A Singer from the Sea Part 23

"Of course! I had all the preparatory work to do, getting you known--getting a hearing for you, in fact. Now the harvest is ripe, it is easy enough to get offers. You had better let me have a talk with Moss."

"I have signed all the necessary papers. I have accepted fifty pounds in advance. I will not--no--I will not break a letter of my promise for anyone."

"Then I shall have nothing to do with the affair. It is a swindle on Moss' part."

"No, it is not. He made me a fair offer; I, of my own free will and judgment, accepted it."

"Thirty pounds a week! What is that for a first-cla.s.s part?"

"It is a good salary. I can pay my expenses and buy my wardrobe out of it. You have Elizabeth's money. When it is done she will probably give you more. She ought to, as you preferred trusting to her." But though the words were laughingly said, they sprang from a root of bitterness.

In fact, Roland quickly discovered that those ten days he had so idly pa.s.sed at Burrell Court with his sister had been ten days of amazing growth in every direction to Denasia. She had wept when Roland so suddenly left her; wept at his want of faith in her, at his want of care for her, at his indifference to her weakness and poverty. But to sit still and cry was not the way of her cla.s.s. She had been accustomed to reflect, when trouble came, whether it could be helped or could not be helped. If the former, then it was "up and about it;"

if the latter, tears were useless, and to make the best of the irrevocable was the way of wisdom.

In an hour she had conquered the physical weakness which spoke by weeping. A suspicion of cruelty gave her the salutary stimulus of a lash; she sat upright and began to plan. The next day she went out, sold a bracelet, hired a cab, and went from one manager to another until she succeeded. Brought face to face with the question of work and wage, all the shrewd calculating instincts of a race of women accustomed to chaffer and bargain awoke within her. She sold her wares to good advantage, and she knew she had done so. Then a long-nascent distrust of Roland's business tact and ability sprang suddenly to vigorous life. She realised in a moment all the financial mistakes of the past winter. She resolved not to have them repeated.

The sea air soon restored all her vigour and her beauty. She gave herself to study and to practice with an industry often irritating to Roland. It reproached his own idleness and it deprived him of her company. He did indeed rehea.r.s.e his characters, and in a stealthy way he endeavoured to find a better engagement for Denasia. He was sure that if he were successful there would be no difficulty in inducing, or if necessary compelling, his wife to accept it. He could as easily have made Queen Victoria accept it. For with the inherited shrewdness of her cla.s.s she had also their integrity. She would have kept any engagement she made even if it had ruined her.

The winter was a profitable one, though not as happy as Denasia had hoped it would be. They had no debts and were able to indulge in many luxuries, and yet Roland was irritable, gloomy, and full of unpleasant reminiscences and comparisons. He thought it outrageous for Moss to refuse the payment of his wife's salary to him. And Denasia had a disagreeable habit of leaving a large portion of her income with the treasurer of the company, and then sending her costumer and other creditors to the theatre for payment. Indeed, she was developing an independence in money matters that was extremely annoying to Roland.

He felt that his applications to Elizabeth were perpetual offences to Denasia, and if he had been a thoughtful man he would have understood that this separation of their interests in financial matters was the precursor of a much wider and more dangerous one.

Roland had other unpleasant experiences to encounter. It seemed incredible that the handsome, witty, fascinating Mr. Tresham could possibly be a bore, and yet the authorities in various green-rooms either said so in plain English or made him aware of the fact through every other sense but hearing. He felt himself to be politely or sarcastically quizzed. Stars ignored him; meaner lights gave him a bare tolerance. A few inquired if his grand relatives had yet forgiven him. One or two affected to have heard he had an offer from Henry Irving, or some other histrionic luminary; in fact, he gradually was made to understand that Roland Tresham was by no means a name to conjure with.

He did not tell Denasia of these humiliations, and she believed that his chagrin and ill-temper arose from his continual disappointments.

He could get no chance worthy of his efforts for a trial of his new Shakespearian interpretations. He felt sure there was a coalition against him. "Let a man have a little more beauty or talent than the crowd, and the crowd are determined to ruin him, naturally," he said, and he believed his own dictum thoroughly. Toward the end of the season, however, he did obtain a hearing under what were undoubtedly favourable circ.u.mstances; and then the press was his enemy. And he knew positively that the adverse criticisms were the results of venality, or ignorance, or want of taste, or of that brutal conservatism which makes Englishmen suspicious of everything not endorsed by centuries of use and wont.

