XLVII…

XLVII

When Mrs. Dallow returned to London just before London broke up the fact was immediately known in Calcutta Gardens and was promptly communicated to Nick Dormer by his sister Bridget. He had learnt it in no other way--he had had no correspondence with Julia during her absence. He gathered that his mother and sisters were not ignorant of her whereabouts--he never mentioned her name to them--but as to this he was not sure if the source of their information had been the Morning Post or a casual letter received by the inscrutable Biddy. He knew Biddy had some epistolary commerce with Julia; he had an impression Grace occasionally exchanged letters with Mrs. Gresham. Biddy, however, who, as he was also well aware, was always studying what he would like, forbore to talk to him about the absent mistress of Harsh beyond once dropping the remark that she had gone from Florence to Venice and was enjoying gondolas and sunsets too much to leave them. Nick's comment on this was that she was a happy woman to have such a go at Titian and Tintoret: as he spoke, and for some time afterwards, the sense of how he himself should enjoy a like "go" made him ache with ineffectual longing.

He had forbidden himself at the present to think of absence, not only because it would be inconvenient and expensive, but because it would be a kind of retreat from the enemy, a concession to difficulty. The enemy was no particular person and no particular body of persons: not his mother; not Mr. Carteret, who, as he heard from the doctor at Beauclere, lingered on, sinking and sinking till his vitality appeared to have the vertical depth of a gold-mine; not his pacified constituents, who had found a healthy diversion in returning another Liberal wholly without Mrs. Dallow's aid (she had not participated even to the extent of a responsive telegram in the election); not his late colleagues in the House, nor the biting satirists of the newspapers, nor the brilliant women he took down at dinner-parties--there was only one sense in which he ever took them down; not in short his friends, his foes, his private thoughts, the periodical phantom of his shocked father: the enemy was simply the general awkwardness of his situation. This awkwardness was connected with the sense of responsibility so greatly deprecated by Gabriel Nash, Gabriel who had ceased to roam of late on purpose to miss as few scenes as possible of the drama, rapidly growing dull alas, of his friend's destiny; but that compromising relation scarcely drew the soreness from it. The public flurry produced by his collapse had only been large enough to mark the flatness of our young man's position when it was over. To have had a few jokes cracked audibly at your expense wasn't an ordeal worth talking of; the hardest thing about it was merely that there had not been enough of them to yield a proportion of good ones. Nick had felt in fine the benefit of living in an age and in a society where number and pressure have, for the individual figure, especially when it's a zero, compensations almost equal to their cruelties.

No, the pinch for his conscience after a few weeks had passed was simply an acute mistrust of the superficiality of performance into which the desire to justify himself might hurry him. That desire was passionate as regards Julia Dallow; it was ardent also as regards his mother; and, to make it absolutely uncomfortable, it was complicated with the conviction that neither of them would know his justification even when she should see it. They probably couldn't know it if they would, and very certainly wouldn't if they could. He assured himself, however, that this limitation wouldn't matter; it was their affair--his own was simply to have the right sort of thing to show. The work he was now attempting wasn't the right sort of thing, though doubtless Julia, for instance, would dislike it almost as much as if it were. The two portraits of Miriam, after the first exhilaration of his finding himself at large, filled him with no private glee; they were not in the direction in which he wished for the present really to move. There were moments when he felt almost angry, though of course he held his tongue, when by the few persons who saw them they were pronounced wonderfully clever. That they were wonderfully clever was just the detestable thing in them, so active had that cleverness been in making them seem better than they were. There were people to whom he would have been ashamed to show them, and these were the people whom it would give him most pleasure some day to please. Not only had he many an hour of disgust at his actual work, but he thought he saw as in an ugly revelation that nature had cursed him with an odious facility and that the lesson of his life, the sternest and wholesomest, would be to keep out of the trap it had laid for him. He had fallen into this trap on the threshold and had only scrambled out with his honour. He had a talent for appearance, and that was the fatal thing; he had a damnable suppleness and a gift of immediate response, a readiness to oblige, that made him seem to take up causes which he really left lying, enabled him to learn enough about them in an hour to have all the air of having converted them to his use. Many people used them--that was the only thing to be said--who had taken them in much less. He was at all events too clever by half, since this pernicious overflow had wrecked most of his attempts. He had assumed a virtue and enjoyed assuming it, and the assumption had cheated his father and his mother and his affianced wife and his rich benefactor and the candid burgesses of Harsh and the cynical reporters of the newspapers. His enthusiasms had been but young curiosity, his speeches had been young agility, his professions and adhesions had been like postage-stamps without glue: the head was all right, but they wouldn't stick. He stood ready now to wring the neck of the irrepressible vice that certainly would tend to nothing so much as to get him into further trouble. His only real justification would be to turn patience--his own of course--inside out; yet if there should be a way to misread that recipe his humbugging genius could be trusted infallibly to discover it. Cheap and easy results would dangle before him, little amateurish conspicuities at exhibitions helped by his history; putting it in his power to triumph with a quick "What do you say to that?" over those he had wounded. The fear of this danger was corrosive; it poisoned even lawful joys. If he should have a striking picture at the Academy next year it wouldn't be a crime; yet he couldn't help suspecting any conditions that would enable him to be striking so soon. In this way he felt quite enough how Gabriel Nash had "had" him whenever railing at his fever for proof, and how inferior as a productive force the desire to win over the ill-disposed might be to the principle of quiet growth. Nash had a foreign manner of lifting up his finger and waving it before him, as if to put an end to everything, whenever it became, in conversation or discussion, to any extent a question whether any one would "like" anything.

It was presumably in some degree at least a due respect for the principle of quiet growth that kept Nick on the spot at present, made him stick fast to Rosedale Road and Calcutta Gardens and deny himself the simplifications of absence. Do what he would he couldn't despoil himself of the impression that the disagreeable was somehow connected with the salutary, and the "quiet" with the disagreeable, when stubbornly borne; so he resisted a hundred impulses to run away to Paris or to Florence, coarse forms of the temptation to persuade himself by material motion that he was launched. He stayed in London because it seemed to him he was there more conscious of what he had undertaken, and he had a horror of shirking the consciousness. One element in it indeed was his noting how little convenience he could have found in a foreign journey even had his judgement approved such a subterfuge. The stoppage of his supplies from Beauclere had now become an historic fact, with something of the majesty of its class about it: he had had time to see what a difference this would make in his life. His means were small and he had several old debts, the number of which, as he believed, loomed large to his mother's imagination. He could never tell her she exaggerated, because he told her nothing of that sort in these days: they had no intimate talk, for an impenetrable partition, a tall, bristling hedge of untrimmed misconceptions, had sprung up between them. Poor Biddy had made a hole in it through which she squeezed from side to side, to keep up communications, at the cost of many rents and scratches; but Lady Agnes walked straight and stiff, never turning her head, never stopping to pluck the least little daisy of consolation. It was in this manner she wished to signify that she had accepted her wrongs. She draped herself in them as in a Roman mantle and had never looked so proud and wasted and handsome as now that her eyes rested only on ruins.

Nick was extremely sorry for her, though he marked as a dreadful want of grace her never setting a foot in Rosedale Road--she mentioned his studio no more than if it had been a private gambling-house or something worse; sorry because he was well aware that for the hour everything must appear to her to have crumbled. The luxury of Broadwood would have to crumble: his mind was very clear about that. Biddy's prospects had withered to the finest, dreariest dust, and Biddy indeed, taking a lesson from her brother's perversities, seemed little disposed to better a bad business. She professed the most peace-making sentiments, but when it came really to doing something to brighten up the scene she showed herself portentously corrupt. After Peter Sherringham's heartless flight she had wantonly slighted an excellent opportunity to repair her misfortune. Lady Agnes had reason to infer, about the end of June, that young Mr. Grindon, the only son--the other children being girls--of an immensely rich industrial and political baronet in the north, was literally waiting for the faintest sign. This reason she promptly imparted to her younger daughter, whose intelligence had to take it in but who had shown it no other consideration. Biddy had set her charming face as a stone; she would have nothing to do with signs, and she, practically speaking, wilfully, wickedly refused a magnificent offer, so that the young man carried his high expectations elsewhere. How much in earnest he had been was proved by the fact that before Goodwood had come and gone he was captured by Lady Muriel Macpherson. It was superfluous to insist on the frantic determination to get married written on such an accident as that. Nick knew of this episode only through Grace, and he deplored its having occurred in the midst of other disasters.

He knew or he suspected something more as well--something about his brother Percival which, should it come to light, no phase of their common history would be genial enough to gloss over. It had usually been supposed that Percy's store of comfort against the ills of life was confined to the infallibility of his rifle. He was not sensitive, and his use of that weapon represented a resource against which common visitations might have spent themselves. It had suddenly come to Nick's ears, however, that he cultivated a concurrent support in the person of a robust countrywoman, housed in an ivied corner of Warwickshire, in whom he had long been interested and whom, without any flourish of magnanimity, he had ended by making his wife. The situation of the latest born of the pledges of this affection, a blooming boy--there had been two or three previously--was therefore perfectly regular and of a nature to make a difference in the worldly position, as the phrase ran, of his moneyless uncle. If there be degrees in the absolute and Percy had an heir--others, moreover, supposedly following--Nick would have to regard himself as still more moneyless than before. His brother's last step was doubtless, given the case, to be commended; but such discoveries were enlivening only when made in other families, and Lady Agnes would scarcely enjoy learning to what tune she had become a grandmother.

