It was the second week in February, Parliament had just met, and Ethelberta appeared for the first time before an audience in London.
There was some novelty in the species of entertainment that the active young woman had proposed to herself, and this doubtless had due effect in collecting the body of strangers that greeted her entry, over and above those friends who came to listen to her as a matter of course. Men and women who had become totally indifferent to new actresses, new readers, and new singers, once more felt the freshness of curiosity as they considered the promise of the announcement. But the chief inducement to attend lay in the fact that here was to be seen in the flesh a woman with whom the tongue of rumour had been busy in many romantic ways--a woman who, whatever else might be doubted, had certainly produced a volume of verses which had been the talk of the many who had read them, and of the many more who had not, for several consecutive weeks.
What was her story to be? Persons interested in the inquiry-a small proportion, it may be owned, of the whole London public, and chiefly young men--answered this question for themselves by assuming that it would take the form of some pungent and gratifying revelation of the innermost events of her own life, from which her gushing lines had sprung as an inevitable consequence, and which being once known, would cause such musical poesy to appear no longer wonderful.
The front part of the room was well filled, rows of listeners showing themselves like a drilled-in crop of which not a seed has failed. They were listeners of the right sort, a majority having noses of the prominent and dignified type, which when viewed in oblique perspective ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place. Ethelberta's plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair--as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends. By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed. She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near her or not, and, in her fear of seeming artificial, spoke too low. This defect, however, she soon corrected, and ultimately went on in a charmingly colloquial manner. What Ethelberta relied upon soon became evident. It was not upon the intrinsic merits of her story as a piece of construction, but upon her method of telling it. Whatever defects the tale possessed- -and they were not a few--it had, as delivered by her, the one pre- eminent merit of seeming like truth. A modern critic has well observed of De Foe that he had the most amazing talent on record for telling lies; and Ethelberta, in wishing her fiction to appear like a real narrative of personal adventure, did wisely to make De Foe her model. His is a style even better adapted for speaking than for writing, and the peculiarities of diction which he adopts to give verisimilitude to his narratives acquired enormous additional force when exhibited as viva-voce mannerisms. And although these artifices were not, perhaps, slavishly copied from that master of feigning, they would undoubtedly have reminded her hearers of him, had they not mostly been drawn from an easeful section in society which is especially characterized by the mental condition of knowing nothing about any author a week after they have read him. The few there who did remember De Foe were impressed by a fancy that his words greeted them anew in a winged auricular form, instead of by the weaker channels of print and eyesight. The reader may imagine what an effect this well-studied method must have produced when intensified by a clear, living voice, animated action, and the brilliant and expressive eye of a handsome woman--attributes which of themselves almost compelled belief. When she reached the most telling passages, instead of adding exaggerated action and sound, Ethelberta would lapse to a whisper and a sustained stillness, which were more striking than gesticulation. All that could be done by art was there, and if inspiration was wanting nobody missed it. It was in performing this feat that Ethelberta seemed first to discover in herself the full power of that self-command which further onward in her career more and more impressed her as a singular possession, until at last she was tempted to make of it many fantastic uses, leading to results that affected more households than her own. A talent for demureness under difficulties without the cold-bloodedness which renders such a bearing natural and easy, a face and hand reigning unmoved outside a heart by nature turbulent as a wave, is a constitutional arrangement much to be desired by people in general; yet, had Ethelberta been framed with less of that gift in her, her life might have been more comfortable as an experience, and brighter as an example, though perhaps duller as a story.
'Ladywell, how came this Mrs. Petherwin to think of such a queer trick as telling romances, after doing so well as a poet?' said a man in the stalls to his friend, who had been gazing at the Story- teller with a rapt face.
'What--don't you know?--everybody did, I thought,' said the painter.
'A mistake. Indeed, I should not have come here at all had I not heard the subject mentioned by accident yesterday at Grey's; and then I remembered her to be the same woman I had met at some place-- Belmaine's I think it was--last year, when I thought her just getting on for handsome and clever, not to put it too strongly.'
