‘But just now, I’m in a very awkward position about that,’ Logotheti continued. I cannot afford to sacrifice my reputation as a lucky fool, and yet I want you to think me a marvel of cleverness, good taste and perfection in every way.’
‘Is that all?’ asked Margaret, more and more amused.
‘Almost all. You see I know perfectly well that I cannot surprise you into falling in love with me —— Yes, she’s sound asleep! The ideal chaperon, isn’t she?’
‘I don’t know,’ Margaret answered lightly, and she glanced at Madame De Rosa, as if she thought of waking her.
‘Excuse me, you do; for if I were “some one else” you would be delighted that she should be asleep. But that’s not the question. As I cannot surprise you into — there’s no harm in saying it! — into loving me, I’m driven to use what they call the “arts of persuasion”! But in order to persuade, it’s necessary to inspire confidence. Do you understand?’
‘Vaguely!’
‘Have I succeeded at all?’ His voice changed suddenly as he asked the question.
‘I don’t know why I should distrust you, I’m sure,’ Margaret answered gravely. ‘You are certainly very outspoken,’ she continued more lightly, as if wishing to keep the conversation from growing serious. ‘In fact, I never knew anything like your frankness!’
‘I’m in earnest, and I don’t wish to leave the least doubt in your mind. You are the first woman I have ever met whom I wanted to marry, and you are likely to be the last. I’m not a boy and I know the world as you can never know it, even if you insist upon going on the stage. I’m not amazingly young, for I’m five-and-thirty, and I suppose I have had as large a share of what the world holds as most rich men. That is my position. Until I met you, I thought I had really had everything. When I knew you I found that I had never had the only thing worth having at all.’
He spoke quietly, without the least affectation of feeling, or the smallest apparent attempt to make an impression upon her; but it was impossible not to believe that he was speaking the truth. Margaret was silent, and looked steadily at an imaginary point in the distance.
‘So far,’ he said, in the same tone, ‘I have always got what I wanted. I don’t mean to say,’ he continued quickly, as she made a movement, ‘that I expected you to accept me when I asked you to marry me, at our second meeting. I was sure you would not. I merely put in a claim — that was all.’
Margaret turned a little and rested her elbow on the back of her chair, facing him.
‘And I told you there was some one else. Do you understand clearly? I am frank, too. I love another man, and he loves me.’
‘And you are going to be married, I suppose?’ said Logotheti, his lids contracting a very little.
‘I hope so. Some day.’
‘Ah! There is an obstacle. I see. A question of fortune, I daresay?’
‘No.’ Her tone was meant to discourage further questioning, and she moved in her seat and looked away again.
‘That man does not love you,’ Logotheti said. ‘If he did, nothing could hinder your marriage, since he knows that you are willing.’
‘There may be a reason you don’t understand,’ Margaret answered reluctantly.
‘A man who loves does not reason. A man who wants a certain woman wants nothing else, any more than a man who is dying of thirst can want anything but drink. He must have it or die, and nothing can keep him from it if he sees it.’
There was a shade of more energy in his tone now, though he still spoke quietly enough. Margaret was silent again, possibly because the same thought had crossed her own mind during the last few days, and even an hour ago, when she had met Lushington at the door. Since she was willing to marry him, in spite of his birth, could he be in earnest as long as he hesitated?
She wished that he might have said what Logotheti was saying now, instead of reasoning with her about a point of honour.
‘When people think themselves in love and hesitate,’ Logotheti continued, almost speaking her own thoughts aloud, ‘it is because something else in them is stronger than love, or quite as strong.’
‘There may be honour,’ said Margaret, defending Lushington in her mind, out of sheer loyalty.
‘There ought to be, sometimes, but it is more in the nature of real love to tear honour to pieces than to be torn in pieces for it. I’m not defending such things, I’m only stating a fact. More men have betrayed their country for love than have sacrificed love to save their country!’
‘That’s not a very noble view of love!’