Nick forbore from delicacy to intimate to Biddy that he thought it a pity she couldn't care for Mr. Grindon; but he had a private sense that if she had been capable of such a feat it would have lightened a little the weight he himself had to carry. He bore her a slight grudge, which lasted till Julia Dallow came back; when the circumstance of the girl's being summoned immediately down to Harsh created a diversion that was perhaps after all only fanciful. Biddy, as we know, entertained a theory, which Nick had found occasion to combat, that Mrs. Dallow had not treated him perfectly well; therefore in going to Harsh the very first time that relative held out a hand to her so jealous a little sister must have recognised a special inducement. The inducement might have been that the relative had comfort for her, that she was acting by her cousin's direct advice, that they were still in close communion on the question of the offers Biddy was not to accept, that in short Peter's sister had taken upon herself to see that their young friend should remain free for the day of the fugitive's inevitable return. Once or twice indeed Nick wondered if Julia had herself been visited, in a larger sense, by the thought of retracing her steps--if she wished to draw out her young friend's opinion as to how she might do that gracefully. During the few days she was in town Nick had seen her twice in Great Stanhope Street, but neither time alone. She had said to him on one of these occasions in her odd, explosive way: "I should have thought you'd have gone away somewhere--it must be such a bore." Of course she firmly believed he was staying for Miriam, which he really was not; and probably she had written this false impression off to Peter, who, still more probably, would prefer to regard it as just. Nick was staying for Miriam only in the sense that he should very glad of the money he might receive for the portrait he was engaged in painting. That money would be a great convenience to him in spite of the obstructive ground Miriam had taken in pretending--she had blown half a gale about it--that he had had no right to dispose of such a production without her consent. His answer to this was simply that the purchaser was so little of a stranger that it didn't go, so to speak, out of the family, out of hers. It didn't matter, Miriam's retort that if Mr. Sherringham had formerly been no stranger he was utterly one now, so that nothing would ever less delight him than to see her hated image on his wall. He would back out of the bargain and Nick be left with the picture on his hands. Nick jeered at this shallow theory and when she came to sit the question served as well as another to sprinkle their familiar silences with chaff. He already knew something, as we have seen, of the conditions in which his distracted kinsman had left England; and this connected itself, in casual meditation, with some of the calculations imputable to Julia and to Biddy. There had naturally been a sequel to the queer behaviour perceptible in Peter, at the theatre, on the eve of his departure--a sequel lighted by a word of Miriam's in the course of her first sitting to Nick after her great night. "Fancy"--so this observation ran--"fancy the dear man finding time in the press of all his last duties to ask me to marry him!"

"He told me you had found time in the press of all yours to say you would," Nick replied. And this was pretty much all that had passed on the subject between them--save of course her immediately making clear that Peter had grossly misinformed him. What had happened was that she had said she would do nothing of the sort. She professed a desire not to be confronted again with this obnoxious theme, and Nick easily fell in with it--quite from his own settled inclination not to handle that kind of subject with her. If Julia had false ideas about him, and if Peter had them too, his part of the business was to take the simplest course to establish the falsity. There were difficulties indeed attached even to the simplest course, but there would be a difficulty the less if one should forbear to meddle in promiscuous talk with the general, suggestive topic of intimate unions. It is certain that in these days Nick cultivated the practice of forbearances for which he didn't receive, for which perhaps he never would receive, due credit.

He had been convinced for some time that one of the next things he should hear would be that Julia Dallow had arranged to marry either Mr. Macgeorge or some other master of multitudes. He could think of that now, he found--think of it with resignation even when Julia, before his eyes, looked so handsomely forgetful that her appearance had to be taken as referring still more to their original intimacy than to his comparatively superficial offence. What made this accomplishment of his own remarkable was that there was something else he thought of quite as much--the fact that he had only to see her again to feel by how great a charm she had in the old days taken possession of him. This charm operated apparently in a very direct, primitive way: her presence diffused it and fully established it, but her absence left comparatively little of it behind. It dwelt in the very facts of her person--it was something she happened physically to be; yet--considering that the question was of something very like loveliness--its envelope of associations, of memories and recurrences, had no great destiny. She packed it up and took it away with her quite as if she had been a woman who had come to sell a set of laces. The laces were as wonderful as ever when taken out of the box, but to admire again their rarity you had to send for the woman. What was above all remarkable for our young man was that Miriam Rooth fetched a fellow, vulgarly speaking, very much less than Julia at the times when, being on the spot, Julia did fetch. He could paint Miriam day after day without any agitating blur of vision; in fact the more he saw of her the clearer grew the atmosphere through which she blazed, the more her richness became one with that of the flowering work. There are reciprocities and special sympathies in such a relation; mysterious affinities they used to be called, divinations of private congruity. Nick had an unexpressed conviction that if, according to his defeated desire, he had embarked with Mrs. Dallow in this particular quest of a great prize, disaster would have overtaken them on the deep waters. Even with the limited risk indeed disaster had come; but it was of a different kind and it had the advantage for him that now she couldn't reproach and denounce him as the cause of it--couldn't do so at least on any ground he was obliged to recognise. She would never know how much he had cared for her, how much he cared for her still; inasmuch as the conclusive proof for himself was his conscious reluctance to care for another woman--evidence she positively misread. Some day he would doubtless try to do that; but such a day seemed as yet far off, and he had meanwhile no spite, no vindictive impulse, to help him. The soreness that mingled with his liberation, the sense of indignity even, as of a full cup suddenly dashed by a blundering hand from his lips, demanded certainly a balm; but it found the balm, for the time, in another passion, not in a rancorous exercise of the same--a passion strong enough to make him forget what a pity it was he was not so formed as to care for two women at once.

As soon as Julia returned to England he broke ground to his mother on the subject of her making the mistress of Broadwood understand that she and the girls now regarded their occupancy of that estate as absolutely over. He had already, several weeks before, picked a little at the arid tract of that indicated surrender, but in the interval the soil appeared to have formed again to a considerable thickness. It was disagreeable to him to call his parent's attention to the becoming course, and especially disagreeable to have to emphasise it and discuss it and perhaps clamour for it. He would have liked the whole business to be tacit--a little triumph of silent delicacy. But he found reasons to suspect that what in fact would be most tacit was Julia's certain endurance of any chance failure of that charm. Lady Agnes had a theory that they had virtually--"practically" as she said--given up the place, so that there was no need of making a splash about it; but Nick discovered in the course of an exploration of Biddy's view more rigorous perhaps than any to which he had ever subjected her, that none of their property had been removed from the delightful house--none of the things (there were ever so many things) heavily planted there when their mother took possession. Lady Agnes was the proprietor of innumerable articles of furniture, relics and survivals of her former greatness, and moved about the world with a train of heterogeneous baggage; so that her quiet overflow into the spaciousness of Broadwood had had all the luxury of a final subsidence. What Nick had to propose to her now was a dreadful combination, a relapse into the conditions she most hated--seaside lodgings, bald storehouses in the Marylebone Road, little London rooms crammed with objects that caught the dirt and made them stuffy. He was afraid he should really finish her, and he himself was surprised in a degree at his insistence. He wouldn't have supposed he should have cared so much, but he found he did care intensely. He cared enough--it says everything--to explain to his mother that her retention of Broadwood would show "practically" (since that was her great word) for the violation of an agreement. Julia had given them the place on the understanding that he was to marry her, and once he was definitely not to marry her they had no right to keep the place. "Yes, you make the mess and we pay the penalty!" the poor lady flashed out; but this was the only overt protest she made--except indeed to contend that their withdrawal would be an act ungracious and offensive to Julia. She looked as she had looked during the months that succeeded his father's death, but she gave a general, a final grim assent to the proposition that, let their kinswoman take it as she would, their own duty was unmistakably clear.

It was Grace who was principal representative of the idea that Julia would be outraged by such a step; she never ceased to repeat that she had never heard of anything so "nasty." Nick would have expected this of Grace, but he felt rather bereft and betrayed when Biddy murmured to him that she knew--that there was really no need of their sacrificing their mother's comfort to an extravagant scruple. She intimated that if Nick would only consent to their going on with Broadwood as if nothing had happened--or rather as if everything had happened--she would answer for the feelings of the owner. For almost the first time in his life Nick disliked what Biddy said to him, and he gave her a sharp rejoinder, a taste of the general opinion that they all had enough to do to answer for themselves. He remembered afterwards the way she looked at him--startled, even frightened and with rising tears--before turning away. He held that they should judge better how Julia would take it after they had thrown up the place; and he made it his duty to arrange that his mother should formally advise her, by letter, of their intending to depart at once. Julia could then protest to her heart's content. Nick was aware that for the most part he didn't pass for practical; he could imagine why, from his early years, people should have joked him about it. But this time he was determined to rest on a rigid view of things as they were. He didn't sec his mother's letter, but he knew that it went. He felt she would have been more loyal if she had shown it to him, though of course there could be but little question of loyalty now. That it had really been written, however, very much on the lines he dictated was clear to him from the subsequent surprise which Lady Agnes's blankness didn't prevent his divining.

Julia acknowledged the offered news, but in unexpected terms: she had apparently neither resisted nor protested; she had simply been very glad to get her house back again and had not accused any of them of nastiness. Nick saw no more of her letter than he had seen of his mother's, but he was able to say to Grace--to their parent he was studiously mute--"My poor child, you see after all that we haven't kicked up such a row." Grace shook her head and looked gloomy and deeply wise, replying that he had no cause to triumph--they were so far from having seen the end of it yet. Thus he guessed that his mother had complied with his wish on the calculation that it would be a mere form, that Julia would entreat them not to be so fantastic and that he himself would then, in the presence of her wounded surprise, consent to a quiet continuance, so much in the interest--the air of Broadwood had a purity!--of the health of all of them. But since Julia jumped at their sacrifice he had no chance to be mollified: he had all grossly to persist in having been right.

At bottom probably he was a little surprised at Julia's so prompt assent. Literally speaking, it was not perfectly graceful. He was sorry his mother had been so deceived, but was sorrier still for Biddy's mistake--it showed she might be mistaken about other things. Nothing was left now but for Lady Agnes to say, as she did substantially whenever she saw him: "We're to prepare to spend the autumn at Worthing then or some other horrible place? I don't know their names: it's the only thing we can afford." There was an implication in this that if he expected her to drag her girls about to country-houses in a continuance of the fidgety effort to work them off he must understand at once that she was now too weary and too sad and too sick. She had done her best for them and it had all been vain and cruel--now therefore the poor creatures must look out for themselves. To the grossness of Biddy's misconduct she needn't refer, nor to the golden opportunity that young woman had forfeited by her odious treatment of Mr. Grindon. It was clear that this time Lady Agnes was incurably discouraged; so much so as to fail to glean the dimmest light from the fact that the girl was really making a long stay at Harsh. Biddy went to and fro two or three times and then in August fairly settled there; and what her mother mainly saw in her absence was the desire to keep out of the way of household reminders of her depravity. In fact, as turned out, Lady Agnes and Grace gathered themselves together in the first days of that month for another visit to the very old lady who had been Sir Nicholas's godmother; after which they went somewhere else--so that the question of Worthing had not immediately to be faced.

