‘It’s a thousand mercies she’s no more to do than she has,’ muttered Miss Garth, overhearing him. ‘As things are, the people can’t well turn her head with applause. She’s out of the play in the second act – that’s one comfort!’
No well-regulated mind ever draws its inferences in a hurry; Miss Garth’s mind was well regulated; therefore, logically speaking, Miss Garth ought to have been superior to the weakness of rushing at conclusions. She had committed that error, nevertheless, under present circumstances. In plainer terms, the consoling reflection which had just occurred to her, assumed that the play had by this time survived all its disasters, and entered on its long-deferred career of success. The play had done nothing of the sort. Misfortune and the Marrable family had not parted company yet.
When the rehearsal was over, nobody observed that the stout lady with the wig privately withdrew herself from the company; and when she was afterwards missed from the table of refreshments, which Mr Marrable’s hospitality kept ready spread in a room near the theatre, nobody imagined that there was any serious reason for her absence. It was not till the ladies and gentlemen assembled for the next rehearsal, that the true state of the case was impressed on the minds of the company. At the appointed hour no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs Marrable portentously approached the stage, with an open letter in her hand. She was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding: she was mistress of every bland conventionality in the English language – but disasters and dramatic influences combined, threw even this harmless matron off her balance at last. For the first time in her life Mrs Marrable indulged in vehement gesture, and used strong language. She handed the letter sternly, at arm’s length, to her daughter. ‘My dear,’ she said, with an aspect of awful composure, ‘we are under a Curse.’ Before the amazed dramatic company could petition for an explanation, she turned and left the room. The manager’s professional eye followed her out respectfully – he looked as if he approved of the exit, from a theatrical point of view.
What new misfortune had befallen the play? The last and worst of all misfortunes had assailed it. The stout lady had resigned her part.
Not maliciously. Her heart, which had been in the right place throughout, remained inflexibly in the right place still. Her explanation of the circumstances proved this, if nothing else did. The letter began with a statement: She had overheard, at the last rehearsal (quite unintentionally) personal remarks of which she was the subject. They might, or might not have had reference to her – Hair; and her – Figure. She would not distress Mrs Marrable by repeating them. Neither would she mention names, because it was foreign to her nature to make bad worse. The only course at all consistent with her own self-respect, was to resign her part. She enclosed it accordingly to Mrs Marrable, with many apologies for her presumption in undertaking a youthful character, at – what a gentleman was pleased to term – her Age; and with what two ladies were rude enough to characterize as her disadvantages of – Hair, and – Figure. A younger and more attractive representative of Julia, would no doubt be easily found. In the mean time, all persons concerned had her full forgiveness, to which she would only beg leave to add her best and kindest wishes for the success of the play.
In four nights more the play was to be performed. If ever any human enterprise stood in need of good wishes to help it, that enterprise was unquestionably the theatrical entertainment at Evergreen Lodge!
One arm-chair was allowed on the stage; and, into that arm-chair, Miss Marrable sank, preparatory to a fit of hysterics. Magdalen stepped forward at the first convulsion; snatched the letter from Miss Marrable’s hand; and stopped the threatened catastrophe.
‘She’s an ugly, bald–headed, malicious, middle-aged wretch,’ said Magdalen, tearing the letter into fragments, and tossing them over the heads of the company. ‘But I can tell her one thing – she sha’n’t spoil the play. I’ll act Julia.’
‘Bravo!’ cried the chorus of gentlemen – the anonymous gentleman who had helped to do the mischief (otherwise Mr Francis Clare) loudest of all.
‘If you want the truth, I don’t shrink from owning it,’ continued Magdalen. ‘I’m one of the ladies she means. I said she had a head like a mop, and a waist like a bolster. So she has.’
‘I am the other lady,’ added the spinster-relative. ‘But I only said she was too stout for the part.’
‘I am the gentleman,’ chimed in Frank, stimulated by the force of example. ‘I said nothing – I only agreed with the ladies.’
Here Miss Garth seized her opportunity, and addressed the stage loudly from the pit.
‘Stop! stop!’ she said. ‘You can’t settle the difficulty that way. If Magdalen plays Julia, who is to play Lucy?’
Miss Marrable sank back in the arm-chair, and gave way to the second convulsion.
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ cried Magdalen, ‘the thing’s simple enough. I’ll act Julia and Lucy both together.’
The manager was consulted on the spot. Suppressing Lucy’s first entrance, and turning the short dialogue about the novels into a soliloquy for Lydia Languish, appeared to be the only changes of importance necessary to the accomplishment of Magdalen’s project. Lucy‘s two telling scenes at the end of the first and second acts, were sufficiently removed from the scenes in which Julia appeared, to give time for the necessary transformations in dress. Even Miss Garth, though she tried hard to find them, could put no fresh obstacles in the way. The question was settled in five minutes, and the rehearsal went on; Magdalen learning Julia’s stage situations with the book in her hand, and announcing afterwards, on the journey home, that she proposed sitting up all night to study the new part. Frank thereupon expressed his fears that she would have no time left to help him through his theatrical difficulties. She tapped him on the shoulder coquettishly with her part. ‘You foolish fellow, how am I to do without you? You’re Julia’s jealous lover; you’re always making Julia cry. Come to-night, and make me cry at tea-time. You haven’t got a venomous old woman in a wig to act with now. It’s my heart you’re to break – and of course I shall teach you how to do it.’
