Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  It was a love-letter, at least in part, such as a man might have written a hundred years ago — not such as men write nowadays, thought Margaret; certainly not such as Mr. Barker would write — or could. But she was glad he had written; and written so, for it was like him, who was utterly unlike any one else. The letter had come in the morning while Clémentine was dressing her, and she laid it on her writing-desk. But when the maid was gone, she read it once again, sitting by her window, and when she had done she unconsciously held it in her hand and rested her cheek against it. A man kisses a letter received from the woman he loves, but a woman rarely does. She thinks when he is away that she would hardly kiss him, were he present, much less will she so honour his handwriting. But when he himself comes the colour of things is changed. Nevertheless, Margaret put the folded letter in her bosom and wore it there unseen all through that day; and when Mr. Barker came to offer to take her to drive she said she would not go, making some libellous remark about the weather, which was exceeding glad and sunshiny in spite of her refusal to face it. And Mr. Barker, seeing that he was less welcome than usual, went away, for he was mortally afraid of annoying her.

  Margaret was debating within herself whether she should answer, and if so, what she should say. In truth, it was not easy. She felt herself unable to write in the way he did, had she wished to. Besides, there was that feminine feeling still lurking in her heart, which said, “Do not trust him till he comes back.” It seemed to her it must be so easy to write like that — and yet, she had not thought so at the first reading. But she loved him, not yet as she would some day, but still she loved, and it was her first love, as it was his.

  She had settled herself in the hotel for the present, and to make it more like home — like her pretty home at Baden — she had ordered a few plants and growing flowers, very simple and inexpensive, for she felt herself terribly pinched, although she had not yet begun actually to feel the restrictions laid on her by her financial troubles. When Barker was gone, she amused herself with picking off the dried leaves and brushing away the little cobwebs and spiders that always accumulate about growing things. In the midst of this occupation she made up her mind, and rang the bell.

  “Vladimir, I am not at home,” she said solemnly, and the gray-haired, gray-whiskered functionary bowed in acknowledgment of the fact, which was far from evident. When he was gone she sat down to her desk and wrote to Dr. Claudius. She wrote rapidly in her large hand, and before long she had covered four pages of notepaper. Then she read it over, and tore it up. The word “dear” occurred once too often for her taste. Again the white fingers flew rapidly along the page, but soon she stopped.

  “That is too utterly frigid,” she said half aloud, with a smile. Then she tried again.

  “DEAR DR. CLAUDIUS — So many thanks for your charming letter, which I received this morning. Tell me a great deal more, please, and write at once. Tell me everything you do and say and see, for I want to feel just as though you were here to talk everything over.

  “Mr. Barker has been here a good deal lately, and the other day he told me a story I did not like. But I forgave him, for he seemed so penitent. Please burn my letters.

  “It is very cold and disagreeable, and I really half wish I were in Europe. Europe is much pleasanter. I have not read a word of Spencer since you left, but I have thought a great deal about what you said the last time we did any work together.

  “Let me know positively when you are coming back, and let it be as soon as possible, for I must see you. I am going to see Salvini, in Othello, to-night, with Miss Skeat. He sent me a box, in memory of a little dinner years ago, and I expect him to call. He did call, but I could not see him.

  “I cannot write any more, for it is dinner-time. Thanks, dear, for your loving letter. It was sweet of you to post it the same day, for it caught the steamer.

  — In tearing haste, yours, M.

  “P.S. — Answer all my questions, please.”

  There was an indistinctness about the last word; it might have been “your,” or “yours.” The “tearing haste” resolved itself into ringing the bell to know what time it was, for Margaret had banished the hideous hotel clock from the room. On finding it was yet early, she sat down in a deep chair, and warmed her toes at the small wood fire, which was just enough to be enjoyable and not enough to be hot. It was now the beginning of October, for Claudius’s letter, begun on the 15th of September, had not been posted until the 21st, and had been a long time on the way. She wondered when he would get the letter she had just written. It was not much of a letter, but she remembered the last paragraph, and thought it was quite affectionate enough. As for Claudius, when he received it he was as much delighted as though it had been six times as long and a hundred times more expansive. “Thanks, dear, for your loving letter,” — that phrase alone acknowledged everything, accepted everything, and sanctioned everything.

  In the evening, as she had said in writing to the Doctor, she went with Miss Skeat and sat in the front box of the theatre, which the great actor had placed at her disposal. The play was Othello. Mr. Barker had ascertained that she was going, and had accordingly procured himself a seat in the front of the orchestra. He endeavoured to catch a look from Margaret all through the first part of the performance, but she was too entirely absorbed in the tragedy to notice him. At length, in the interval before the last act, Mr. Barker took courage, and, leaving his chair, threaded his way out of the lines of seats to the entrance. Then he presented himself at the door of the Countess’s box.

  “May I come in for a little while?” he inquired with an affectation of doubt and delicacy that was unnatural to him.

  “Certainly,” said Margaret indifferently, but smiling a little withal.