‘If you were passionately in love with a man, should you like him to sacrifice you in order to save his country, especially if his country were not yours? If it were your own, you might be as patriotic as he and you would associate yourself with him in the salvation of your own people. But that would not be a fair case. The question is whether, in a matter that concerns him only and not yourself, you would set his honour higher than his love for you and let yourself be sacrificed, without feeling that if he had loved you as you would like to be loved he would forfeit his honour rather than give you up.’
‘That’s a dreadfully hard question to answer!’ Margaret smiled.
‘It is only hard to answer, because you are conscious of a convention called honour which man expects you to set above everything. Very good. A couple of thousand years hence there will be some other convention in its place called by another name; but love will be precisely the same passion that it is now, because it’s purely human and not subject to any conventions when it is real — any more than you can make the circulation of your blood conventional or the beating of your heart, or hunger, or thirst, or sleepiness, instead of being natural as they all are.’
‘You’re a materialist,’ said Margaret, finding nothing else to say.
‘I don’t think so, but whatever I am, I’m in earnest, and I don’t pretend to be anything but human.’
He stopped and looked straight into Margaret’s eyes; and somehow she did not turn away, for there was nothing in his that she was afraid to meet. Just then she would rather have tried to stare him out of countenance than look for one minute at the woman’s face in the picture, which he said was so like her. She did not remember that in all her life anything had so strangely disturbed her as that likeness. She had seen pictures and statues by the score in exhibitions and public places, which should have offended her maiden modesty far more. What was there in that one painting that could offend at all? A woman’s head thrown back, a woman’s hand pressing her hair to her breast — it ended there, and that was all; and what was that, compared with the acres of raw nudity that crowd the walls of the Salon every year.
Logotheti said that he was ‘human,’ and she felt it was true, in the sense that he was a ‘primitive,’ or an ‘elementary being,’ as some people would say. The fact that he had all the profound astuteness of the true Oriental did not conflict with this in the least. The astuteness of the Asiatic, and of the Greek of Asia, is an instinct like that of the wild animal; talent alone is ‘human’ in any true sense, but instinct is animal, even in men, whether it shows itself in matters of money-getting or matters of taste.
Yet somehow Margaret was beginning to be attracted by the man. He had never shown the least lack of respect, or of what Mrs. Rushmore would have called ‘refinement,’ and he had done nothing which even distantly resembled taking a liberty. He spoke quietly, and even gently, and his eyes did not gloat upon her face and figure as some men’s eyes did. Even as to the picture, he had not led her to see it, for she had gone up to it herself, drawn to it against her will, and he had only told the truth in saying that it was like her. Yet he was very much in love with her, she was sure, and most of the men she had met would not have behaved as well as he did, under the rather unusual circumstances. For little Madame De Rosa had been sleeping so soundly that she might as well not have been in the room at all. Behind all he did and said, she felt his almost primitive sincerity, and the elementary strength of the
passion she had inspired. No woman can feel that and not be flattered, and few, being flattered by a man’s love, can resist the temptation to play with it.
Women are more alike than men are; some of the nature of the worst of them is latent in the very best, and in the very worst there are little treasures of gentleness and faith that can ransom the poor soul at last.
‘I am in earnest, indeed I am,’ Logotheti repeated, looking at Margaret still.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I am sure you are.’
There was something in her tone that acquiesced, that almost approved, and he felt that these were the first words of encouragement she had vouchsafed him.
A portentous yawn from Madame De Rosa made them both turn round. She was stretching herself like a cat when it wakes, and looking about her with blinking eyes, as if trying to remember where she was. Then she saw Margaret, smiled at her spasmodically, and yawned again.
‘I must have been asleep,’ she said, and she laughed rather foolishly.
‘Only for a few minutes,’ answered Logotheti in a reassuring tone.
Margaret rose and came up to her, followed by the Greek.
‘It’s most extraordinary!’ cried Madame De Rosa. ‘I never go to sleep like that! Do you think it could possibly have been the maraschino?’
‘No indeed!’ Logotheti laughed carelessly. ‘You were tired, after the rehearsal.’
