"I don't quite know how much you mean, but enough for all practical ends."

"Marrying a fashionable actress is hardly a practical end."

"Certainly not, but I'm not speaking from his point of view." Nash was perfectly lucid. "Moreover, I thought you just now said it would be such a good thing for her."

"To marry Nick Dormer?"

"You said a good decent man, and he's one of the very decentest."

"I wasn't thinking of the individual, but of the protection. It would fence her about, settle certain questions, or appear to; it would make things safe and comfortable for her and keep a lot of cads and blackguards away."

"She ought to marry the prompter or the box-keeper," said Nash. "Then it would be all right. I think indeed they generally do, don't they?"

Peter felt for a moment a strong disposition to drop his friend on the spot, to cross to the other side of the street and walk away without him. But there was a different impulse which struggled with this one and after a minute overcame it, the impulse that led to his saying presently: "Has she told you she's--a--she's in love with Nick?"

"No, no--that's not the way I know it."

"Has Nick told you then?"

"On the contrary, I've told _him_."

"You've rendered him a questionable service if you've no proof," Peter p.r.o.nounced.

"My proof's only that I've seen her with him. She's charming, poor dear thing."

"But surely she isn't in love with every man she's charming to."

"I mean she's charming to _me_," Nash returned. "I see her that way. I see her interested--and what it does to her, with her, _for_ her. But judge for yourself--the first time you get a chance."

"When shall I get a chance? Nick doesn't come near her."

"Oh he'll come, he'll come; his picture isn't finished."

"You mean _he'll_ be the box-keeper, then?"

"My dear fellow, I shall never allow it," said Gabriel Nash. "It would be idiotic and quite unnecessary. He's beautifully arranged--in quite a different line. Fancy his taking that sort of job on his hands! Besides, she'd never expect it; she's not such a goose. They're very good friends--it will go on that way. She's an excellent person for him to know; she'll give him lots of ideas of the plastic kind. He would have been up there before this, but it has taken him time to play his delightful trick on his const.i.tuents. That of course is pure amus.e.m.e.nt; but when once his effect has been well produced he'll get back to business, and his business will be a very different matter from Miriam's. Imagine him writing her advertis.e.m.e.nts, living on her money, adding up her profits, having rows and recriminations with her agent, carrying her shawl, spending his days in her rouge-pot. The right man for that, if she must have one, will turn up. '_Pour le mariage, non_.'

She isn't wholly an idiot; she really, for a woman, quite sees things as they are."

As Peter had not crossed the street and left Gabriel planted he now suffered the extremity of irritation. But descrying in the dim vista of the Edgware Road a vague and vigilant hansom he waved his stick with eagerness and with the abrupt declaration that, feeling tired, he must drive the rest of his way. He offered Nash, as he entered the vehicle, no seat, but this coldness was not reflected in the lucidity with which that master of every subject went on to affirm that there was of course a danger--the danger that in given circ.u.mstances Miriam would leave the stage.

"Leave it, you mean, for some man?"

"For the man we're talking about."

"For Nick Dormer?" Peter asked from his place in the cab, his paleness lighted by its lamps.

"If he should make it a condition. But why should he? why should he make _any_ conditions? He's not an a.s.s either. You see it would be a bore"--Nash kept it up while the hansom waited--"because if she were to do anything of that sort she'd make him pay for the sacrifice."

"Oh yes, she'd make him pay for the sacrifice," Peter blindly concurred.

"And then when he had paid she'd go back to her footlights," Gabriel developed from the curbstone as his companion closed the ap.r.o.n of the cab.

"I see--she'd go back--good-night," Peter returned. "_Please_ go on!" he cried to the driver through the hole in the roof. And while the vehicle rolled away he growled to himself: "Of course she would--and quite right!"

x.x.xVII

"Judge for yourself when you get a chance," Nash had said to him; and as it turned out he was able to judge two days later, for he found his cousin in Balaklava Place on the Tuesday following his walk with their insufferable friend. He had not only stayed away from the theatre on the Monday evening--he regarded this as an achievement of some importance--but had not been near Miriam during the day. He had meant to absent himself from her company on Tuesday as well; a determination confirmed by the fact that the afternoon turned to rain. But when at ten minutes to five o'clock he jumped into a hansom and directed his course to Saint John's Wood it was precisely upon the weather that he shifted the responsibility of his behaviour.

Miriam had dined when he reached the villa, but she was lying down, unduly fatigued, before going to the theatre. Mrs. Rooth was, however, in the drawing-room with three gentlemen, in two of whom the fourth visitor was not startled to recognise Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash.

