The Marquis of Castrillon, meanwhile, was pirouetting sublimely before the long mirror in his dressing-room, while his valet, a sour-faced individual, looked on in great but gloomy interest. The Marquis was superbly dressed in a Louis Seize costume--an exact reproduction of the one worn by that monarch on his wedding-day--and he presented a very fine figure. In features, expression, colouring, and manner it would have been difficult to find, or imagine, a more fascinating puppet. An unsurpassable actor of noble parts, he seemed created to play the hero in deeds, the poet in thoughts, the lover on all occasions. Confident of his attractions, he appeared quite free from vanity: each fresh attitude became him better than the last: no light could do less than show the classic beauty of his head and body. When he laughed, one could admire his magnificent teeth; when he looked grave, one could enjoy the splendid serenity of his brow and the passion in his deep brown eyes. It was said that his legs alone would have made the plainest man a dangerous rival, that his well-cut mouth would have made a monster irresistible.
"So you don't think," said he, as he executed a final bow and kicked off his shoes because a buckle stuck into his instep--"so you don't think, Isidore, that Her Imperial Highness loves me?"
"I know she doesn't," replied his man. "I am not going to say that I see more than I see."
"It may be that she cannot love," said the Marquis, "and I don't think less of her on that account. These sentimental girls become very monotonous and sickening. The women whom men love the longest are prim, stand-off women. Have you noticed that, Isidore?"
"No, I haven't noticed that. I haven't noticed much love lasting long for any kind of person."
"There's something in your stupidity which refreshes me. I have a strong notion to marry Her Imperial Highness. I could make her happy."
"Not you."
"I tell you I could. She has the oddest effect upon me. No other woman has ever affected me in such a way. I feel when I am with her as though we were well matched. If I were a King, I would make her my Queen. I might love others, but I should always say, 'Remember the Queen. The Queen must be remembered, and honoured, and obeyed in all things.' Sometimes I see myself--with her--at a kind of Versailles: every one standing up as we enter: Her Majesty very pale and tall and wonderful in a blue velvet robe and pearls, I would adore her with a passion as constant as it was respectful. I should ask in return une amitie la plus tendre. Isidore, she is an angel. The sweetness of her soul is in her face--in the very sound of her voice. I am a little too material to be so sublime in my sentiments as M. de Hausee, but I could be unusually faithful to that charming, beautiful creature. Isn't there a crease under my left arm? Hold the glass for me."
Isidore held the glass while Castrillon, with knit brows, studied the back view of his coat.
"The coat is perfect," said Isidore; "you have no heart or you would never find fault with such a back."
"Would you call me heartless?"
"I couldn't call you anything else," replied the valet, bluntly.
"Then why have you been with me, cat-fish, ever since I was born?"
The Marquis had a stock of names for his servant, none of which he employed unless he felt in a good humour. Owl-pig, hog-mouse, ape-dog, rat-weasel, and cat-fish were the highest expressions of his amiability toward the man who had been his ill-tempered, dishonest, impudent, and treacherous attendant all the years of his life.
"You know, mule-viper," he continued, "that no one else would keep you for five minutes. You are a liar, a thief, and a traitor. Yet I endure you. I agree that I must be either heartless or an idiot to put up with such a rogue."
Isidore grew livid, muttered blasphemies under his breath, and put pink cotton-wool in the toes of his master's dancing-shoes. Castrillon then kicked him into the adjoining room and resumed his gymnastic exercises. At the end of half an hour, the man re-entered carrying a note fastidiously between his left thumb and forefinger.
"Is that for me?" asked the Marquis, who was in the act of turning a double somersault with much agility.
"It is for Monsieur."
"Then read it aloud while I stand on my head."
Isidore tore it open and began to read as follows:--
"Do not misjudge me----"
"Stop!" exclaimed Castrillon, falling upon his feet at once; "that is from a woman. Why didn't you say so?"
"It is from Madame Parflete," replied Isidore.
"Impossible!" said Castrillon, snatching it from his hand; "impossible!"
He read the letter, flushed to the roots of his hair, and kicked Isidore for the second time.
"You beast!" said he; "where did you get this? It is her writing, but she never wrote it--never on God's earth! Where did you get it?"
"It was given to me by one of her servants."
"Why the devil do you tell me such lies?" exclaimed the young man in a fury; "it's some d----d practical joke in the most infernal bad taste, and, by God! I have a mind to shoot you."
Castrillon was not given to the utterance of vain threats, and his anger was so great that the wretched Isidore, shaking, whining, and cursing, edged round the room with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed on his master.