Nick stayed on in London with the obsession of work humming in his ears; he was joyfully conscious that for three or four months, in the empty Babylon, he would have ample stores of time. But toward the end of August he got a letter from Grace in which she spoke of her situation and of her mother's in a manner that seemed to impose on him the doing of something tactful. They were paying a third visit--he knew that in Calcutta Gardens lady's-maids had been to and fro with boxes, replenishments of wardrobes--and yet somehow the outlook for the autumn was dark. Grace didn't say it in so many words, but what he read between the lines was that they had no more invitations. What, therefore, in pity's name was to become of them? People liked them well enough when Biddy was with them, but they didn't care for her mother and her, that prospect tout pur, and Biddy was cooped up indefinitely with Julia. This was not the manner in which Grace had anciently alluded to her sister's happy visits at Harsh, and the change of tone made Nick wince with a sense of all that had collapsed. Biddy was a little fish worth landing in short, scantly as she seemed disposed to bite, and Grace's rude probity could admit that she herself was not.

Nick had an inspiration: by way of doing something tactful he went down to Brighton and took lodgings, for several weeks, in the general interest, the very quietest and sunniest he could find. This he intended as a kindly surprise, a reminder of how he had his mother's and sisters' comfort at heart, how he could exert himself and save them trouble. But he had no sooner concluded his bargain--it was a more costly one than he had at first calculated--than he was bewildered and befogged to learn that the persons on whose behalf he had so exerted himself were to pass the autumn at Broadwood with Julia. That daughter of privilege had taken the place into familiar use again and was now correcting their former surprise at her crude indifference--this was infinitely characteristic of Julia--by inviting them to share it with her. Nick wondered vaguely what she was "up to"; but when his mother treated herself to the line irony of addressing him an elaborately humble request for his consent to their accepting the merciful refuge--she repeated this expression three times--he replied that she might do exactly as she liked: he would only mention that he shouldn't feel himself at liberty to come and see her there. This condition proved apparently to Lady Agnes's mind no hindrance, and she and her daughters were presently reinstated in the very apartments they had learned so to love. This time in fact it was even better than before--they had still fewer expenses. The expenses were Nick's: he had to pay a forfeit to the landlady at Brighton for backing out of his contract. He said nothing to his mother about that bungled business--he was literally afraid; but a sad event just then reminded him afresh how little it was the moment for squandering money. Mr. Carteret drew his last breath; quite painlessly it seemed, as the closing scene was described at Beauclere when the young man went down to the funeral. Two or three weeks later the contents of his will were made public in the Illustrated London News, where it definitely appeared that he left a very large fortune, not a penny of which was to go to Nick. The provision for Mr. Chayter's declining years was remarkably handsome.

XLVIII

Miriam had mounted at a bound, in her new part, several steps in the ladder of fame, and at the climax of the London season this fact was brought home to her from hour to hour. It produced a thousand solicitations and entanglements, and she rapidly learned that to be celebrated takes up almost as much of one's own time as of other people's. Even though, as she boasted, she had reduced to a science the practice of "working" her mother--she made use of the good lady socially to the utmost, pushing her perpetually into the breach--there was many a juncture at which it was clear that she couldn't too much disoblige without hurting her cause. She made almost an income out of the photographers--their appreciation of her as a subject knew no bounds--and she supplied the newspapers with columns of characteristic copy. To the gentlemen who sought speech of her on behalf of these organs she poured forth, vindictively, floods of unscrupulous romance; she told them all different tales, and, as her mother told them others more marvellous yet, publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions, which surpassed each other in authenticity. The whole case was remarkable, was unique; for if the girl was advertised by the bewilderment of her readers she seemed to every sceptic, on his going to see her, as fine as if he had discovered her for himself. She was still accommodating enough, however, from time to time, to find an hour to come and sit to Nick Dormer, and he helped himself further by going to her theatre whenever he could. He was conscious Julia Dallow would probably hear of this and triumph with a fresh sense of how right she had been; but the reflexion only made him sigh resignedly, so true it struck him as being that there are some things explanation can never better, can never touch.

Miriam brought Basil Dashwood once to see her portrait, and Basil, who commended it in general, directed his criticism mainly to two points--its not yet being finished and its not having gone into that year's Academy. The young actor audibly panted; he felt the short breath of Miriam's rapidity, the quick beat of her success, and, looking at everything now from the standpoint of that speculation, could scarcely contain his impatience at the painter's clumsy slowness. He thought the latter's second attempt much better than his first, but somehow it ought by that time to be shining in the eye of the public. He put it to their friend with an air of acuteness--he had those felicities--that in every great crisis there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. He even betrayed the conviction that by putting on a spurt Nick might wind up the job and still get the Academy people to take him in. Basil knew some of them; he all but offered to speak to them--the case was so exceptional; he had no doubt he could get something done. Against the appropriation of the work by Peter Sherringham he explicitly and loudly protested, in spite of the homeliest recommendations of silence from Miriam; and it was indeed easy to guess how such an arrangement would interfere with his own conception of the eventual right place for the two portraits--the vestibule of the theatre, where every one going in and out would see them suspended face to face and surrounded by photographs, artistically disposed, of the young actress in a variety of characters. Dashwood showed superiority in his jump to the contention that so exhibited the pictures would really help to draw. Considering the virtue he attributed to Miriam the idea was exempt from narrow prejudice.

Moreover, though a trifle feverish, he was really genial; he repeated more than once, "Yes, my dear sir, you've done it this time." This was a favourite formula with him; when some allusion was made to the girl's success he greeted it also with a comfortable "This time she has done it." There was ever a hint of fine judgement and far calculation in his tone. It appeared before he went that this time even he himself had done it--he had taken up something that would really answer. He told Nick more about Miriam, more certainly about her outlook at that moment, than she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's impression that one by one every gage of a great career was being dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the hour. Miriam let her comrade talk only to contradict him, and contradicted him only to show how indifferently she could do it. She treated him as if she had nothing more to learn about his folly, but as if it had taken intimate friendship to reveal to her the full extent of it. Nick didn't mind her intimate friendships, but he ended by disliking Dashwood, who gave on his nerves--a circumstance poor Julia, had it come to her knowledge, would doubtless have found deplorably significant. Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She had a fuller vision of how successful success could be; she took everything as it came--dined out every Sunday and even went into the country till the Monday morning; kept a hundred distinguished names on her lips and abounded in strange tales of the people who were making up to her. She struck Nick as less strenuous than she had been hitherto, as making even an aggressive show of inevitable laxities; but he was conscious of no obligation to rebuke her for it--the less as he had a dim vision that some effect of that sort, some irritation of his curiosity, was what she desired to produce. She would perhaps have liked, for reasons best known to herself, to look as if she were throwing herself away, not being able to do anything else. He couldn't talk to her as if he took a deep interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him primarily and essentially a pictorial object, with the nature of whose vicissitudes he was concerned--putting common charity and his personal good nature of course aside--only so far as they had something to say in her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience, twist of her life, would say most?--so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his particular purpose more precious.

When she had left him at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood, and still more on a later occasion, that of his turning back to his work after putting her into her carriage, and otherwise bare-headedly manifesting, the last time, for that year apparently, that he was to see her--when she had left him it occurred to him in the light of her quick distinction that there were deep differences in the famous artistic life. Miriam was already in a glow of glory--which, moreover, was probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he closed the door on her and took up his palette to rub it with a dirty cloth the little room in which his own battle was practically to be fought looked woefully cold and grey and mean. It was lonely and yet at the same time was peopled with unfriendly shadows--so thick he foresaw them gather in winter twilights to come--the duller conditions, the longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys. His late beginning was there and his wasted youth, the mistakes that would still bring forth children after their image, the sedentary solitude, the grey mediocrity, the poor explanations, the effect of foolishness he dreaded even from afar of in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and wait again, for a fruition which to their sense at least might well prove a grotesque anti-climax. He yearned enough over it, however it should figure, to feel that this possible pertinacity might enter into comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. That was after all in his bare studio the most collective dim presence, the one that kept him company best as he sat there and that made it the right place, however wrong--the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was attached. This was Miriam's case too, but the sharp contrast, which she showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things she got with the thing in itself.

I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this last mystic value struck him as requiring for its full operation no adjunct whatever--as being in its own splendour a summary of all adjuncts and apologies. I have related that the great collections, the National Gallery and the Museum, were sometimes rather a series of dead surfaces to him; but the sketch I have attempted of him will have been inadequate if it fails to suggest that there were other days when, as he strolled through them, he plucked right and left perfect nosegays of reassurance. Bent as he was on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he judged it better for long periods not to haunt the earlier masters, whose conditions had been so different--later he came to see that it didn't matter much, especially if one kept away; but he was liable to accidental deflexions from this theory, liable in particular to feel the sanctity of the great portraits of the past. These were the things the most inspiring, in the sense that while generations, while worlds had come and gone, they seemed far most to prevail and survive and testify. As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different worlds, knowing so many secrets the particular world didn't, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible thread on which the pearls of history were strung.

Miriam notified her artist that her theatre was to close on the tenth of August, immediately after which she was to start, with the company, on a tremendous tour of the provinces. They were to make a lot of money, but they were to have no holiday, and she didn't want one; she only wanted to keep at it and make the most of her limited opportunities for practice; inasmuch as at that rate, playing but two parts a year--and such parts: she despised them!--she shouldn't have mastered the rudiments of her trade before decrepitude would compel her to lay it by. The first time she came to the studio after her visit with Dashwood she sprang up abruptly at the end of half an hour, saying she could sit no more--she had had enough and to spare of it. She was visibly restless and preoccupied, and though Nick had not waited till now to note that she had more moods in her list than he had tints on his palette he had never yet seen her sensibility at this particular pitch. It struck him rather as a waste of passion, but he was ready to let her go. She looked round the place as if suddenly tired of it and then said mechanically, in a heartless London way, while she smoothed down her gloves, "So you're just going to stay on?" After he had confessed that this was his dark purpose she continued in the same casual, talk-making manner: "I daresay it's the best thing for you. You're just going to grind, eh?"