  “I have ventured to bring you some marrons glacés,” said Barker, when he was seated, producing at the same time a neat bonbonnière in the shape of a turban. “I thought they would remind you of Baden. You used to be very fond of them.”

  “Thanks,” said she, “I am still.” And she took one. The curtain rose, and Barker was obliged to be silent, much against his will. Margaret immediately became absorbed in the doings on the stage. She had witnessed that terrible last act twenty times before, but she never wearied of it. Neither would she have consented to see it acted by any other than the great Italian. Whatever be the merits of the play, there can be no question as to its supremacy of horror in the hands of Salvini. To us of the latter half of this century it appears to stand alone; it seems as if there could never have been such a scene or such an actor in the history of the drama. Horrible — yes! beyond all description, but, being horrible, of a depth of horror unrealised before. Perhaps no one who has not lived in the East can understand that such a character as Salvini’s Othello is a possible, living reality. It is certain that American audiences, even while giving their admiration, withhold their belief. They go to see Othello, that they may shudder luxuriously at the sight of so much suffering; for it is the moral suffering of the Moor that most impresses an intelligent beholder, but it is doubtful whether Americans or English, who have not lived in Southern or Eastern lands, are capable of appreciating that the character is drawn from the life.

  The great criticism to which all modern tragedy, and a great deal of modern drama, are open is the undue and illegitimate use of horror. Horror is not terror. They are two entirely distinct affections. A man hurled from a desperate precipice, in the living act to fall, is properly an object of terror, sudden and quaking. But the same man, reduced to a mangled mass of lifeless humanity, broken to pieces, and ghastly with the gaping of dead wounds — the same man, when his last leap is over and hope is fled, is an object of horror, and as such would not in early times have been regarded as a legitimate subject for artistic representation, either on the stage or in the plastic or pictorial arts.

  It may be that in earlier ages, when men were personally familiar with the horrors of a barbarous ethical system, while at the same time they had the culture and refinement
belonging to a high development of æsthetic civilisation, the presentation of a great terror immediately suggested the concomitant horror; and suggested it so vividly that the visible definition of the result — the bloodshed, the agony, and the death-rattle — would have produced an impression too dreadful to be associated with any pleasure to the beholder. There was no curiosity to behold violent death among a people accustomed to see it often enough in the course of their lives, and not yet brutalised into a love of blood for its own sake. The Romans presented an example of the latter state; they loved horror so well that they demanded real horror and real victims. And that is the state of the populations of England and America at the present day. Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law, there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts. Not the “cultured” classes — some of them would be ashamed, and some would really feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain — but the masses would go, and would pay handsomely for the sport; and, moreover, if they once tasted blood they would be strong enough to legislate in favour of tasting more. It is not to the discredit of the Anglo-Saxon race that it loves savage sports. The blood is naturally fierce, and has not been cowed by the tyranny endured by European races. There have been more free men under England’s worst tyrants than under France’s most liberal kings.

  But, failing gladiators and wild beasts, the people must have horrors on the stage, in literature, in art, and, above all, in the daily press. Shakspere knew that, and Michelangelo, who is the Shakspere of brush and chisel, knew it also, as those two unrivalled men seem to have known everything else. And so when Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment, and Shakspere wrote Othello (for instance), they both made use of horror in a way the Greeks would not have tolerated. Since we no longer see daily enacted before us scenes of murder, torture, and public execution, our curiosity makes us desire to see those scenes represented as accurately as possible. The Greeks, in their tragedies, did their slaughter behind the scenes, and occasionally the cries of the supposed victims were heard. But theatre-goers of to-day would feel cheated if the last act of Othello were left to their imagination. When Salvini thrusts the crooked knife into his throat, with that ghastly sound of death that one never forgets, the modern spectator would not understand what the death-rattle meant, did he not see the action that accompanies it.

  “It is too realistic,” said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it was over, and he was helping Margaret with her silken wrappings.

  “It is not realistic,” said she, “it is real. It may be an unhealthy excitement, but if we are to have it, it is the most perfect of its kind.”

  “It is very horrible,” said Miss Skeat; and they drove away.

  Margaret would not stay to see the great man after the curtain fell. The disillusion of such a meeting is too great to be pleasurable. Othello is dead, and the idea of meeting Othello in the flesh ten minutes later, smiling and triumphant, is a death-blow to that very reality which Margaret so much enjoyed. Besides, she wanted to be alone with her own thoughts, which were not entirely confined to the stage, that night. Writing to Claudius had brought him vividly into her life again, and she had caught herself more than once during the evening wondering how her fair Northern lover would have acted in Othello’s place. Whether, when the furious general takes Iago by the throat in his wrath, the Swede’s grip would have relaxed so easily on one who should dare to whisper a breath against the Countess Margaret. She so lived in the thought for a moment that her whole face glowed in the shade of the box, and her dark eyes shot out fire. Ah me! Margaret, will he come back to stand by your side and face the world for you? Who knows. Men are deceivers ever, says the old song.