"Stand still, will you?" continued the Marquis; "I want to hear a little more. How much were you paid for giving me this twaddle? Answer me that."
"Two guineas!"
"Two? I'll bet you had twenty. Stand still, I tell you, or I'll kick you again. Do you expect me to believe that Mrs. Parflete's servant gave you twenty guineas?"
"No, I don't," answered Isidore. "I don't expect you to believe anything. But if that isn't Madame Parflete's writing, whose writing is it?"
"That is just what I mean to find out," replied Castrillon, "and that is why I won't shoot you till it suits my convenience."
Isidore, who had a venomous attachment to the Marquis, burst into tears. For many generations their respective ancestors had stood in the relation, each to the other, of tyrant and dependent. Isidore's father had robbed, cheated, deceived, and adored Castrillon's father; the fathers of these two reprobates had observed the same measure of whippings and treacheries, and so it had been always from the first registered beginnings of the noble and the slavish house. But an Isidore had never been known to leave a Castrillon's service. The hereditary, easy-going forbearance, on the one hand, which found killing less tedious than a crude dismissal, and the hereditary guilty conscience, on the other, which had to recognise the justice of punishment, kept the connection rudely loyal.
"I detest you," said Castrillon; "I hate the sight of you."
Isidore blubbered aloud, and accepted the information as a turn for the better in the tide of his master's wrath.
"Who gave you that letter?"
"Well, if you must know, it was Signor Mudara."
"Mudara? Then Mudara wrote it. I'll wring his neck."
"I'll wring his neck, too--if he has tried any of his games on me," sobbed Isidore. "But it may not be a game. You are always so hasty."
Castrillon read the letter through once more.
"I can't believe that she wrote it," he said. "I'll swear she didn't."
"And why?"
"Because the style is not in keeping with her character, blockhead! She does not ask me--or any one else--to visit her at two o'clock in the morning."
A revolting smile made the valet's loose-hanging, sullen lips quiver with emotion.
"No, that is not Madame's style. She is too clever. But does that affect the opportunity!"
"What opportunity?"
"You have the letter. It is for Madame herself to deny the handwriting--not you. Why should you, of all people, think it a joke? Why not act upon it? Why not ask her what it means?"
"At two in the morning? I have no wish to compromise Madame--not the least. She is too rich to compromise. She is the sort of lady one marries. Tell Mudara, with my compliments, he must understand gentlemen before he can play successful tricks upon them."
"I will take my oath that I am not sure it is a trick," answered Isidore.
Castrillon studied the letter for a third time.
"Here and there," he said, "it has the ring of her voice, and the words are the words she uses."
"With such a justification in my pocket, I know what I should do," mumbled Isidore.
"So do I. But you are the scum of the earth, and what you would, or wouldn't do, could only interest the hangman."
The Marquis locked the note in his dressing-case, and handed his keys, with his usual simplicity, to Isidore.
"I do not propose to tire myself with this nonsense before the play," said he. "Get my raw eggs and milk."
At nine o'clock that evening, a brilliant company were gathered in the Salle de Comedie. Most of the Foreign Ambassadors, and about fifty illustrious personages of great social importance, were present. Prince d'Alchingen had resolved that the daughter of Henriette Duboc should have every opportunity of making a successful debut in England. He had sprinkled most judiciously among his guests a few accredited experts in various departments of knowledge, and these he hoped would lead appreciation into the right channel by explaining, at fit intervals, just why Mrs. Parflete was beautiful and just where her art had its especial distinction. The play itself--La Seconde Surprise de l'Amour--by Pierre de Marivaux, was quite unknown to the audience. Brigit and Castrillon had appeared in it at Madrid, and descriptions of their success were whispered through the room. The story of her birth, her unhappy marriage, her adventures in Spain, and her relations with De Hausee had quickened curiosity to the highest pitch. Was she really so young? was she really so pretty? was she going on the public stage, or would she remain an accomplished, semi-royal amateur? No one referred openly to the late Archduke Charles, but the facts that Madame Duboc had been his Canonical wife, that Mrs. Parflete was the one child of their union, kept the whole aristocratic assembly thrilled with the sense of taking part in something as distinguished as a Court function, as exciting as a Court scandal, and as bewildering as a Court conspiracy. A string orchestra--conducted by Strauss himself--played French melodies of the eighteenth century. Would there be any dancing? would she sing? Henriette Duboc had been compared, as a dancer, to La Guimard, said Sir Piers Harding to the Duchess of Lossett. And who was La Guimard? asked the Duchess. And was Mrs. Parflete at all like her mother? And did she bear the extraordinary resemblance, of which so much had been made, to Marie Antoinette? Sir Piers felt bound to own that the likeness was remarkable. And this de Hausee--what of him? Had Sir Piers seen the odd announcement, about his name and antecedents, in the Times? The Duchess didn't know what to think. It was all so very odd, but most interesting, of course. Was M. de Hausee, by any chance, in the audience? No. Well, perhaps it was better taste on his part to keep away. The bell rang. All eyes turned toward the blue satin curtains; they moved: the lights were lowered; the violins played a languorous air: with a rustle--not unlike that caused by the movement of wings--the curtains were drawn back and disclosed an empty garden. Then, following the stage direction, the Marquise entered "tristement sur la scene." The entrance was made quietly, and, for a breathless second, no one realised that the heroine of the evening had at last appeared. Her Grace of Lossett began to fear she felt a little disappointed when, in the nick of time, a great poet, who sat near her, murmured, "Divine."
