Part 28

And he knew that in no more direct fashion would she ever accept aid from him. Were she driven from one opera house to the next by the jealousies of the most jealous of all artists, unable to obtain a permanent position, she could support herself by teaching; no doubt, too, she had a small private fortune, and the villa was hers. But that was not the point. She was a great and a very ambitious artist. The voice was the shortest-lived of all Nature’s gifts, and the voices devoted to the music of Wagner had an even shorter lease than the nightingales in the throats of the Violettas and Lucias. Something must be done at once. On Monday he would go up to London and ask advice of Hans Richter, who had conducted Wagner concerts with distinguished success, and whom Styr had met many times in Bayreuth and Munich. It must be the dream of his life to conduct a season of Wagner opera in London, and this could be made possible only if the experiment were privately financed. At this time Covent Garden was not a company; there was no board of directors to consult. It could be rented by any one that had the money to put up, so long as its traditions were not violated. Ordham knew that with Richter behind him, it would be possible to hire the opera house for a season—the season, were it not already disposed of; and that Styr could obtain a leave of absence either through the influence of her friends, or by flying into a rage and goading the directors to break her contract. He could rely upon many of his aristocratic and all of his artistic friends to spread the fame of Styr before her arrival, make her the fashion, fill the house for the first night with all that prided themselves upon being fad tasters, avid for new sensations. Let them be manipulated to that extent and Styr would do the rest. The English might not be able to appreciate the wonder of her voice, might yawn miserably during those everlasting recitatives, but they would succumb to her personality, her magic and magnetism; for to these rare qualities no race is more susceptible; and the mere sweetness of her voice would enchant them no matter what their lack of artistic instinct.

And then! A triumph in London, and New York, already nibbling at Wagner, would give him at least a season’s hearing and demand the Styr as a matter of course. Her fortune and greater fame would be assured. Ordham, as he strode up and down the room, had never felt so enthusiastic, so energetic, so inspired. He could give to England what Ludwig II had given to central Europe. He had never been sensible, save when Styr had deliberately played upon him, of wishing to be of any use to the world; but in these exalted moments, rattling those thin sheets of foreign paper (a link in themselves), he felt his first real impulse toward accomplishment, to stand for something, experienced the real awakening of that gift for leadership which has raised him so high among men to-day, but which, so far, had only manifested itself occasionally in an obstinate determination to have his own way. He felt his power, saw his future more clearly than he had ever done before.

His mind flashed to the woman who had always roused his higher and better impulses, while other women sought to make a Lucien de Rubempré of him; to-night she had transmitted to him out of her own stupendous energies—Good God! what had they not accomplished?—a tingling shock. She sent him his first opportunity to use his own energies, to taste the delights of power. It was something of the rapture of the creative artist that he felt on that never-to-be-forgotten night, for although no composition took form in his quickened brain, the genius of his personality came to life, the fires of his own peculiar gifts crackled in a mind created for the world’s use. As he finally made his way through the silent house to his room, he admitted with delight that he owed those moments of temperamental rapture, this awakening of his vital forces, which reached far beyond introducing Styr and Wagner to England, to the mate of that secret part of him the world would never suspect. His wife’s door was ajar, but he did not even glance at it. He made haste to get into bed, and, with the functional regularity of youth, was asleep in five minutes.

XLVII A FAIRY COMET

Mabel was not a congenital liar. She had, indeed, displayed a fairly truthful record until John Ordham came into her life. When little, she had been duly punished for telling the fibs natural to childhood; and, during the years that followed, those faculties with which the social unit adapts itself automatically, and economically, to the exigencies of the moment, had in her case been put to little strain, indulged young beauty that she was. She was a good girl in all ways, and after turning on the fountain of those beautiful crystal tears, or terrifying the parent whose solitary passion she was, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself, vowing never to repeat the offence. As she grew older, she broke this vow less and less often.

But the long coaching of her mother and Lady Bridgminster had wrought its inevitable work. She was merely one more victim of the disabilities of her sex. She could not go frankly forth and woo the man to whom she had immediately surrendered her heart; she must scheme, and wait, blow hot and cold, demoralize her character generally. She had no cleverness save in female craft, but she was vaguely conscious during those weeks when Ordham wooed her with a silken rope round his neck and a padded prod at his back, that the crystalline quality of her girl’s mind was permanently clouding.

