"The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's
country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply
fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put
them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only
a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe
me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in
what I say to you."
"You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were
the fibres of your being then?"
"They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass,
not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the
maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of
perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really
want."
"The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest
smile.
"I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such
rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he
piteously went on.
"How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your
responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_,
they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections:
therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh
I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted
and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that
would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you
did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she
presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you,
_pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?"
"Like you? I loathe you!"
"_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you
feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see,
because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must
adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You
admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which
the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her
live!"
"Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with
unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a
spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting
you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all
persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be
in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with
her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying
everything before you."
Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all
but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?"
"Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe? I think I can do
with it."
"Aren't you afraid of me?"
"Not a bit."
"Bravely said. How little you know me after all!" sighed the girl.
"I tell the truth," Peter ardently went on; "and you must do me the
justice to admit that I've taken the time to dig deep into my feelings.
I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've
observed; in short I know what I mean and what I want. It isn't a thing
to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me. I've put it on
starvation diet, but that's no use--really, it's no use, Miriam," the
young man declared with a ring that spoke enough of his sincerity. "It
is no question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your
trusting me. You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're
frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature. Just
quietly marry me and I'll manage you."
"'Manage' me?" The girl's inflexion was droll; it made him change
colour.
"I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any
other way. The stage is great, no doubt, but the world's greater. It's a
bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand. We'll go in for
realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do
the fables."
Miriam had listened attentively, but her face that could so show things
showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity. "Pardon my saying it
after your delightful tributes to my worth," she returned in a moment,
"but I've never listened to anything quite so grandly unreal. You think
so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless
I _must_ utter a few shabby words of sense. I'm a magnificent creature
on the stage--well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to
see such evidence that I succeed. But off the stage, woe betide us both,
I should lose all my advantages. The fact's so patent that it seems to
me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you."
"Are you on the stage now, pray? Ah Miriam, if it weren't for the
respect I owe you!" her companion wailed.
"If it weren't for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift
is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that
it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason?
It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts,
since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are.
Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman,
and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you're
ready to face yourself."
"Without it--without it?" Sherringham cried. "Your own sophistry's
infinitely worse than mine. I should like to see you without it for the
fiftieth part of a second. What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards
of the play-house and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence
of your being. Your 'gift,' your genius, is yourself, and it's because
it's yourself that I yearn for you. If it had been a thing you could
leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never
have looked at you a second time. Don't talk to me as if I were a
simpleton--with your own false simplifications! You were made to charm
and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable
human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that--not a
vulgar shop with a turnstile that's open only once in the twenty-four
hours. 'Without it,' verily!" Peter proceeded with a still, deep heat
that kept down in a manner his rising scorn and exasperated passion.
"Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without
your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and
the wonder of your look!"
Miriam at this moved away from him with a port that resembled what she
sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the
footlights and then after a few steps grandly swept round again. This
evolution she performed--it was over in an instant--on the present
occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head
admirably erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other
solution never occurs to you."
"The other solution?"
"That _you_ should stay on the stage."
"I don't understand you," her friend gloomed.
"Stay on _my_ stage. Come off your own."
For a little he said nothing; then: "You mean that if I'll do that
you'll have me?"
"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice
on your own side it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive
light."
"Continue to let you act--as my wife?" he appealed. "Is it a real
condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?"
"I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them."
"Would you accept them _from_ me?" he demanded; "accept the manly, the
professional sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects--of course
I should have to do that--and simply become your appendage?"
She raised her arms for a prodigious fall. "My dear fellow, you invite
me with the best conscience in the world to become yours."
"The cases are not equal. You'd make of me the husband of an actress. I
should make of you the wife of an ambassador."
"The husband of an actress, _c'est bientot dit_, in that tone of scorn!
If you're consistent," said Miriam, all lucid and hard, "it ought to be
a proud position for you."
"What do you mean, if I'm consistent?"
"Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and
the greatness of our mission? Haven't you almost come to blows with poor
Gabriel Nash about it? What did all that mean if you won't face the
first consequences of your theory? Either it was an enlightened
conviction or it was an empty pretence. If you were only talking
against time I'm glad to know it," she rolled out with a darkening eye.
"The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the
theatre _is_ important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so
charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of
me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your
services in an intelligent, indirect way. Of course if you're not
serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of
what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid,
taking one devotion with another? If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after
a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!"
He had a long pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had
never done. "You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest
domesticity of private life. I've no conception whatever of what the
actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the
theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me,
and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs--which I judge it
altogether probably will!"