'Ah! naturally you would not know much,' replied Ladywell, in an eager whisper. 'Perhaps I am judging others by myself a little more than--but, as you have heard, she is an acquaintance of mine. I know her very well, and, in fact, I originally suggested the scheme to her as a pleasant way of adding to her fame. "Depend upon it, dear Mrs. Petherwin," I said, during a pause in one of our dances together some time ago, "any public appearance of yours would be successful beyond description."'
'O, I had no idea that you knew her so well! Then it is quite through you that she has adopted this course?'
'Well, not entirely--I could not say entirely. She said that some day, perhaps, she might do such a thing; and, in short, I reduced her vague ideas to form.'
'I should not mind knowing her better--I must get you to throw us together in some way,' said Neigh, with some interest. 'I had no idea that you were such an old friend. You could do it, I suppose?'
'Really, I am afraid--hah-hah--may not have the opportunity of obliging you. I met her at Wyndway, you know, where she was visiting with Lady Petherwin. It was some time ago, and I cannot say that I have ever met her since.'
'Or before?' said Neigh.
'Well--no; I never did.'
'Ladywell, if I had half your power of going to your imagination for facts, I would be the greatest painter in England.'
'Now Neigh--that's too bad--but with regard to this matter, I do speak with some interest,' said Ladywell, with a pleased sense of himself.
'In love with her?--Smitten down?--Done for?'
'Now, now! However, several other fellows chaff me about her. It was only yesterday that Jones said--'
'Do you know why she cares to do this sort of thing?' 'Merely a desire for fame, I suppose.'
'I should think she has fame enough already.'
'That I can express no opinion upon. I am thinking of getting her permission to use her face in a subject I am preparing. It is a fine face for canvas. Glorious contour--glorious. Ah, here she is again, for the second part.'
'Dream on, young fellow. You'll make a rare couple!' said Neigh, with a flavour of superciliousness unheeded by his occupied companion.
Further back in the room were a pair of faces whose keen interest in the performance contrasted much with the languidly permissive air of those in front. When the ten minutes' break occurred, Christopher was the first of the two to speak. 'Well, what do you think of her, Faith?' he said, shifting restlessly on his seat.
'I like the quiet parts of the tale best, I think" replied the sister; 'but, of course, I am not a good judge of these things. How still the people are at times! I continually take my eyes from her to look at the listeners. Did you notice the fat old lady in the second row, with her cloak a little thrown back? She was absolutely unconscious, and stayed with her face up and lips parted like a little child of six.'
'She well may! the thing is a triumph. That fellow Ladywell is here, I believe--yes, it is he, busily talking to the man on his right. If I were a woman I would rather go donkey-driving than stick myself up there, for gaping fops to quiz and say what they like about! But she had no choice, poor thing; for it was that or nothing with her.'
Faith, who had secret doubts about the absolute necessity of Ethelberta's appearance in public, said, with remote meanings, 'Perhaps it is not altogether a severe punishment to her to be looked at by well-dressed men. Suppose she feels it as a blessing, instead of an affliction?'
'She is a different sort of woman, Faith, and so you would say if you knew her. Of course, it is natural for you to criticize her severely just now, and I don't wish to defend her.' 'I think you do a little, Kit.'
'No; I am indifferent about it all. Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had never seen her; and possibly it might have been better for her if she had never seen me. She has a heart, and the heart is a troublesome encumbrance when great things have to be done. I wish you knew her: I am sure you would like each other.'
'O yes,' said Faith, in a voice of rather weak conviction. 'But, as we live in such a plain way, it would be hardly desirable at present.'
Ethelberta being regarded, in common with the latest conjurer, spirit-medium, aeronaut, giant, dwarf or monarch, as a new sensation, she was duly criticized in the morning papers, and even obtained a notice in some of the weekly reviews.