"I see before me an eternity of grinding."

"All alone by yourself in this dull little hole? You will be conscientious, you will be virtuous."

"Oh my solitude will be mitigated--I shall have models and people."

"What people--what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before the glass.

"Well, no one so good as you."

"That's a prospect!" the girl laughed--"for all the good you've got out of me!"

"You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you--I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman occupation. You can't do much to them besides."

"Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them."

"Cruel--that's too much," he objected.

"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's over it's over: it kills your interest in them. After you've finished them you don't like them any more at all."

"Surely I like you," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his picture with his hands in his pockets.

"We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"--and she smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight your work--I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here--I speak from the point of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say--rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur. Haven't you any confreres--fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don't they come near you?"

"I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"

"Well, I've got confreres, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does your sister never come near you any more," she asked, "or is it only the fear of meeting me?"

He was aware of his mother's theory that Biddy was constantly bundled home from Rosedale Road at the approach of improper persons: she was as angry at this as if she wouldn't have been more so had her child suffered exposure; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was nearer the truth. He reminded her that he had already told her--he had been careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was avoided--that his sister was now most of the time in the country, staying with an hospitable relation.

"Oh yes," the girl rejoined to this, "with Mr. Sherringham's sister, Mrs.--what's her name? I always forget." And when he had pronounced the word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal--he hated to talk of Julia by any name and didn't know what business Miriam had with her--she went on: "That's the one--the beauty, the wonderful beauty. I shall never forget how handsome she looked the day she found me here. I don't in the least resemble her, but I should like to have a try at that type some day in a comedy of manners. But who the devil will write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The danger would be, no doubt, that I should push her a la charge."

Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if she should have the bad taste--which she seemed trembling on the brink of--to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question and himself he should dislike her beyond remedy. It would show him she was a coarse creature after all. Her good genius interposed, however, as against this hard penalty, and she quickly, for the moment at least, whisked away from the topic, demanding, since they spoke of comrades and visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she hadn't heard of for so many days.

"I think he's tired of me," said Nick; "he hasn't been near me either. But after all it's natural--he has seen me through."

"Seen you through? Do you mean," she laughed, "seen through you? Why you've only just begun."

"Precisely, and at bottom he doesn't like to see me begin. He's afraid I shall do something."

She wondered--as with the interest of that. "Do you mean he's jealous?"

"Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that's just the discomfort for him--he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely: he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects, belong to a lower plane, for which one must doubtless be tolerant and indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and trifles. Indeed he'll probably tell me frankly the next time I see him that he can't but feel that to come down to small questions of action--to the small prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice--is for the superior person really a fatal descent. One may be inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend to be interesting. 'Il en faut comme ca,' but one doesn't haunt them. He'll do his best for me; he'll come back again, but he'll come back sad, and finally he'll fade away altogether. Hell go off to Granada or somewhere."

"The simplifications of practice?" cried Miriam. "Why they're just precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without them?"

"What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not superior persons. We're awful Philistines."

"I'll be one with you," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?"

"Yes, he has a weakness for giving up--he'll go with you as far as that. But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's gross."

"He's an idiot--n'en parlons plus!" she dropped, gathering up her parasol but lingering.

"Ah I stick to him," Nick said. "He helped me at a difficult time."

"You ought to be ashamed to confess it."

"Oh you are a Philistine!" Nick returned.

"Certainly I am," she declared, going toward the door--"if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like in patient obscurity while I'm pitchforked into the melee and into the most improbable fame--all on the back of a solitary cheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days--do you see that?--to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall have had--five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?"

"Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad."

"I mean good, you know--there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Miriam tapped him--he was near her at the door--with her parasol.

"I scarcely know what to say to you," he logically pleaded, "for certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast."

"I'm too clever--I'm a humbug."

"That's the way I used to be," said Nick.

She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly; after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly--rather as if he had been a fine view or an interesting object--to his face. "Ah, the pride of that--the sense of purification! He 'used' to be forsooth! Poor me! Of course you'll say, 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to produce compared with the rot you have.' So it's all right. Become great in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more at the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, "Poor Mr. Sherringham--with that!" she wailed.

"Oh I'll finish it--it will be very decent," Nick said.

"Finish it by yourself?"

"Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London."

"Never, never, never again."

He wondered. "Why you've made me the most profuse offers and promises."

"Yes, but they were made in ignorance and I've backed out of them. I'm capricious too--faites la part de ca. I see it wouldn't do--I didn't know it then. We're too far apart--I am, as you say, a Philistine." And as he protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith she added: "You'll find other models. Paint Gabriel Nash."

"Gabriel Nash--as a substitute for you?"

"It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her--"paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb."

It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: "The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?"

"Oh in you. I don't know anything about 'her.'"

"But that wouldn't be the effect," he argued with the same supervening candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed."

"The usual law?"

"Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general truth. In the case you speak of," he said, "I should probably make a shocking picture."

"And fall in love with her again? Then for God's sake risk the daub!" Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria.

XLIX

She had guessed happily in saying to him that to offer to paint Gabriel Nash would be the way to get rid of that visitant. It was with no such invidious purpose indeed that our young man proposed to his intermittent friend to sit; rather, as August was dusty in the London streets, he had too little hope that Nash would remain in town at such a time to oblige him. Nick had no wish to get rid of his private philosopher; he liked his philosophy, and though of course premeditated paradox was the light to read him by he yet had frequently and incidentally an inspired unexpectedness. He remained in Rosedale Road the man who most produced by his presence the effect of company. All the other men of Nick's acquaintance, all his political friends, represented, often very communicatively, their own affairs, their own affairs alone; which when they did it well was the most their host could ask of them. But Nash had the rare distinction that he seemed somehow to figure his affairs, the said host's, and to show an interest in them unaffected by the ordinary social limitations of capacity. This relegated him to the class of high luxuries, and Nick was well aware that we hold our luxuries by a fitful and precarious tenure. If a friend without personal eagerness was one of the greatest of these it would be evident to the simplest mind that by the law of distribution of earthly boons such a convenience should be expected to forfeit in duration what it displayed in intensity. He had never been without a suspicion that Nash was too good to last, though for that matter nothing had yet confirmed a vague apprehension that his particular manner of breaking up or breaking down would be by his wishing to put so fresh a recruit in relation with other disciples.

That would practically amount to a catastrophe, Nick felt; for it was odd that one could both have a great kindness for him and not in the least, when it came to the point, yearn for a view of his personal extensions. His originality had always been that he appeared to have none; and if in the first instance he had introduced his bright, young, political prodigy to Miriam and her mother, that was an exception for which Peter Sherringham's interference had been mainly responsible. All the same, however, it was some time before Nick ceased to view it as perhaps on the awkward books that, to complete his education as it were, Gabriel would wish him to converse a little with spirits formed by a like tonic discipline. Nick had an instinct, in which there was no consciousness of detriment to Nash, that the pupils, possibly even the imitators, of such a genius would be, as he mentally phrased it, something awful. He could be sure, even Gabriel himself could be sure, of his own reservations, but how could either of them be sure of those of others? Imitation is a fortunate homage only in proportion as it rests on measurements, and there was an indefinable something in Nash's doctrine that would have been discredited by exaggeration or by zeal. Providence happily appeared to have spared it this ordeal; so that Nick had after months still to remind himself how his friend had never pressed on his attention the least little group of fellow-mystics, never offered to produce them for his edification. It scarcely mattered now that he was just the man to whom the superficial would attribute that sort of tail: it would probably have been hard, for example, to persuade Lady Agnes or Julia Dallow or Peter Sherringham that he was not most at home in some dusky, untidy, dimly-imagined suburb of "culture," a region peopled by unpleasant phrasemongers who thought him a gentleman and who had no human use but to be held up in the comic press--which was, moreover, probably restrained by decorum from touching upon the worst of their aberrations.

Nick at any rate never ran his academy to earth nor so much as skirted the suburb in question; never caught from the impenetrable background of his life the least reverberation of flitting or of flirting, the fainting esthetic ululation. There had been moments when he was even moved to anxiety by the silence that poor Gabriel's own faculty of sound made all about him--when at least it reduced to plainer elements (the mere bald terms of lonely singleness and thrift, of the lean philosophic life) the mystery he could never wholly dissociate from him, the air as of the transient and occasional, the likeness to curling vapour or murmuring wind or shifting light. It was, for instance, a symbol of this unclassified state, the lack of all position as a name in cited lists, that Nick in point of fact had no idea where he lived, would not have known how to go and see him or send him a doctor if he had heard he was ill. He had never walked with him to any door of Gabriel's own, even to pause at the threshold, though indeed Nash had a club, the Anonymous, in some improbable square, of which he might be suspected of being the only member--one had never heard of another--where it was vaguely understood letters would some day or other find him. Fortunately he pressed with no sharpness the spring of pity--his whole "form" was so easy a grasp of the helm of consciousness, which he would never let go. He would never consent to any deformity, but would steer his course straight through the eventual narrow pass and simply go down over the horizon.

He in any case turned up Rosedale Road one day after Miriam had left London; he had just come back from a fortnight in Brittany, where he had drawn refreshment from the tragic sweetness of--well, of everything. He was on his way somewhere else--was going abroad for the autumn but was not particular what he did, professing that he had come back just to get Nick utterly off his mind. "It's very nice, it's very nice; yes, yes, I see," he remarked, giving a little, general, assenting sigh as his eyes wandered over the simple scene--a sigh which for a suspicious ear would have testified to an insidious reaction.

Nick's ear, as we know, was already suspicious; a fact accounting for the expectant smile--it indicated the pleasant apprehension of a theory confirmed--with which he returned: "Do you mean my pictures are nice?"

"Yes, yes, your pictures and the whole thing."

"The whole thing?"

"Your existence in this little, remote, independent corner of the great city. The disinterestedness of your attitude, the persistence of your effort, the piety, the beauty, in short the edification, of the whole spectacle."