She had assumed, of course, that after marriage her influence would be paramount. Had not momma ruled poppa? Was not the ascendency of the American woman one of the truisms of the century? She rode gayly into the breakers of generalities oblivious of the rocks beneath, whose other name is facts.

The result of that triumphant little confession in the library had given her self-confidence a profound shock. As time went on she found her husband more and more of a mystery, caught blinding glimpses of wants far beyond her comprehension, of dissimilar tastes, of an almost world-old brain, and, in spite of his youthful ardours, of an inner impenetrable reserve. She had almost despised him at times during the courtship, so easy had been the game, so completely had he been deluded. But Ordham was not a man to be despised for more than a moment at a time, and he had won her complete respect on that fatal day in the library when he had given her to understand that when people were so simple as to lay their cards on the table no will but his would prevail. But after the lachrymal attack was over (genuine enough upon this occasion), she had reflected that the cleverest of men would be no match for three clever women if they kept their cards out of sight. She had lost no time calling to her aid Lady Bridgminster and her mother, and a new campaign of gentle manipulation began. Live on the Continent she would not; where one could never drink water and the food ruined one’s complexion, where she must be taken in to dinner by an attaché, instead of by a prince of the blood, where she must play fourth fiddle to old frumps with frizzed fronts and bugles and not a tenth part of her income. Not she. Jackie could have all the career he wanted in England.

She was enchanted at the idea of having a baby, not only because she possessed all those charming feminine instincts which would have made her an estimable woman had circumstances permitted, but because it gratified her to feel one of a line, to be the indispensable connecting link between one Bridgminster and the next. It is only the well-born American that is deeply impressed with the antiquity of English blood, of a descent in which figure historic names; for all these represent what they feel they have just missed, and to capture them for their issue is a triumph far more subtle than that experienced by the American who belongs to the aristocracy of wealth alone. Not that Mabel was capable of any such analysis, but her mother was; the instinct was in her, however, and it is doubtful if she would have adored Ordham as blindly and devoutly as she did had it not been for that long record of his family in Burke, and the magnificence of Ordham Castle. But, to be sure, minus these causes, and he would not have been John Ordham.

Once more he was unconsciously demonstrating the inferiority of his sex when pitted against hers. But like many another, she forgot that there is a psychological statute of limitations, also that it is impossible to watch the manœuvres of an enemy whose existence is unknown. She was pouting in bed late on Sunday night, wondering if her husband intended to sit up until dawn again, almost hating the social triumphs that so oddly separated them, when the door between their rooms was pushed softly open and he entered.

She was lying in a mass of pale green satin and lace; her bedroom had been done over and looked like Undine’s bower. Her hair, spread over the shimmering counterpane, might have been the golden fleece. No more enchanting vision was ever presented to a young husband; but Ordham was suffering (slightly) from conscience, and the familiar picture did not appeal to him. He kissed her affectionately, asked her solicitously if she were shockingly tired, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I must not awaken you in the morning,” he remarked. “I thought it better to run the risk to-night—to tell you that I must go up to London for a few days. I have some business to attend to.”

“What? Business?” She sat up straight, and she was so astonished that grievance stood off. “You never had any business in your life. You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“But it is time I learned. I wish to consult my solicitors in regard to certain investments.”

“Well, I never!” She stared at him for a moment. Then she asked plaintively: “Am I not your wife? I expect to share all your worries, although I can’t imagine your condescending to have any.” She knew that he disliked direct questions, but there are moments when no woman can be diplomatic, and she finally asked him if that were his only reason for going up to London on the eve of another house party.

He had anticipated glittering spheres, which he would dutifully stanch, the while administering the lesson that he had not yielded a jot of his real liberty. But he answered promptly, looking straight into her surprised but unclouded eyes: “Yes, I have another reason. Quaritch has some rare books that I am to have a first look at.”

“We go up to London before long, now. Books will keep.”

“Not these, I am afraid. There are many in England quite as keen as I am on first editions.”

She explored those large ingenuous orbs. Hers was not a jealous nature, and she had been given ample opportunity to observe how little his devoted manner and challenging eyes meant, had often laughed at the girls who took him seriously. So the possibility of a feminine magnet in London she rejected with disdain, but a sensation of antagonism took possession of her. It angered her that she could not understand him better, that he never really deferred to her, that he must be eternally “managed.” Still more did it incense her that he was indifferently depriving himself of several days of her society. But she could think of no ruse to keep him at home unless she whipped up a storm, and against this indulgence she had been warned by the doctor. As for tears, better reserve them until the Continent threatened again. Much to his surprise, she lay back in her pillows and said in the grand manner:

“Nothing that I could say will hold you back if you have made up your mind to go. I never expect to have the slightest influence over you.”

