'Oh, I have no doubts at all about that,' she said, but with a quick look at him; 'I always feel at once when a part will suit me, and I have fallen in love with this one. It is tragic and passionate, like the White Lady, but it is quite a different phase of passion. I am tired of scolding and declaiming. Elvira will give me an opportunity of showing what I can do with something soft and pathetic. I have had such difficulties in deciding upon a play to begin my October season with, and now this seems to me exactly what I want. People prefer me always in something poetical and romantic, and this is new, and the mounting of it might be quite original.'
'And yet I doubt,' said Kendal; 'I think the part of Elvira wants variety, and would it not be well for you to have more of a change? Something with more relief in it, something which would give your lighter vein, which comes in so well in the White Lady, more chance?'
She frowned a little and shook her head. 'My turn is not that way. I can play a comedy part, of course—every actor ought to be able to—but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act.'
'I don't mean a pure light-comedy part, naturally, but something which would be less of a continuous tragic strain than this. Why, almost all the modern tragic plays have their passages of relief, but the texture of Elvira is so much the same throughout,—I cannot conceive a greater demand on any one. And then you must consider your company. Frankly, I cannot imagine a part less suited to Mr. Hawes than Macias; and his difficulties would react on you.'
'I can choose whom I like,' she said abruptly; 'I am not bound to Mr.
Hawes.'
'Besides,' he said cautiously, changing his ground a little, 'I should have said—only, of course, you must know much better—that it is a little risky to give the British public such very serious fare as this, and immediately after the White Lady. The English theatre-goer never seems to me to take kindly to medievalism—kings and knights and nobles and the fifteenth century are very likely to bore him. Not that I mean to imply for a moment that the play would be a failure in point of popularity. You have got such a hold that you could carry anything through; but I am inclined to think that in Elvira you would be rather fighting against wind and tide, and that, as I said before, it would be a great strain upon you.'
'The public makes no objection to Madame Desforêts in Victor Hugo,' she answered quickly, even sharply. 'Her parts, so far as I know anything about them, are just these romantic parts, and she has made her enormous reputation out of them.'
Kendal hesitated. 'The French have a great tradition of them,' he said.
'Racine, after all, was a preparation for Victor Hugo.'
'No, no!' she exclaimed, with sudden bitterness and a change of voice which startled him; 'it is not that. It is that I am I, and Madame Desforêts is Madame Desforêts. Oh, I see! I see very well that your mind is against it. And Mr. Wallace—there were two or three things in his manner which have puzzled me. He has never said yes to my proposal formally. I understand perfectly what it means; you think that I shall do the play an injury by acting it; that it is too good for me!'
Kendal felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen; the sombre passion of her manner affected him indescribably.