Chapter XXI: Part 21

"Oh dying!--he's dying very hard!" cried Miriam. "Mr. Sherringham's a man of whom I can't speak with too much esteem and affection and who may be destined to perish by some horrid fever (which God forbid!) in the unpleasant country he's going to. But he won't have caught his fever from your humble servant."

"You may kill him even while you remain in perfect health yourself," said Nick; "and since we're talking of the matter I don't see the harm of my confessing that he strikes me as far gone--oh as very bad indeed."

"And yet he's in love with your sister?--_je n'y suis plus_."

"He tries to be, for he sees that as regards you there are difficulties. He'd like to put his hand on some nice girl who'd be an antidote to his poison."

"Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't know what the devil he wants. The next is that I don't either--or what the devil I want myself. I only know what I don't want," Miriam kept on brightly and as if uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr. Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him's in a perpetual row with the other side. He's trying to serve God and Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is that you've definitely let Mammon go--it's the only decent way. That's my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Dear Mr. Sherringham has tremendous ambitions--tremendous _riguardi_, as we used to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every appearance, and all without making a scrap of a sacrifice. He expects others--me, for instance--to make all the sacrifices. _Merci_, much as I esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray at all into our bold, bad, downright Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making dashes across the border, and yet as soon as he gets here he's on pins and needles. There's another in whose position--if I were in it--I wouldn't look at the likes of us!"

"I don't know much about the matter," Nick brought out after some intent smudging, "but I've an idea Peter thinks he has made or at least is making sacrifices."

"So much the better--you must encourage him, you must help him."

"I don't know what my daughter's talking about," Mrs. Rooth contributed--"she's much too paradoxical for my plain mind. But there's one way to encourage Mr. Sherringham--there's one way to help him; and perhaps it won't be a worse way for a gentleman of your good nature that it will help me at the same time. Can't I look to you, dear Mr. Dormer, to see that he does come to the theatre to-night--that he doesn't feel himself obliged to stay away?"

"What danger is there of his staying away?" Nick asked.

"If he's bent on sacrifices that's a very good one to begin with," Miriam observed.

"That's the mad, bad way she talks to him--she has forbidden the dear unhappy gentleman the house!" her mother cried. "She brought it up to him just now at the door--before Miss Dormer: such very odd form! She pretends to impose her commands upon him."

"Oh he'll be there--we're going to dine together," said Nick. And when Miriam asked him what that had to do with it he went on: "Why we've arranged it; I'm going, and he won't let me go alone."

"You're going? I sent you no places," his sitter objected.

"Yes, but I've got one. Why didn't you, after all I've done for you?"

She beautifully thought of it. "Because I'm so good. No matter," she added, "if Mr. Sherringham comes I won't act."

"Won't you act for me?"

"She'll act like an angel," Mrs. Rooth protested. "She might do, she might be, anything in all the world; but she won't take common pains."

"Of one thing there's no doubt," said Miriam: "that compared with the rest of us--poor passionless creatures--mamma does know what she wants."

"And what's that?" Nick inquired, chalking on.

"She wants everything."

"Never, never--I'm much more humble," retorted the old woman; upon which her daughter requested her to give then to Mr. Dormer, who was a reasonable man and an excellent judge, a general idea of the scope of her desires.

As, however, Mrs. Rooth, sighing and deprecating, was not quick to acquit herself, the girl tried a short cut to the truth with the abrupt demand: "Do you believe for a single moment he'd marry me?"

"Why he has proposed to you--you've told me yourself--a dozen times."

"Proposed what to me?" Miriam rang out. "I've told you _that_ neither a dozen times nor once, because I've never understood. He has made wonderful speeches, but has never been serious."

"You told me he had been in the seventh heaven of devotion, especially that night we went to the foyer of the Francais," Mrs. Rooth insisted.

