she couldn’t take some
particular line of the profession, in which she could somehow produce a
_social_ effect, don’t you know! I’ll tell you what; she could do
something perfectly charming in the way of what they call
sketches--character sketches--little morsels of drama that she could
have all to herself, with the audience in her confidence--a sort of
partner in the enterprise, like the audience at private theatricals.
That’s it; that’s the very thing! She’d be the greatest possible success
in private theatricals.”
“Well, Robert, it’s better than I ever dreamt she could do,” said Mrs.
Gilbert, as they drove home from the theater. “But what a life for a
woman! How hard and desolate at the best. Well, she’s sufficiently
punished!”
“Yes,” said her husband, “it’s a great pity they couldn’t somehow make
up their minds to marry each other.”
“Never! There are things they can never get over.”
“Oh, people get over all sorts of things. And even according to your own
showing, she behaved very well when it came to the worst.”
“Yes, I shall always say that of her. But she was to blame for it’s
coming to the worst. No, a whole lifetime wouldn’t be enough to atone
for what she’s done.”
“It wouldn’t, in a romance. But in life you have to make some allowance
for human nature. I had no idea she was so charming.”
“Robert,” said Mrs. Gilbert, sternly, “do you think it would be right
for a woman to be happy after she had made others so wretched?”
“Well, not at once. But I don’t see how her remaining unhappy is to help
matters. You say that you really think she does like him, after all?”
“She would hardly talk of anything else--where he was, and what he saw,
and what he said. Yes, I should say she does like him.”
“Then I don’t see why he shouldn’t come back from Europe and marry her,
when she makes her final failure on the stage. I would, in his place.”
“My dear, you _know_ you wouldn’t!”
“Well, then, _he_ would in _my_ place. Have it your own way, my love.”
Mr. Gilbert seemed to think he had made a joke, but his wife did not
share his laugh.
“Robert,” she said, after a thoughtful pause, “the lenient way in which
you look at her is worse than wrong; it’s weak.”
“Very likely, my dear; but I can’t help feeling it’s a noble weakness.
Why, of course I know that she spread a ruin round, for a while, but, as
you say, it seems to have been more of a ruin than she meant; and
there’s every probability that she’s been sorry enough for it since.”
“Oh! And so you think such a person as that can change by trying--and
atone for what she’s done by being _sorry_ for it!” said Mrs. Gilbert,
with scorn.
“Well, Susan, I should not like to be such a heathen as _not_ to think
_so_,” responded her husband, with an assumption none the less
intolerable because, while his position was in itself impregnable, it
left a thousand things to be said.
THE END
* * * * *
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