# The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 3/Chapter 14

XIV.
Peter Sherringham rolled away through the summer night to St. John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words upon Miriam, entreating her to drive home immediately, without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone, for a purpose that he would fully and satisfactorily explain—couldn't she trust him? He implored her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place.
He did so when he got there, but it took half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than before in a kind of after-glow of old sociabilities, a vulgar ghostly vibration. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions were lying about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of taking a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open into the garden he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate—then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was ​unreasonable, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her to time her; she was capable of playing him—that is playing Sherringham—or even playing them both, that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons (Peter remembered now the omitted shilling) had only pretended to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her.
When half an hour had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at Basil Dashwood's feast. Then he remembered Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings, but at some tavern or restaurant, the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly however Sherringham became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden-door at last. He rushed out before Miriam had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped out of the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and exasperation melted away and a flood of pleading tenderness came out in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any ​right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature—this showed it—as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven, he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. Miriam stopped short, in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman—they had left the garden-door open: "Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again."
"What's the matter—won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he urged gently. And he went back and closed the garden-door. He wanted to say to the coachman: "It's no matter; please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to Miriam.
"I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be. That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself—that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here, now," Miriam added. She had remained standing in the path.
Peter felt the irony of her "now," and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for it and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was, in spite of his plea that everything was changed—he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense ​reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his tergiversation: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation, the justification, were in the very fact, and the fact had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to Miriam: "I've simply overrated my strength."
"Oh, I knew—I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" she groaned. She turned away impatiently, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant he felt her yield.
"The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added, as he made her go into the house, bending over her: "The failure of my strength—that was just the reason of my coming."
She burst out laughing at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and her laugh made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her fifth act, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been representing. "Whatever it is you want (when I understand), you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them."
"You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," said Sherringham. ​"Oh, she's all right, but she's nervous," Miriam rejoined. Then she added quickly: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?"
"Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from Sherringhani's mind as if she had never existed.
"The charming girl you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh, she'd be so good for you!"
"Don't speak of that," said Peter, gravely. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was—I was. But I can't—I can't: you are too unutterably dear to me."
"Oh, don't—please don't," moaned Miriam. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands upon it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?"
"It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me."
"And what is the whole thing?"
He hesitated a moment. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah, if you knew how nervous I am!"
"Well, I'm not. Go on."
"Give it up—give it up!" stammered Sherringham.
"Give it up?" Miriam fixed him like a mild Medusa.
"I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before."
"Renounce, after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" asked Miriam. "Those are old words and very foolish ones: you wanted something of the sort a year ago."
"Oh, I fluttered round the idea then; we were talking in ​the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future moreover wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference, and I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate, it's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things."
"What sort of things?" Miriam inquired.
"The things of my profession—of my life—the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Sherringham pleaded, "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you."
"You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," said Miriam. "Where were the fibres of your being then?"
"They trembled even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening, yesterday—where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah, you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want."
"The perfection of perfections?" the girl repeated interrogatively, with the strangest smile.
"I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night, with such rapture, what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" Sherringham asked.
"How can I, my poor friend? I like your plans and your ​responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. Voyons, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to renounce, as you gracefully say? Oh, I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting solicitous, pitying eyes upon her visitor, as if she were trying to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor dear doating brain would be quite addled," she presently went on. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, pourtant. Dear me, why do you like us so much?"
"Like you? I loathe you!"
"Je le vois parbleu bien! I mean, why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and because I please you, you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore you wish to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah, be reasonable; you must let her live!"
"Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried, with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I wanted, how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one. The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly, exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you."
Miriam's colour rose, through her paint, at this vivid picture, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?"
​"Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe? I think I can do with it."
"Aren't you afraid of me?"
"Not a bit."
"Bravely said. How little you know me after all!" sighed the girl.
"I tell the truth," Peter went on; "and you must do me the justice to admit that I have taken the time to dig deep into my feelings. I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've observed; in short I know what I'm about. It isn't a thing to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me. I've put it on starvation diet, but it's no use—really it's no use, Miriam," poor Sherringham pursued, with a soft quaver that betrayed all his sincerity. "It isn't a question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your trusting me. You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature. Just quietly marry me, and I'll manage you."
