Part 7 (1/2)

'No, no!' she exclaimed, with sudden bitterness and a change of voice which startled him; 'it is not that. It is that I am I, and Madame Desforets is Madame Desforets. Oh, I see! I see very well that your mind is against it. And Mr. Wallace--there were two or three things in his manner which have puzzled me. He has never said yes to my proposal formally. I understand perfectly what it means; you think that I shall do the play an injury by acting it; that it is too good for me!'

Kendal felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen; the sombre pa.s.sion of her manner affected him indescribably.

'Miss Bretherton!' he cried.

'Yes, yes!' she said, almost fiercely, stopping in the path. 'It's that, I know. I have felt it almost since your first word. What power have I, if not tragic power? If a part like Elvira does not suit me, what does suit me? Of course, that is what you mean. If I cannot act Elvira, I am good for nothing--I am worse than good for nothing--I am an impostor, a sham!'

She sat down on the raised edge of the bank, for she was trembling, and clasped her quivering hands on her knees. Kendal was beside himself with distress. How had he blundered so, and what had brought this about? It was so unexpected, it was incredible.

'Do--do believe me!' he exclaimed, bending over her. 'I never meant anything the least disrespectful to you; I never dreamt of it. You asked me to give you my true opinion, and my criticism applied much more to the play than to yourself. Think nothing of it, if you yourself are persuaded. You must know much better than I can what will suit you. And as for Wallace--Wallace will be proud to let you do what you will with his play.'

It seemed to him that he would have said anything in the world to soothe her. It was so piteous, so intolerable to him to watch that quivering lip.

'Ah, yes,' she said, looking up, a dreary smile flitting over her face, 'I know you didn't mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn't been a fool, in Mr.

Wallace's manner. I did see it. It's only what every one whose opinion is worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me lately. I believe it has all been a great, great mistake.'

Kendal never felt a keener hatred of the conventions which rule the relations between men and women. Could he only simply have expressed his own feeling, he would have knelt beside her on the path, have taken the trembling hands in his own, and comforted her as a woman would have done.

But as it was, he could only stand stiff and awkward before her, and yet it seemed to him as if the whole world had resolved itself into his own individuality and hers, and as if the gay river party and the bright friendly relations of an hour before were separated from the present by an impa.s.sable gulf. And, worst of all, there seemed to be a strange perversity in his speech--a fate which drove him into betraying every here and there his own real standpoint whether he would or no.

'You must not say such things,' he said, as calmly as he could. 'You have charmed the English public as no one else has ever charmed it. Is not that a great thing to have done? And if I, who am very fastidious and very captious, and over-critical in a hundred ways--if I am inclined to think that a part is rather more than you, with your short dramatic experience, can compa.s.s quite successfully, why, what does it matter? I may be quite wrong. Don't take any notice of my opinion: forget it, and let me help you, if I can, by talking over the play.'

She shook her head with a bitter little smile. 'No, no; I shall never forget it. Your att.i.tude only brought home to me, almost more strongly than I could bear, what I have suspected a long, long time--the _contempt_ which people like you and Mr. Wallace feel for me!'

'Contempt!' cried Kendal, beside himself, and feeling as if all the criticisms he had allowed himself to make of her were recoiling in one avenging ma.s.s upon his head. 'I never felt anything but the warmest admiration for your courage, your work, your womanly goodness and sweetness.'

'Yes,' she said, rising and holding out her hand half-unconsciously for her cloak, which she put round her as though the wood had suddenly grown cold; 'admiration for me as a woman, contempt for me as an artist!

There's the whole bare truth. Does it hold my future in it, I wonder? Is there nothing in me but this beauty that people talk of, and which I sometimes _hate_?'

She swept her hair back from her forehead with a fierce dramatic gesture.

It was as though the self in her was rising up and a.s.serting itself against the judgment which had been pa.s.sed upon it, as if some hidden force hardly suspected even by herself were beating against its bars.

Kendal watched her in helpless silence. 'Tell me,' she said, fixing her deep hazel eyes upon him, 'you owe it me--you have given me so much pain.

No, no; you did not mean it. But tell me, and tell me from the bottom of your heart--that is, if you are interested enough in me--what is it I want? What is it that seems to be threatening me with failure as an artist? I work all day long, my work is never out of my head; it seems to pursue me all night. But the more I struggle with it the less successful I seem even to myself.'

Her look was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, direct truth to her.

'What you want,' he said slowly, as if the words were forced from him, 'is _knowledge!_ London has taught you much, and that is why you are dissatisfied with your work--it is the beginning of all real success. But you want positive knowledge--the knowledge you could get from books, and the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young, and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of experience others have laid up for us.'

It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her.

And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster--he, one captious man of letters, against the world.

But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal's words, instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she felt a relief in having a.n.a.lysed to the full the vague trouble which had been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.

'I am very grateful to you,' she said steadily; 'very. It is strange, but almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don't look so grieved,' she cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, 'I am glad you told me all you thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira,' she added, trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, 'tell Mr. Wallace I give her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don't you think now we had better go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet again.'

She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in the descending path, and held out a hand to her to help her. She gave him her own, and he carried it impetuously to his lips.