Prince Fortunatus, William Black [pdf e book reader .txt] 📗

better to do. The rehearsals of the under-studies begin on Monday--but I'll see you before then and let you know all about it. You won't mind my running away?--I'm on in the first scene. There is Mrs. Grey waiting for you--you must go and get something to eat--and when you come back, call at the stage-door, and you'll find an envelope waiting for you, with two places in it--the dress circle, if it can be managed, for I want you to be some distance away from the orchestra. Good-bye, Nina!"

She held his hand for a moment.

"Leo, I thank you," she said, regarding him with her dark eyes; and then he smiled and waved another farewell to her as he disappeared; and she was left to make her way with her patient chaperon out of this great, hollow, portentous building, that was now resounding with mysterious clankings and calls.

And it was from a couple of seats in the back of the dress-circle that Mrs. Grey and her young charge heard the comedy-opera of "The Squire's Daughter;" and Lionel knew they were there; and no doubt he sang his best--for, if Nina had been showing off what she could do in the morning, why should he not show off now, amid all these added glories of picturesque costumes and surroundings? Nina was in an extraordinary state of excitement, which she was unable altogether to conceal. Mrs. Grey could hear the little, muttered exclamations in Italian; she could see how intently that expressive face followed the progress of the piece, reflecting its every movement, as it were; she caught a glimpse of tears on the long, dark lashes when Lionel was singing, with impassioned fervor, his love-lorn serenade; and then the next moment she was astonished by the vehemence of the girl's delight when the vast house thundered forth its applause--indeed, Nina herself was clapping her hands furiously, to join in the universal roar of a recall--she was laughing with joy--she appeared to have gone mad. Then, at the end of the second act, she said, quickly,

"Mrs. Grey, can I send to him a note?--is there letter-paper?"

"Well, my dear, if we go into the refreshment-room and have a cup of tea, perhaps one of the young ladies could give us a sheet of writing-paper."

And thus it was that Lionel, when he was leaving the theatre that night, found a neatly folded little note awaiting him. He was in a considerable hurry; for he had to go home and dress and get off to a crush in Grosvenor Square, where he hoped to find Lady Adela Cunyngham, her sisters, and Miss Georgie Lestrange (there was some talk of an immediate presentation of the little pastoral comedy), so that he had only time to glance over Nina's nervously pencilled scrawl. Thus it ran:

"Leo, it is magnificent, it is splendid, you are a true artist;
to-morrow I write to Pandiani, he will be overjoyed as I am. But
Miss Burgoyne--no, no, no--she is not artist at all--she is
negligent of her part, of the others in the scene--she puts up her
fan and talks to you from behind it--why you allow that?--it is
insult to the public! She believes not her part and makes all the
rest false. What a shame to you, Leo; but your splendid voice, your
fine timbre, carries everything! Bravo, my Leo! It is a great
trionf, brilliant, beautiful, and Nina is proud of her friend.
Good-night from

"NINA."

As Lionel was spinning along Piccadilly in his swift hansom, it occurred to him that if Nina were going to join the "Squire's Daughter" company, it might be just as well for her not to have any preconceived antipathy against Miss Burgoyne. For Miss Burgoyne was an important person at the New Theatre.


CHAPTER IV.


COUNTRY AND TOWN.

On this Sunday morning, when all the good people had gone to church, there was no sign of life on these far-stretching Winstead Downs. The yellow roads intersecting the undulations of black-and-golden gorse were undisturbed by even a solitary tramp; so that Lionel Moore and his friend Mangan, as they idly walked along, seemed to be the sole possessors of the spacious landscape. It was a beautiful morning, warm and clear and sunny; a southerly breeze stirred the adjacent elms into a noise as of the sea, caused the chestnuts to wave their great branches bearing thousands of milky minarets, and sent waves of shadows across the silken gray-green of a field of rye. There was a windmill on a distant height, its long arms motionless. A strip of Scotch firs stood black and near at one portion of the horizon; but elsewhere the successive lines of wood and hill faded away into the south, becoming of a paler and paler hue until they disappeared in a silvery mist. The air was sweet with the resinous scent of the furze. In short, it was a perfect day in early June, on a wide, untenanted, high-lying Surrey common.

And Maurice Mangan, in his aimless, desultory fashion, was inveighing against the vanity of the life led by certain classes in the great Babylon out of which he had just haled his rather unwilling friend; and describing their mad and frantic efforts to wrest themselves free of the demon ennui; and their ceaseless, eager clamor for hurry and excitement, lest, in some unguarded moment of silence, their souls should speak.