The four days’ interval passed busily in perpetual rehearsals, public and private. The night of performance arrived; the guests assembled; the great dramatic experiment stood on its trial. Magdalen had made the most of her opportunities; she had learnt all that the manager could teach her in the time. Miss Garth left her when the overture began, sitting apart in a corner behind the scenes, serious and silent, with her smelling-bottle in one hand, and her book in the other, resolutely training herself for the coming ordeal, to the very last.
The play began, with all the proper accompaniments of a theatrical performance in private life; with a crowded audience, an African temperature, a bursting of heated lamp-glasses, and a difficulty in drawing up the curtain. Fag, and the Coachman, who opened the scene, took leave of their memories as soon as they stepped on the stage; left half their dialogue unspoken; came to a dead pause; were audibly entreated by the invisible manager to ‘come off’; and went off accordingly, in every respect sadder and wiser men than when they went on. The next scene disclosed Miss Marrable as Lydia Languish, gracefully seated, very pretty, beautifully dressed, accurately mistress of the smallest words in her part; possessed, in short, of every personal resource – except her voice. The ladies admired, the gentlemen applauded. Nobody heard anything, but the words ‘Speak up, Miss’, whispered by the same voice which had already entreated Fag and the Coachman to ‘come off’. A responsive titter rose among the younger spectators; checked immediately by magnanimous applause. The temperature of the audience was rising to Blood Heat – but the national sense of fair play was not boiled out of them yet.
In the midst of the demonstration, Magdalen quietly made her first entrance, as Julia. She was dressed very plainly in dark colours, and wore her own hair; all stage adjuncts and alterations (excepting the slightest possible touch of rouge on her cheeks) having been kept in reserve, to disguise her the more effectually in her second
part. The grace and simplicity of her costume, the steady self-possession with which she looked out over the eager rows of faces before her, raised a low hum of approval and expectation. She spoke – after suppressing a momentary tremor – with a quiet distinctness of utterance which reached all ears, and which at once confirmed the favourable impression that her appearance had produced. The one member of the audience who looked at her and listened to her coldly, was her elder sister. Before the actress of the evening had been five minutes on the stage, Norah detected, to her own indescribable astonishment, that Magdalen had audaciously individualized the feeble amiability of Julia’s character, by seizing no less a person than herself as the model to act it by. She saw all her own little formal peculiarities of manner and movement, unblushingly reproduced – and even the very tone of her voice so accurately mimicked from time to time, that the accents startled her as if she was speaking herself, with an echo on the stage. The effect of this cool appropriation of Norah’s identity to theatrical purposes, on the audience – who only saw results – asserted itself in a storm of applause on Magdalen’s exit. She had won two incontestable triumphs in her first scene. By a dexterous piece of mimicry, she had made a living reality of one of the most insipid characters in the English drama; and she had roused to enthusiasm an audience of two hundred exiles from the blessings of ventilation, all simmering together in their own animal heat. Under the circumstances, where is the actress by profession who could have done much more?
But the event of the evening was still to come. Magdalen’s disguised reappearance at the end of the act, in the character of Lucy–with false hair and false eyebrows, with a bright-red complexion and patches on her cheeks, with the gayest colours flaunting in her dress, and the shrillest vivacity of voice and manner – fairly staggered the audience. They looked down at their programmes, in which the representative of Lucy figured under an assumed name; looked up again at the stage; penetrated the disguise; and vented their astonishment in another round of applause, louder and heartier even than the last. Norah herself could not deny this time, that the tribute of approbation had been well deserved. There, forcing its way steadily through all the faults of inexperience – there, plainly visible to the dullest of the spectators, was the rare faculty of dramatic impersonation, expressing itself in every look and action of this girl of eighteen, who now stood on a stage for the first time in her life. Failing in many minor requisites of the double task which she had undertaken, she succeeded in the one important necessity of keeping the main distinctions of the two characters thoroughly apart. Everybody felt that the difficulty lay here – everybody saw the difficulty conquered – everybody echoed the manager‘s enthusiasm at rehearsal, which had hailed her as a born actress.
When the drop-scene descended for the first time, Magdalen had concentrated in herself the whole interest and attraction of the play. The audience politely applauded Miss Marrable, as became the guests assembled in her father’s house: and good-humouredly encouraged the remainder of the company, to help them through a task for which they were all, more or less, palpably unfit. But, as the play proceeded, nothing roused them to any genuine expression of interest when Magdalen was absent from the scene. There was no disguising it: Miss Marrable and her bosom friends had been all hopelessly cast in the shade by the new recruit whom they had summoned to assist them, in the capacity of forlorn hope. And this on Miss Marrable’s own birthday! and this in her father’s house! and this after the unutterable sacrifices of six weeks past! Of all the domestic disasters which the thankless theatrical enterprise had inflicted on the Marrable family, the crowning misfortune was now consummated by Magdalen’s success.
