'I must not.'
She had applied herself to the task of furthering Charles's ambition,
and until she had succeeded she would not yield, nor would she seek for
herself in life any advantage or even any natural fulfilment.
Charles came back in a state of excitement.
'It was wonderful,' he said. 'What has happened to you? Your voice is
so full and round. You lose yourself entirely, you speak with a voice
that has in it all the colour and beauty and enchantment of my island.
You move simply, inevitably, so that every gesture is rhythmical, and
like a musical accompaniment to the words.... You'll be an artist.
You are an artist. There has been nothing like it since the old
days.... Duse could not do more with her voice.'
'I didn't know,' she said. 'I didn't know.'
'But I did,' he cried. 'I did. I knew you would become a wonder....
Bother money, bother Butcher, bother Clott, and damn the committee.
Together we shall be irresistible--as we have been. You didn't tell me
you were practising. If that is why you want to be alone I have
nothing to say against it. I've been a selfish brute.'
She was deeply moved. Never before had Charles shown the slightest
thought for her. Human beings as such were nothing to him, but for an
artist, as for art, no trouble was too great, no sacrifice too extreme
for him.
He seized her hands and kissed them over and over again.
'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy
you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly
move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his
privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure
that is in us.'
His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she
protested,--
'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'
It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the
cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly
gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was
only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper
magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness
and cajolery.
'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.
'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.
'What?'
'Do it again!'
'I can't.'
'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to
find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it
again now.'
'No.'
To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by
the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side
and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with passion, ruthless,
impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had
so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as
about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.
'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I
fished you out of Picquart's studio....'
'How dare you speak to me like that?'
She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and
lashed out at him with her tongue.
'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You
treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if
they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out
of me what your own work lacks....'
Charles reeled under this assault and his arms fell limply by his side.
'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked
out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the
stage was empty. I thought we were working....'
Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the
play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ...
With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to
her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could
never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his
imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a
royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become
an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with
realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand
his frenzy, his fury, his despair.
'That will do, Charles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can
be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are
not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me
to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet
him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'
'Does Verschoyle know?'
'He knows that you are you and that I am I--that is all he cares
about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is
the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of
money--if the man was worth it.'
'Ah!' said Charles, reassured. This was like the old Clara speaking,
but with more assurance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering
intuition and guess-work.
X