  Home through the long streets, lighted with the pale electric flame that gives so deathly a tinge to everything that comes within the circling of its discolour; home to her rooms with the pleasant little fire smouldering on the hearth, and flowers — Barker’s flowers — scenting the room; home to the cares of Clémentine, to lean back with half-closed eyes, thinking, while the deft French fingers uncoil and smooth and coil again the jet-black tresses; home to the luxury of sleep unbroken by ill ease of body, though visited by the dreams of a far-away lover — dreams not always hopeful, but ever sweet; home to a hotel! Can a hostelry be dignified with that great name? Yes. Wherever we are at rest and at peace, wherever the thought of love or dream of lover visits us, wherever we look forward to meeting that lover again — that is home. For since the cold steel-tipped fingers of science have crushed space into a nut-shell, and since the deep-mouthed capacious present has swallowed time out of sight, there is no landmark left but love, no hour but the hour of loving, no home but where our lover is.

  The little god who has survived ages of sword-play and centuries of peace-time, survives also science the leveller, and death the destroyer.

  And in the night, when all are asleep, and the chimes are muffled with the thick darkness, and the wings of the dream-spirits caress the air, then the little Red Mouse comes out and meditates on all these things, and wonders how it is that men can think there is any originality in their lives or persons or doings. The body may have changed a little, men may have grown stronger and fairer, as some say, or weaker and more puny, as others would have it, but the soul of man is even as it was from the beginning.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  A MONTH HAS passed since Margaret went to see Othello, and New York is beginning to wake to its winter round of amusements. There are dinners and dances and much leaving of little pasteboard chips with names and addresses.

  Mr. Barker had made progress, in his own opinion, since the day when he so unfortunately roused Margaret’s anger by his story. He bethought him one day that Claudius’s influence had begun with the reading of books, and he determined to try something of the kind himself. He was no scholar as Claudius was, but he knew men who were. He cultivated the acquaintance of Mr. Horace Bellingham, and spent studious hours in ascertaining the names of quaint and curious volumes, which he spared no expense in procuring. He read books he had never heard of before, and then talked about them to Margaret; and when he hit upon anything she did not know he was swift to bring it to her, and sometimes she would even listen while he read a few pages aloud.

  Margaret encouraged Barker in this new fancy unconsciously enough, for she thought it an admirable thing that a man whose whole life was devoted to business pursuits should develop a taste for letters; and when he had broken the ice on the sea of literature she talked more freely with him than she had ever done before. It was not Barker who interested her, but the books he brought, which were indeed rare and beautiful. He, on the other hand, quick to assimilate any knowledge that might be of use to him, and cautious of exposing the weaker points of his ignorance, succeeded in producing an impression of considerable learning, so that by and by he began to think he was taking Claudius’s place in her daily pursuits, as he hoped to take it in her heart.

  Meanwhile no one had heard from the Doctor, for his correspondence with Margaret was unknown to Barker, and the latter began to cherish a hope that, after all, there might be overwhelming difficulties in the way of proving Claudius’s right to the estate. He had more than once talked over the matter with Mr. Screw, and they came to the conclusion that this silence was prognostic of the Doctor’s defeat. Screw thought it probable that, had Claudius immediately obtained from Heidelberg the necessary papers, he would have sent a triumphant telegram over the cable, announcing his return at the shortest possible interval. But the time was long. It was now the first week in November and nearly two months had passed since he had sailed. Mr. Barker had avoided speaking of him to the Countess, at first because he did not wish to recall him to her memory, and later because he observed that she never mentioned the Doctor’s name. Barker had inquired of Mr. Bellingham whether he knew anything of his friend’s movements, to which Uncle H
orace had replied, with a grim laugh, that he had quite enough to do with taking care of distinguished foreigners when they were in New York, without looking after them when they had gone elsewhere.

  One evening before dinner Vladimir brought Margaret a telegram. She was seated by the fire as usual and Miss Skeat, who had been reading aloud until it grew too dark, was by her side warming her thin hands, which always looked cold, and bending forward towards the fire as she listened to Margaret’s somewhat random remarks about the book in hand. Margaret had long since talked with Miss Skeat about her disturbed affairs, and concerning the prospect that was before her of being comparatively poor. And Miss Skeat, in her high-bred old-fashioned way, had laid her hand gently on the Countess’s arm in token of sympathy.

  “Dear Countess,” she had said, “please remember that it will not make any difference to me, and that I will never leave you. Poverty is not a new thing to me, my dear.” The tears came into Margaret’s eyes as she pressed the elder lady’s hand in silence. These passages of feeling were rare between them, but they understood each other, for all that. And now Margaret was speaking despondently of the future. A few days before she had made up her mind at last to write the necessary letters to Russia, and she had now despatched them on their errand. Not that she had any real hope of bettering things, but a visit from Nicholas had roused her to the fact that it was a duty she owed to him as well as to herself to endeavour to recover what was possible of her jointure.