It may be easily seen how these personal irritations made an unhappy atmosphere in which to dwell. And Roland had another disappointment also which he hardly liked to admit to himself--Denasia was changing so rapidly. The society into which he himself had brought her forced the simple, trustful, ignorant girl into observations and calculations which lifted her unconsciously to a level, perhaps in some respects to a plane above her husband. She was naturally clever, and she learned how to dress herself, how to take care of herself, how to look out for her own interests. Roland had intended to dictate to her, and she began to smile at his dictations and to take her own way, which she charmingly declared was the only reasonable way for her to take.

During this interval Roland wrote often to Elizabeth. He wanted some one to complain to, and Elizabeth was the only person he knew who was willing to listen to his complaints. She perceived very early the little rift between husband and wife which might be bridged by love or might become an abyss in which love would be for ever lost. It must, however, be noted to her credit that she avoided any word likely to widen it. She did not like Denasia, but she had a controlling sense of honour. She had also a lofty ideal of the sacredness of the marriage tie. To have made trouble between a man and his wife would, in Elizabeth's opinion, have been as wicked a thing as to break into a church vestry and steal the sacramental silver. But she did sympathize with her brother, and advise him, and send him money. And naturally Denasia, who thought badly of Elizabeth, resented her interference in her life at all; so that there was usually a coolness between Roland and Denasia after the arrival of a letter from Burrell Court.

In truth, any letter from St. Penfer at this period of Denasia's life hurt her. She longed for her own people. She felt heart-sick for a word from them. In some moment of confidence or ill-temper, Roland had given his wife his own version of the visit to his mother-in-law. And whatever else he remembered or forgot, he was clear and positive about Joan's message to her daughter. She had broken her good father's life in two and her mother was sorry she had ever given her suck. Denasia knew her mother's pa.s.sionate nature, and she could understand that some powerful aggravation had made her speak so strongly, but the words, after all allowances, were terrible words. They haunted her in the midst of her professional excitements, and still more in the solitude of her frequently restless nights.

And if Joan had felt this a year ago, Denasia knew that she now felt much more bitterly; for in one of her letters to Roland Elizabeth had written freely of the pa.s.sionate anger of John Penelles when he learned that his daughter had become a public dancer. Indeed, Elizabeth affected to think it very cruel of Denasia to send to her old ignorant parents the ill.u.s.trated paper which contained her picture in the dance act. She thought Denasia's vanity had overstepped all bounds and become positive cruelty, etc., etc. And Denasia, in a pa.s.sion which matched any outbreak of her father's, vowed not only that she had never sent such a paper to St. Penfer, but that Elizabeth herself must have been the perpetrator of the cruelty, unless--and she then gave Roland a glance which made him wonder where his willing and obedient Denasia of former days had gone.

In all essential points this story was a false one. It was indeed true that some person had sent to the Penelles cottage a London paper, in which there was a large picture of Denasia and the admiral dancing the famous hornpipe. But the manner of its reception was matter of speculation only, and the speculative had founded their tale upon the known hastiness of John and Joan's tempers, without taking into consideration the presence of unknown influences.

As it happened, the pictured girl was received in the St. Penfer post-office during a storm. John had been called in the grey dawn to the life-boat, and Joan, in spite of wind and rain, went down to the beach with him. With a prayer in her heart, she saw him buckle on his buoyant armour and set his pale blue oar like lance athwart his rest, and then make straight out into the breakers that dashed and surged around. Joan saw the boat's swift forward leaping, its downward plunge into the trough of the sea, its perilous uplifting, its perpendicular rearing, its dread descent. And John felt its human reel and shudder, its desperate striving and leaping and plunging, and its sad submission when the waters half filled it and the quivering men clung for very life under the deluge pouring over them.

So for three hours John was face to face with awful death, and Joan on her knees praying for his safety, and John had but just got back to his home, and the cry of thanksgiving for her old dear's return was yet on Joan's lips, when the postman brought the fateful newspaper.

Fortunately they did not open it at once. Joan laid it carefully aside and brought on their belated breakfast. And as they ate it they talked of the lives that were lost and saved. Then John smoked his pipe, and Joan tidied up her house and sat down beside him with her knitting in her hands. Both their hearts were solemn and tender. John felt as if his life was a new gift to him; Joan, as if her husband's love had some miraculous sweetness never known before. They spoke seldom and softly, finding in their responsive silence a language beyond words.