"Manage me?" The girl's inflection was droll; it made Sherringham change colour.
"I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any other way. The stage is great, no doubt, but the world is greater. It's a bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand. We'll go in for realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do the fables."
Miriam had listened to him attentively, but her face showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity. "Excuse me for saying so, after your delightful tributes to my worth," she ​returned in a moment, "but I've never listened to such a flood of determined sophistry. You think so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless I must utter a few shabby words of sense. I'm a magnificent creature on the stage—well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to see such evidence that I succeed. But off the stage—come, come: I should lose all my advantages. The fact is so patent that it seems to me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you."
"Are you on the stage now, pray? Ah, Miriam, if it were not for the respect I owe you!" her companion murmured.
"If it were not for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My talent is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's exhibition of it that has settled you? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to this particular kind of talent, since it plays such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without it I should be a dull, ignorant, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you are ready to face yourself."
"Without it—without it?" Sherringham cried. "Your own sophistry is infinitely worse than mine. I should like to see you without it for the fiftieth part of a second. What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards of the playhouse and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence of your being. Your talent is yourself, and it's because it's yourseif that I yearn for you. If it had been a thing you could leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never have looked at you a second time. Don't talk to me as if I were ​a simpleton, with your false simplifications! You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that—not a vulgar shop with a turnstile, that's open only once in the twenty-four hours. Without it, verily?" Sherringham went on, with rising scorn and exasperated passion. "Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your eye!"
Miriam, at. this, moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then, after a few steps, grandly swept round again. This evolution she performed (it was over in an instant) on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you."
"The other solution?"
"That you should stay on the stage."
"I don't understand you," Sherringham confessed.
"Stay on my stage; come off your own."
Sherringham hesitated a moment. "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?"
"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side, it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light."
"Continue to let you act—as my wife?" Sherringham demanded. "Is it a real condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?"
​"I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them."
"Would you accept them, from me—accept the sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects (of course I should have to do that), and simply become your appendage?"
"My dear fellow, you invite me with the best conscience in the world to become yours."
"The cases are not equal. You would make of me the husband of an actress. I should make of you the wife of an ambassador."
"The husband of an actress, c'est bientôt dit, in that tone of scorn! If you're consistent," said Miriam, "it ought to be a proud position for you."
"What do you mean, if I'm consistent?"
"Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and the greatness of our mission? Haven't you almost come to blows with poor Gabriel Nash about it? What did all that mean if you won't face the first consequences of your theory? Either it was an enlightened conviction or it was an empty pretence. If it was heartless humbug I'm glad to know it," Miriam rolled out, with a darkening eye. "The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre is important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you have the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous to give us your services in an intelligent indirect way. Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid, taking one ​devotion with another? If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!"
"You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life," Sherringham returned. "I have no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely quitted me, and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs."
"You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!" Miriam flashed. "It was the theatre that brought you here; if it hadn't been for the theatre I never would have looked at you. It was in the name of the theatre you first made love to me; it is to the theatre that you owe every advantage that, so far as I'm concerned, you possess."
"I seem to possess a great many!" groaned Sherringham.
"You might certainly make more of those you have! You make me angry, but I want to be fair," said the glowing girl, "and I can't be unless you will. You are not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old friends and old memories for a selfish purpose."
"'Selfish purpose' is in your own convenient idiom, bientôt dit," Sherringham answered. "I suppose you consider that if I truly esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of your genius. Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality: there are different kinds, aren't there? At any rate I've explained that I propose to deprive the world of nothing at all. You shall be celebrated, allez!"
​"Rubbish—rubbish!" Miriam mocked, turning away again. "I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool yourself with such platitudes you must be pretty bad."
"Yes, I'm pretty bad," Sherringham admitted, looking at her dismally. "What do you do with the declaration you made me the other day—the day I found my cousin here—that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who had risen high?"
