Works of Grant Allen, page 456
Never in my life did I make such a dramatic success — at least, never again till I called on Mr. Burminster. Many of the girls crowded round and listened with open eyes: “It was just like the theatre.” The more they applauded, the more vigorously I acted, and the more desperately I made love in the person of Romeo. An armchair with a table-cover typified the balcony; I set doll Romeo below, and myself leaned over, impassioned, as Juliet, to answer him. With my hand pressed hard on my heart, Italian-wise, as if to still its throbbings, I discoursed of love in abbreviated Shakespeare. The girls listened, spellbound. Their interest charmed me. I had never before played to such a cultivated audience. Ethel Moriarty declared aloud it was “heavenly.”
I had just uttered the words —
“Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face;
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night” —
when the door opened, and Miss Westmacott sailed in.
There was a sound of scurrying. All the other girls sprang back to their seats with awestruck countenances; but I, being a confirmed rebel, kept my state in my armchair balcony, and declaimed my speech to the end, as if unconscious of my superior’s presence. Miss Westmacott drew herself up, let her chin drop, and gazed at me severely. I have intimated that she was a placid person, and she did not allow my audacity to discompose her. She merely waited till I had finished, her Roman nose becoming more and more Roman, with a massive air of judicial silence. As I reached the words —
“Which the dark night hath so discoverèd” —
she confronted me calmly; her under lip was like flabby india-rubber.
“Rosalba,” she said, in a quite unruffled voice, which, nevertheless, somehow conveyed the impression of the sternest disapprobation, “where did you get that fancy dress?”
“It isn’t a fancy dress, Miss Westmacott,” I answered. “It’s my Italian clothes; the beauteous scarf veiling an Indian beauty. I always wore these things when I was touring.”
“And those dolls?” she continued, raising Romeo by one leg, and holding him out gingerly upside down, between finger and thumb, by his toes, as if she expected him to bite her.
“He doesn’t sting,” I interposed. “He’s not a scorpion. Those are my dramatis persona. I always use them when I give entertainments. I was giving one now. Thou overheard’st, ere I was ‘ware, my true love’s passion.”
Miss Westmacott never lost her temper. That was partly temperament, partly acquired habit of self-repression. She eyed me with a large and compassionate disapprobation. I was but a poor Foreigner!— “Go to your own room,” she said, in the same slow, measured tone as ever, “and take off these — these garments. Really, your appearance is quite extraordinary. Also, remove these toys” — she pointed with her ruler to Mercutio, who lay huddled in a heap on the ground—” and lock them up in your box again. As soon as you are clothed and in your right mind, come to me in the drawing-room.”
I think from their faces the other girls thought Miss Westmacott meant to flay me alive, like St. Bartholomew. But when I went to the drawing-room, I found her just largely and compassionately reproachful. Allowances must be made for benighted Foreigners. She knitted at a loose white woollen shawl while she spoke to me — a deliberate little device, the solemn effect of which I did not fail to notice. Her bone needles went click, click, click together, to point each sentence.
“Your guardian has placed you here, Rosalba, not merely in order that you may learn” — click, click, click— “but also that you may enjoy the advantage of association with English Ladies.” She laid a stress on the last two words which seemed designed to impress upon me the double fact that I had not the good fortune to be born English, and that I was not a lady. I believe I admire English ladies as amply as they deserve; but I could never see that they differed wholly in kind from other ladies elsewhere. However, I bowed submission. “You have had great early disadvantages, which we regret and for which we pity you; but your guardian wishes to give you the opportunity” — click, click, click— “for repairing them. I should have thought” — this with a gentle mixture of massive severity and persuasive suggestiveness— “that your own good taste and good sense (for I know you have intelligence) would have deterred you” — click, click, click—” from alluding before your fellow-pupils — young ladies from cultivated English homes — to your unfortunate childhood and your wild foreign experiences.” She put an accent on the word foreign which showed she regarded it as practically synonymous with disreputable. “I should have thought you would have taken care to conceal from them these unhappy episodes in your past. You have not done so. I must ask you now, for your own sake, and in justice to your guardian, as well as for the sake of the other girls confided to me, not to repeat these undesirable performances. Will you promise me never again, while you remain here, to wear that — that garb, or to produce those—”
She paused for a word, so I suggested “Fantoccini.”