It was, then, in this gentle mood that John reached to the shelf above his head and took down the paper. He opened it, and Denas in her pretty dancing dress, with her bare arms lifted above her head, looked her father full in the face. She was laughing; she was the incarnation of merriment and of consciously graceful, captivating vivacity. The miserable father was, however, fascinated; he gazed and gazed until his eyes overflowed, and his hands trembled, and the paper fell with a rustle to the floor.

Joan lifted it and looked at her husband. His eyes were shut, he was sobbing inwardly as punished children sob in sleep. She spoke to him, and he opened his eyes and pointed to the paper. Then Joan met the same well-beloved face. The mother's cheeks burned red and redder, her eyes flashed, she straightened out every crease, as if the pictured satin and lace had been real; and then turning to the printed page, she read aloud every word of adulation.

They had talked together of the men and women drowned within sight of land that morning, but here was their only child dancing in sight of eternal death, and they could not say a word to each other about her.

For it must be remembered that these simple, G.o.d-fearing fisher-folk had been strictly and straitly reared in a creed which regarded dancing as one of the deadly sins. They honestly believed that there was but a step between their darling and eternal death, and if she should take that step while dancing! To have known that she was on the s.h.i.+p which had just gone to pieces on the rocks would not have made them so heart-sick. Their very souls s.h.i.+vered as they thought of her.

As for John, he could find only those two words that spring instinctively to every soul in trouble, "O G.o.d!"

But he motioned Joan to take the paper away, and Joan took it into the room which was still called "Denas' room." She kissed the pictured face, the hair and eyes and mouth, the lifted arms, the slender throat. She could not bear to crush the paper together; she opened a drawer and laid it as gently within as if she had been putting her baby in its coffin. At this hour there was no anger in her heart; there was even a little motherly pride in her child's beauty and grace and cleverness. At this extremity of ill-doing she did not altogether blame Denas. She was certain that before Denas danced, some one had somehow persuaded the girl that it was not wicked to dance. "Denas do have principles," she said stiffly, "and the man do not live who can make her do wickedly if she do think it be wicked."

She looked with a sad affection around the little room. How lonely it was! Yes, it is the living who desert us that make lonely rooms, and not the dead. We know the dead will never come back, but oh, how long it seems to wait for the living! Month after month to keep the room ready for the one who does not come for our longing! Month after month to dress the bed and the table, and lay out the books they loved, and the little treasures that may tell they were unforgotten. Joan looked at the small dressing-table holding the sh.e.l.l box, and the satin pincus.h.i.+on, and the alabaster vase which Denas had once thought beautiful beyond price. The snowy quilt and pillows, the carefully kept floor and chairs, the clothing washed and laid with sprigs of lavender in the tidy drawers--oh, what poetry and eloquence of untiring, undespairing mother-love were in these things!

But this patient, loving pity for their erring child was an att.i.tude not easily supposable, and Denasia did not suppose it. She knew from Roland's report that her appearance as a public singer had caused her parents great sorrow and anger, and she could only imagine a still deeper anger when she added the sin of dancing to other causes of offence. But this alienation from her own people was the bitter drop in all her success and in all her pleasure. For now that the illusions and selfishness of her bride-days were past, the faithful home affection that never wounded and never deceived resumed its importance, and she longed for her father's kiss and her mother's breast.

But every day the day's work is to face, and Denasia's days were fully occupied by their obvious duties. So week after week and month after month wore on in alternations of hope and despair, happiness and vexation, loving and quarrelling. Roland certainly, with his discontent and abiding sense of wrong, threw a perpetual shadow over life. She did not even dare to take, with any show of pleasure, such poor satisfaction as her pa.s.sing fame awarded. A man may be jealous of the praise given to his own wife, and there were times when Roland could not understand Denasia's success and his own failure--bitter hours in which the poor girl felt that whether she pleased her audience or did not please them, her husband was sure to be offended and angry.

She was almost glad when, at the close of the season, the company disbanded and she was at liberty to retire. She had saved money and was resolved to resume her studies. There was at least nothing in that to irritate her husband, and she had a strong desire to improve her talent in every direction. One evening Roland entered their sitting-room in that hurry of hope and satisfaction once common enough to him, but of which he had shown little during the past winter.

Denasia looked up from her writing with a smile, to meet his smile.

"Denasia," he cried impulsively, "what do you think? We are going to America! The United States is the place for me. How soon can you be ready?"

"But, Roland? What?"

"It is true, dear. Whom are you writing to?"

"I was writing to Mr. Harrison and to madame. I want to know if they are going to Broadstairs this summer, for where they go I wish to go also; that is, if they can give me lessons."