Miriam reflected a moment. "I remember—the chaff about the orders, the stars and garters. My poor dear friend, don't be so painfully literal. Don't you know a joke when you see it? It was to worry your cousin, wasn't it? But it didn't in the least succeed."
"Why should you wish to worry my cousin?"
"Because he's so provoking. And surely I had my freedom no less than I have it now. Pray, what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you should I have gone? However, that has nothing to do with it. Say I did tell you that we might arrange it on the day that you should come to me covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such a long time in advance? Where is the glory, please, and where are the medals?"
"Dearest girl, am I not going to America (a capital promotion) next month," Sherringham argued, "and can't you trust me enough to believe that I speak with a real appreciation of the facts—that I'm not lying to you, in short—when I tell you that I've my foot in the stirrup? The glory's dawning. I'm all right too."
​"What you propose to me then is to accompany you tout bonnement to your new post."
"You put it in a nutshell," smiled Sherringham.
"You're touching; it has its charm. But you can't get anything in America, you know. I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up there. That's why the diplomatic body hate it."
"It's on the way—it's on the way," Sherringham hammered, feverishly. "They don't keep us long in disagreeable places unless we want to stay. There's one thing you can get anywhere if you're clever, and nowhere if you're not, and in the disagreeable places generally more than in the others: and that (since it's the element of the question we're discussing) is simply success. It's odious to be put on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had nothing to offer—to offer to a person who has such glories of her own. I'm not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined, and the omens are on my side." Peter faltered a moment, and then with a queer expression he went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking, your glories are also still in the future." An exclamation, at these words, burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues if they consider that I've nothing to offer."
Peter Sherringham had an idea, as he ceased speaking, that Miriam was on the point of breaking out with some strong word of resentment at his allusion to the contingent nature of her prospects. But it only twisted the weapon in his wound to hear her saying with extraordinary mildness: "It's ​perfectly true that my glories are still to come, that I may fizzle out and that my little success of to-day is perhaps a mere flash in the pan. Stranger things have been—something of that sort happens every day. But don't we talk too much of that part of it?" she asked, with a weary tolerance that was noble in its effect. "Surely it's vulgar to consider only the noise one's going to make; especially when one remembers how unintelligent nine-tenths of it will be. It isn't to my glories that I cling; it's simply to my idea, even if it's destined to sink me into obscurity. I like it better than anything else—a thousand times better (I'm sorry to have to put it in such a way) than tossing up my head as the fine lady of a little coterie."
"A little coterie? I don't know what you're talking about!" Peter retorted, with considerable heat.
"A big coterie, then! It's only that, at the best. A nasty, prim 'official' woman, who is perched on her little local pedestal and thinks she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour! Oh, you needn't tell me. I've seen them abroad, I could imitate them here. I could do one for you on the spot if I were not so tired. It's scarcely worth mentioning perhaps, but I'm ready to drop." Miriam picked up the white mantle she had tossed off, flinging it round her with her usual amplitude of gesture. "They're waiting for me, and I confess I'm hungry. If I don't hurry they'll eat up all the nice things. Don't say I haven't been obliging, and come back when you're better. Good-night."
"I quite agree with you that we've talked too much about the vulgar side of our question," Peter responded, walking ​round to get between her and the French window, by which she apparently had a view of leaving the room. "That's because I've wanted to bribe you. Bribery is almost always vulgar."
"Yes, you should do better. Merci! There's a cab; some of them have come for me. I must go," Miriam added, listening for a sound that reached her from the road.
Sherringham listened too, making out no cab. "Believe me, it isn't wise to turn your back on such an affection as mine and on such a confidence," he went on, speaking almost in a warning tone (there was a touch of superior sternness in it, as of a rebuke for real folly, but it was meant to be tender), and stopping her within a few feet of the window. "Such things are the most precious that life has to give us," he added, all but didactically.
Miriam had listened again for a moment; then she appeared to give up the idea of the cab. The reader need hardly be told, at this stage of her youthful history, that the right way for her lover to soothe her was not to represent himself as acting for her highest good. "I like your calling it confidence," she presently said; and the deep note of the few words had something of the distant mutter of thunder.