“Those objectionable puppets?”
I hesitated. “I don’t want to promise,” I answered.
“Why not?” Click, click, click, very clearly.
“Because — if I promise, I shall keep my word. And I don’t want to leave off my performances altogether.”
The unexpected answer was counted to me for righteousness. Miss Westmacott paused in her knitting and regarded me for a moment with mollified eyes. “Mr. Stodmarsh and Mrs. Mallory would wish it,” she said at last in her massive way.
My colour deepened. She had applied judicial torture. “If Mrs. Mallory wishes it — I promise,” I answered.
She looked me through and through in her calm, well-bred way. “That will do,” she murmured. “You can go back now to the other girls. I accept your promise. Rosalba, I trust you.”
I felt that was harder than if she had scolded and punished me.
But from that day forth, I was an immense favourite with the other girls. Though I was not allowed to produce my puppets, or wear my native dress, I gave my little plays and told my stories without them. And my vivid southern manner delighted my audience. What to an Italian child came by nature as mere spontaneous gesture seemed to my English schoolfellows the most intense and exciting dramatic action. The Brownie was thenceforth on the best of terms with them.
CHAPTER XIV
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
“HOW about lessons?” you ask. Oh, lessons gave me very little trouble.
You see, I had so long been unused to learning that school came to me as a novelty: I plied my books diligently; for I went to subjects fresh, where to the other girls they were stale and hackneyed. Besides, the languages caused me no difficulty. I had French and Italian by ear already; and with their aid I found Latin easy; indeed I had spelt it out a little when I went to church, for I could follow a great deal of the prayer-book by guesswork. Arithmetic I hated — there is nothing picturesque in arithmetic; but I circumvented it. As for history and geography, well — they were so interesting! It was funny to find out that Julius Cæsar was a real person, and that Bagdad was not an airy nothing in Fairyland, but a town on the Tigris! I was constantly making such fresh discoveries, which delighted me in the same way as it delighted King George’s minister to learn that Cape Breton was an island. If M. Jourdain was charmed to hear he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, I was equally charmed to hear that I had been drinking in history and geography when I supposed myself to be reading poetic fancies by Shakespeare and Dante. Virgil, it seemed, was an actual poet, not a myth of the Inferno; and Pisa and Bruges were actual cities!
“Naturally quick, but undisciplined,” was Miss Westmacott’s favourite report. “Takes pains where she is interested, and none where she is not.” It shocked Her Imperturbability when I tore open my first report — addressed to “John Stodmarsh, Esq.” — before her very eyes, and made the audible comment upon it, “No profit comes where is no pleasure ta’en; in short, sir, study what you most affect.”
“That child,” she said in her slow way to my natural enemy, the mathematical mistress, “has read more than is good for her.”
When John spoke to me once in the garden of the need for learning mathematics (which I hated), I tried to be submissive.
“You must think of your after life,” he said.
“We must not sacrifice the present to the future,” I answered sweetly. “It is too often done.”
He looked at me with an odd look. “You mean the future to the present,” he said, puzzled.
“Oh no; that would be platitude,” I cried; “and I am never a platitudinarian. So many people forget that the present is all we have; the future” — I blew a dandelion-clock— “it may go pop, like that! I try to remember our duty to the present.”
He did not quite understand, but he smiled pleasantly.
Sundays I was often allowed, by my guardian’s leave, to spend at Mrs. Mallory’s. In winter, she was at her flat in town; in summer, at Patchingham. One Saturday afternoon, in my first term, I went to stop with her in her London home; and the moment I arrived I tore up-stairs, as was my wont, to slip off my horrid, insipid English clothes, and resume my beloved Italian costume. It was so much warmer in colour; it gratified my barbaric taste for bright hues; item, it suited my complexion and my cast of features better. As soon as I had changed, and was fit to look at, I darted out into the studio, where my beloved Mrs. Mallory was never tired of making little sketches of me.