'A handsome woman,' said one of these, 'may have her own reasons for causing the flesh of the London public to creep upon its bones by her undoubtedly remarkable narrative powers; but we question if much good can result from such a form of entertainment. Nevertheless, some praise is due. We have had the novel-writer among us for some time, and the novel-reader has occasionally appeared on our platforms; but we believe that this is the first instance on record of a Novel-teller--one, that is to say, who relates professedly as fiction a romantic tale which has never been printed--the whole owing its chief interest to the method whereby the teller identifies herself with the leading character in the story.' Another observed: 'When once we get away from the magic influence of the story-teller's eye and tongue, we perceive how improbable, even impossible, is the tissue of events to which we have been listening with so great a sense of reality, and we feel almost angry with ourselves at having been the victims of such utter illusion.'
'Mrs. Petherwin's personal appearance is decidedly in her favour,' said another. 'She affects no unconsciousness of the fact that form and feature are no mean vehicles of persuasion, and she uses the powers of each to the utmost. There spreads upon her face when in repose an air of innocence which is charmingly belied by the subtlety we discover beneath it when she begins her tale; and this amusing discrepancy between her physical presentment and the inner woman is further illustrated by the misgiving, which seizes us on her entrance, that so impressionable a lady will never bear up in the face of so trying an audience. . . . The combinations of incident which Mrs. Petherwin persuades her hearers that she has passed through are not a little marvellous; and if what is rumoured be true, that the tales are to a great extent based upon her own experiences, she has proved herself to be no less daring in adventure than facile in her power of describing it.'
After such successes as these, Christopher could not forego the seductive intention of calling upon the poetess and romancer, at her now established town residence in Exonbury Crescent. One wintry afternoon he reached the door--now for the third time--and gave a knock which had in it every tender refinement that could be thrown into the somewhat antagonistic vehicle of noise. Turning his face down the street he waited restlessly on the step. There was a strange light in the atmosphere: the glass of the streetlamps, the varnished back of a passing cab, a milk-woman's cans, and a row of church-windows glared in his eyes like new-rubbed copper; and on looking the other way he beheld a bloody sun hanging among the chimneys at the upper end, as a danger-lamp to warn him off.
By this time the door was opened, and before him stood Ethelberta's young brother Joey, thickly populated with little buttons, the remainder of him consisting of invisible green. 'Ah, Joseph,' said Christopher, instantly recognizing the boy. 'What, are you here in office? Is your--'
Joey lifted his forefinger and spread his mouth in a genial manner, as if to signify particular friendliness mingled with general caution.
'Yes, sir, Mrs. Petherwin is my mistress. I'll see if she is at home, sir,' he replied, raising his shoulders and winking a wink of strategic meanings by way of finish--all which signs showed, if evidence were wanted, how effectually this pleasant young page understood, though quite fresh from Wessex, the duties of his peculiar position. Mr. Julian was shown to the drawing-room, and there he found Ethelberta alone.
She gave him a hand so cool and still that Christopher, much as he desired the contact, was literally ashamed to let her see and feel his own, trembling with unmanageable excess of feeling. It was always so, always had been so, always would be so, at these meetings of theirs: she was immeasurably the strongest; and the deep-eyed young man fancied, in the chagrin which the perception of this difference always bred in him, that she triumphed in her superior control. Yet it was only in little things that their sexes were thus reversed: Christopher would receive quite a shock if a little dog barked at his heels, and be totally unmoved when in danger of his life.
Certainly the most self-possessed woman in the world, under pressure of the incongruity between their last meeting and the present one, might have shown more embarrassment than Ethelberta showed on greeting him today. Christopher was only a man in believing that the shyness which she did evince was chiefly the result of personal interest. She might or might not have been said to blush--perhaps the stealthy change upon her face was too slow an operation to deserve that name: but, though pale when he called, the end of ten minutes saw her colour high and wide. She soon set him at his ease, and seemed to relax a long-sustained tension as she talked to him of her arrangements, hopes, and fears.
'And how do you like London society?' said Ethelberta. 'Pretty well, as far as I have seen it: to the surface of its front door.'
'You will find nothing to be alarmed at if you get inside.' 'O no--of course not--except my own shortcomings,' said the modest musician. 'London society is made up of much more refined people than society anywhere else.'
'That's a very prevalent opinion; and it is nowhere half so prevalent as in London society itself. However, come and see my house--unless you think it a trouble to look over a house?'