"What is it, then, when I offer you everything I am, everything I have, everything I shall achieve?"
She seemed to measure him for a moment, as if she were thinking whether she should try to pass him. But she remained where she was and she returned: "I'm sorry for you, yes, but I'm also rather ashamed of you."
"Ashamed of me?"
​"A brave offer to see me through—that's what I should call confidence. You say to-day that you hate the theatre; and do you know what has made you do it? The fact that it has too large a place in your mind to let you repudiate it and throw it over with a good conscience. It has a deep fascination for you, and yet you're not strong enough to make the concession of taking up with it publicly, in my person. You're ashamed of yourself for that, as all your constant high claims for it are on record; so you blaspheme against it, to try and cover your retreat and your treachery and straighten out your personal situation. But it won't do, my dear fellow—it won't do at all," Miriam proceeded, with a triumphant, almost judicial lucidity which made her companion stare; "you haven't the smallest excuse of stupidity, and your perversity is no excuse at all. Leave her alone altogether—a poor girl who's making her way—or else come frankly to help her, to give her the benefit of your wisdom. Don't lock her up for life under the pretence of doing her good. What does one most good is to see a little honesty. You're the best judge, the best critic, the best observer, the best believer, that I've ever come across; you're committed to it by everything you've said to me for a twelvemonth, by the whole turn of your mind, by the way you've followed up this business of ours. If an art is noble and beneficent, one shouldn't be afraid to offer it one's arm. Your cousin isn't: he can make sacrifices."
"My cousin?" shouted Peter. "Why, wasn't it only the other day that you were throwing his sacrifices in his teeth?"
​Under this imputation upon her consistency Miriam flinched but for an instant. "I did that to worry you," she smiled.
"Why should you wish to worry me if you care so little about me?"
"Care little about you? Haven't I told you often, didn't I tell you yesterday, how much I care? Ain't I showing it now by spending half the night here with you (giving myself away to all those cynics), taking all this trouble to persuade you to hold up your head and have the courage of your opinions?"
"You invent my opinions for your convenience," said Peter. "As long ago as the night I introduced you, in Paris, to Mademoiselle Voisin, you accused me of looking down on those who practise your art. I remember you almost scratched my eyes out because I didn't kootoo enough to your friend Dashwood. Perhaps I didn't; but if already at that time I was so wide of the mark you can scarcely accuse me of treachery now."
"I don't remember, but I dare say you're right," Miriam meditated. "What I accused you of then was probably simply what I reproach you with now: the germ at least of your deplorable weakness. You consider that we do awfully valuable work, and yet you wouldn't for the world let people suppose that you really take our side. If your position was even at that time so false, so much the worse for you, that's all. Oh, it's refreshing," the girl exclaimed, after a pause during which Sherringham seemed to himself to taste the full bitterness of despair, so baffled and derided he felt—"oh, it's refreshing to see a man burn his ships in a cause that appeals ​to him, give up something for it and break with hideous timidities and snobberies! It's the most beautiful sight in the world."
Sherringham, sore as he was and angry and exasperated, nevertheless burst out laughing at this. "You're magnificent, you give me at this moment the finest possible illustration of what you mean by burning one's ships. Verily, verily, there's no one like you: talk of timidity, talk of refreshment! If I had any talent for it I'd go on the stage to-morrow, to spend my life with you the better."
"If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first appearance. That would be really respectable," said Miriam.
"Unfortunately I've no talent."
"That would only make it the more respectable."
"You're just like Nick," Peter rejoined: "you've taken to imitating Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your contrasting me invidiously with Nick Dormer and in my giving up one career for another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your smelling-bottle!" Peter concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to debate.
"Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing a very small part of the various precious services, the protection and encouragement for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a man interested in her work and accomplished and determined, as you very justly describe yourself."
"And would it be your idea that such a man should live on ​the money earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and still more determined wife?"
"Why not, if they work together—if there's something of his spirit and his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "Je vous attendais, with the famous 'person;' of course that's the great stick they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have anything to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea, it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the clumsy body. Poor old 'person'—if you knew what we think of it! If you don't forget it, that's your own affair: it shows that you're dense before the idea."