He put the decanter back into the large liqueur case from which he had taken it, shut down the lid, locked it and put the key in his pocket. Madame De Rosa watched him in silence, but Margaret paid no attention to what he was doing, for she was accustomed to see Mrs. Rushmore do the same thing. The taste of servants for liqueur and cigars is quite irreproachable; they always take the best there is.
A few minutes later the three were on their way to Versailles, and before long Logotheti put Margaret down at Mrs. Rushmore’s gate, starting to take Madame De Rosa back to Paris, as soon as the girl had gone in. Neither of them said much on the way, and the motor stopped again in the Boulevard Malesherbes. Madame De Rosa thanked Logotheti, with an odd little smile of intelligence.
‘Take care!’ she said, as they parted, and her beady little black eyes looked sharply at him.
‘Why?’ he asked, with perfect calm, but his lids were slightly contracted.
Madame De Rosa shook her finger at him, laughed and ran in, leaving him standing on the pavement.
CHAPTER XI
GREAT SINGERS AND, generally, all good singers, are perfectly healthy animals with solid nerves, in which respect they differ from other artists, with hardly an exception. They have good appetites, they sleep soundly, they are not oppressed by morbid anticipations of failure nor by the horrible reaction that follows a great artistic effort of any kind except singing. Without a large gift of calm physical strength they could not possibly do the physical work required of them, and as they possess the gift they have also the characteristics that go with it and help to preserve it.
It does not follow that they have no feelings; but it does follow that their feelings are natural and healthy, when those of other musicians are apt to be frightfully morbid. A great deal of nonsense has been thought and written about the famous Malibran, because Alfred de Musset was moved to write of her as if she were a consumptive and devoured by the flame of genius. Malibran was a genius, but she was no more consumptive than Hercules. She died of internal injuries caused by a fall from a horse.
Margaret Donne, when she was about to go on the stage as Margarita da Cordova, was a perfectly normal young woman; which does not mean that she felt no anxiety about her approaching début, but only that her actual diffidence as to the result did not keep her awake or spoil her appetite, though it made her rather more quiet and thoughtful than usual, because so very much depended on success.
At least, she had thought so when Logotheti had set her down at the gate. Five minutes later that aspect of the matter had changed. Mrs. Rushmore met her at the door of the morning room and gathered her in with a large embrace.
‘My dear child!’ cried the good lady. ‘My dear child!’
This was indefinite, but Margaret felt that something more was coming, of a nature which Mrs. Rushmore considered fortunate in the extreme, and in a short time she had learned the news, but with no mention of Logotheti’s name.
Six months earlier Margaret would have rejoiced at her good fortune. Yesterday she might still have hesitated about keeping the engagement she had signed with Schreiermeyer; but between yesterday and to-day there was her first rehearsal, there was the echo of that little round of real applause from fellow-artists, there was the sound of her own voice, high and true, singing ‘Anges pures’; and there was the smell of the stage, with its indescribable attraction. To have gone back now would have been to gainsay every instinct and every aspiration she felt. She told Mrs. Rushmore this, as quietly as she could.
‘You’re quite mad,’ said Mrs. Rushmore. ‘You may say what you please. I maintain that you are quite mad.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Margaret answered without a smile. ‘I began by wishing to do it to earn my living, if I could, but as it turns out, I have a great voice. I believe I have one of the great voices of the day. I’m born to sing, and I should sing if you told me I had millions. I feel it now, and I am not boasting in the least. Ask Schreiermeyer, if you like.’
‘Who is that person with the queer name?’ inquired Mrs. Rushmore severely.
‘He’s one of the big managers — the one who has engaged me.’
‘Engaged fiddlesticks!’ commented Mrs. Rushmore, with contempt. ‘I say you are quite mad. If not, how do you account for your wishing to go on the stage?’
Margaret was thinking how she could account for it, when Mrs. Rushmore went on.
‘I’ll have a specialist out this afternoon to look at you,’ she said. ‘You’re not sane. I wonder who the best man is.’
The last sentence was spoken in an undertone of reflection.
‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Margaret emphatically, and adding to the emphasis by taking off her hat and throwing her head back, shaking it a little as if she wished her hair were down.
