Miss Bretherton

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

For this moment the audience had been impatiently waiting, and when the dazzling figure in its trailing, pearl-embroidered robes appeared in the doorway of the ballroom, a storm of applause broke forth again and again, and for some minutes delayed the progress of the scene.

Nothing, indeed, could have been better calculated than this opening to display the peculiar gifts of the actress. The quadrille was a stately spectacular display, in which splendid dress and stirring music and the effects of rhythmic motion had been brought freely into play for the delight of the beholders. Between the figures there was a little skilfully-managed action, mostly in dumb show. The movements of the jealous beauty and of her faithless lover were invested throughout with sufficient dramatic meaning to keep up the thread of the play. But it was not the dramatic aspect of the scene for which the audience cared, it was simply for the display which it made possible of Isabel Bretherton's youth and grace and loveliness. They hung upon her every movement, and Kendal found himself following her with the same eagerness of eye as those about him, lest any phase of that embodied poetry should escape him.

In this introductory scene, the elements which went to make up the spell she exercised over her audience were perfectly distinguishable. Kendal's explanation of it to himself was that it was based upon an exceptional natural endowment of physical perfection, informed and spiritualised by certain moral qualities, by simplicity, frankness, truth of nature. There was a kind of effluence of youth, of purity, of strength, about her which it was impossible not to feel, and which evidently roused the enthusiastic sympathy of the great majority of those who saw her.

Forbes was sitting in the front of the box with Mrs. Stuart, his shaggy gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince and his intended bride, he hardly looked at the stage. The Princess, indeed, was all that Mrs. Stuart had pronounced her to be; she was stiffer and clumsier than even her Teutonic rôle could justify, and she marched laboriously through her very proper and virtuous speeches, evidently driven on by an uneasy consciousness that the audience was only eager to come to the end of them and of her.

In the little pause which followed the disappearance of the newly-betrothed pair into the distant ballroom, Mrs. Stuart leant backward over her chair and said to Kendal:

'Now then, Mr. Kendal, prepare your criticisms! In the scene which is just coming Miss Bretherton has a good deal more to do than to look pretty!'

'Oh, but you forget our compact!' said Kendal. 'Remember you are to be the judge of our behaviour at the end. It is not the part of a judge to tempt those on whom he is to deliver judgment to crime.'

'Don't put too much violence on yourselves!' said Mrs. Stuart, laughing. 'You and Edward can have the back of the box to talk what heresy you like in, so long as you let Mr. Forbes perform his devotions undisturbed.'

At this Forbes half turned round, and shook his great mane, under which gleamed a countenance of comedy menace, at the two men behind him. But in another instant the tones of Isabel Bretherton's voice riveted his attention, and the eyes of all those in the box were once more turned towards the stage.

The scene which followed was one of the most meritorious passages in the rather heavy German play from which the White Lady had been adapted. It was intended to show the romantic and passionate character of the Countess, and to suggest that vein of extravagance and daring in her which was the explanation of the subsequent acts. In the original the dialogue had a certain German force and intensity, which lost nothing of its occasional heaviness in the mouth of Hawes, the large-boned swaggering personage who played the Prince. An actress with sufficient force of feeling, and an artistic sense subtle enough to suggest to her the necessary modulations, could have made a great mark in it. But the first words, almost, revealed Isabel Bretherton's limitations, and before two minutes were over Kendal was conscious of a complete collapse of that sympathetic relation between him and the actress which the first scene had produced. In another sentence or two the spell had been irrevocably broken, and he seemed to himself to have passed from a state of sensitiveness to all that was exquisite and rare in her to a state of mere irritable consciousness of her defects. It was evident to him that in a scene of great capabilities she never once rose beyond the tricks of an elementary elocution, that her violence had a touch of commonness in it which was almost vulgarity, and that even her attitudes had lost half their charm. For, in the effort—the conscious and laboured effort of acting—her movements, which had exercised such an enchantment over him in the first scene, had become mere strides and rushes, never indeed without grace, but often without dignity, and at all times lacking in that consistency, that unity of plan which is the soul of art.