Dashwood appeared to have become Miriam's brother-in-arms and a second child--a fonder one--to Mrs. Rooth; it had reached Peter on some late visit that the young actor had finally moved his lodgings into the quarter, making himself a near neighbour for all sorts of convenience.

"Hang his convenience!" Peter thought, perceiving that Mrs. Lovick's "Arty" was now altogether one of the family. Oh the family!--it was a queer one to be connected with: that consciousness was acute in Sherringham's breast to-day as he entered Mrs. Rooth's little circle.

The place was filled with cigarette-smoke and there was a messy coffee-service on the piano, whose keys Basil Dashwood lightly touched for his own diversion. Nash, addressing the room of course, was at one end of a little sofa with his nose in the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease and with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o'clock in the day, but Mrs. Rooth was not dressed; there was, however, no want of finish in her elegant att.i.tude--the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to let you understand) for which she used to be distinguished at Castle Nugent when the house was full. She toyed incongruously, in her unb.u.t.toned wrapper, with a large tinsel fan which resembled a theatrical property.

It was one of the discomforts of Peter's position that many of those minor matters which are superficially at least most characteristic of the histrionic life had power to displease him, so that he was obliged constantly to overlook and condone and pretend. He disliked besmoked drawing-rooms and irregular meals and untidy arrangements; he could suffer from the vulgarity of Mrs. Rooth's apartments, the importunate photographs which gave on his nerves, the barbarous absence of signs of an orderly domestic life, the odd volumes from the circulating library (you could see what they were--the very covers told you--at a glance) tumbled about under smeary cups and gla.s.ses. He hadn't waited till now to feel it "rum" that fate should have let him in for such contacts; but as he stood before his hostess and her companions he wondered perhaps more than ever why he should. Her companions somehow, who were not responsible, didn't keep down his wonder; which was particularly odd, since they were not superficially in the least of Bohemian type.

Almost the first thing that struck him, as happened, in coming into the room, was the fresh fact of the high good looks of his cousin, a gentleman, to one's taste and for one's faith, in a different enough degree from the stiff-collared, conversible Dashwood. Peter didn't hate Nick for being of so fine an English grain; he knew rather the brush of a new wave of annoyance at Julia's stupid failure to get on with him under that good omen.

It was his first encounter with the late member for Harsh since his arrival in London: they had been on one side and the other so much taken up with their affairs. Since their last meeting Nick had, as we know, to his kinsman's perception, really put on a new character: he had done the finest stroke of business in the quietest way. This had made him a presence to be counted with, and in just the sense in which poor Peter desired least to count. Poor Peter, after his somersault in the blue, had just lately been much troubled; he was ravaged by contending pa.s.sions; he paid every hour in a torment of unrest for what was false in his position, the impossibility of keeping the presentable parts of his character together, the opposition of interest and desire. Nick, his junior and a lighter weight, had settled _his_ problem and showed no wounds; there was something impertinent and mystifying in it. Yet he looked, into the bargain, too innocently young and happy, and too careless and modest and amateurish, to figure as a rival or even as the genius he was apparently going to try to be--the genius that the other day, in the studio there with Biddy, Peter had got a startled glimpse of his power to become. Julia's brother would have liked to be aware of grounds of resentment, to be able to hold she had been badly treated or that Nick was basely fatuous, for in that case he might have had the resource of taking offence. But where was the outrage of his merely being liked by a woman in respect to whom one had definitely denied one's self the luxury of pretensions, especially if, as the wrong-doer, he had taken no action in the matter? It could scarcely be called wrong-doing to call, casually, on an afternoon when the lady didn't seem to be there. Peter could at any rate rejoice that Miriam didn't; and he proposed to himself suggesting to Nick after a little that they should adjourn together--they had such interesting things to talk about.

Meanwhile Nick greeted him with a friendly freedom in which he could read neither confusion nor defiance. Peter was rea.s.sured against a danger he believed he didn't recognise and puzzled by a mystery he flattered himself he hadn't heeded. And he was still more ashamed of being rea.s.sured than of being puzzled.

It must be recorded that Miriam's absence from the scene was not prolonged. Nick, as Sherringham gathered, had been about a quarter of an hour in the house, which would have given her, gratified by his presence, due time to array herself to come down to him. At all events she was in the room, prepared apparently to go to the theatre, very shortly after one of her guests had become sensible of how glad he was she was out of it. Familiarity had never yet cured him of a certain tremor of expectation, and even of suspense, in regard to her entrances; a flutter caused by the simple circ.u.mstance of her infinite variety. To say she was always acting would too much convey that she was often fatiguing; since her changing face affected this particular admirer at least not as a series of masks, but as a response to perceived differences, an intensity of that perception, or still more as something richly constructional, like the shifting of the scene in a play or like a room with many windows. The image she was to project was always incalculable, but if her present denied her past and declined responsibility for her future it made a good thing of the hour and kept the actual peculiarly fresh. This time the actual was a bright, gentle, graceful, smiling, young woman in a new dress, eager to go out, drawing on fresh gloves, who looked as if she were about to step into a carriage and--it was Gabriel Nash who thus formulated her physiognomy--do a lot of London things.