'No; I should like it very much.'
The decorations tended towards the artistic gymnastics prevalent in some quarters at the present day. Upon a general flat tint of duck's-egg green appeared quaint patterns of conventional foliage, and birds, done in bright auburn, several shades nearer to redbreast-red than was Ethelberta's hair, which was thus thrust further towards brown by such juxtaposition--a possible reason for the choice of tint. Upon the glazed tiles within the chimney-piece were the forms of owls, bats, snakes, frogs, mice, spiders in their webs, moles, and other objects of aversion and darkness, shaped in black and burnt in after the approved fashion.
'My brothers Sol and Dan did most of the actual work,' said Ethelberta, 'though I drew the outlines, and designed the tiles round the fire. The flowers, mice, and spiders are done very simply, you know: you only press a real flower, mouse, or spider out flat under a piece of glass, and then copy it, adding a little more emaciation and angularity at pleasure.' 'In that "at pleasure" is where all the art lies,' said he. 'Well, yes--that is the case,' said Ethelberta thoughtfully; and preceding him upstairs, she threw open a door on one of the floors, disclosing Dan in person, engaged upon a similar treatment of this floor also. Sol appeared bulging from the door of a closet, a little further on, where he was fixing some shelves; and both wore workmen's blouses. At once coming down from the short ladder he was standing upon, Dan shook Christopher's hand with some velocity.
'We do a little at a time, you see,' he said, 'because Colonel down below, and Mrs. Petherwin's visitors, shan't smell the turpentine.'
'We be pushing on to-day to get it out of the way,' said Sol, also coming forward and greeting their visitor, but more reluctantly than his brother had done. 'Now I'll tell ye what-you two,' he added, after an uneasy pause, turning from Christopher to Ethelberta and back again in great earnestness; 'you'd better not bide here, talking to we rough ones, you know, for folks might find out that there's something closer between us than workmen and employer and employer's friend. So Berta and Mr. Julian, if you'll go on and take no more notice o' us, in case of visitors, it would be wiser-- else, perhaps, if we should be found out intimate with ye, and bring down your gentility, you'll blame us for it. I get as nervous as a cat when I think I may be the cause of any disgrace to ye.'
'Don't be so silly, Sol,' said Ethelberta, laughing.
'Ah, that's all very well,' said Sol, with an unbelieving smile; 'but if we bain't company for you out of doors, you bain't company for we within--not that I find fault with ye or mind it, and shan't take anything for painting your house, nor will Dan neither, any more for that--no, not a penny; in fact, we are glad to do it for 'ee. At the same time, you keep to your class, and we'll keep to ours. And so, good afternoon, Berta, when you like to go, and the same to you, Mr. Julian. Dan, is that your mind?'
'I can but own it,' said Dan.
The two brothers then turned their backs upon their visitors, and went on working, and Ethelberta and her lover left the room. 'My brothers, you perceive,' said she, 'represent the respectable British workman in his entirety, and a touchy individual he is, I assure you, on points of dignity, after imbibing a few town ideas from his leaders. They are painfully off-hand with me, absolutely refusing to be intimate, from a mistaken notion that I am ashamed of their dress and manners; which, of course, is absurd.'
'Which, of course, is absurd,' said Christopher.
'Of course it is absurd!' she repeated with warmth, and looking keenly at him. But, finding no harm in his face, she continued as before: 'Yet, all the time, they will do anything under the sun that they think will advance my interests. In our hearts we are one. All they ask me to do is to leave them to themselves, and therefore I do so. Now, would you like to see some more of your acquaintance?'
She introduced him to a large attic; where he found himself in the society of two or three persons considerably below the middle height, whose manners were of that gushing kind sometimes called Continental, their ages ranging from five years to eight. These were the youngest children, presided over by Emmeline, as professor of letters, capital and small. 'I am giving them the rudiments of education here,' said Ethelberta; 'but I foresee several difficulties in the way of keeping them here, which I must get over as best I can. One trouble is, that they don't get enough air and exercise.' 'Is Mrs. Chickerel living here as well?' Christopher ventured to inquire, when they were downstairs again.
