“It is not by applause,” he said, “it is not by any help really that I or any one else can give you that you may become great. It is in yourself alone that the power lies, and it is by your life, by your industry, and by the fulness and completeness of your experience and your sympathy that you will be able to get hold of that power. For your warning, I tell you that it is no easy task—that, mining in yourself, you will have to think and struggle and despair before you can bring your own gold to the surface. You will also have to find your choice by patient, unremitting work. You cannot make others feel unless you feel yourself, and you have to learn how to feel. It is not so easy. Again, having learned that, you cannot convey what you feel until you have learned speech. And, for your encouragement, I believe—or else I would not accept you, much less ask you to be my pupil—I believe that you will be able to do so. You have perception. You can interpret others, as I have heard to-night. So that some day you may write that which will give tears or laughter to those not yet born. Good-night.”
The summer and the season were at their mid-most, but though the former had been fine, the latter at present had been rather objectless. Balls, concerts, parties, all the various devices by which the crowd believes it amuses itself, and without which it would certainly be bored, had occurred with their usual frequency, but up till now no bright particular star had arisen to draw the eyes and the thoughts of all to itself. There had, in fact, been no “rage,” and neither book, play, violinist, or traveller, nor even a cowboy from the remote West, had appeared to fill the invitation-cards and usurp the thoughts of emigrant London. Why nobody had invented something by this time was not clear, for absolutely anything in the world can become the rage of one season to be dropped either like a hot potato or a soiled glove the next. The year before there had been a cowboy,—this year he was a hot potato, for he had become odiously familiar; a female palmist was also still in existence, but she was a soiled glove, since the pleasant frisson of having a bewildering future told in all the horror of detail before your friends is an experience not to be repeated if subsequent events have shewn the prophecy to have been altogether erratic.
But from the night of Lord Yorkshire’s concert hope began to wake in the season’s middle-aged breast, that it, too, like most of its predecessors, would be known by an engrossing topic to mark it out from others before it was numbered with the colourless dead. For the picturesque—of a picturesqueness unequalled even by last season’s cowboy—had at length arisen in the shape of twins from Hampshire, Challoner twins, Flints’s nephew and niece. They sprang from a country parsonage, where Flints’s brother, whom nobody had hitherto even heard of, lived like a sort of mediæval ascetic prophet in a lugubrious atmosphere of fasting and prayer and scourging and sack-cloth. He preached the most curdling sermons on Sunday, quite like Savonarola, on the comfortable doctrine of eternal damnation. About the twins, however, there was nothing in the least ascetic or mediæval: they were both quite young, hardly out of their teens, and were simply Diana and Apollo come to earth again. The girl (Helen, too) had Titian hair, in golden, glorious profusion, a face like the morning, and the inches of a goddess. And her charm, her bubbling spirits, her extraordinary enjoyment and vitality! She made everybody else look like a kitchen-maid, which was so delightful. But Martin—Phœbus Apollo, drunk with nectar! He played, too; Karl Rusoff said he had never heard anything like it, and the dear old angel simply wept the other night at Frank Yorkshire’s, when Phœbus Apollo first dawned, but wept floods. And what could have been more romantic than the manner of their appearance? People were asked—we were all asked—to Lord Yorkshire’s for “Music” in the bottom left-hand corner, expecting, perhaps, a couple of songs from Maltina and a nocturne of Rusoff’s. Instead, this divine boy walks up to the piano and plays the “Pied Piper” to us all. Yorkshire brought him up from the country, without a word to anybody, and just shot him at London. He hit. Helen was with Lady Sunningdale,—she always scores somehow,—who gives out openly that she is madly in love with Martin, and makes him imitate her, which he does with such awful fidelity that it is impossible not to believe, if one shuts one’s eyes, that it is not she who is talking. The only question is whether she will poison Sunningdale and insist on marrying Phœbus Apollo, or whether he will say “Retro Sathanas.” It may be taken for granted that Yorkshire will marry the girl. Then, the next night they were all four at the opera in Yorkshire’s box, next the Royal box, and nobody looked at anything else. The girl was dressed in grey, very simple, but quite good. There was just a touch of blue somewhere; no jewels, but that radiant face and that glorious hair! Poor Lady Sunningdale beside her looked like a lobster salad in the highest spirits. But really the boy is the handsomer; and when the opera was over people simply stood on the stairs to see them go out. But the twins were completely unconscious that it was they whom every one was looking at, and came downstairs together, chatting, laughing, and chaffing Lady Sunningdale because she had gone to sleep in the second act of “Siegfried.” My dear, they are simply divine, and we must secure them at once for dinner or something, otherwise it will be too late.