"A waste of money, Denasia. I have had a long talk with some of the men who are here with the American company. Splendid fellows! They tell me that my Shakespearian ideas will set New York agog. New Yorkers give every one a fair hearing; at least 'there's nothing beats a trial!' That is a New York motto, and these people are sure I would have a fair trial there. And the country is so big! So big, Denasia, that the parts you know will last you for years. There is not a bit of need for you to study new songs and dances. Sing the old ones in new places. Why, you may travel thousands of miles in all directions--big cities everywhere, little ones scattered thick as blackberries on all the railroad routes, and railroad routes are spread like spider-webs all over the United States! That is the country for us! New York first of all, then Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake, San Francisco, New Orleans--oh, hundreds of cities! And money, my dear! Money for the picking up--that is, for the singing for."

"I do not believe a word of it, Roland. It is all talk. I am going to Broadstairs to spend the summer in study."

Roland looked a moment at the handsome, resolute woman who had resumed her writing, and he wondered how this Denasia had sprung from the sweetly obedient little maid he had once manipulated to his will with a look or a word. However, he could not spare her. It was not only her earnings he required; her beauty and talent gave him a kind of reflected importance, and he expected great things from their united efforts in the wonderful new world of which he had just begun to think.

So he set himself to win what it was evident he could not command, and, Denasia's womanly instincts being stronger than her artistic instincts, the husband conquered. The sweet words and kisses, the frank acknowledgment of his faults, the declaration that his whole future hung now on her support and interest in his American scheme, moved Denasia to concede where she felt sure she ought to have refused. But when a man finds all other arguments fail with a woman, he has only to throw himself upon her unselfishness. To prove it, she will ruin her own life. Denasia was sure she was going a wrong road, but then Roland asked her to take it for his sake, and to show her love for him she offered up her own hopes and desires, and offered them with smiles and kind words and an affected belief that the change might be as good for her reputation as for her husband's. She did indeed--as good women do a kindness--surrender herself entirely, and pretended that the surrender was her own desire and her husband's complaisance a thing he deserved praise for.

However, Roland's enthusiasms were undoubtedly partly contagious. Even Denasia, who had so often been deceived, was partly under their influence. His words had caught something of the vastness of the land of his hopes, and he talked so ambitiously and with so much certainty that the untravelled woman caught his fever once more. Then she also suffered the idea of America to fascinate her, and she permitted Roland to bring his new friends to see her, for she desired to be entirely possessed by the idea which was now to be the ruling motive of their lives. It was decided that they should sail about the middle of June. "We shall then have time to become familiar with the country, and we need not be in a hurry to decide about engagements. Hurry is such a mistake," said Roland with oracular wisdom. And Denasia hoped and smiled, and then turned away to hide the sudden frown and sigh.

For the heart is difficult to deceive, and Denasia's heart warned her morning, noon, and night. But to what purpose? Who heeds the warning from their higher selves? Though one rose from the dead to point out a fatal mistake, how many would heed the messenger? For when love says, "This is the way," wisdom, fate, death itself may speak in vain.

About a week before the voyage, Roland said one night: "I think now, Denasia, that we have everything packed, I shall run down to St.

Penfer and see my sister. I may never come back from America. Indeed, I do not think I shall ever want to come back, and I really ought to bid Elizabeth good-bye. She will doubtless also remember me in money matters, and in a strange country money is always a good friend. Is it not, dear? What do you think, Denasia?"

"I have been thinking a great deal of St. Penfer. My heart is like to break when I think of it. I do want to see my father and mother so much."

"You would only get a heart-break, my love. They would have no end of reproaches for you. I shall never forget your mother. Her temper was awful!"

"You must have said something awful to aggravate her, Roland. Mother has a quick temper, but it is also n.o.ble and generous. I do want to see her. I must see her once more. Let us go together."

"To St. Penfer? What a foolish idea! You would only give yourself a wretched memory to carry through your whole life."

"Never mind! I want to go to St. Penfer."

"How can you? I cannot take you to Burrell Court, Denasia."

"I would not put my foot inside Burrell Court."

"Then if I went there and you went to your father's house, that would look very bad. People would say all kinds of wicked things."

"We could stop together at the Black Lion. From there you could call upon Elizabeth. From there I could go to my father and mother. Even if they should be cruel to me, I want to see them. I want to see them. If father should strike me--well, I deserve it. I will kiss his hand for the blow! That is how I feel, Roland."