'Yes; but confined to her room as usual, I regret to say. Two more sisters of mine, whom you have never seen at all, are also here. They are older than any of the rest of us, and had, broadly speaking, no education at all, poor girls. The eldest, Gwendoline, is my cook, and Cornelia is my housemaid. I suffer much sadness, and almost misery sometimes, in reflecting that here are we, ten brothers and sisters, born of one father and mother, who might have mixed together and shared all in the same scenes, and been properly happy, if it were not for the strange accidents that have split us up into sections as you see, cutting me off from them without the compensation of joining me to any others. They are all true as steel in keeping the secret of our kin, certainly; but that brings little joy, though some satisfaction perhaps.' 'You might be less despondent, I think. The tale-telling has been one of the successes of the season.'
'Yes, I might; but I may observe that you scarcely set the example of blitheness.'
'Ah--that's not because I don't recognize the pleasure of being here. It is from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling I have that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man's spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight.
"As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow."'
Ethelberta bowed uncertainly; the remark might refer to her past conduct or it might not. 'My great cause of uneasiness is the children,' she presently said, as a new page of matter. 'It is my duty, at all risk and all sacrifice of sentiment, to educate and provide for them. The grown-up ones, older than myself, I cannot help much, but the little ones I can. I keep my two French lodgers for the sake of them.'
'The lodgers, of course, don't know the relationship between yourself and the rest of the people in the house?'
'O no!--nor will they ever. My mother is supposed to let the ground and first floors to me--a strange lady--as she does the second and third floors to them. Still, I may be discovered.'
'Well--if you are?'
'Let me be. Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense that a game of chess is a battle--there is no seriousness in it; it may be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten, with a careless "Ha-ha!" and sweeping your pieces into the box. Experimentally, I care to succeed in society; but at the bottom of my heart, I don't care.'
'For that very reason you are likely to do it. My idea is, make ambition your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you will succeed. So impish are the ways of the gods.'
'I hope that you at any rate will succeed,' she said, at the end of a silence.
'I never can--if success means getting what one wants.' 'Why should you not get that?'
'It has been forbidden to me.'
Her complexion changed just enough to show that she knew what he meant. 'If you were as bold as you are subtle, you would take a more cheerful view of the matter,' she said, with a look signifying innermost things.
'I will instantly! Shall I test the truth of my cheerful view by a word of question?'
'I deny that you are capable of taking that view, and until you prove that you are, no question is allowed,' she said, laughing, and still warmer in the face and neck. 'Nothing but melancholy, gentle melancholy, now as in old times when there was nothing to cause it.'
'Ah--you only tease.'
'You will not throw aside that bitter medicine of distrust, for the world. You have grown so used to it, that you take it as food, as some invalids do their mixtures.'
'Ethelberta, you have my heart--my whole heart. You have had it ever since I first saw you. Now you understand me, and no pretending that you don't, mind, this second time.' 'I understood you long ago; you have not understood me.' 'You are mysterious,' he said lightly; 'and perhaps if I disentangle your mystery I shall find it to cover--indifference. I hope it does--for your sake.'
'How can you say so!' she exclaimed reproachfully. 'Yet I wish it did too--I wish it did cover indifference--for yours. But you have all of me that you care to have, and may keep it for life if you wish to. Listen, surely there was a knock at the door? Let us go inside the room: I am always uneasy when anybody comes, lest any awkward discovery should be made by a visitor of my miserable contrivances for keeping up the establishment.'
Joey met them before they had left the landing.