"You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!" Miriam flashed. "It
was the theatre brought you here--if it hadn't been for the theatre I
never would have looked at you. It was in the name of the theatre you
first made love to me; it's to the theatre you owe every advantage that,
so far as I'm concerned, you possess."
"I seem to possess a great many!" poor Peter derisively groaned.
"You might avail yourself better of those you have! You make me angry,
but I want to be fair," said the shining creature, "and I can't be
unless you are. You're not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you
swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old
friends and old memories for a selfish purpose."
"'Selfish purpose' is, in your own convenient idiom, _bientot dit_,"
Peter promptly answered. "I suppose you consider that if I truly
esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of
your genius. Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality--there are
different kinds, aren't there? At any rate I've explained to you that I
propose to deprive the world of nothing at all. You shall be celebrated,
_allez_!"
"Vain words, vain words, my dear!" and she turned off again in her
impatience. "I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool
yourself with such twaddle you must be pretty bad."
"Yes, I'm pretty bad," he admitted, looking at her dismally. "What do
you do with the declaration you made me the other day--the day I found
my cousin here--that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who
had risen high?"
Miriam thought of it. "I remember--the chaff about the honours, the
orders, the stars and garters. My poor foolish friend, don't be so
painfully literal. Don't you know a joke when you see it? It was to
worry your cousin, wasn't it? But it didn't in the least succeed."
"Why should you wish to worry my cousin?"
"Because he's so provoking!" she instantly answered; after which she
laughed as if for her falling too simply into the trap he had laid.
"Surely, at all events, I had my freedom no less than I have it now.
Pray what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you
should I have gone? However, that has nothing to do with it. Say I did
tell you that we might arrange it on the day you should come to me
covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should
you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such
a long time in advance? Where's the glory, please, and where are the
medals?"
"Dearest girl, am I not going to strange parts--a capital
promotion--next month," he insistently demanded, "and can't you trust me
enough to believe I speak with a real appreciation of the facts (that
I'm not lying to you in short) when I tell you I've my foot in the
stirrup? The glory's dawning. _I_'m all right too."
"What you propose to me, then, is to accompany you _tout bonnement_ to
your new post. What you propose to me is to pack up and start?"
"You put it in a nutshell." But Peter's smile was strained.
"You're touching--it has its charm. But you can't get anything in any of
the Americas, you know. I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up
in those parts--which are therefore 'strange' indeed. That's why the
diplomatic body hate them all."
"They're on the way, they're on the way!"--he could only feverishly
hammer. "The people here don't keep us long in disagreeable places
unless we want to stay. There's one thing you can get anywhere if you've
ability, and nowhere if you've not, and in the disagreeable places
generally more than in the others; and that--since it's the element of
the question we're discussing--is simply success. It's odious to be put
on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had
nothing to offer--to offer a person who has such glories of her own. I'm
not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined,
and the omens are on my side." Peter faltered a moment and then with a
queer expression went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking,
your glories are also still in the future." An exclamation at these
words burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask
my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues, if they consider I've
nothing to offer."
He had an idea as he ceased speaking that she was on the point of
breaking out with some strong word of resentment at his allusion to the
contingent nature of her prospects. But it only deepened his wound to
hear her say with extraordinary mildness: "It's perfectly true that my
glories are still to come, that I may fizzle out and that my little
success of to-day is perhaps a mere flash in the pan. Stranger things
have been--something of that sort happens every day. But don't we talk
too much of that part of it?" she asked with a weary patience that was
noble in its effect. "Surely it's vulgar to think only of the noise
one's going to make--especially when one remembers how utterly _betes_
most of the people will be among whom one makes it. It isn't to my
possible glories I cling; it's simply to my idea, even if it's destined
to betray me and sink me. I like it better than anything else--a
thousand times better (I'm sorry to have to put it in such a way) than
tossing up my head as the fine lady of a little coterie."
"A little coterie? I don't know what you're talking about!"--for this at
least Peter could fight.
"A big coterie, then! It's only that at the best. A nasty, prim,
'official' woman who's perched on her little local pedestal and thinks
she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour! Oh you
needn't tell me, I've seen them abroad--the dreariest females--and could
imitate them here. I could do one for you on the spot if I weren't so
tired. It's scarcely worth mentioning perhaps all this while--but I'm
ready to drop." She picked up the white mantle she had tossed off,
flinging it round her with her usual amplitude of gesture. "They're
waiting for me and I confess I'm hungry. If I don't hurry they'll eat up
all the nice things. Don't say I haven't been obliging, and come back
when you're better. Good-night."