She was standing at her easel, the dear thing, adding delicate and almost imperceptible little strokes to the polished surface of a marble floor in her foreground. Her brush touched the canvas as if it were thistle-down. But she was not alone. A young man in a brown Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers leant his elbows on a pedestal at her side, criticising or admiring her dainty brush-work. The picture represented a dark Roman girl in classical costume, who had flung herself with careless grace on the floor of an atrium, near a bronze statue. “The reflection is perfect,” the young man said, “quite perfect; the varying tints in the marble, and in the reflected flesh of the foot on the parti-coloured squares, are as good as they can be made. But — just a touch of green there for local colour, in the shadow, between the arch of the instep and the floor — what do you think? Dare I venture?”
“Why, Rosalba, my child,” Mrs. Mallory exclaimed, turning round and perceiving me as I stood on tiptoe. “You’re early! How delightful!”
“Miss Westmacott let me go an hour before my time,” I answered, jumping at her. “It ought to have been Latin; but to-morrow being the First Sunday in Advent, she made it religious instruction instead; and I’m off religion, by my guardian’s orders.”
The young man turned too. For a second he stared at me, astonished. Then he advanced, with his right hand extended. “Have you forgotten me?” he asked, with a bright smile, all his face aglow with it.
John Stodmarsh did not remember me when we met. The man in brown did. That struck a keynote. One likes to be remembered.
“Forgotten you!” I answered, taking his hand like an old friend. “Not at all! Your name is Arthur Wingham.”
“You don’t mean to say you recollect it!”
“Perfectly. I have always remembered you; also Mr. Stodmarsh.”
“So this is the girl that Stodmarsh—”
“Has adopted as his ward,” Mrs. Mallory interjected before he could commit himself to anything more precise. “Yes, this is my Rosalba!”
“He has taken me — on approbation,” I put in saucily.
“But he never told me it was you,” the man in brown went on, standing off to stare at me.
“He did not know,” I answered. “I did not quite like to recall to him now that he had seen me before on the Monti Berici.”
“Why not?” he asked curiously.
I hesitated. “Well, you know, he said Berici,” I answered at last, with some reluctance, “and I thought” — I pursed my lips—” I thought it might annoy him to feel that I perhaps remembered it. You see, he has such consciousness of his own dignity.”
Arthur Wingham glanced at Mrs. Mallory. “The young lady possesses tact,” he murmured, “as well as observation of character.”
“Observation!” Mrs. Mallory answered in the same half-aside. “A blade of Damascus!”
“But you will not tell Mr. Stodmarsh I have seen him before?” I put in anxiously.
“Tell him? not for worlds,” he answered. I was too young to know then that this was a bad beginning to a friendship, for a girl who was to be John Stodmarsh’s wife. Nothing is more dangerous than a secret shared together; a secret shared together, no matter how small, against the man or woman one is meant to marry — well, there can be but one of two ends to it.
“Where did you see her?” Mrs. Mallory asked, laying down her palette and drawing me towards her.
Arthur Wingham told her in brief, in his own way, the story of our first meeting at the Madonna del Monte.
The smell of the wine-vats rose again to my nostrils. It brought tears into my eyes to be thus carried back to home and my father.
“How odd you should both remember!” Mrs. Mallory exclaimed, seating me on the couch.
He looked down at me once more, and pointed with his left hand demonstratively. “Not at all,” he answered, moving one finger of his right down through the air in sinuous curves, as if drawing my figure. “The astonishing point is — that Stodmarsh should have forgotten. But the dear fellow lacks only one thing — a soul.... In a Government office, the omission is unimportant.”
“Arthur! You are unjust to him! And besides, he is my cousin.”
“Yes. He has that good point But you have been at my rooms and looked over my sketches; I wonder that when you saw her first — those illusive eyes, that erratic hair — you did not recollect having seen something like her.”
