What ailed the world that it was so slow to accept Richard Wagner, one of the few positive geniuses it had produced? If he could but do something to rouse the British public at least, create in it a thirst for The Master, interpreted by the greatest of his pupils, surely that must add to their happiness. The most ignorant were often quite happy when surrendering themselves to the seductive charm of music, to that spell which enmeshes the facile senses and makes no demand upon a brain often tired out by nightfall. And what master had ever liberated from those mysterious centres of the musically gifted brain such a voluptuous perfumed sea of music as Richard Wagner? People that had been educated on the old barrel-organ operas had only forcibly to be introduced to the far more satisfying—intoxicating—music to crave it constantly, as the Germans did.
Suddenly he remembered that he possessed two hundred thousand pounds in his own right. To what better use could he put a part of it than to educate the musical taste of his country while assuring the future of the best of his friends? That a nice ethical point was involved in spending the gift of one woman upon another he would have dismissed as unworthy of consideration had it occurred to him. He was without conscious arrogance, but he had the blood of kings in his veins, as have all the older families of the British aristocracy, with or without the bend sinister, for Plantagenets and Tudors had married more than one daughter to a peer of the realm; and in blood of this order democracy is but one more affectation, or policy, or manifest of good manners, as the individual is composed; all tributes, therefore, are his natural due. Ordham would have shrunk with a hot blush from admitting that his wife belonged to a nation of upstarts, that her family pretensions were absurd, and that the god of circumstance had shown uncommon judgment in sweeping that river of crude American gold across the Atlantic to be properly enjoyed by one of a mighty people to whom that bundle of states owed its being; he would have blushed, but, driven to the wall, he would have set his countenance into the mask of a type, opened his large cold eyes, and carelessly admitted it.
Therefore did he give no thought whatever to the source of his present affluence. Besides, not only would he have done as much for one or two of his old college friends, but he was meditating a great public service. To hold London by the nose until it swallowed, and assimilated, and bred an appetite for the greatest music ever written, what signified it if the artist who should help him to accomplish the miracle happened to be his dearest friend threatened with disaster? Not that he pretended to any such sophistry as that he was not thinking quite as much of Margarethe Styr as of London, more perhaps; but facts were facts.
And he knew that in no more direct fashion would she ever accept aid from him. Were she driven from one opera house to the next by the jealousies of the most jealous of all artists, unable to obtain a permanent position, she could support herself by teaching; no doubt, too, she had a small private fortune, and the villa was hers. But that was not the point. She was a great and a very ambitious artist. The voice was the shortest-lived of all Nature’s gifts, and the voices devoted to the music of Wagner had an even shorter lease than the nightingales in the throats of the Violettas and Lucias. Something must be done at once. On Monday he would go up to London and ask advice of Hans Richter, who had conducted Wagner concerts with distinguished success, and whom Styr had met many times in Bayreuth and Munich. It must be the dream of his life to conduct a season of Wagner opera in London, and this could be made possible only if the experiment were privately financed. At this time Covent Garden was not a company; there was no board of directors to consult. It could be rented by any one that had the money to put up, so long as its traditions were not violated. Ordham knew that with Richter behind him, it would be possible to hire the opera house for a season—the season, were it not already disposed of; and that Styr could obtain a leave of absence either through the influence of her friends, or by flying into a rage and goading the directors to break her contract. He could rely upon many of his aristocratic and all of his artistic friends to spread the fame of Styr before her arrival, make her the fashion, fill the house for the first night with all that prided themselves upon being fad tasters, avid for new sensations. Let them be manipulated to that extent and Styr would do the rest. The English might not be able to appreciate the wonder of her voice, might yawn miserably during those everlasting recitatives, but they would succumb to her personality, her magic and magnetism; for to these rare qualities no race is more susceptible; and the mere sweetness of her voice would enchant them no matter what their lack of artistic instinct.
And then! A triumph in London, and New York, already nibbling at Wagner, would give him at least a season’s hearing and demand the Styr as a matter of course. Her fortune and greater fame would be assured. Ordham, as he strode up and down the room, had never felt so enthusiastic, so energetic, so inspired. He could give to England what Ludwig II had given to central Europe. He had never been sensible, save when Styr had deliberately played upon him, of wishing to be of any use to the world; but in these exalted moments, rattling those thin sheets of foreign paper (a link in themselves), he felt his first real impulse toward accomplishment, to stand for something, experienced the real awakening of that gift for leadership which has raised him so high among men to-day, but which, so far, had only manifested itself occasionally in an obstinate determination to have his own way. He felt his power, saw his future more clearly than he had ever done before.
His mind flashed to the woman who had always roused his higher and better impulses, while other women sought to make a Lucien de Rubempré of him; to-night she had transmitted to him out of her own stupendous energies—Good God! what had they not accomplished?—a tingling shock. She sent him his first opportunity to use his own energies, to taste the delights of power. It was something of the rapture of the creative artist that he felt on that never-to-be-forgotten night, for although no composition took form in his quickened brain, the genius of his personality came to life, the fires of his own peculiar gifts crackled in a mind created for the world’s use. As he finally made his way through the silent house to his room, he admitted with delight that he owed those moments of temperamental rapture, this awakening of his vital forces, which reached far beyond introducing Styr and Wagner to England, to the mate of that secret part of him the world would never suspect. His wife’s door was ajar, but he did not even glance at it. He made haste to get into bed, and, with the functional regularity of youth, was asleep in five minutes.
XLVII
A FAIRY COMET
Mabel was not a congenital liar. She had, indeed, displayed a fairly truthful record until John Ordham came into her life. When little, she had been duly punished for telling the fibs natural to childhood; and, during the years that followed, those faculties with which the social unit adapts itself automatically, and economically, to the exigencies of the moment, had in her case been put to little strain, indulged young beauty that she was. She was a good girl in all ways, and after turning on the fountain of those beautiful crystal tears, or terrifying the parent whose solitary passion she was, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself, vowing never to repeat the offence. As she grew older, she broke this vow less and less often.
But the long coaching of her mother and Lady Bridgminster had wrought its inevitable work. She was merely one more victim of the disabilities of her sex. She could not go frankly forth and woo the man to whom she had immediately surrendered her heart; she must scheme, and wait, blow hot and cold, demoralize her character generally. She had no cleverness save in female craft, but she was vaguely conscious during those weeks when Ordham wooed her with a silken rope round his neck and a padded prod at his back, that the crystalline quality of her girl’s mind was permanently clouding.
She had assumed, of course, that after marriage her influence would be paramount. Had not momma ruled poppa? Was not the ascendency of the American woman one of the truisms of the century? She rode gayly into the breakers of generalities oblivious of the rocks beneath, whose other name is facts.