"Do you call the seventh heaven of devotion serious? He's in love with me, _je le veux bien_; he's so poisoned--Mr. Dormer vividly puts it--as to require a strong antidote; but he has never spoken to me as if he really expected me to listen to him, and he's the more of a gentleman from that fact. He knows we haven't a square foot of common ground--that a grasshopper can't set up a house with a fish. So he has taken care to say to me only more than he can possibly mean. That makes it stand just for nothing."

"Did he say more than he can possibly mean when he took formal leave of you yesterday--for ever and ever?" the old woman cried.

On which Nick re-enforced her. "And don't you call that--his taking formal leave--a sacrifice?"

"Oh he took it all back, his sacrifice, before he left the house."

"Then has that no meaning?" demanded Mrs. Rooth.

"None that I can make out," said her daughter.

"Ah I've no patience with you: you can be stupid when you will--you can be even that too!" the poor lady groaned.

"What mamma wishes me to understand and to practise is the particular way to be artful with Mr. Sherringham," said Miriam. "There are doubtless depths of wisdom and virtue in it. But I see only one art--that of being perfectly honest."

"I like to hear you talk--it makes you live, brings you out," Nick contentedly dropped. "And you sit beautifully still. All I want to say is please continue to do so: remain exactly as you are--it's rather important--for the next ten minutes."

"We're washing our dirty linen before you, but it's all right," the girl returned, "because it shows you what sort of people we are, and that's what you need to know. Don't make me vague and arranged and fine in this new view," she continued: "make me characteristic and real; make life, with all its horrid facts and truths, stick out of me. I wish you could put mother in too; make us live there side by side and tell our little story. 'The wonderful actress and her still more wonderful mamma'--don't you think that's an awfully good subject?"

Mrs. Rooth, at this, cried shame on her daughter's wanton humour, professing that she herself would never accept so much from Nick's good nature, and Miriam settled it that at any rate he was some day and in some way to do her mother, _really_ do her, and so make her, as one of the funniest persons that ever was, live on through the ages.

"She doesn't believe Mr. Sherringham wants to marry me any more than you do," the girl, taking up her dispute again after a moment, represented to Nick; "but she believes--how indeed can I tell you what she believes?--that I can work it so well, if you understand, that in the fulness of time I shall hold him in a vice. I'm to keep him along for the present, but not to listen to him, for if I listen to him I shall lose him. It's ingenious, it's complicated; but I daresay you follow me."

"Don't move--don't move," said Nick. "Pardon a poor clumsy beginner."

"No, I shall explain quietly. Somehow--here it's _very_ complicated and you mustn't lose the thread--I shall be an actress and make a tremendous lot of money, and somehow too (I suppose a little later) I shall become an ambassadress and be the favourite of courts. So you see it will all be delightful. Only I shall have to go very straight. Mamma reminds me of a story I once heard about the mother of a young lady who was in receipt of much civility from the pretender to a crown, which indeed he, and the young lady too, afterwards more or less wore. The old countess watched the course of events and gave her daughter the cleverest advice: '_Tiens bon, ma fille_, and you shall sit upon a throne.' Mamma wishes me to _tenir bon_--she apparently thinks there's a danger I mayn't--so that if I don't sit upon a throne I shall at least parade at the foot of one. And if before that, for ten years, I pile up the money, they'll forgive me the way I've made it. I should hope so, if I've _tenu bon_! Only ten years is a good while to hold out, isn't it? If it isn't Mr. Sherringham it will be some one else. Mr. Sherringham has the great merit of being a bird in the hand. I'm to keep him along, I'm to be still more diplomatic than even he can be."

Mrs. Rooth listened to her daughter with an air of assumed reprobation which melted, before the girl had done, into a diverted, complacent smile--the gratification of finding herself the proprietress of so much wit and irony and grace. Miriam's account of her mother's views was a scene of comedy, and there was instinctive art in the way she added touch to touch and made point upon point. She was so quiet, to oblige her painter, that only her fine lips moved--all her expression was in their charming utterance. Mrs. Rooth, after the first flutter of a less cynical spirit, consented to be sacrificed to an effect of the really high order she had now been educated to recognise; so that she scarce hesitated, when Miriam had ceased speaking, before she tittered out with the fondest indulgence: '_Comedienne_!' And she seemed to appeal to their companion. "Ain't she fascinating? That's the way she does for you!"