'Please, Berta,' he whispered, 'Mr. Ladywell has called, and I've showed him into the liberry. You know, Berta, this is how it was, you know: I thought you and Mr. Julian were in the drawing-room, and wouldn't want him to see ye together, and so I asked him to step into the liberry a minute.' 'You must improve your way of speaking,' she said, with quick embarrassment, whether at the mention of Ladywell's name before Julian, or at the way Joey coupled herself with Christopher, was quite uncertain. 'Will you excuse me for a few moments?' she said, turning to Christopher. 'Pray sit down; I shall not be long.' And she glided downstairs. They had been standing just by the drawing-room door, and Christopher turned back into the room with no very satisfactory countenance. It was very odd, he thought, that she should go down to Ladywell in that mysterious manner, when he might have been admitted to where they were talking without any trouble at all. What could Ladywell have to say, as an acquaintance calling upon her for a few minutes, that he was not to hear? Indeed, if it came to that, what right had Ladywell to call upon her at all, even though she were a widow, and to some extent chartered to live in a way which might be considered a trifle free if indulged in by other young women. This was the first time that he himself had ventured into her house on that very account--a doubt whether it was quite proper to call, considering her youth, and the fertility of her position as ground for scandal. But no sooner did he arrive than here was Ladywell blundering in, and, since this conjunction had occurred on his first visit, the chances were that Ladywell came very often.
Julian walked up and down the room, every moment expanding itself to a minute in his impatience at the delay and vexation at the cause. After scrutinizing for the fifth time every object on the walls as if afflicted with microscopic closeness of sight, his hands under his coat-tails, and his person jigging up and down upon his toes, he heard her coming up the stairs. When she entered the apartment her appearance was decidedly that of a person subsiding after some little excitement.
'I did not calculate upon being so long,' she said sweetly, at the same time throwing back her face and smiling. 'But I-was longer than I expected.'
'It seemed rather long,' said Christopher gloomily, 'but I don't mind it.'
'I am glad of that,' said Ethelberta.
'As you asked me to stay, I was very pleased to do so, and always should be; but I think that now I will wish you goodbye.'
'You are not vexed with me?' she said, looking quite into his face. 'Mr. Ladywell is nobody, you know.'
'Nobody?'
'Well, he is not much, I mean. The case is, that I am sitting to him for a subject in which my face is to be used--otherwise than as a portrait--and he called about it.'
'May I say,' said Christopher, 'that if you want yourself painted, you are ill-advised not to let it be done by a man who knows how to use the brush a little?'
'O, he can paint!' said Ethelberta, rather warmly. 'His last picture was excellent, I think. It was greatly talked about.' 'I imagined you to say that he was a mere nobody!' 'Yes, but--how provoking you are!--nobody, I mean, to talk to. He is a true artist, nevertheless.'
Christopher made no reply. The warm understanding between them had quite ended now, and there was no fanning it up again. Sudden tiffs had been the constant misfortune of their courtship in days gone by, had been the remote cause of her marriage to another; and the familiar shadows seemed to be rising again to cloud them with the same persistency as ever. Christopher went downstairs with well- behaved moodiness, and left the house forthwith. The postman came to the door at the same time.
Ethelberta opened a letter from Picotee--now at Sandbourne again; and, stooping to the fire-light, she began to read:-'MY DEAR ETHELBERTA,--I have tried to like staying at Sandbourne because you wished it, but I can't endure the town at all, dear Berta; everything is so wretched and dull! O, I only wish you knew how dismal it is here, and how much I would give to come to London! I cannot help thinking that I could do better in town. You see, I should be close to you, and should have the benefit of your experience. I would not mind what I did for a living could I be there where you all are. It is so like banishment to be here. If I could not get a pupilteachership in some London school (and I believe I could by advertising) I could stay with you, and be governess to Georgina and Myrtle, for I am sure you cannot spare time enough to teach them as they ought to be taught, and Emmeline is not old enough to have any command over them. I could also assist at your dressmaking, and you must require a great deal of that to be done if you continue to appear in public. Mr. Long read in the papers the account of your first evening, and afterwards I heard two ladies of our committee talking about it; but of course not one of them knew my personal interest in the discussion. Now will you, Ethelberta, think if I may not come: Do, there's a dear sister! I will do anything you set me about if I may only come.-- Your ever affectionate, PICOTEE.'
'Great powers above--what worries do beset me!' cried Ethelberta, jumping up. 'What can possess the child so suddenly?--she used to like Sandbourne well enough!' She sat down, and hastily scribbled the following reply:-- 'MY DEAR PICOTEE-