Instead of rushing wildly from side to side according to custom, she
advanced timidly, absorbed in deep memory; at every glance her face
expressed a recollection; she seemed to alternate between a vague dread
and an unconquerable delight; she seemed like a dim sky filled with an
inner radiance, but for a time it seemed uncertain which would
prevail--sunlight or shadow. But, like the sunlight, joy burst forth,
scattering uncertainty and alarm, illuminating life from end to end; and
her emotion vented itself in cries of April melody, and all the barren
stage seemed in flower about her; she stood like a bird on a branch
singing the spring time. And she sang every note with the same ease,
each was equally round and clear, but what delighted Ulick was the
perfect dramatic expression of her singing. It seemed to him that he was
really listening to a very young girl who had just heard of the return
of a man whom she had loved or might have loved. A bud last night slept
close curled in virginal strictness, with the morning light it awoke a
rose. But the core of the rose is still hidden from the light, only the
outer leaves know it, and so Elizabeth is pure in her first aspiration;
she rejoices as the lark rejoices in the sky, without desiring to
possess the sky. Ulick could not explain to himself the obsession of
this singing; he was thrall to the sensation of a staid German princess
of the tenth century, and the wearing of a large hat with ostrich
feathers, and tied with a blue veil, hindered no whit of it. And the
tailor-made dress and six years of _liaison_ with Owen Asher was no let
to the mediæval virgin formulated in antique custom. In the duet with
Tannhäuser she was benign and forgiving, the divine penitent who, having
no sins of her own to do penance for, does penance for the sins of
others.
It was then that Ulick began to understand the secret of Evelyn's
acting; in Elizabeth she had gone back to the Dulwich days before she
knew Asher, and was acting what she then felt and thought. She believed
she was living again with her father, and so intense was her conviction
that it evoked the externals. Even her age vanished; she was but
eighteen, a virgin whose sole reality has been her father and her
châtelaine, and whose vision of the world was, till now, a mere
decoration--sentinels on the drawbridge, hunters assembling on the
hillside, pictures hardly more real to her than those she weaves on her
tapestry loom.
Ulick leaned out of the box and applauded; he dared even to cry encore,
and, following suit, the musicians laid aside their instruments and,
standing up in the orchestra, applauded with him. The conductor tapped
approval with his stick on the little harmonium, the chorus at the back
cried encore. It was a curious scene; these folk, whose one idea at
rehearsal is to get it over as soon as possible, conniving at their own
retention in the theatre.
The applause of her fellow artistes delighted her; she bowed to the
orchestra, and, turning to the chorus, said that she would be pleased to
sing the duet again if they did not mind the delay; and coming down the
stage and standing in front of the box, she said to Ulick--
"Well, are you satisfied?... Is that your idea of Elizabeth?"
"So far as we have gone, yes, but I shall not know if your Elizabeth is
my Elizabeth until I have heard the end of the act."