Nick laughed a little ruefully. "How near to having had enough of me you must be when you speak of me as edifying!" Nash changed colour slightly at this; it was the first time in his friend's remembrance that he had given a sign of embarrassment. "Vous allez me lacher, I see it coming; and who can blame you?--for I've ceased to be in the least spectacular. I had my little hour; it was a great deal, for some people don't even have that. I've given you your curious case and I've been generous; I made the drama last for you as long as I could. You'll 'slope,' my dear fellow--you'll quietly slope; and it will be all right and inevitable, though I shall miss you greatly at first. Who knows whether without you I shouldn't still have been 'representing' Harsh, heaven help me? You rescued me; you converted me from a representative into an example--that's a shade better. But don't I know where you must be when you're reduced to praising my piety?"

"Don't turn me away," said Nash plaintively; "give me a cigarette."

"I shall never dream of turning you away; I shall cherish you till the latest possible hour. I'm only trying to keep myself in tune with the logic of things. The proof of how I cling is that precisely I want you to sit to me."

"To sit to you?" With which Nick could fancy his visitor a little blank.

"Certainly, for after all it isn't much to ask. Here we are and the hour's peculiarly propitious--long light days with no one coming near me, so that I've plenty of time. I had a hope I should have some orders: my younger sister, whom you know and who's a great optimist, plied me with that vision. In fact we invented together a charming little sordid theory that there might be rather a 'run' on me from the chatter (such as it was) produced by my taking up this line. My sister struck out the idea that a good many of the pretty ladies would think me interesting and would want to be done. Perhaps they do, but they've controlled themselves, for I can't say the run has commenced. They haven't even come to look, but I daresay they don't yet quite take it in. Of course it's a bad time--with every one out of town; though you know they might send for me to come and do them at home. Perhaps they will when they settle down. A portrait-tour of a dozen country-houses for the autumn and winter--what do you say to that for the ardent life? I know I excruciate you," Nick added, "but don't you see how it's in my interest to try how much you'll still stand?"

Gabriel puffed his cigarette with a serenity so perfect that it might have been assumed to falsify these words. "Mrs. Dallow will send for you--vous allez voir ca," he said in a moment, brushing aside all vagueness.

"She'll send for me?"

"To paint her portrait; she'll recapture you on that basis. She'll get you down to one of the country-houses, and it will all go off as charmingly--with sketching in the morning, on days you can't hunt, and anything you like in the afternoon, and fifteen courses in the evening; there'll be bishops and ambassadors staying--as if you were a 'well-known,' awfully clever amateur. Take care, take care, for, fickle as you may think me, I can read the future: don't imagine you've come to the end of me yet. Mrs. Dallow and your sister, of both of whom I speak with the greatest respect, are capable of hatching together the most conscientious, delightful plan for you. Your differences with the beautiful lady will be patched up and you'll each come round a little and meet the other halfway. The beautiful lady will swallow your profession if you'll swallow hers. She'll put up with the palette if you'll put up with the country-house. It will be a very unusual one in which you won't find a good north room where you can paint. You'll go about with her and do all her friends, all the bishops and ambassadors, and you'll eat your cake and have it, and every one, beginning with your wife, will forget there's anything queer about you, and everything will be for the best in the best of worlds; so that, together--you and she--you'll become a great social institution and every one will think she has a delightful husband; to say nothing of course of your having a delightful wife. Ah my dear fellow, you turn pale, and with reason!" Nash went lucidly on: "that's to pay you for having tried to make me let you have it. You have it then there! I may be a bore"--the emphasis of this, though a mere shade, testified to the first personal resentment Nick had ever heard his visitor express--"I may be a bore, but once in a while I strike a light, I make things out. Then I venture to repeat, 'Take care, take care.' If, as I say, I respect ces dames infinitely it's because they will be acting according to the highest wisdom of their sex. That's the sort of thing women do for a man--the sort of thing they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying. There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep--the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing," Nash continued, "then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer the virtue of the individual, it's that of the wondrous sex."

"You're so remarkable that, more than ever, I must paint you," Nick returned, "though I'm so agitated by your prophetic words that my hand trembles and I shall doubtless scarcely be able to hold my brush. Look how I rattle my easel trying to put it into position. I see it all there just as you show it. Yes, it will be a droll day, and more modern than anything yet, when the conscience of women makes out good reasons for men's not being in love with them. You talk of their goodness and cleverness, and it's certainly much to the point. I don't know what else they themselves might do with those graces, but I don't see what man can do with them but be fond of them where he finds them."

"Oh you'll do it--you'll do it!" cried Nash, brightly jubilant.

"What is it I shall do?"

"Exactly what I just said; if not next year then the year after, or the year after that. You'll go halfway to meet her and she'll drag you about and pass you off. You'll paint the bishops and become a social institution. That is, you'll do it if you don't take great care."

"I shall, no doubt, and that's why I cling to you. You must still look after me," Nick went on. "Don't melt away into a mere improbable reminiscence, a delightful, symbolic fable--don't if you can possibly help it. The trouble is, you see, that you can't really keep hold very tight, because at bottom it will amuse you much more to see me in another pickle than to find me simply jogging down the vista of the years on the straight course. Let me at any rate have some sort of sketch of you as a kind of feather from the angel's wing or a photograph of the ghost--to prove to me in the future that you were once a solid sociable fact, that I didn't invent you, didn't launch you as a deadly hoax. Of course I shall be able to say to myself that you can't have been a fable--otherwise you'd have a moral; but that won't be enough, because I'm not sure you won't have had one. Some day you'll peep in here languidly and find me in such an attitude of piety--presenting my bent back to you as I niggle over some interminable botch--that I shall give cruelly on your nerves and you'll just draw away, closing the door softly. You'll be gentle and considerate about it and spare me, you won't even make me look round. You'll steal off on tiptoe, never, never to return."

Gabriel consented to sit; he professed he should enjoy it and be glad to give up for it his immediate foreign commerce, so vague to Nick, so definite apparently to himself; and he came back three times for the purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment, for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had never seen his subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty--what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there--except that he couldn't catch them--which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it most. He was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely so--silent, restless, gloomy, dim, as if on the test the homage of a directer attention than he had ever had gave him less pleasure than he would have supposed. He had been willing to judge of this in good faith; but frankly he rather suffered. He wasn't cross, but was clearly unhappy, and Nick had never before felt him contract instead of expanding.

It was all accordingly as if a trap had been laid for him, and our young man asked himself if it were really fair. At the same time there was something richly rare in such a relation between the subject and the artist, and Nick was disposed to go on till he should have to stop for pity or for shame. He caught eventually a glimmer of the truth underlying the strangeness, guessed that what upset his friend was simply the reversal, in such a combination, of his usual terms of intercourse. He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new to him to be himself interpreted and--as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be--interpreted all ironically. From being outside of the universe he was suddenly brought into it, and from the position of a free commentator and critic, an easy amateurish editor of the whole affair, reduced to that of humble ingredient and contributor. It occurred afterwards to Nick that he had perhaps brought on a catastrophe by having happened to throw off as they gossiped or languished, and not alone without a cruel intention, but with an impulse of genuine solicitude: "But, my dear fellow, what will you do when you're old?"

"Old? What do you call old?" Nash had replied bravely enough, but with another perceptible tinge of irritation. "Must I really remind you at this time of day that that term has no application to such a condition as mine? It only belongs to you wretched people who have the incurable superstition of 'doing'; it's the ignoble collapse you prepare for yourselves when you cease to be able to do. For me there'll be no collapse, no transition, no clumsy readjustment of attitude; for I shall only be, more and more, with all the accumulations of experience, the longer I live."

"Oh I'm not particular about the term," said Nick. "If you don't call it old, the ultimate state, call it weary--call it final. The accumulations of experience are practically accumulations of fatigue."

"I don't know anything about weariness. I live freshly--it doesn't fatigue me."

"Then you need never die," Nick declared.

"Certainly; I daresay I'm indestructible, immortal."

Nick laughed out at this--it would be such fine news to some people. But it was uttered with perfect gravity, and it might very well have been in the spirit of that gravity that Nash failed to observe his agreement to sit again the next day. The next and the next and the next passed, but he never came back.

True enough, punctuality was not important for a man who felt that he had the command of all time. Nevertheless his disappearance "without a trace," that of a personage in a fairy-tale or a melodrama, made a considerable impression on his friend as the months went on; so that, though he had never before had the least difficulty about entering into the play of Gabriel's humour, Nick now recalled with a certain fanciful awe the special accent with which he had ranked himself among imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last, balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless, and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple. Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary spirit--thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, a purple rim of mystery to an horizon now so dreadfully let down. The mystery at any rate remained; another shade of purple in fact was virtually added to it. Nick had the prospect, for the future, of waiting to see, all curiously, when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further diversion--it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a second unfinished thing on his hands--of imagining in the portrait he had begun an odd tendency to fade gradually from the canvas. He couldn't catch it in the act, but he could have ever a suspicion on glancing at it that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little--for all the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale--and making the surface indistinct and bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral of the Hawthorne tale would be that his personage would come back in quaint confidence on the day his last projected shadow should have vanished.

L

One day toward the end of March of the following year, in other words more than six months after Mr. Nash's disappearance, Bridget Dormer came into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at Broadwood--she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about her small subterraneous self, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they could remember, the head of the family had honoured their common parent. Nick noted indeed that this demonstration had apparently been taken as a great favour, and Biddy loyally testified to the fact that her elder brother was awfully jolly and that his presence had been a pretext for tremendous fun. Nick accordingly asked her what had passed about his marriage--what their mother had said to him.

"Oh nothing," she replied; and Percy had said nothing to Lady Agnes and not a word to herself. This partly explained, for his junior, the consequent beatitude--none but cheerful topics had been produced; but he questioned the girl further--to a point which led her to say: "Oh I daresay that before long she'll write to her."

"Who'll write to whom?"

"Mamma'll write to Percy's wife. I'm sure he'd like it. Of course we shall end by going to see her. He was awfully disappointed at what he found in Spain--he didn't find anything."