But at this point we may quote from the Memoirs of Lady Julia Babington:--
_Mrs. Parflete's personal appearance caused an immediate furore. Many disagreed about her claims to perfect beauty, but these hostile feelings did not last longer than five minutes. She was an extremely pretty woman; rather tall for her slight proportions, but elegant to a surprising degree. The extraordinary charm of her acting, her voice, her countenance, and her accent were delightful. It would have been impossible to display more grace, simplicity, and ingenuousness than she did: she gave several touches of pathos in a manner to make one cry, and to quite enchant all who bad taste enough and mind to appreciate her inimitable talent._
And again in the Letters of Charlotte, Lady Pardwicke, we read:--
If Mrs. Parflete can be called handsome, it is certainly a figure de fantasie_. She has a clear complexion, is young, tall; her manners are doucereuses, for, besides being a beauty, she has pretensions, I understand, to bel-esprit. The majority of those present were undeniably captivated by her peculiar fascination._
Augustus Barfield has the following remarks in his famous Journal:--
There were no two opinions about the success of the debutante_. We had been led to expect a good deal, but fortunately every description proved inaccurate, so, while she utterly failed to realise any single preconceived idea, she had the great advantage of appearing as some one wholly new. Rumour had prepared me equally for a St. Elizabeth, a Mademoiselle Mars, a Marie-Antoinette, a Recamier, or a Sophie Arnould. She resembled none of these ladies--being far more tragic in her nature than the rather sensual Queen of France, and she is clearly an uncommon individual in her own right. The women will squabble about her looks; the men will have views about her figure: all must agree that her fortune on the stage is assured. A more pleasing performance I never saw. Love, innocence, tenderness, grief, joy, petulance, uncertainty, modesty, despair--every feminine attribute, in fact, showed to admiration in her expressive features. Voice, bewitching. Gestures, exquisite. All, in fact, was truly enjoyable. I would not have missed the evening on any account._
Orange, it is true, had not joined the general company. But Prince d'Alchingen for reasons of his own, however, had offered the young man a seat in the one small box which had a gilded grille before it and was so made that it seemed part of the massive decoration.
"You cannot be seen," said the Prince; "I won't tell her that you are present; and I give you my word of honour that I won't tell anybody--not even my wife."
The temptation was irresistible. Robert accepted the invitation, and as he watched the play, it seemed to him that he had never known Brigit till that evening. He had seen her in dreams--yes; and talked to her in dreams, yes; but now at last she lived--a real creature. Lost in the part, she was able to throw aside the self-restraint which had given her always a cold, almost sexless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred changing emotions: the youth, strength, and passion so severely repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never come till the last hours before death--when in one look or one utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis--not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the grille, watched the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars. He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing, dancing--fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age, was he to look on--with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate?
His whole nature rose up in revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that a change--perhaps a terrible change--had taken place in his mind--a change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of analysis and reflection. Imaginative love--made up of renunciation and spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a space. He was madly jealous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and uttered his lines with the most touching air of passionate devotion. She seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that delicate, irresistible abandon--apparently unconscious and unpremeditated--which is only possible between two players who are not in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on the stage, where, as a merely assumed thing, it harmonised perfectly with its artificial surroundings--the canvas landscape, the painted trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy--a Midsummer Night's music--nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play--The Second Surprise of Love--carried a mocking significance.
Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand--and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month--alone with books--in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of a Kempis as they do in Schopenhauer, as they do in Lucretius, as they do in St. Bernard, as they do in Montaigne, in Marcus Aurelius, in Dante, in St. Teresa. They are, indeed, the ever-recurrent cries in human feeling, the ever-recurrent phases in human thought. Uninterrupted contentment was never yet found in any calling or state; the saints were haggard with combats; sleep, the most reposeful state we know, has its fearful sorrows, hideous terrors, pursuing uncertainties. Robert's spirit, stimulated by jealousy, played round these reflections, common enough at all times, but, as all common things, overwhelming at the first moment of their complete realisation. The original frame of his mind joined a defiance of formal precedent and an intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense with an impatience of all that makes for secrecy and an abhorrence of the substitutes which are sometimes basely, sometimes madly, accepted in default of true objects.
He could not desire the star and find solace in the glow-worm--pursue Isolde and lag by the way with Moll Flanders. It was true that he had resolved to put stars and Isolde alike from his life. It was true that he had bound himself to certain fair ambitions beyond the determinations of calculation and experience. It was true that he had resolved to sacrifice this world to the next. He knew the claims which the world to come has upon us. But did he know the world he was renouncing? How that doubt opened the way to further doubts! Was he a fool for his pains? Was an enfeebling and afflicting of the natural man so necessary to the exaltation of the soul? Was the soul in itself so weak that it could only rest decently in a sick body? Could it only wish for something greater than this earth can give by being artificially saddened?
Such questions have their answers, but they do not occur very readily to young men hopelessly in love and half out of their wits with jealousy. He might have taken refuge in prayer, but at that moment he did not want to pray. He wanted to think about himself, to be himself throughout the entire reach of his consciousness, to lose himself in the tempest of emotion which seemed to drive out, beat, and shatter every hindrance to its furious sweep. A smouldering fire is for a while got under, and yet by suppression is but thrown in, to spread more widely and deeply than before. So his fatal affection, perhaps pitilessly fought down in the first instance--asserted its power--its power for evil. Not to love was not to live. He was dead while he lived. He could not find peace in an invisible world of which he did not see any more even a shadow round about him. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? He did not believe that. What miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased. Perhaps they were not happy, but if they received the punishment of wrong-doing, the wrong at least was committed out of fetters and joyously. It is not until men find themselves assailed by a strong wish that they perceive how very still and very small, all but inaudible, the still, small voice can be. A moment comes when one ceases to think--one wills, and if one is able and the will is sufficiently determined, the purpose is carried into effect. Temptations to steal, to lie, to deceive, to gamble, to excess in drink and the like cannot approach a certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller life--either in a spiritual or the human way--is implanted ineradicably in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind of apathy, the craving is there--to be aroused surely enough at some dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of disappointed love is the most critical. Calm spectators of mortal folly who have been satisfactorily married for twenty years and more, who have sons to provide for and daughters to establish, cherish a disdain of love-stories and boast that they have no patience with morbidity. Love--which put them into being and keeps the earth in existence--seems to all such a silly malady peculiar to the sentimental in early youth. So they put the First Cause--in one of its many manifestations--in the waste-paper basket, asking each other what will become of Charles if he cannot find a rich wife, and poor Alice, if she cannot entrap a suitable husband. But there are others who look on life with some hope of understanding it truly, in part, at any rate, and these know, perhaps by experience, perhaps by sympathy, that whereas bodily disturbances may pass away leaving little or no effect upon the general health, all mental tumults are perpetual in their consequences: they never die out entirely, and they live, sometimes with appalling energy, sometimes with gnawing listlessness, to the end of an existence. Robert, in the judgment of his intellect and his senses, had found his ideal. Brigit did not belong to "the despised day of small things"; she was the woman of his imagination--the well-beloved, and having gained her, was he to say--Farewell? It seemed so. Meanwhile, the graceful, swaying dialogue rippled between the players on the stage; the smiling audience, hushed with interest, gazed at the delightful beings before them; the exquisite Marquise had uttered her two last speeches--
"Je ne croyois pas l'amitie si dangereuse."
and--
"Je ne me mele plus de rien!"
Lubin brought the performance to an end by the final utterance--
"Allons de la joie!"
The curtain fell--to rise again a dozen times. Orange did not hear the door of the box being opened. Prince d'Alchingen came in and put a hand on the young man's shoulder.
"Would you like to see her?" he whispered. "I can arrange it. No one need know."
But the training of a lifetime and constant habits of thought were stronger still than any mood.
"No," said Robert, shortly, "I won't see her. I must get back to London at once."