"It's rather cruel, isn't it," said Miriam, "to deprive people of the luxury of calling one an actress as they'd call one a liar? I represent, but I represent truly."

"Mr. Sherringham would marry you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness.

Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that."

"But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer."

"Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof."

"I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over."

Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say."

"Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth.

"Do you want me to leave it then?"

"Oh you can manage if you will!"

"The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through."

"But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?"

"I only know one," said Miriam.

At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street."

"Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour."

"I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?"

"Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous."

"We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth.

"How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly.

"Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you."

"Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly.

"Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act."

"I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother.

"It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously.

"Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it.

XLV

Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state.

This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts.

One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure.

After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?"

To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her."

"Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes."

He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one.

It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view.

The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come."

"To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick.

"Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards.

When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit.

On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card.

"That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!"

His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick.

"I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?"

"Give her a hand? I hated it."

"My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together."

"Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there."

"Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her."

"I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind."

Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?"

"I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice.

"I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him.

"She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'"

Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?"

"Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth:

"Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it."

"Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper.

XLVI

Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place.

He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her.

When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed.

She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again."

"What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her.

"I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path.

Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength."

"Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield.

"The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming."

She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them."

"You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply.

"Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?"

"Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed.

"The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!"

"Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me."

"Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?"

"It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me."

"And what's the whole thing?"

He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!"

"Well, I'm not. Go on."

"Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered.

"Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa.

"I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before."

"Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago."

"Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things."

She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?"

"The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you."

"You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?"

"They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want."

"The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile.

"I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on.

"How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?"

"Like you? I loathe you!"

"_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!"

"Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you."

Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?"

"Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe? I think I can do with it."

"Aren't you afraid of me?"

"Not a bit."

"Bravely said. How little you know me after all!" sighed the girl.

"I tell the truth," Peter ardently went on; "and you must do me the justice to admit that I've taken the time to dig deep into my feelings. I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've observed; in short I know what I mean and what I want. It isn't a thing to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me. I've put it on starvation diet, but that's no use--really, it's no use, Miriam," the young man declared with a ring that spoke enough of his sincerity. "It is no question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your trusting me. You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature. Just quietly marry me and I'll manage you."

"'Manage' me?" The girl's inflexion was droll; it made him change colour.

"I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any other way. The stage is great, no doubt, but the world's greater. It's a bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand. We'll go in for realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do the fables."

Miriam had listened attentively, but her face that could so show things showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity. "Pardon my saying it after your delightful tributes to my worth," she returned in a moment, "but I've never listened to anything quite so grandly unreal. You think so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless I _must_ utter a few shabby words of sense. I'm a magnificent creature on the stage--well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to see such evidence that I succeed. But off the stage, woe betide us both, I should lose all my advantages. The fact's so patent that it seems to me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you."

"Are you on the stage now, pray? Ah Miriam, if it weren't for the respect I owe you!" her companion wailed.

"If it weren't for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you're ready to face yourself."

"Without it--without it?" Sherringham cried. "Your own sophistry's infinitely worse than mine. I should like to see you without it for the fiftieth part of a second. What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards of the play-house and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence of your being. Your 'gift,' your genius, is yourself, and it's because it's yourself that I yearn for you. If it had been a thing you could leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never have looked at you a second time. Don't talk to me as if I were a simpleton--with your own false simplifications! You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that--not a vulgar shop with a turnstile that's open only once in the twenty-four hours. 'Without it,' verily!" Peter proceeded with a still, deep heat that kept down in a manner his rising scorn and exasperated passion. "Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your look!"

Miriam at this moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then after a few steps grandly swept round again. This evolution she performed--it was over in an instant--on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head admirably erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you."

"The other solution?"

"That _you_ should stay on the stage."

"I don't understand you," her friend gloomed.

"Stay on _my_ stage. Come off your own."

For a little he said nothing; then: "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?"

"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light."