Biddy spoke of his disappointment almost with commiseration, for she was evidently inclined this morning to a fresh and kindly view of things. Nick could share her feeling but so far as was permitted by a recognition merely general of what his brother must have looked for. It might have been snipe and it might have been bristling boars. Biddy was indeed brief at first about everything, in spite of all the weeks that had gone since their last meeting; for he quickly enough saw she had something behind--something that made her gay and that she wanted to come to quickly. He was vaguely vexed at her being, fresh from Broadwood, so gay as that; for--it was impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact--what had practically come to pass in regard to that rural retreat was exactly what he had desired to avert. All winter, while it had been taken for granted his mother and sisters were doing what he wished, they had been doing precisely what he hated. He held Biddy perhaps least responsible, and there was no one he could exclusively blame. He washed his hands of the matter and succeeded fairly well, for the most part, in forgetting he was not pleased. Julia herself in truth appeared to have been the most active member of the little group united to make light of his decencies. There had been a formal restitution of Broadwood, but the three ladies were there more than ever, with the slight difference that they were mainly there with its mistress. Mahomet had declined to go any more to the mountain, so the mountain had virtually come to Mahomet.

After their long visit in the autumn Lady Agnes and her girls had come back to town; but they had gone down again for Christmas and Julia had taken this occasion to write to Nick that she hoped very much he wouldn't refuse them all his own company for just a little scrap of the supremely sociable time. Nick, after reflexion, judged it best not to refuse, so that he passed, in the event, four days under his cousin's roof. The "all" proved a great many people, for she had taken care to fill the house. She took the largest view of hospitality and Nick had never seen her so splendid, so free-handed, so gracefully active. She was a perfect mistress of the revels; she had arranged some ancient bravery for every day and for every night. The Dormers were so much in it, as the phrase was, that after all their discomfiture their fortune seemed in an hour to have come back. There had been a moment when, in extemporised charades, Lady Agnes, an elderly figure being required, appeared on the point of undertaking the part of the housekeeper at a castle, who, dropping her h's, showed sheeplike tourists about; but she waived the opportunity in favour of her daughter Grace. Even Grace had a great success; Grace dropped her h's as with the crash of empires. Nick of course was in the charades and in everything, but Julia was not; she only invented, directed, led the applause. When nothing else was forward Nick "sketched" the whole company: they followed him about, they waylaid him on staircases, clamouring to be allowed to sit. He obliged them so far as he could, all save Julia, who didn't clamour; and, growing rather red, he thought of Gabriel Nash while he bent over the paper. Early in the new year he went abroad for six weeks, but only as far as Paris. It was a new Paris for him then; a Paris of the Rue Bonaparte and three or four professional friends--he had more of these there than in London; a Paris of studios and studies and models, of researches and revelations, comparisons and contrasts, of strong impressions and long discussions and rather uncomfortable economies, small cafes, bad fires and the general sense of being twenty again.

While he was away his mother and sisters--Lady Agnes now sometimes wrote to him--returned to London for a month, and before he was again established in Rosedale Road they went back for a third course of Broadwood. After they had been there five days--and this was the salt of the whole feast--Julia took herself off to Harsh, leaving them in undisturbed possession. They had remained so--they wouldn't come up to town till after Easter. The trick was played, and Biddy, as I have mentioned, was now very content. Her brother presently learned, however, that the reason of this was not wholly the success of the trick; unless indeed her further ground were only a continuation of it. She was not in London as a forerunner of her mother; she was not even as yet in Calcutta Gardens. She had come to spend a week with Florry Tressilian, who had lately taken the dearest little flat in a charming new place, just put up, on the other side of the Park, with all kinds of lifts and tubes and electricities. Florry had been awfully nice to her--had been with them ever so long at Broadwood while the flat was being painted and prepared--and mamma had then let her, let Biddy, promise to come to her, when everything was ready, so that they might have a happy old maids' (for they were, old maids now!) house-warming together. If Florry could by this time do without a chaperon--she had two latchkeys and went alone on the top of omnibuses, and her name was in the Red Book--she was enough of a duenna for another girl. Biddy referred with sweet cynical eyes to the fine happy stride she had thus taken in the direction of enlightened spinsterhood; and Nick hung his head, immensely abashed and humiliated, for, modern as he had fatuously supposed himself, there were evidently currents more modern yet.

It so happened that on this particular morning he had drawn out of a corner his interrupted study of Gabriel Nash; on no further curiosity--he had only been looking round the room in a rummaging spirit--than to see how much or how little of it remained. It had become to his view so dim an adumbration--he was sure of this, and it pressed some spring of melancholy mirth--that it didn't seem worth putting away, and he left it leaning against a table as if it had been a blank canvas or a "preparation" to be painted over. In this posture it attracted Biddy's attention, for on a second glance it showed distinguishable features. She had not seen it before and now asked whom it might represent, remarking also that she could almost guess, yet not quite: she had known the original but couldn't name him.

"Six months ago, for a few days, it represented Gabriel Nash," Nick replied. "But it isn't anybody or anything now."

"Six months ago? What's the matter with it and why don't you go on?"

"What's the matter with it is more than I can tell you. But I can't go on because I've lost my model."

She had an almost hopeful stare. "Is he beautifully dead?"

Her brother laughed out at the candid cheerfulness, hopefulness almost, with which this inquiry broke from her. "He's only dead to me. He has gone away."

"Where has he gone?"

"I haven't the least idea."

"Why, have you quarrelled?"--Biddy shone again.

"Quarrelled? For what do you take us? Docs the nightingale quarrel with the moon?"

"I needn't ask which of you is the moon," she said.

"Of course I'm the nightingale. But, more literally," Nick continued, "Nash has melted back into the elements--he's part of the great air of the world." And then as even with this lucidity he saw the girl still mystified: "I've a notion he has gone to India and at the present moment is reclining on a bank of flowers in the vale of Cashmere."

Biddy had a pause, after which she dropped: "Julia will be glad--she dislikes him so."

"If she dislikes him why should she be glad he's so enviably placed?"

"I mean about his going away. She'll be glad of that."

"My poor incorrigible child," Nick cried, "what has Julia to do with it?"

"She has more to do with things than you think," Biddy returned with all her bravery. Yet she had no sooner uttered the words than she perceptibly blushed. Hereupon, to attenuate the foolishness of her blush--only it had the opposite effect--she added: "She thinks he has been a bad element in your life."

Nick emitted a long strange sound. "She thinks perhaps, but she doesn't think enough; otherwise she'd arrive at this better thought--that she knows nothing whatever about my life."

"Ah brother," the girl pleaded with solemn eyes, "you don't imagine what an interest she takes in it. She has told me many times--she has talked lots to me about it." Biddy paused and then went on, an anxious little smile shining through her gravity as if from a cautious wonder as to how much he would take: "She has a conviction it was Mr. Nash who made trouble between you."

"Best of little sisters," Nick pronounced, "those are thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have got into him. Moreover," our young man continued, "if Julia has talked to you so much about the matter there's no harm in my talking to you a little. When she threw me over in an hour it was on a perfectly definite occasion. That occasion was the presence in my studio of a dishevelled, an abandoned actress."

"Oh Nick, she has not thrown you over!" Biddy protested. "She has not--I've proof."

He felt at this direct denial a certain stir of indignation and looked at the girl with momentary sternness. "Has she sent you here to tell me this? What do you mean by proof?"

Biddy's eyes, at these questions, met her brother's with a strange expression, and for a few seconds, while she looked entreatingly into them, she wavered there with parted lips and vaguely stretched out her hands. The next minute she had burst into tears--she was sobbing on his breast. He said "Hallo!" and soothed her; but it was very quickly over. Then she told him what she meant by her proof and what she had had on her mind ever since her present arrival. It was a message from Julia, but not to say--not to say what he had questioned her about just before; though indeed, more familiar now that he had his arm round her, she boldly expressed the hope it might in the end come to the same thing. Julia simply wanted to know--- she had instructed her to sound him discreetly--if Nick would undertake her portrait; and she wound up this experiment in "sounding" by the statement that their beautiful kinswoman was dying to sit.

"Dying to sit?" echoed Nick, whose turn it was this time to feel his colour rise.

"At any moment you like after Easter, when she comes up. She wants a full-length and your very best, your most splendid work."

Nick stared, not caring that he had blushed. "Is she serious?"

"Ah Nick--serious!" Biddy reasoned tenderly. She came nearer again and he thought her again about to weep. He took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes.

"It's all right if she knows I am. But why doesn't she come like any one else? I don't refuse people!"

"Nick, dearest Nick!" she went on, her eyes conscious and pleading. He looked into them intently--as well as she could he play at sounding--and for a moment, between these young persons, the air was lighted by the glimmer of mutual searchings and suppressed confessions. Nick read deep and then, suddenly releasing his sister, turned away. She didn't see his face in that movement, but an observer to whom it had been presented might have fancied it denoted a foreboding that was not exactly a dread, yet was not exclusively a joy.

The first thing he made out in the room, when he could distinguish, was Gabriel Nash's portrait, which suddenly filled him with an unreasoning rancour. He seized it and turned it about, jammed it back into its corner with its face against the wall. This small diversion might have served to carry off the embarrassment with which he had finally averted himself from Biddy. The embarrassment, however, was all his own; none of it was reflected in the way she resumed, after a silence in which she had followed his disposal of the picture:

"If she's so eager to come here--for it's here she wants to sit, not in Great Stanhope Street, never!--how can she prove better that she doesn't care a bit if she meets Miss Rooth?"

"She won't meet Miss Rooth," Nick replied rather dryly.

"Oh I'm sorry!" said Biddy. She was as frank as if she had achieved a virtual victory, and seemed to regret the loss of a chance for Julia to show an equal mildness. Her tone made her brother laugh, but she went on with confidence: "She thought it was Mr. Nash who made Miss Rooth come."

"So he did, by the way," said Nick.

"Well then, wasn't that making trouble?"

"I thought you admitted there was no harm in her being here."

"Yes, but he hoped there'd be."

"Poor Nash's hopes!" Nick laughed. "My dear child, it would take a cleverer head than you or me, or even Julia, who must have invented that wise theory, to say what they were. However, let us agree that even if they were perfectly fiendish my good sense has been a match for them."

"Oh Nick, that's delightful!" chanted Biddy. Then she added: "Do you mean she doesn't come any more?"

"The dishevelled actress? She hasn't been near me for months."

"But she's in London--she's always acting? I've been away so much I've scarcely observed," Biddy explained with a slight change of note.

"The same silly part, poor creature, for nearly a year. It appears that that's 'success'--in her profession. I saw her in the character several times last summer, but haven't set foot in her theatre since."