“I wish you would not say such things!” He looked as uncomfortable as she intended he should feel. “How can you? I shall be gone only four days. Please do not make me feel a brute.”

“Four days will seem very long.”

She uttered these artistically simple words with a quiver of her little pink mouth, which was not altogether deliberate, for although she was determined not to be commonplace, those four days without her husband unrolled before her in an endless procession. He felt very contrite, and kissed her fondly; but he did not retreat from his purpose. The next night saw him in London, enjoying himself hugely at the theatre, from which he had been divorced for nearly three months. It so happened that there were a number of good plays on, and Hans Richter was out of town when he arrived. Mabel received long impassioned telegrams and brief impassioned notes, apologies and explanations that would have hoodwinked a wronged and suspicious wife; but the castle did not see him again for ten days. Then he was so charming, so repentant, so indignant at a cruel destiny, and so unfeignedly happy in being with his lovely little wife once more, that he was not only forgiven, but Mabel, in her joy at having him again after that dreary watch, was persuaded to move up to London a month earlier than she had intended.

XLVIII THE GREAT PRIZES

The hopes that rise insistent in the cold discouraging mind when the first shock and depression have run their course have their origin, no doubt, in the subterranean chambers of the brain; mean, when it is a case of outraged love, that the soul is continuing its eternal struggle for completion with another soul. These are immemorial rights, and do not endure disintegration and change every seven years.

Margarethe had passed through many phases, not only since the night she had heard of Ordham’s engagement, but since the beginning of her deliberate correspondence with him. As is commonly the case, she found more satisfaction in the writing of her own letters than in the reading of his; although that excited, hopeful, terrified, tremulous, forlorn waiting for the post was a new and astounding experience. Men, the cleverest of them, are indifferent letter writers, and Ordham was no exception. A woman lets her pen run on with a freedom and felicity which conscious art but intensifies, the while it exercises selection and restraint. But men are prone to say what they have to say in the fewest possible words, rather rejecting all subjects but the essential than wandering afield in search of others that might make their compositions interesting.

Although Styr, in a manner, enjoyed this correspondence even more deeply than her personal intercourse with the man who had strolled into her inner kingdom and taken possession (for it gave her a sense of greater intimacy, liberated her imagination), she was too wise to give alarm to his limited amount of masculine endurance by writing him twenty pages when she was artistically capable of packing news, gossip, personalities, disquisitions upon books, the opera, the drama, and politics, into ten. Nor, although she longed to write daily, did she gratify this new passion oftener than once a week; and even so, she cultivated a certain irregularity, that the assured appearance of a too familiar envelope on his morning tray might not in time inspire him with that nervous irritability which so often takes shape in ennui. Not for nothing had she been forced to accept man as her chief study before Wagner transposed her from life to art; but she hated these restraints, longed to be natural. She knew, however, that, given a man of Ordham’s temperament, only nature heightened by art could hold him, never nature unbridled and ingenuous.

Ordham’s disposition was so far from frank that although while within her magnetic radius he had been more confidential and revealing than he had ever been before, he could not shed his diplomatic shell with nothing but a sheet of paper before him, headed “Dear Countess Tann.” Moreover, with all his soul he hated letter writing, and only answered these fascinating epistles with a reasonable promptness for the sake of others to come. If she had tacitly agreed to write alone, he would have been completely happy. And she, of course, wanted a running picture of his daily life at Ordham, of the companies assembled there, of trivial but always interesting personalities and incidents. But he could as easily have written a book; the bare suggestion would have appalled him; and, while making his letters as short as decency would permit, he confined himself to a brief comment upon the literary and artistic people invited to the castle, music, and books—he sent her many new ones—and devoted the last page to herself, expressing his desire to see her again, and his regret that their summer had been all too short. Sometimes she smiled at these laborious epistles, and sometimes she flung them across the room and stamped her foot. She had to read them over and over to extract any comfort out of them; then, finally, she succeeded in reading between the lines, rewrote them, in short, as women will.