“She did strike me as strangely familiar, but I could not think why. I set it down to her being the type of the ideal Italian — the higher and more ethereal Italian, don’t you know, with poetry, feeling, fancy.”
“My dear Mrs. Mallory!” I cried, hiding my blushes in her soft pashmina gown. “You conspire to spoil me! What would Miss Westmacott say if only she could hear you? It is well that I have her candid opinion constantly turned on like a cold douche, to counteract your flow of flattery.”
“Stop a minute!” Arthur Wingham cried, seizing his crush felt hat. “I’ll just run round to my rooms, Linda, and see if you can reconstruct something.” And he darted away round the corner to his own studio.
“He is very handsome,” I said, as he disappeared down the corridor. “How nice of him to remember me!”
“Quite nice.” She coughed a little cough. “But still, Rosalba dear, he spoke the truth; it is not easy to forget you.”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Mallory! Recollect I am a waif of the highway, unused to gentle treatment.” My eyes were dim again.
“Then you have arrears to make up, dear. I am not afraid of spoiling you. Miss Westmacott will serve to redress the balance.”
In a minute or two Arthur Wingham dashed in again, bearing in his hand a much-worn sketch-book. He opened it to a certain page, and displayed it to Mrs. Mallory. It contained two or three sketches of a tripping little Italian child, half monkey, half fairy, clad in an obtrusively national costume, and engaged in the wildest and most impossible gambols. One of the pages he turned over in haste and tried to conceal from me; but I insisted upon seeing it. It showed two children pushing one another, and bore the inscription, “Naow, then, Marier-Ann, if you do that agin, I shall gao stright in an’ tell your mother!”
“Did I look like that then?” I cried, laughing.
“Yes; you looked like that then,” he answered, eyeing it sideways and comparing past with present. “But already, even then, there was a wistfulness in your big eyes, a questioning wonder in your expression, a strange touch of fancy in the twitch of your eager mouth, that I have never forgotten. I have put you since that time in more than one picture from those hasty notes. — We do not always find faces, Linda, that look straight through space into the Infinite beyond it.”
“You are not to be alone in spoiling me, it seems, Mrs. Mallory,” I said, growing crimson.
But Mrs. Mallory answered nothing; for she was hurriedly jotting down, on a spare bit of cardboard, the red flush through my brown cheek before it paled and faded.
Arthur Wingham turned once more to my portrait on the easel. “It is not quite right, Linda,” he said, gazing from me to it. “Not quite magical enough, somehow. A spark more of the gipsy fire in that left eye — dare I?” He scarce touched it with a brush, and suddenly, as if Cinderella’s fairy godmother had been at work, a strange light gleamed in the pupil.
Mrs. Mallory looked on with a longing delight “How is it, Arthur,” she cried, “that I am a modest success, while you—”
“Are a failure?”
“In popularity — yes; and yet, one stroke—”
He mused and fetched a little sigh. “It is because you paint faultlessly the things that people want, while I grope blindly, with fierce graspings and stumblings, after the things people do not care for.”
Arthur Wingham dined at Mrs. Mallory’s that Saturday night. He had not been invited, and we had one ptarmigan between us; but I was glad he stopped. He seemed to me there like an old acquaintance. On Sunday morning he came round early, and insisted on escorting me to the Pro-Cathedral. The Mass in G was glorious. When we returned, we found John Stodmarsh awaiting us — close-shaven, immaculate; he lunched, by arrangement, at Mrs. Mallory’s every Sunday when I was there. He took my hand with cold politeness and asked where we had been, but seemed vexed when I told him. However, he muttered apologetically to Mrs. Mallory, “Of course, she will outgrow it.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Mallory answered, with a gentle smile. She was the broadest-minded of Anglicans.
“She has too much sense not to see through their rubbish in the long run,” he answered, growing warm. I think John Stodmarsh believed I had too much sense not to conform in the end to all his opinions. Sensible people were those who thought sensibly — as he did.