"Continue to let you act--as my wife?" he appealed. "Is it a real condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?"

"I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them."

"Would you accept them _from_ me?" he demanded; "accept the manly, the professional sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects--of course I should have to do that--and simply become your appendage?"

She raised her arms for a prodigious fall. "My dear fellow, you invite me with the best conscience in the world to become yours."

"The cases are not equal. You'd make of me the husband of an actress. I should make of you the wife of an ambassador."

"The husband of an actress, _c'est bientot dit_, in that tone of scorn! If you're consistent," said Miriam, all lucid and hard, "it ought to be a proud position for you."

"What do you mean, if I'm consistent?"

"Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and the greatness of our mission? Haven't you almost come to blows with poor Gabriel Nash about it? What did all that mean if you won't face the first consequences of your theory? Either it was an enlightened conviction or it was an empty pretence. If you were only talking against time I'm glad to know it," she rolled out with a darkening eye. "The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre _is_ important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your services in an intelligent, indirect way. Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid, taking one devotion with another? If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!"

He had a long pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had never done. "You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life. I've no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me, and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs--which I judge it altogether probably will!"

"You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!" Miriam flashed. "It was the theatre brought you here--if it hadn't been for the theatre I never would have looked at you. It was in the name of the theatre you first made love to me; it's to the theatre you owe every advantage that, so far as I'm concerned, you possess."

"I seem to possess a great many!" poor Peter derisively groaned.

"You might avail yourself better of those you have! You make me angry, but I want to be fair," said the shining creature, "and I can't be unless you are. You're not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old friends and old memories for a selfish purpose."

"'Selfish purpose' is, in your own convenient idiom, _bientot dit_," Peter promptly answered. "I suppose you consider that if I truly esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of your genius. Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality--there are different kinds, aren't there? At any rate I've explained to you that I propose to deprive the world of nothing at all. You shall be celebrated, _allez_!"

"Vain words, vain words, my dear!" and she turned off again in her impatience. "I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool yourself with such twaddle you must be pretty bad."

"Yes, I'm pretty bad," he admitted, looking at her dismally. "What do you do with the declaration you made me the other day--the day I found my cousin here--that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who had risen high?"

Miriam thought of it. "I remember--the chaff about the honours, the orders, the stars and garters. My poor foolish friend, don't be so painfully literal. Don't you know a joke when you see it? It was to worry your cousin, wasn't it? But it didn't in the least succeed."

"Why should you wish to worry my cousin?"

"Because he's so provoking!" she instantly answered; after which she laughed as if for her falling too simply into the trap he had laid. "Surely, at all events, I had my freedom no less than I have it now. Pray what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you should I have gone? However, that has nothing to do with it. Say I did tell you that we might arrange it on the day you should come to me covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such a long time in advance? Where's the glory, please, and where are the medals?"

"Dearest girl, am I not going to strange parts--a capital promotion--next month," he insistently demanded, "and can't you trust me enough to believe I speak with a real appreciation of the facts (that I'm not lying to you in short) when I tell you I've my foot in the stirrup? The glory's dawning. _I_'m all right too."

"What you propose to me, then, is to accompany you _tout bonnement_ to your new post. What you propose to me is to pack up and start?"

"You put it in a nutshell." But Peter's smile was strained.

"You're touching--it has its charm. But you can't get anything in any of the Americas, you know. I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up in those parts--which are therefore 'strange' indeed. That's why the diplomatic body hate them all."

"They're on the way, they're on the way!"--he could only feverishly hammer. "The people here don't keep us long in disagreeable places unless we want to stay. There's one thing you can get anywhere if you've ability, and nowhere if you've not, and in the disagreeable places generally more than in the others; and that--since it's the element of the question we're discussing--is simply success. It's odious to be put on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had nothing to offer--to offer a person who has such glories of her own. I'm not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined, and the omens are on my side." Peter faltered a moment and then with a queer expression went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking, your glories are also still in the future." An exclamation at these words burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues, if they consider I've nothing to offer."