The last sentence, whatever in this brief résumé of what London said was false or exaggerated, was certainly borne out by subsequent facts. For London, tired with its spinster ragelessness, rose at them as trout rise in the days of May-fly, and besought their presence, finding them, as is not always the case with its rages, improve on acquaintance. They enjoyed themselves so enormously, and enjoyment is a most infectious disease, of which every hostess prays that her guests may sicken. They danced divinely, with the same childish pleasure, all night. Whatever the entertainment was, they were delighted, and their delight diffused itself through the crowds of which they were the centre. And it was always interesting to have at one’s house the girl from nowhere, who was going to make the match of the season, and the boy from nowhere, who was going to send the world mad with music. The twins, in fact, blazed in the blue; they were the latest discovery, the point at which all telescopes were aimed. And they presumably, like the latest-discovered star, were too busy to be either pleased or embarrassed that everybody was looking at them; they just sang and shone together with all the other lesser stars.
Ten days passed thus, Lady Sunningdale plying the bellows assiduously and from time to time throwing on fresh faggots of interesting and picturesque information to feed the blaze. Nobody, not even the twins themselves, had been more astonished than she when they shot up into the zenith of success, for she had not anticipated anything of the kind; but that having happened, she was quick to assume the rôle of godmother. Nothing again, a week or two before, had been further from her thoughts than the idea that Frank Yorkshire should marry Helen; but that having been suggested to her, it was, of course, incumbent on her to say that she had brought them together with that express purpose, and by dint of repetition soon got to believe it.
The allied forces mean time had concerted their attack on that very well-garrisoned fortress known as Martin’s father. Sheets of desultory letters were rained upon him by Lady Sunningdale, which he answered with punctilious politeness; while Frank, in far soberer strain, told Lord Flintshire the opinion of those like Karl Rusoff, who were thoroughly competent to judge, begging him use it in Martin’s behalf. In consequence he wrote soon afterwards to his brother with some earnestness:
“You hardly ever come to town, I know, my dear Sidney,” his letter ran, “but I really wish you would come now. It would make you prouder than you have ever been of both your children, if you saw them here. London, I am speaking quite seriously, has gone off its head about them. And, indeed, I’m sure I don’t wonder. They are absolutely entrancing; their enjoyment of it all is the most infectious thing I ever saw, and we play ridiculous round games after dinner instead of grumbling at each other over Bridge. And their looks! Helen has taken the shine out of all the débutantes, and yet not one of them seems to hate her for it.
“This, however, is frivolous; but I want to tell you very seriously what an extraordinary impression Martin’s musical abilities have made. He played the other night at Yorkshire’s house, and I assure you all the musical lights of London simply hung on his hands. I know nothing about it myself; but when you find a great pianist and a great musician like Karl Rusoff listening, absorbed, to a young man of twenty-three, whom nobody has hitherto ever heard of, one cannot help attaching some weight to it. Others, too, so Frank tells me, have been no less enthusiastic about him, but they are only names to you and me.
“Well, this is not entirely unasked advice, for I remember at Chartries a fortnight ago you consulted me about Martin and his future. And now it seems to me there is really no choice. He must be a musician; you cannot take the responsibility of trying to render unfruitful a gift like his. Nor would it be any good; he is bound to be one.
“Now, my dear Sidney, if there is any difficulty about expense, for I gather he must study exclusively for some time, pray do not give a thought to it. I will most gladly defray all expenses connected with him. Pray let me hear from you as soon as possible on the subject; and if you can run up to town for a day or two, you will see for yourself, and be a most welcome guest at the house of