"That I'm dense?"
"I mean the public is—the public who pays us. After all, they expect us to look at them too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in the stalls, before one, for three mortal hours! I dare say it would be simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all the while; only some of us are not worth paying."
"You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," said Peter, his handsome face lengthened to a point that sufficiently attested the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you—the day you recited at my place?" he abruptly inquired, a good deal as if he were ​drawing from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also one of the most pointed.
"Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!"
"You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of self-exposure to which the profession you were seeking to enter would commit you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm only taking my cue from you."
"I don't know what I may have said then," replied Miriam, whose steady flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; "I was, no doubt, already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than it is. One warms it a bit one's self, when once one is in. Of course I'm a contortionist and of course there's a hateful side; but don't you see how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of those who are ready to insist on the other side, the grand one, and especially on the sympathy of the person who is ready to insist most and to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for every thing?"
"The element?" Peter questioned, with a vagueness which was pardonably exaggerated. "Do you mean your success?"
"I mean what you've so often been eloquent about," the girl returned, with an indulgent shrug—"the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah, there's where life can help us," she broke out, with a change of tone, "there's where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy and suffering and experience—I don't know what to call 'em! ​They suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say; they make them appear worth doing." She became radiant for a moment, as if with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which seemed all nature and harmony, she proceeded: "I must tell you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!"
Sherringham stood there looking at her a minute, during which her eyes sustained the rummage of his gaze without a relenting gleam of the sense of cruelty or of paradox. With a passionate but inarticulate ejaculation he turned away from her and remained, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation—the bleared, irresponsive eyes of the London heaven. For the brief space that he glared at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted was something that was not in that thick prospect. What was the meaning of this sudden offensive importunity of "art," this senseless mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad opera, in which Miriam's voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more bewilderingly to mingle? Art be damned: what commission, ​after all, had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with the genuine British mistrust of the bothersome principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but there was an immemorial compact formation which lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest upon it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when he was most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease his vision was solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things.
An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of Peter's observation, and then whisked round the corner of the little villa. This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery (it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies) that, to feel that the game was up and his interview over, Sherringham had no need of seeing the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a vexatious sportive imbecility. Evidently Miriam's warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden-door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself—had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations ​had drawn her away from a festival as yet only imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to St. John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be abrupt; she would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably (the small hours had come), to see what her young charges were doing. She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be telegraphing to Sherringham to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the odious old woman there was one faint little spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.
Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half expecting that she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.
"Don't let us part so disagreeably," she said, "with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking—we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure—when you have such a capital ​one. Try it, try it, my dear friend—you'll see! I wish you the highest promotion and the quickest—every success and every reward. When you've got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been nasty now."
"Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this," Sherringham answered, holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell that she had finally tormented him with. "Are you ready to follow up by a definite promise your implied assurance that I have a remedy?"
"A definite promise?" Miriam benignly gazed, with the perfection of evasion. "I don't 'imply' that you have a remedy. I declare it on the housetops. That delightful girl—"
"I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!" Peter broke in with a voice which, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Booth's ears, in the garden, with affright. "I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said a quarter of an hour ago."
"Ah, I've said so many things; one has to do that to get rid of you. You rather hurt my hand," she added, jerking it away in a manner that showed that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.
"As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my profession?" Peter pursued. "If I break with everything, my prospects, my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie—if ​after further reflection I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your precious hand?"
"I don't think you have any right to put the question to me now," said Miriam, with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut form Peter's solemn speech had given (it was a charm to hear it) to each item of his enumeration. "The case is so very contingent, so dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflection. While you reserve yourself you ask me to commit myself. If it's a question of further reflection, why did you drag me up here? And then," she added, "I'm so far from wishing you to take any such monstrous step."
"Monstrous, you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime."
"Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it's done after further reflection. As you said perfectly a while ago, it isn't a thing to reason about."
"Ah, what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!" Sherringham cried. "Will you give me a year to consider?"
"Would you trust me for a year?"
"Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?"
"Oh, I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take for granted one must like you!"