The young woman had time to spare, however, and she sat down and talked and laughed and presently gave, as seemed to Peter, a deeper glow to the tawdry little room, which could do for others if it had to do for her.

She described herself as in a state of nervous muddle, exhausted, blinded, _abrutie_, with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece--the first night was close at hand, and it was going to be of a vileness: they would all see!--but there was no correspondence between this account of the matter and her present bravery of mood. She sent her mother away--to "put on some clothes or something"--and, left alone with the visitors, went to a long gla.s.s between the windows, talking always to Nick Dormer, and revised and rearranged a little her own attire. She talked to Nick, over her shoulder, and to Nick only, as if he were the guest to recognise and the others didn't count. She broke out at once on his having thrown up his seat, wished to know if the strange story told her by Mr. Nash were true--that he had knocked all the hopes of his party into pie.

Nick took it any way she liked and gave a pleasant picture of his party's ruin, the critical condition of public affairs: he was as yet clearly closed to contrition or shame. The pilgrim from Paris, before Miriam's entrance, had not, in shaking hands with him, made even a roundabout allusion to his odd "game"; he felt he must somehow show good taste--so English people often feel--at the cost of good manners. But he winced on seeing how his scruples had been wasted, and was struck with the fine, jocose, direct turn of his kinsman's conversation with the young actress. It was a part of her unexpectedness that she took the heavy literal view of Nick's behaviour; declared frankly, though without ill nature, that she had no patience with his mistake. She was horribly disappointed--she had set her heart on his being a great statesman, one of the rulers of the people and the glories of England. What was so useful, what was so n.o.ble?--how it belittled everything else! She had expected him to wear a cordon and a star some day--acquiring them with the greatest prompt.i.tude--and then to come and see her in her _loge_: it would look so particularly well. She talked after the manner of a lovely Philistine, except perhaps when she expressed surprise at hearing--hearing from Gabriel Nash--that in England gentlemen accoutred with those emblems of their sovereign's esteem didn't so far forget themselves as to stray into the dressing-rooms of actresses. She admitted after a moment that they were quite right and the dressing-rooms of actresses nasty places; but she was sorry, for that was the sort of thing she had always figured in a corner--a distinguished man, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, admiring the smallness of a satin shoe and saying witty things. Nash was convulsed with hilarity at this--such a vision of the British political hero. Coming back from the gla.s.s and making that critic give her his place on the sofa, she seated herself near Nick and continued to express her regret at his perversity.

"They all say that--all the charming women, but I shouldn't have looked for it from you," Nick replied. "I've given you such an example of what I can do in another line."

"Do you mean my portrait? Oh I've got it, with your name and 'M.P.' in the corner, and that's precisely why I'm content. 'M.P.' in the corner of a picture is delightful, but I want to break the mould: I don't in the least insist on your giving specimens to others. And the artistic life, when you can lead another--if you've any alternative, however modest--is a very poor business. It comes last in dignity--after everything else. Ain't I up to my eyes in it and don't I truly know?"

"You talk like my broken-hearted mother," said Nick.

"Does she hate it so intensely?"

"She has the darkest ideas about it--the wildest theories. I can't imagine where she gets them; partly I think from a general conviction that the 'esthetic'--a horrible insidious foreign disease--is eating the healthy core out of English life (dear old English life!) and partly from the charming pictures in _Punch_ and the clever satirical articles, pointing at mysterious depths of contamination, in the other weekly papers. She believes there's a dreadful coterie of uncannily artful and desperately refined people who wear a kind of loose faded uniform and worship only beauty--which is a fearful thing; that Gabriel has introduced me to it; that I now spend all my time in it, and that for its sweet sake I've broken the most sacred vows. Poor Gabriel, who, so far as I can make out, isn't in any sort of society, however bad!"

"But I'm uncannily artful," Nash objected, "and though I can't afford the uniform--I believe you get it best somewhere in South Audley Street--I do worship beauty. I really think it's me the weekly papers mean."

"Oh I've read the articles--I know the sort!" said Basil Dashwood.

Miriam looked at him. "Go and see if the brougham's there--I ordered it early."

Dashwood, without moving, consulted his watch. "It isn't time yet--I know more about the brougham than you. I've made a ripping good arrangement for her stable--it really costs her nothing," the young actor continued confidentially to Peter, near whom he had placed himself.