"I quite agree with you that we've talked too much about the vulgar side
of our question," Peter returned, walking round to get between her and
the French window by which she apparently had a view of leaving the
room. "That's because I've wanted to bribe you. Bribery's almost always
vulgar."
"Yes, you should do better. _Merci_! There's a cab: some of them have
come for me. I must go," she added, listening for a sound that reached
her from the road.
Peter listened too, making out no cab. "Believe me, it isn't wise to
turn your back on such an affection as mine and on such a confidence,"
he broke out again, speaking almost in a warning tone--there was a touch
of superior sternness in it, as of a rebuke for real folly, but it was
meant to be tender--and stopping her within a few feet of the window.
"Such things are the most precious that life has to give us," he added
all but didactically.
She had listened once more for a little; then she appeared to give up
the idea of the cab. The reader need hardly be told that at this stage
of her youthful history the right way for her lover to take her wouldn't
have been to picture himself as acting for her highest good. "I like
your calling the feeling with which I inspire you confidence," she
presently said; and the deep note of the few words had something of the
distant mutter of thunder.
"What is it, then, when I offer you everything I have, everything I am,
everything I shall ever be?"
She seemed to measure him as for the possible success of an attempt to
pass him. But she remained where she was. "I'm sorry for you, yes, but
I'm also rather ashamed."
"Ashamed of _me_?"
"A brave offer to see me through--that's what I should call confidence.
You say to-day that you hate the theatre--and do you know what has made
you do it? The fact that it has too large a place in your mind to let
you disown it and throw it over with a good conscience. It has a deep
fascination for you, and yet you're not strong enough to do so
enlightened and public a thing as take up with it in my person. You're
ashamed of yourself for that, as all your constant high claims for it
are on record; so you blaspheme against it to try and cover your retreat
and your treachery and straighten out your personal situation. But it
won't do, dear Mr. Sherringham--it won't do at all," Miriam proceeded
with a triumphant, almost judicial lucidity which made her companion
stare; "you haven't the smallest excuse of stupidity, and your
perversity is no excuse whatever. Leave her alone altogether--a poor
girl who's making her way--or else come frankly to help her, to give her
the benefit of your wisdom. Don't lock her up for life under the
pretence of doing her good. What does one most good is to see a little
honesty. You're the best judge, the best critic, the best observer, the
best _believer_, that I've ever come across: you're committed to it by
everything you've said to me for a twelvemonth, by the whole turn of
your mind, by the way you've followed us up, all of us, from far back.
If an art's noble and beneficent one shouldn't be afraid to offer it
one's arm. Your cousin isn't: he can make sacrifices."
"My cousin?" Peter amazedly echoed. "Why, wasn't it only the other day
you were throwing his sacrifices in his teeth?"
Under this imputation on her straightness Miriam flinched but for an
instant. "I did that to worry _you_," she smiled.
"Why should you wish to worry me if you care so little about me?"
"Care little about you? Haven't I told you often, didn't I tell you
yesterday, how much I care? Ain't I showing it now by spending half the
night here with you--giving myself away to all those cynics--taking all
this trouble to persuade you to hold up your head and have the courage
of your opinions?"
"You invent my opinions for your convenience," said Peter all undaunted.
"As long ago as the night I introduced you, in Paris, to Mademoiselle
Voisin, you accused me of looking down on those who practise your art. I
remember how you came down on me because I didn't take your friend
Dashwood seriously enough. Perhaps I didn't; but if already at that time
I was so wide of the mark you can scarcely accuse me of treachery now."
"I don't remember, but I daresay you're right," Miriam coldly meditated.
"What I accused you of then was probably simply what I reproach you with
now--the germ at least of your deplorable weakness. You consider that we
do awfully valuable work, and yet you wouldn't for the world let people
suppose you really take our side. If your position was even at that time
so false, so much the worse for you, that's all. Oh it's refreshing,"
his formidable friend exclaimed after a pause during which Peter seemed
to himself to taste the full bitterness of despair, so baffled and
cheapened he intimately felt--"oh it's refreshing to see a man burn his
ships in a cause that appeals to him, give up something precious for it
and break with horrid timidities and snobberies! It's the most beautiful
sight in the world."
