Miss Bretherton

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

'I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago but two subjects—Jamaica and the stage—the latter taken in a somewhat narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her mind and Mrs. Stuart's more frequently into contact with each other. But I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton. Her strong womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical delight in the girl's beauty, and the little personal pride and excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the season. It is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her in the best light. Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in her turn evidently admires enormously her friend's social capabilities and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs. Stuart's kindness—an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest complaisance towards all the Stuarts' friends, and in a constant watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.

'However, here I am as usual wasting time in analysis instead of describing to you our Sunday. It was one of those heavenly days with which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty. We found a carriage waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region in some virgin continent. On either hand the gorse was thick and golden, great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist grass beneath, and over the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose into the sky in masses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle of white set in the environing blue.

'Then came the farmhouse—old, red-brick, red-tiled, casemented—everything that the aesthetic soul desires—the farmer and his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the parlour, with its last-century woodwork.

'Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch. I never knew him more racy; he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, illustrated by sketches, made in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has condescended to take this year. They range from a bishop and a royalty down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his presentation of the characteristic attitudes of each—those attitudes which, according to him, betray the "inner soul" of the bishop or the foundling—was admirable. Then he fell upon the Academy—that respected body of which I suppose he will soon be the President—and tore it limb from limb. With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at the Academy dinners of the future—supposing fortune ever exalts me again as she did this year to that august meal—I hardly know. Millais's faces, Pettie's knights, or Calderon's beauties—all fared the same. You could not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.

'Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman's cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet. She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries assigned to them. Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth's and an unutterable mawkish thing of Halford's—a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown, gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust young women in a "light which never was on sea or land." "You could count all the figures in the first," she said, "it was so lifelike, so real;" and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it. I looked at Forbes with some amusement; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of the White Lady, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton's liking of the worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.

'"Oh, you couldn't," he said with a groan, "you couldn't like that ballroom,—and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us! Well, there must be something in it,—there must be something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,—I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn't. I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's figures don't join in the middle, and that Forth's men and women are as flat as my hand—there isn't a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don't think I can stand it. I am all for people getting enjoyment where they can," with a defiant look at me, "and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the line somewhere. There's some art that's out of court from the beginning."

'I couldn't resist it.

'"Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to feel; defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms."

'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there's no denying it.

'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like—that's all I know in anything."