Biddy took this in; then she suggested; "Peter wouldn't have liked that."

"Oh Peter's likes--!" Nick at his easel, beginning to work, conveniently sighed.

"I mean her acting the same part for a year."

"I'm sure I don't know; he has never written me a word."

"Nor me either," Biddy returned.

There was another short silence, during which Nick brushed at a panel. It ended in his presently saying: "There's one thing certainly Peter would like--that is simply to be here to-night. It's a great night--another great night--for the abandoned one. She's to act Juliet for the first time."

"Ah how I should like to see her!" the girl cried.

Nick glanced at her; she sat watching him. "She has sent me a stall; I wish she had sent me two. I should have been delighted to take you."

"Don't you think you could get another?" Biddy quavered.

"They must be in tremendous demand. But who knows after all?" Nick added, at the same moment looking round. "Here's a chance--here's quite an extraordinary chance!"

His servant had opened the door and was ushering in a lady whose identity was indeed justly reflected in those words. "Miss Rooth!" the man announced; but he was caught up by a gentleman who came next and who exclaimed, laughing and with a gesture gracefully corrective: "No, no--no longer Miss Rooth!"

Miriam entered the place with her charming familiar grandeur--entered very much as she might have appeared, as she appeared every night, early in her first act, at the back of the stage, by the immemorial middle door. She might exactly now have been presenting herself to the house, taking easy possession, repeating old movements, looking from one to the other of the actors before the footlights. The rich "Good-morning" she threw into the air, holding out her right hand to Biddy and then giving her left to Nick--as she might have given it to her own brother--had nothing to tell of intervals or alienations. She struck Biddy as still more terrible in her splendid practice than when she had seen her before--the practice and the splendour had now something almost royal. The girl had had occasion to make her curtsey to majesties and highnesses, but the flutter those effigies produced was nothing to the way in which at the approach of this young lady the agitated air seemed to recognise something supreme. So the deep mild eyes she bent on Biddy were not soothing, though for that matter evidently intended to soothe. Biddy wondered Nick could have got so used to her--he joked at her as she loomed--and later in the day, still under the great impression of this incident, she even wondered that Peter could have full an impunity. It was true that Peter apparently didn't quite feel one.

"You never came--you never came," Miriam said to her kindly and sadly; and Biddy, recognising the allusion, the invitation to visit the actress at home, had to explain how much she had been absent from London and then even that her brother hadn't proposed to take her.

"Very true--he hasn't come himself. What's he doing now?" asked Miss Rooth, standing near her young friend but looking at Nick, who had immediately engaged in conversation with his other visitor, a gentleman whose face came back to the girl. She had seen this gentleman on the stage with the great performer--that was it, the night Peter took her to the theatre with Florry Tressilian. Oh that Nick would only do something of that sort now! This desire, quickened by the presence of the strange, expressive woman, by the way she scattered sweet syllables as if she were touching the piano-keys, combined with other things to make our young lady's head swim--other things too mingled to name, admiration and fear and dim divination and purposeless pride and curiosity and resistance, the impulse to go away and the determination to (as she would have liked fondly to fancy it) "hold her ground." The actress courted her with a wondrous voice--what was the matter with the actress and what did she want?--and Biddy tried in return to give an idea of what Nick was doing. Not succeeding very well she was about to appeal to her brother, but Miriam stopped her with the remark that it didn't signify; besides, Dashwood was telling Nick something--something they wanted him to know. "We're in a great excitement--he has taken a theatre," Miriam added.

"Taken a theatre?" Biddy was vague.

"We're going to set up for ourselves. He's going to do for me altogether. It has all been arranged only within a day or two. It remains to be seen how it will answer," Miriam smiled. Biddy murmured some friendly hope, and the shining presence went on: "Do you know why I've broken in here to-day after a long absence--interrupting your poor brother so basely, taking up his precious time? It's because I'm so nervous."

"About your first night?" Biddy risked.

"Do you know about that--are you coming?" Miriam had caught at it.

"No, I'm not coming--I haven't a place."

"Will you come if I send you one?"

"Oh but really it's too beautiful of you!" breathed the girl.

"You shall have a box; your brother shall bring you. They can't squeeze in a pin, I'm told; but I've kept a box, I'll manage it. Only if I do, you know, mind you positively come!" She sounded it as the highest of favours, resting her hand on Biddy's.

"Don't be afraid. And may I bring a friend--the friend with whom I'm staying?"

Miriam now just gloomed. "Do you mean Mrs. Dallow?"

"No, no--Miss Tressilian. She puts me up, she has got a flat. Did you ever see a flat?" asked Biddy expansively. "My cousin's not in London." Miriam replied that she might bring whom she liked and Biddy broke out to her brother: "Fancy what kindness, Nick: we're to have a box to-night and you're to take me!"

Nick turned to her a face of levity which struck her even at the time as too cynically free, but which she understood when the finer sense of it subsequently recurred to her. Mr. Dashwood interposed with the remark that it was all very well to talk about boxes, but that he didn't see how at that time of day the miracle was to be worked.

"You haven't kept one as I told you?" Miriam demanded.

"As you told me, my dear? Tell the lamb to keep its tenderest mutton from the wolves!"

"You shall have one: we'll arrange it," Miriam went on to Biddy.

"Let me qualify that statement a little, Miss Dormer," said Basil Dashwood. "We'll arrange it if it's humanly possible."

"We'll arrange it even if it's inhumanly _im_possible--that's just the point," Miriam declared to the girl. "Don't talk about trouble--what's he meant for but to take it? Cela s'annonce bien, you see," she continued to Nick: "doesn't it look as if we should pull beautifully together?" And as he answered that he heartily congratulated her--he was immensely interested in what he had been told--she exclaimed after resting her eyes on him a moment: "What will you have? It seemed simpler! It was clear there had to be some one." She explained further to Nick what had led her to come in at that moment, while Dashwood approached Biddy with a civil assurance that they would see, they would leave no stone unturned, though he would not have taken upon himself to promise.

Miriam reminded Nick of the blessing he had been to her nearly a year before, on her other first night, when she was all impatient and on edge; how he had let her come and sit there for hours--helped her to possess her soul till the evening and to keep out of harm's way. The case was the same at present, with the aggravation indeed that he would understand--Dashwood's nerves as well as her own: Dashwood's were a great deal worse than hers. Everything was ready for Juliet; they had been rehearsing for five months--it had kept her from going mad from the treadmill of the other piece--and he, Nick, had occurred to her again, in the last intolerable hours, as the friend in need, the salutary stop-gap, no matter how much she worried him. She shouldn't be turned out? Biddy broke away from Basil Dashwood: she must go, she must hurry off to Miss Tressilian with her news. Florry might make some other stupid engagement for the evening: she must be warned in time. The girl took a flushed, excited leave after having received a renewal of Miriam's pledge and even heard her say to Nick that he must now give back the seat already sent him--they should be sure to have another use for it.

LI

That night at the theatre and in the box--the miracle had been wrought, the treasure found--Nick Dormer pointed out to his two companions the stall he had relinquished, which was close in front; noting how oddly it remained during the whole of the first act vacant. The house was beyond everything, the actress beyond any one; though to describe again so famous an occasion--it has been described repeatedly by other reporters--is not in the compass of the closing words of a history already too sustained. It is enough to say that these great hours marked an era in contemporary art and that for those who had a spectator's share in them the words "revelation," "incarnation," "acclamation," "demonstration," "ovation"--to name only a few, and all accompanied by the word "extraordinary"--acquired a new force. Miriam's Juliet was an exquisite image of young passion and young despair, expressed in the truest, divinest music that had ever poured from tragic lips. The great childish audience, gaping at her points, expanded there before her like a lap to catch flowers.

During the first interval our three friends in the box had plenty to talk about, and they were so occupied with it that for some time they failed to observe a gentleman who had at last come into the empty stall near the front. This discovery was presently formulated by Miss Tressilian in the cheerful exclamation: "Only fancy--there's Mr. Sherringham!" This of course immediately became a high wonder--a wonder for Nick and Biddy, who had not heard of his return; and the prodigy was quickened by the fact that he gave no sign of looking for them or even at them. Having taken possession of his place he sat very still in it, staring straight before him at the curtain. His abrupt reappearance held the seeds of anxiety both for Biddy and for Nick, so that it was mainly Miss Tressilian who had freedom of mind to throw off the theory that he had come back that very hour--had arrived from a long journey. Couldn't they see how strange he was and how brown, how burnt and how red, how tired and how worn? They all inspected him, though Biddy declined Miss Tressilian's glass; but he was evidently indifferent to notice and finally Biddy, leaning back in her chair, dropped the fantastic words:

"He has come home to marry Juliet!"

Nick glanced at her and then replied: "What a disaster--to make such a journey as that and to be late for the fair!"

"Late for the fair?"

"Why she's married--these three days. They did it very quietly; Miriam says because her mother hated it and hopes it won't be much known! All the same she's Basil Dashwood's wedded wife--he has come in just in time to take the receipts for Juliet. It's a good thing, no doubt, for there are at least two fortunes to be made out of her, and he'll give up the stage." Nick explained to Miss Tressilian, who had inquired, that the gentleman in question was the actor who was playing Mercutio, and he asked Biddy if she hadn't known that this was what they were telling him in Rosedale Road that morning. She replied that she had understood nothing but that she was to be where she was, and she sank considerably behind the drapery of the box. From this cover she was able to launch, creditably enough, the exclamation:

"Poor, poor Peter!"

Nick got up and stood looking at poor, poor Peter. "He ought to come round and speak to us, but if he doesn't see us I suppose he doesn't." He quitted the box as to go to the restored exile, and I may add that as soon as he had done so Florence Tressilian bounded over to the dusk in which Biddy had nestled. What passed immediately between these young ladies needn't concern us: it is sufficient to mention that two minutes later Miss Tressilian broke out:

"Look at him, dearest; he's turning his head this way!"