Leaving Mr Vanstone and Norah, on the conclusion of the play, among the guests in the supper-room, Miss Garth went behind the scenes; ostensibly anxious to see if she could be of any use; really bent on ascertaining whether Magdalen’s head had been turned by the triumphs of the evening. It would not have surprised Miss Garth if she had discovered her pupil in the act of making terms with the manager for her forthcoming appearance in a public theatre. As events really turned out, she found Magdalen on the stage, receiving, with gracious smiles, a card which the manager presented to her with a professional bow. Noticing Miss Garth’s mute look of inquiry, the civil little man hastened to explain that the card was his own, and that he was merely asking the favour of Miss Vanstone’s recommendation at any future opportunity.
‘This is not the last time the young lady will be concerned in private theatricals, I’ll answer for it,’ said the manager. ‘And if a superintendent is wanted on the next occasion, she has kindly promised to say a good word for me. I am always to be heard of, Miss, at that address.’ Saying those words, he bowed again, and discreetly disappeared.
Vague suspicions beset the mind of Miss Garth, and urged her to insist on looking at the card. No more harmless morsel of pasteboard was ever passed from one hand to another. The card contained nothing but the manager’s name, and, under it, the name and address of a theatrical agent in London.
‘It is not worth the trouble of keeping,’ said Miss Garth.
Magdalen caught her hand, before she could throw the card away – possessed herself of it the next instant – and put it in her pocket.
‘I promised to recommend him,’ she said – ‘and that’s one reason for keeping his card. If it does nothing else, it will remind me of the happiest evening of my life – and that’s another. Come!’ she cried, throwing her arms round Miss Garth with a feverish gaiety – ‘congratulate me on my success!’
‘I will congratulate you when you have got over it,’ said Miss Garth.
In half an hour more, Magdalen had changed her dress; had joined the guests; and had soared into an atmosphere of congratulation, high above the reach of any controlling influence that Miss Garth could exercise. Frank, dilatory in all his proceedings, was the last of the dramatic company who left the precincts of the stage. He made no attempt to join Magdalen in the supper-room – but he was ready in the hall, with her cloak, when the carriages were called and the party broke up.
‘Oh, Frank!’ she said, looking round at him, as he put the cloak on her shoulders, ‘I am so sorry it’s all over! Come to-morrow morning, and let’s talk about it by ourselves.’
‘In the shrubbery at ten?’ asked Frank in a whisper.
She drew up the hood of her cloak, and nodded to him gaily. Miss Garth, standing near, noticed the looks that passed between them, though the disturbance made by the parting guests prevented her from hearing the words. There was a soft, underlying tenderness in Magdalen’s assumed gaiety of manner – there was a sudden thoughtfulness in her face, a confidential readiness in her hand, as she took Frank’s arm and went out to the carriage. What did it mean? Had her passing interest in him, as her stage-pupil, treacherously sown the seeds of any deeper interest in him, as a man? Had the idle theatrical scheme, now that it was all over, graver results to answer for than a mischievous waste of time?
The lines on Miss Garth’s face deepened and hardened: she stood lost among the fluttering crowd around her. Norah’s warning words, addressed to Mrs Vanstone in the garden, recurred to her memory – and now, for the first time, the idea dawned on her that Norah had seen consequences in their true light.
Chapter Seven
Early the next morning Miss Garth and Norah met in the garden, and spoke together privately. The only noticeable result of the interview, when they presented themselves at the breakfast-table, appeared in the marked silence which they both maintained on the topic of the theatrical performance. Mrs Vanstone was entirely indebted to her husband and to her youngest daughter for all that she heard of the evening’s entertainment. The governess and the elder daughter had evidently determined on letting the subject drop.
After breakfast was over, Magdalen proved to be missing, when the ladies assembled as usual in the morning-room. Her habits were so little regular that Mrs Vanstone felt neither surprise nor uneasiness at her absence. Miss Ga
rth and Norah looked at one another significantly, and waited in silence. Two hours passed – and there were no signs of Magdalen. Norah rose, as the clock struck twelve, and quietly left the room to look for her.
She was not upstairs, dusting her jewellery and disarranging her dresses. She was not in the conservatory, not in the flower-garden; not in the kitchen teasing the cook; not in the yard playing with the dogs. Had she, by any chance, gone out with her father? Mr Vanstone had announced his intention, at the breakfast-table, of paying a morning visit to his old ally, Mr Clare, and of rousing the philosopher’s sarcastic indignation by an account of the dramatic performance. None of the other ladies at Combe-Raven ever ventured themselves inside the cottage. But Magdalen was reckless enough for anything – and Magdalen might have gone there. As the idea occurred to her, Norah entered the shrubbery.