'Yes. We had just gone on to the stage to see her after the curtain had fallen. It was such a pretty sight, you ought not to have missed it. The Prince had come to say good-bye to her, and, as we came in, she was just turning away in her long phantom dress with the white hood falling round her head, like that Romney picture—don't you remember?—of Lady Hamilton,—Mr. Forbes has drawn her in it two or three times. The stage was full of people. Mr. Forbes was there, of course, and Edward, and ourselves, and presently I heard her say to Edward, "Is Mr. Kendal here? I did not see him in the house." Edward said something about your not having been able to get a seat, which I thought clumsy of him, for, of course, we could have got some sort of place for you at the last moment. She didn't say anything, but I thought—if you won't mind my saying so, Mr. Kendal—that, considering all things, it would have been better if you had been there.'
'It seems to me,' said Kendal, with vexation in his voice, 'that there is a fate against my doing anything as I ought to do it. I thought, on the whole, it would be better not to make a fuss about it when it came to the last. You see she must look upon me to some extent as a critical, if not a hostile, influence, and I did not wish to remind her of my existence.'
'Oh well,' said Mrs. Stuart in her cheery commonsense way, 'that evening was such an overwhelming experience that I don't suppose she could have felt any soreness towards anybody. And, do you know, she is improved? I don't quite know what it is, but certainly one or two of those long scenes she does more intelligently, and even the death-scene is better,—less monotonous. I sometimes think she will surprise us all yet.'
'Very likely,' said Kendal absently, not in reality believing a word of it, but it was impossible to dissent.
'I hope so,' exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, 'with all my heart. She has been very depressed often these last weeks, and certainly, on the whole, people have been harder upon her than they were at first. I am so glad that she and your sister will meet in Venice. Madame de Châteauvieux is just the friend she wants.'
Kendal walked home feeling the rankling of a fresh pin-point. She had asked for him, and he had not been there! What must she think, apparently, but that, from a sour, morose consistency, he had refused to be a witness of her triumph!
Oh, hostile fates!
* * * * *
A week later Eustace was settled in the Surrey farmhouse which had sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition. The Surrey country was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds. And under Kendal's sitting-room window a pair of tomtits, which the party had watched that May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world. One of his first walks was to that spot beyond the pond where they had made their afternoon camping-ground. The nut-hatches had fled—fled, Kendal hoped, some time before, for the hand of the spoiler had been near their dwelling, and its fragments lay scattered on the ground. He presently learnt to notice that he never heard the sharp sound of the bird's tapping beak among the woods without a little start of recollection.
Outside his walks, his days were spent in continuous literary effort. His book was in a condition which called for all his energies, and he threw himself vigorously into it. The first weeks were taken up with a long review of Victor Hugo's prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical result. It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to suit all weathers and all skies. There were sombre, wind-swept days, when the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and the bending trees, were in harmony with all the fierce tempestuous side of the great Romantic. There were others when the homely, tender, domestic aspect of the country formed a sort of framework and accompaniment to the simpler patriarchal elements in the books which Kendal had about him. Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him, and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.