Robert Orange
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