Poor Peter, sore as he was, and with the cold breath of failure in his
face, nevertheless burst out laughing at this fine irony. "You're
magnificent, you give me at this moment the finest possible illustration
of what you mean by burning one's ships. Verily, verily there's no one
like you: talk of timidity, talk of refreshment! If I had any talent for
it I'd go on the stage to-morrow, so as to spend my life with you the
better."
"If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first
appearance. That would be really respectable," Miriam said.
"Unfortunately I've no talent."
"That would only make it the more respectable."
"You're just like poor Nick," Peter returned--"you've taken to imitating
Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my
going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your
contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for
another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your
smelling-bottle--!" he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to
debate.
"Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing
a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and
encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a
man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you
very justly describe yourself."
"And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money
earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and
still more determined wife?"
"Why not if they work together--if there's something of his spirit and
his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "_Je vous
attendais_ with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick
they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have
anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the
real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea,
it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in
proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the
clumsy body. Poor old 'person'--if you knew what _we_ think of it! If
you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before
the idea."
"That _I_'m dense?"--and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the
favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this
outrage had been all that was wanting.
"I mean the public is--the public who pays us. After all, they expect us
to look at _them_ too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should
see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in
the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be
simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would
be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all
the while; only some of us are not worth paying."
"You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," he
said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently
attesting the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you--the
day you recited at my place?" he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he
were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also
one of the sharpest.
"Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!"
"You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of
self-exposure to which the profession you were taking up would commit
you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm
only taking my cue from you."
"I don't know what I may have said then," replied Miriam, whose steady
flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; "I was no doubt
already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only
on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than
it is. One warms it a bit one's self when once one's in. Of course I'm a
contortionist and of course there's a hateful side, but don't you see
how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of
those who are ready to insist on the _other_ side, the grand one, and
especially on the sympathy of the person who's ready to insist most and
to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for
everything?"
"The element--?" Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably
exaggerated. "Do you mean your success?"
"I mean what you've so often been eloquent about," she returned with an
indulgent shrug--"the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah there's
where life can help us," she broke out with a change of tone, "there's
where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy
and suffering and experience--I don't know what to call 'em! They
suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say;
they make them appear worth doing." She became radiant a while, as if
with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which
seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: "I must tell
you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a
tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of
interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!"
He stood there looking at her for a time during which her eyes
sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of
cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he
turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his
pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into
the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar
smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's
histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a
bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation--the bleared,
irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief space of his
glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted
was something that was not in _that_ thick prospect. What was the
meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of "art," this senseless,
mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad
opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and
in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more
bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to damnation: what commission
after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the
pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had
been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily
charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if
the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several
acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial,
compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest
on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when
most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease
he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately
guessed, could only add to the complication of things.
An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the
gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight
projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become
aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge.
This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery--it
could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous
secrecies--that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no
need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in
the dusk with a sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam's
warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited
her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with
precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced
herself--had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and
muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly
commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been
intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company
and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and
rattling up to Saint John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had
wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and
would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to
promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to
abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and
justifiably--the small hours having come--to see what her young charges
were "up to." She would probably have gathered that they were
quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it
were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he
only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was
one small spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.
Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned
again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance
to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other
egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was
in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and
she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.
"Don't let us part so harshly," she said--"with your trying to make me
feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking--we only hurt
each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our
business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure--when you've such a capital
one. Try it, try it, my dear friend--you'll see! I wish you the highest
promotion and the quickest--every success and every reward. When you've
got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on
that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been dreadful now."
"Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this," he answered,
holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell she had chosen
finally to torment him with. "Are you ready to follow up by a definite
promise your implied assurance that I've a remedy?"
"A definite promise?" Miriam benignly gazed--it was the perfection of
indirectness. "I don't 'imply' that you've a remedy. I declare it on the
house-tops. That delightful girl--"
"I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!" he broke in with a
voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth's ears in the
garden with affright. "I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted
of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten
minutes ago."
"Ah I've said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You
rather hurt my hand," she added--and jerked it away in a manner showing
that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.
"As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my
profession?" Peter pursued. "If I break with everything, my prospects,
my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the
service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up
instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn
how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie--if after
further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I
your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your
precious hand?"
"I don't think you've any right to put the question to me now," she
returned with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut
form his solemn speech had given--there was a charm in the sound of
it--to each item of his enumeration. "The case is so very contingent, so
dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you
really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it's a
question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then,"
she added, "I'm so far from wishing you to take any such monstrous
step."
"Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime."
"Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it's
done 'after further reflexion.' As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it
isn't a thing to reason about."
"Ah what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!" Peter yearningly cried.
"Will you give me a year to consider?"
"Would you trust _me_ for a year?"
"Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?"
"Oh I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take
for granted one must like you!"
"Remember," he could immediately say, "that you've made a great point of
your liking me. Wouldn't you do so still more if I were heroic?"
She showed him, for all her high impatience now, the interest of a long
look. "I think I should pity you in such a cause. Give it all to _her_;
don't throw away a real happiness!"
"Ah you can't back out of your position with a few vague and even rather
impertinent words!" Peter protested. "You accuse me of swallowing my
opinions, but you swallow your pledges. You've painted in heavenly
colours the sacrifice I'm talking of, and now you must take the
consequences."
"The consequences?"
"Why my coming back in a year to square you."
"Ah you're a bore!"--she let him have it at last. "Come back when you
like. I don't wonder you've grown desperate, but fancy _me_ then!" she
added as she looked past him at a new interlocutor.
"Yes, but if he'll square you!" Peter heard Mrs. Rooth's voice respond
all persuasively behind him. She had stolen up to the window now, had
passed the threshold, was in the room, but her daughter had not been
startled. "What is it he wants to do, dear?" she continued to Miriam.
"To induce me to marry him if he'll go upon the stage. He'll practise
over there--where he's going--and then come back and appear. Isn't it
too dreadful? Talk him out of it, stay with him, soothe him!" the girl
hurried on. "You'll find some drinks and some biscuits in the
cupboard--keep him with you, pacify him, give him _his_ little supper.
Meanwhile I'll go to mine; I'll take the brougham; don't follow!"
With which words Miriam bounded into the garden, her white drapery
shining for an instant in the darkness before she disappeared. Peter
looked about him to pick up his hat, but while he did so heard the bang
of the gate and the quick carriage get into motion. Mrs. Rooth appeared
to sway violently and in opposed directions: that of the impulse to rush
after Miriam and that of the extraordinary possibility to which the
young lady had alluded. She was in doubt, yet at a venture, detaining
him with a maternal touch, she twinkled up at their visitor like an
insinuating glow-worm. "I'm so glad you came."
"I'm not. I've got nothing by it," Peter said as he found his hat.
"Oh it was so beautiful!" she declared.
"The play--yes, wonderful. I'm afraid it's too late for me to avail
myself of the privilege your daughter offers me. Good-night."
"Ah it's a pity; won't you take _anything_?" asked Mrs. Rooth. "When I
heard your voice so high I was scared and hung back." But before he
could reply she added: "Are you really thinking of the stage?"
"It comes to the same thing."
"Do you mean you've proposed?"
"Oh unmistakably."
"And what does she say?"
"Why you heard: she says I'm an ass."
"Ah the little wretch!" laughed Mrs. Rooth. "Leave her to me. I'll help
you. But you are mad. Give up nothing--least of all your advantages."
"I won't give up your daughter," said Peter, reflecting that if this was
cheap it was at any rate good enough for Mrs. Rooth. He mended it a
little indeed by adding darkly: "But you can't make her take me."
"I can prevent her taking any one else."
"Oh _can_ you?" Peter cried with more scepticism than ceremony.
"You'll see--you'll see." He passed into the garden, but, after she had
blown out the candles and drawn the window to, Mrs. Rooth went with him.
"All you've got to do is to be yourself--to be true to your fine
position," she explained as they proceeded. "Trust me with the
rest--trust me and be quiet."
"How can one be quiet after this magnificent evening?"
"Yes, but it's just that!" panted the eager old woman. "It has launched
her so on this sea of dangers that to make up for the loss of the old
security (don't you know?) we must take a still firmer hold."
"Aye, of what?" Peter asked as Mrs. Rooth's comfort became vague while
she stopped with him at the garden door.
"Ah you know: of the _real_ life, of the true anchor!" Her hansom was
waiting for her and she added: "I kept it, you see; but a little
extravagance on the night one's fortune has come!--"
Peter stared. Yes, there were people whose fortune had come; but he
managed to stammer: "Are you following her again?"
"For you--for you!" And she clambered into the vehicle. From the seat,
enticingly, she offered him the place beside her. "Won't you come too? I
know he invited you." Peter declined with a quick gesture and as he
turned away he heard her call after him, to cheer him on his lonely
walk: "I shall keep this up; I shall never lose sight of her!"