"Thank you, I don't care to watch his turns," said Biddy; and she doubtless demeaned herself in the high spirit of these words. It nevertheless happened that directly afterwards she had certain knowledge of his having glanced at his watch as if to judge how soon the curtain would rise again, as well as of his having then jumped up and passed quickly out of his place. The curtain had risen again without his reappearing and without Nick's returning. Indeed by the time Nick slipped in a good deal of the third act was over; and even then, even when the curtain descended, Peter had not come back. Nick sat down in silence to watch the stage, to which the breathless attention of his companions seemed attached, though Biddy after a moment threw round at him a single quick look. At the end of the act they were all occupied with the recalls, the applause and the responsive loveliness of Juliet as she was led out--Mercutio had to give her up to Romeo--and even for a few minutes after the deafening roar had subsided nothing was said among the three. At last Nick began:

"It's quite true he has just arrived; he's in Great Stanhope Street. They've given him several weeks, to make up for the uncomfortable way they bundled him off--to get there in time for some special business that had suddenly to be gone into--when he first went out: he tells me they even then promised that. He got into Southampton only a few hours ago, rushed up by the first train he could catch and came off here without any dinner."

"Fancy!" said Miss Tressilian; while Biddy more generally asked if Peter might be in good health and appeared to have been happy. Nick replied that he described his post as beastly but didn't seem to have suffered from it. He was to be in England probably a month, he was awfully brown, he sent his love to Biddy. Miss Tressilian looked at his empty stall and was of the opinion that it would be more to the point if he were to come in to see her.

"Oh he'll turn up; we had a goodish talk in the lobby where he met me. I think he went out somewhere."

"How odd to come so many thousand miles for this and then not to stay!" Biddy fluted.

"Did he come on purpose for this?" Miss Tressilian asked.

"Perhaps he's gone out to get his dinner!" joked Biddy.

Her friend suggested that he might be behind the scenes, but Nick cast doubts; whereupon Biddy asked if he himself were not going round. At this moment the curtain rose; Nick said he would go in the next interval. As soon as it came he quitted the box, remaining absent while it lasted.

All this time, in the house, there was no sign of Peter. Nick reappeared only as the fourth act was beginning and uttered no word to his companions till it was over. Then, after a further delay produced by renewed vociferous proofs of the personal victory won, he depicted his visit to the stage and the wonderful sight of Miriam on the field of battle. Miss Tressilian inquired if he had found Mr. Sherringham with her; to which he replied that, save across the footlights, she had not been in touch with him. At this a soft exclamation broke from Biddy. "Poor Peter! Where is he, then?"

Nick seemed to falter. "He's walking the streets."

"Walking the streets?"

"I don't know--I give it up!" our young man replied; and his tone, for some minutes, reduced his companions to silence. But a little later Biddy said:

"Was it for him this morning she wanted that place--when she asked you to give yours back?"

"For him exactly. It's very odd she had just managed to keep it--for all the good use he makes of it! She told me just now that she heard from him, at his post, a short time ago, to the effect that he had seen in a newspaper a statement she was going to do Juliet and that he firmly intended, though the ways and means were not clear to him--his leave of absence hadn't yet come out and he couldn't be sure when it would come--to be present on her first night; whereby she must do him the service to provide him a place. She thought this a speech rather in the air, so that in the midst of all her cares she took no particular pains about the matter. She had an idea she had really done with him for a long time. But this afternoon what does he do but telegraph to her from Southampton that he keeps his appointment and counts on her for a stall? Unless she had got back mine she wouldn't have been able to help him. When she was in Rosedale Road this morning she hadn't received his telegram; but his promise, his threat, whatever it was, came back to her: she had a vague foreboding and thought that on the chance she had better hold something ready. When she got home she found his telegram, and she told me he was the first person she saw in the house, through her fright when she came on in the second act. It appears she was terrified this time, and it lasted half through the play."

"She must be rather annoyed at his having gone away," Miss Tressilian observed.

"Annoyed? I'm not so sure!" laughed Nick.

"Ah here he comes back!" cried Biddy, behind her fan, while the absentee edged into his seat in time for the fifth act. He stood there a moment, first looking round the theatre; then he turned his eyes to the box occupied by his relatives, smiling and waving his hand.

"After that he'll surely come and see you," said Miss Tressilian.

"We shall see him as we go out," Biddy returned: "he must lose no more time."

Nick looked at him with a glass, then exclaiming: "Well, I'm glad he has pulled himself together!"

"Why what's the matter with him--if he wasn't disappointed of his seat?" Miss Tressilian demanded.

"The matter with him is that a couple of hours ago he had a great shock."

"A great shock?"

"I may as well mention it at last," Nick went on. "I had to say something to him in the lobby there when we met--something I was pretty sure he couldn't like. I let him have it full in the face--it seemed to me better and wiser. I let him know that Juliet's married."

"Didn't he know it?" asked Biddy, who, with her face raised, had listened in deep stillness to every word that fell from her brother.

"How should he have known it? It has only just taken place, and they've been so clever, for reasons of their own--those people move among a lot of considerations that are absolutely foreign to us--about keeping it out of the papers. They put in a lot of lies and they leave out the real things."

"You don't mean to say Mr. Sherringham wanted to marry her!" Miss Tressilian gasped.

"Don't ask me what he wanted--I daresay we shall never know. One thing's very certain--that he didn't like my news, dear old Peter, and that I shan't soon forget the look in his face as he turned away from me and slipped out into the street. He was too much upset--he couldn't trust himself to come back; he had to walk about--he tried to walk it off."

"Let us hope, then, he has walked it off!"

"Ah poor fellow--he couldn't hold out to the end; he has had to come back and look at her once more. He knows she'll be sublime in these last scenes."

"Is he so much in love with her as that? What difference does it make for an actress if she is mar--?" But in this rash inquiry Miss Tressilian suddenly checked herself.

"We shall probably never know how much he has been in love with her, nor what difference it makes. We shall never know exactly what he came back for, nor why he couldn't stand it out there any longer without relief, nor why he scrambled down here all but straight from the station, nor why after all, for the last two hours, he has been roaming the streets. And it doesn't matter, for it's none of our business. But I'm sorry for him--she is going to be sublime," Nick added. The curtain was rising on the tragic climax of the play.

Miriam Rooth was sublime; yet it may be confided to the reader that during these supreme scenes Bridget Dormer directed her eyes less to the inspired actress than to a figure in the stalls who sat with his own gaze fastened to the stage. It may further be intimated that Peter Sherringham, though he saw but a fragment of the performance, read clear, at the last, in the intense light of genius with which this fragment was charged, that even so after all he had been rewarded for his formidable journey. The great trouble of his infatuation subsided, leaving behind it something appreciably deep and pure. This pacification was far from taking place at once, but it was helped on, unexpectedly to him--it began to work at least--the very next night he saw the play, through the whole of which he then sat. He felt somehow recalled to the real by the very felicity of this experience, the supreme exhibition itself. He began to come back as from a far-off province of his history where miserable madness had reigned. He had been baffled, he had got his answer; it must last him--that was plain. He didn't fully accept it the first week or the second; but he accepted it sooner than he could have supposed had he known what it was to be when he paced at night, under the southern stars, the deck of the ship bearing him to England.

It had been, as we know, Miss Tressilian's view, and even Biddy's, that evening, that Peter Sherringham would join them as they left the theatre. This view, however, was not confirmed by the event, for our troubled gentleman vanished utterly--disappointingly crude behaviour on the part of a young diplomatist who had distinguished himself--before any one could put a hand on him. And he failed to make up for his crudity by coming to see any one the next day, or even the next. Indeed many days elapsed and very little would have been known about him had it not been that, in the country, Mrs. Dallow knew. What Mrs. Dallow knew was eventually known to Biddy Dormer; and in this way it could be established in his favour that he had remained some extraordinarily small number of days in London, had almost directly gone over to Paris to see his old chief. He came back from Paris--Biddy learnt this not from Julia, but in a much more immediate way: she knew it by his pressing the little electric button at the door of Florence Tressilian's flat one day when the good Florence was out and she herself was at home. He made on this occasion a very long visit. The good Florence knew it not much later, you may be sure--and how he had got their address from Nick--and she took an extravagant pleasure in it. Mr. Sherringham had never been to see her--the like of her--in his life: therefore it was clear what had made him begin. When he had once begun he kept it up, and Miss Tressilian's pleasure grew.

Good as she was, she could remember without the slightest relenting what Nick Dormer had repeated to them at the theatre about the dreary side of Peter's present post. However, she was not bound to make a stand at this if persons more nearly concerned, Lady Agnes and the girl herself, didn't mind it. How little they minded it, and Grace and Julia Dallow and even Nick, was proved in the course of a meeting that took place at Harsh during the Easter holidays. The mistress of that seat had a small and intimate party to celebrate her brother's betrothal. The two ladies came over from Broadwood; even Nick, for two days, went back to his old hunting-ground, and Miss Tressilian relinquished for as long a time the delights of her newly arranged flat. Peter Sherringham obtained an extension of leave, so that he might go back to his legation with a wife. Fortunately, as it turned out, Biddy's ordeal, in the more or less torrid zone, was not cruelly prolonged, for the pair have already received a superior appointment. It is Lady Agnes's proud opinion that her daughter is even now shaping their destiny. I say "even now," for these facts bring me very close to contemporary history. During those two days at Harsh Nick arranged with the former mistress of his fate the conditions, as they might be called, under which she should sit to him; and every one will remember in how recent an exhibition general attention was attracted, as the newspapers said in describing the private view, to the noble portrait of a lady which was the final outcome of that arrangement. Gabriel Nash had been at many a private view, but he was not at that one.

These matters are highly recent, however, as I say; so that in glancing about the little circle of the interests I have tried to evoke I am suddenly warned by a sharp sense of modernness. This renders it difficult to me, for instance, in taking leave of our wonderful Miriam, to do much more than allude to the general impression that her remarkable career is even yet only in its early prime. Basil Dashwood has got his theatre, and his wife--people know now she is his wife--has added three or four new parts to her repertory; but every one is agreed that both in public and in private she has a great deal more to show. This is equally true of Nick Dormer, in regard to whom I may finally say that his friend Nash's predictions about his reunion with Mrs. Dallow have not up to this time been justified. On the other hand, I must not omit to add, this lady has not, at the latest accounts, married Mr. Macgeorge. It is very true there has been a rumour that Mr. Macgeorge is worried about her--has even ceased at all fondly to believe in her.