"To whom?" Miss King draws forth an old-fashioned salts-bottle, and Miss Juliet glances nervously at the tea-tray. "To whom? Can it be possible that my niece, your father's daughter—No, no! my ears deceive me."
"He said I never could learn to be anything more than a coryphée, aunt, and I knew that that would not be accounted an art," she says quite low. "But I then went to Mr. Arbuthnot. You know him, aunt?"
"I have heard of such a person," answers Miss King, peering austerely over her spectacles at Hyacinthe.
"He has engaged me at a salary of two pounds a week, and he says that some day I shall be great." Her eyes dilate and look out afar, through the tiny window-panes, into a limitless and superb future. "I have found my art; and I am so happy!"
Miss Juliet's glance intercepts her sister's speech. There is silence in the quaint, small parlor that night; and for the first time in many a year the memory of her lost lover's first kiss rests softly on Miss King's wan, wrinkled cheek: for the first time in many a year she has remembered the perfection of him and forgotten the perfidy.
That was October.
This is June.
"For thirty-seven consecutive nights the girl has held the public of this great capital spellbound by the magical power of her art. She has great beauty—Greek features lighted up by Northern vividness and intellectuality; but transcendent beauty falls to the lot of very many actresses, yet it is not to be said of any one of them that they have what this unheralded, unknown girl possesses—tragic genius such as thrilled through the Hebrew veins of dead Rachel, and flew from her, a magnetic current, straight to the hearts and brains of her auditors. Of such metal is made this new star. She has as yet appeared but in one rôle, that of Adrienne in Scribe's play, but within the compass of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love to crowned despair. It is[page 227] a new interpretation, and a remarkable one—an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and awful—awful in its physical adherence to realism, and singular in that it does not disgust, or even horrify, but leaves a memory of peace with the listener, who has not failed to catch the last strain for sight of the divine and dying eyes." So the critic of the London oracle wrote of Hyacinthe King.
That night the people had crowned her with a wreath of gold laurel-leaves, and she was walking to her dressing-room, when, as she passed the green-room door, a merry laugh made her glance in. There were fifty people there—actors, journalists, swells and hangers-on of the playhouse. A little to the right of the group, and talking and laughing with two or three others, stood a man both young and handsome.
Hyacinthe went toward him, and the people, unused to seeing her there for a long time past, hushed their talk, and one of them marked the newness of the light that shone in her eyes and the happiness that smiled on her lips as she came. He was a poet, and he went home and made verses on her: he had never thought of such a thing before. She raised the wreath of laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before she slept she whispered to Miss Juliet, "I have found him."