Mrs. Rushmore turned upon her with the moral dignity of five generations of Puritan ancestors.
‘Do you mean to say that after all I’ve done to get you this money, you are going to give me up to be an actress?’ she demanded with scorn. ‘That you’re going to give up your best friends, and your position as a lady, and the chance of making a respectable marriage, not to mention your immortal soul, just for the pleasure of showing yourself every night half-dressed to every commercial traveller in Europe? It’s disgraceful. I don’t care what you say. You’re insane. You shan’t do it!’
At this view of the case Margaret’s forehead flushed a little.
‘You talk as if I were going to be a music-hall singer,’ she said.
‘That’s where you’ll end!’ retorted Mrs. Rushmore, without the slightest regard for facts. ‘That’s where they all end! There, or in the divorce courts — or both! It’s the same thing!’ she concluded triumphantly.
‘I never heard a divorce court compared to a music-hall,’ observed Margaret.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ answered Mrs. Rushmore angrily. ‘Don’t take me up at every word! Contradicting isn’t reasoning. Anybody can contradict.’
‘And besides,’ continued Margaret, growing cooler as the other grew warm, ‘one cannot be divorced till one has been married.’
‘Oh, you’ll marry soon enough!’ cried Mrs. Rushmore, infuriated by her calm. ‘You’ll marry an adventurer with dyed moustaches and a sham title, who’ll steal your money and beat you! And though I am your dear mother’s best friend, Margaret, I’m bound to say that it will serve you right. It’s useless to deny it. It will serve you right.’
‘It would certainly serve me right if I married the individual with the dyed moustaches,’ said Margaret, smiling in spite of herself.
‘I’m glad
you agree with me at last. It shows that you’re not so perfectly mad as you seemed. If you had gone on as you were talking at first I should certainly have had a mad doctor to examine you. As it is, I don’t believe you’re fit to have all that money. You mean well, I daresay. But you have no sense. None at all.’
Margaret laughed and took the opportunity of the lull in the battle to escape to her own room. A moment later Mrs. Rushmore followed her and knocked at the door.
‘I’m sure you’ve had nothing to eat all day,’ she called out anxiously, before Margaret could answer.
Margaret opened and put her head out, to explain that she had lunched, but she did not say where.
‘Oh, very well!’ answered Mrs. Rushmore, unwilling to show that her anger had subsided so soon. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’
Like most Anglo-Saxons, she vaguely connected regular meals with morality.
When Margaret was alone she realised that she was more disturbed by Lushington’s unexpected appearance at Logotheti’s door than she had thought it possible to be. At the time, she had been surprised to see him and a little hurt by his manner, but she had attributed the latter to his natural shyness. Now that she could think quietly about the meeting, she remembered his eyes and the look of cold resentment she had seen in them for the first time since she had known him. He had no right to be angry with her for lunching with Logotheti, she was quite sure. He had parted from her, giving her to understand that they were to meet as little as possible in future. How could he possibly claim to criticise her actions after that? A few days ago, she would have married him, if he had not insisted that it was impossible. She was not sure that she would marry him now, if he came back. He had looked as if he meant to interfere in her life, after refusing to share it. No woman will tolerate that.
Yet she was disturbed, and a little sad, now that the day was over. Logotheti had found words for a thought that had passed through her mind, it was true; if Lushington loved her, how could he make an obstacle of what she had been so ready to overlook? The Greek’s direct speeches had appealed to her, while he had been at her side. But now, she wished with all her heart that Lushington would appear to ask her questions, and let her answer them. She had a most unreasonable impression that she had somehow angered him, and wronged herself in his eyes. She would not ask herself whether she loved him still, or whether she had really loved him at all, but she longed to see him. He had said that he was leaving again in the evening, but perhaps he would think better of it and come out to see her. She even thought of writing to him, for she knew his London address. He lived in Bolton Street, Piccadilly, and she remembered his telling her that his windows looked upon a blank brick wall opposite, in which he sought inspiration and sometimes found it. Sometimes, he had said, he saw her face there.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1117