There were times when she intensely disliked him for his apostasy to herself, his weakness in being blindly steered into a commonplace attack of puppy love when he should have risen superior to the follies of youth and gone unscathed till thirty, then loved some one worthy of him. She hurled him from his pedestal and rolled him in the dirt, announcing that he belonged there, delighted with the sense of emancipation that permeated to her finger tips. Not even yet did her mind dwell upon the possibility of any closer union with him; she dreamed only of the insatiable mysterious immaterial tie; she indulged herself in attacks of bitterness, of furious regret that he had not so ordered his life that she might think of him always as the exceptional man, instead of seeing, against her will, a vision of a love-sick white-faced youth, idiotically in love with a pretty girl, then as a fatuous young husband complacent to all the selfish whims of his bride; drifting with her on a river of gold that threatened to rise and suffocate what energies he had. If he must be “managed,” she was the woman for this office, for she would have steered him to greater goals. She was a thorough woman, was Margarethe Styr, but her saving grace was that she knew it. When she laughed at herself, then was Ordham forgiven, excused, dusted off, and restored to his pedestal, his sovereignty in the realm of the ideal.

When there crept into his letters—after the return of his household to London—a tinge of sadness, deepening at times into melancholy, more than a hint of impatience at enforced inertia, at passing opportunities; when his polite desire to see her again began to vibrate with something like passion, then did she understand that not only was he tiring of his wife, but that her own letters, with their insidious but unremitting spur to his ambitions, were reaping the harvest she had planned. It was after one of these letters of his, longer than usual, more personal, asserting that could he but find a decent excuse, could he but exercise his freedom at this time without brutality, he would take the next train for Munich, that a voice seemed to cry through her brain: “Let him alone! Let him alone! In silence and absence men forget.” This spasm of conscience brought her face to face with a good many possible results that she had ignored; and as she really loved him and was fairly consistent in her desire to see him happy and great, she delayed her answer to this letter, half resolving to drop the correspondence.

Then, a week later, arrived a letter charged with a curious hotchpotch of anger and jubilance, an astonished sense of semi-defeat and almost royal triumph. He had not given her a hint of his scheme to organize a season of Wagner opera at Covent Garden, for, although hopeful at the first, he had met, upon his return to London, with so many objections and difficulties, so much ignorance, prejudice, and pharisaical folly, that he had at times despaired of attaining an object which opposition fanned into a passion. But, calling to his aid older and more influential men than himself, the last barrier had finally gone down, and although he could not hire the opera house for the season, owing to other contracts, he had succeeded in capturing it for five weeks by depositing, as a guarantee against failure, twenty thousand pounds with the committee he had formed. Of this guarantee he naturally made no mention to Styr, but had he been able to conceal the fact that the enterprise was his, a letter received in the same mail from the great conductor would have enlightened her.

She was infinitely touched. If resentments had lingered in her mind, they were swept out, and they never returned. She knew—who better than she?—what all this had meant to that indolent nature, steeped in self-indulgence. For the first time in his life he had really exerted himself, worked to accomplish an object, and not for himself, but for her. He wrote with enthusiasm of being the means of educating his country musically with her assistance, and there was no doubt that he assumed this responsibility in all sincerity, but he dwelt upon it too emphatically, in his desire to save her from any sense of obligation. The deeper tenderness of her nature was stirred; it was the first poignant sweetness in an affair that had already given her far more joy than sorrow, pleasure than disappointment. Moreover, there was a new and a very keen delight in the gratitude she was forced to render to this noble but torpid nature, which she had revealed to itself, to be the first object of his energies.

But she hesitated some time before she accepted the formal offer to sing in London from the first of May until the seventh of June. She vowed anew to spare Ordham the certain disaster of materializing their bond, and herself as well. But this offer arrived very opportunely in her affairs. The King came no more to Munich, summoned her no more to his castles; and although, owing to her popularity with the public, and the still potent shadow of Ludwig, the opera house cabal might not dare to compass her sudden dismissal, they contrived that she sing less and less, gave her the worst support of which that admirable company was capable. Their object, of course, was to wean the public by degrees, to insinuate that the Styr had grown capricious, indifferent to her once beloved Munich, was losing health and nursing her voice; to tickle the Bavarian love of variety with as many _Gasts_ as they could command, to press against her cold resistance until she lost control of her furious temper and flung her contract in the face of the _intendant_.