"Remember that you've made a great point of your liking me. Wouldn't you do so still more if I were heroic?"
Miriam looked at him a moment. "I think I should pity you, in such a cause. Give it all to her; don't throw away a real happiness!"
​"Ah, you can't back out of your position with a few vague and even rather impertinent words!" Sherringham declared. "You accuse me of swallowing my protestations, but you swallow yours. You've painted in heavenly colours the sacrifice I'm talking of, and now you must take the consequences."
"The consequences."
"Why, my coming back in a year to square you."
"Ah, you're tiresome!" cried Miriam. "Come back when you like. I don't wonder you've grown desperate, but fancy me then!" she added, looking past him at a new interlocutor.
"Yes, but if he'll square you!" Peter heard Mrs. Rooth's voice respond conciliatingly behind him. She had stolen up to the window now, she had passed the threshold, she was in the room, but her daughter had not been startled. "What is it he wants to do, dear?" she continued, to Miriam.
"To induce me to marry him if he'll go upon the stage. He'll practise over there, where he's going, and then he'll come back and appear. Isn't it too dreadful? Talk him out of it, stay with him, soothe him!" the girl hurried on. "You'll find some bibite and some biscuits in the cupboard—keep him with you, pacify him, give him his little supper. Meanwhile I'll go to mine; I'll take the brougham; don't follow!"
With these words Miriam bounded into the garden, and her white drapery shone for an instant in the darkness before she disappeared. Peter looked about him, to pick up his hat, and while he did so he heard the bang of the gate and the quick carriage getting into motion. Mrs. Rooth appeared to sway excitedly for a moment in opposed directions: that of the impulse to rush after Miriam and that of the extraordinary ​possibility to which the young lady had alluded. She seemed in doubt, but at a venture, detaining him with a maternal touch, she twinkled up at their visitor like an insinuating glow-worm.
"I'm so glad you came."
"I'm not. I've got nothing by it," he said, finding his hat.
"Oh, it was so beautiful!" she coaxed.
"The play—yes, wonderful. I'm afraid it's too late for me to avail myself of the privilege your daughter offers me. Good-night."
"Oh, it's a pity; won't you take anything?" asked Mrs. Rooth. "When I heard your voice so high I was scared and I hung back." But before he could reply she added: "Are you really thinking of the stage?"
"It comes to the same thing."
"Do you mean you've proposed?"
"Oh, unmistakably."
"And what does she say?"
"Why, you heard: she says I'm an ass."
"Ah, the little rascal!" laughed Mrs. Rooth. "Leave her to me. I'll help you. But you are mad. Give up nothing—least of all your advantages."
"I won't give up your daughter," said Peter, reflecting that if this was cheap it was at any rate good enough for Mrs. Rooth. He mended it a little indeed by adding darkly: "But you can't make her take me."
"I can prevent her taking any one else."
"Oh, can you!" Peter ejaculated, with more scepticism than ceremony.
​"You'll see—you'll see." He passed into the garden, but, after she had blown out the candles and drawn the window to, Mrs. Rooth went with him. "All you've got to do is to be yourself—to be true to your fine position," she explained as they proceeded. "Trust me with the rest—trust me and be quiet."
"How can one be quiet after this magnificent evening?"
"Yes, but it's just that!" panted the eager old woman. "It has launched her so, on this sea of dangers, that to make up for the loss of the old security (don't you know?) we must take a still firmer hold."
"Ay, of what?" asked Sherringham, as Mrs. Rooth's comfort became vague while she stopped with him at the garden-door.
"Ah, you know: of the real life, of the true anchor!" Her hansom was waiting for her, and she added: "I kept it, you see; but a little extravagance, on the night one's fortune has come!"
Peter stared. Yes, there were people whose fortune had come; but he managed to stammer: "Are you following her again?"
"For you—for you!" And Mrs. Rooth clambered into the vehicle. From the seat, enticingly, she offered him the place beside her. "Won't you come too? I know he asked you." Peter declined with a quick gesture, and as he turned away he heard her call after him, to cheer him on his lonely walk: "I shall keep this up; I shall never lose sight of her!"