"It is quite a fallacy," he was saying, as he walked carelessly onwards, his head thrown forward a little, his hands clasped behind his back, his stick trailing after him, "it is altogether a fallacy to talk of the 'complaining millions of men' who 'darken in labor and pain.' It is the hard-working millions of mankind who are the happiest; their constant labor brings content; the riddle of the painful earth doesn't vex them--they have no leisure; they don't fear the hour of sleep--they welcome it. It is the rich, who find time drag remorselessly on their hands, who have desperately to invent occupations and a whirl of amusements, who keep pursuing shadows they can never lay hold of, who are really in a piteous case; and I suppose you take credit to yourself, Linn, my boy, that you are one of the distractions that help them to lighten the unbearable weariness of their life. Well," he continued, in his rambling way, "it isn't quite what I had looked forward to; I had looked forward to something different for you. I can remember, when we used to have our long Sunday walks in those days, what splendid ambitions you had for yourself, and how you were all burning to begin--the organist of Winstead Church was to produce his Hallelujah Chorus, and the nations were to listen; and the other night, when I was in your room at the theatre, when I saw you smearing your face and decking yourself out for exhibition before a lot of fashionable idlers, I could not help saying to myself, 'And this is what Linn Moore has come to!'"

"Yes, that is what Linn Moore has come to," the other said, with entire good-nature. "And what has Maurice Mangan come to? I can remember when Maurice Mangan was to be a great poet, a great metaphysician, a great--I don't know what. Winstead was far too small a place for him; he was to go up and conquer London, and do great and wonderful things. And what is he now?--a reporter of the gabble of the House of Commons."

"I suppose I am a failure," said this tall, thin, contemplative-looking man, who spoke quite dispassionately of himself, just as he spoke with a transparent honesty and simplicity of his friend. "But at least I have kept myself to myself. I haven't sold myself over to the Moloch of fashion--"

"Oh, your dislike of fashionable people is a mere bundle of prejudice!" Lionel cried. "The truth is, Maurice, you don't know those fashionable people you seem to despise so heartily. If you did, you would discover that they had the ordinary human qualities of other people--only that they are better educated and more courteous and pleasant in manner. Then their benevolence--if you knew how much they give away in charity--"

"Benevolence!" Mangan broke in, impatiently. "What is benevolence? It is generally nothing more or less than an expression of your own satisfaction with yourself. You are stuffed with food and wine; your purse is gorged; 'here's a handful of sovereigns for you, you poor devil crouching at the corner!' What merit is in that? Do you call that a virtue? But where charity really becomes a heroism, Linn, is when a poor, suffering, neuralgic woman, without any impulse from abundance of health or abundance of comfort, sets laboriously to work to do what she can for her fellow-creatures. Then that is something to regard--that is something to admire--"

Lionel burst out laughing.

"A very pretty description of Francie Wright!" he cried. "Francie a poor, suffering, wretched woman--because she happened to have a touch of neuralgia the last Sunday you were down here! There's very little of the poor and suffering about Francie; she's as contented and merry a lass as you'd find anywhere."

Mangan was silent for a second or two; and then he said, with a little hesitation,

"Didn't you tell me Miss Wright had not been up yet to see 'The Squire's Daughter?'"

"No, she has not," Lionel answered, lightly. "I don't know whether you have been influencing her, Maurice, or whether you have picked up some of her highly superior prejudices; anyhow, I rather fancy she doesn't quite approve of the theatre--I mean, I don't think she approves of the New Theatre, for she'd go to any other one fast enough, I suppose, if you could only get her away from her sick children. But not the New Theatre, apparently. Perhaps she doesn't care to see me making myself a motley to the view."

"She has a great regard for you, Linn. I wouldn't call her opinions prejudices," Mangan said--but with the curious diffidence he displayed whenever he spoke of Lionel's cousin.

"Oh, Francie should have lived in the fifteenth century--she would have been a follower of Savonarola," Lionel said, with a laugh. "She's far too exalted for these present days."

"Well, Linn," said his friend, "I'm glad you know at least one person who has some notion of duty and self-sacrifice, who has some fineness of perception and some standard of conduct and aim to go by. Why, those people you associate so much with now seem to have but one pursuit--the pursuit of pleasure, the gratification of every selfish whim; they seem to have no consciousness of the mystery surrounding life--of the fact that they themselves are inexplicable phantoms whose very existence might make them pause and wonder and question. No, it is the amassing of wealth, and the expending of it, that is all sufficient. I used to wonder why God should have chosen the Jews, of all the nations of the earth, for the revelation that there was something nobler than the acquisition of riches; but I suppose it was because no race ever needed it so much. And what new revelation--what new message is coming to the multitudes here in England who are living in a paradise of sensual gratification, blinded, besotted, their world a sort of gorgeous pig-stye--"

"Oh, that's all right," Lionel said, cheerfully. "Octavius Quirk has settled all that. The cure for everything is to be a blowing of the whole social fabric to bits. Then we're going to begin again all over;