Yet Alston, quite ignorantly, did harm to Claude. For he helped to win Claude away from his genuine, his inner self, to draw him into the path which he had always instinctively avoided until his marriage with Charmian.
Although unspoiled, Alston Lake had not been unaffected by Paris, which had done little harm to his morals, but which had decidedly influenced his artistic sensibility. The brilliant city had not smirched his soul, but it had helped to form his taste. That was very modern, and very un-British. Alston had a sort of innocent love for the strange and the complex in music. He shrank from anything banal, and disliked the obvious, though his contact with French people had saved him from love of the cloudy. As he intended to make his career upon the stage, and as he was too young, and far too enthusiastic, not to be a bit of an egoist, he was naturally disposed to think that all real musical development was likely to take place in the direction of opera.
"Opera's going to be the big proposition!" was his art cry. There was no doubt of Jacob Crayford's influence upon him.
He was the first person who turned Claude's mind seriously toward opera, and therefore eventually toward a villa in Algeria.
Having launched the song with success, Alston Lake naturally wished to hear more of Claude's music. Claude played to him a great deal of it. He was interested in it, admired it. But—and here his wholly unconscious egoism came into play—he did not quite "believe in it." And his lack of belief probably emanated from the fact that Claude's settings of words from the Bible were not well suited to his own temperament, talent, or training. Being very frank, and already devoted to Claude, he said straight out what he thought. Charmian loved him almost for expressing her secret belief. She now said what she thought. Claude, the reserved and silent recluse of a few months ago, was induced by these two to come out into the open and take part in the wordy battles which rage about art. The instant success of his song took away from him an excuse which he might otherwise have made, when Charmian and Alston Lake urged him to compose with a view to pleasing the public taste; by which they both meant the taste of the cultivated public which was now becoming widely diffused, and which had acquired power. He could not say that his talent was one which had no appeal to the world, that he was incapable of pleasing. One song was nothing. So he declared. Charmian and Alston Lake in their enthusiasm elevated it into a great indication, lifted it up like a lamp till it seemed to shed rays of light on the way in which they urged Claude to walk.
He had long abandoned his violin concerto, and had worked on a setting of the Belle Dame Sans Merci for soprano, chorus, and orchestra. But before it was finished—and during the season his time for work was limited, owing to the numerous social engagements in which Charmian and Alston Lake involved him—an event took place which had led directly to the packing of those boxes which now stood ready for a journey. Jacob Crayford reappeared in London after putting Europe through his sieve. And Claude was introduced to him by Alston Lake, who insisted on his patron hearing Claude's song.
Mr. Crayford did not care very much about the song. A song was not a big proposition, and he was accustomed to think in operas. But his fondness for Lake, and Lake's boyish enthusiasm for Claude, led him to pay some attention to the latter. He was a busy man and did not waste much time. But he was a sharp man and a man on the look-out for talent. Apparently this Claude Heath had some talent, not much developed perhaps as yet. But then he was young. In Claude's appearance and personality there was something arresting. "Looks as if there might be something there," was Crayford's silent comment. And then he admired Charmian and thought her "darned cute." He openly chaffed her on her careful silence about her husband's profession when they had met at Mrs. Shiffney's. "So you wanted to know the great fighter, did you?" he said, pulling at the little beard with a nervous hand, and twitching his eyebrows. "And if he hadn't happened to have one opera house, and to be thinking about running up another, much you'd have cared about his fighting."
"My husband is not a composer of operas, Mr. Crayford," observed Charmian demurely.
From Alston Lake had come the urgent advice to Claude to try his hand on an opera.
Jacques Sennier and his wife, fresh from their triumphs in America, had come to London again in June. The Paradis Terrestre had been revived at Covent Garden, and its success had been even greater than before.