He handed the telegram to me: “Beautiful young woman, answers to description. Landed on Saturday; sings to-night. Hôtel Royal. Elderly man with her.” There was not a doubt in my mind but that this was Isabel. The elderly man must be the villain who passed himself off as her uncle. I said so; my uncle agreed with me.
“The dentist fellow described him just as you do,” he continued—“a gruff old man, with a brown coat and broad-brimmed hat, and a disagreeable snuffle when he talked. He used to go with her a year ago, when she got the silver tooth made, and he was with her the other day. And now, my boy, when are we to start for Dieppe? Let's look at the time-table.”
We started by the tidal train, and reached Dieppe about five p.m. that evening. It was the season, and every hotel was brimful of English and French fashion, come to bathe itself in the briny wave of that strong salt sea. We went straight to the Hôtel Royal, but the landlord had not even a garret where he could put up a bed for us. The lodging-houses in the whole length of the Rue Aguado were overflowing, and we were finally driven to explore the Faubourg de la Barre, where we were thankful to be taken in by a garrulous old landlady, who showed us two small rooms on the first floor. I was not in a frame of mind to quarrel with the accommodation, but I heard the admiral relieving himself in strong vernacular on the corkscrew staircase.
We deposited our light impedimenta in these lodgings, and then went out to see what information was to be gathered concerning the object of our journey. The first thing we beheld on entering the Grande Rue was a placard announcing “La Sonnambula” for that evening; the prima donna was to be a “gifted young soprano débutante, Signorina Graziella.” We went to the box-office; every place was taken, and we had only a prospect of standing-room in the space between the first tier and the balcony. The prima donna had been heralded by such a flourish of trumpets that the whole population was eager to hear her—so the box-keeper informed us.
By this time it was six o'clock; but I was fed by something stronger than meat, and it never occurred to me that since my breakfast, which had been suspended before I was half through it, I had tasted no food. My uncle's sympathy, however, being of the healthiest kind, was not proof against the demands of nature, and he suggested that it was time to think of dinner. I was ashamed of having so entirely forgotten his comfort in my own absorbing preoccupation, and proposed that we should go to the table-d'hôte of the Hôtel Royal, which was served at six. I [pg 751] would have eaten merely to keep him company; but the first spoonful of soup seemed to choke me. The brave old sailor was near losing temper with me at last, and vowed that he would wash his hands of me if I didn't eat my dinner. He had roughed it on many a heavy sea, and in nine cases out of ten it was his hearty appetite that kept him afloat and pulled him through. In any case, he would not admit fasting to be an element in sentiment with rational human beings. He called for a bottle of Château Lafitte, and insisted on my helping him to empty it. I did my best, and the result was that before dinner was over the generous wine repaid me for the effort, and enabled me to take, if not a more hopeful, at any rate a less utterly disconsolate, view of life, and of the particular chapter of it I was now passing through. It had a still kinder effect on my uncle; his heart soon warmed by the juice of the red grape to such an extent that he talked of my miserable position cheerfully, as if it had been the most ordinary occurrence, and as if there was no reason why I should despond about it at all. He persisted in treating Isabel as a naughty child who had never been taught submission to the rules of life, and broke through them the moment she found they trammelled her. It was no unprecedented event for an excitable young thing to go mad about the stage; there were, on the contrary, plenty of instances of it. He could count them on his fingers—young ladies who had gone quite mad about it, and who had calmed down, when the freak was over, into excellent wives and mothers. Why should not this silly little puss do the same? I did not dare remind him of those terrible words, written in her own hand: “If I were as true as I have been false.”
It was a solace to hear him rambling on in his good-natured, foolish talk. Only when he repeated with stout emphasis for the tenth time that she was herself the victim and dupe of the designing old scoundrel who called her his niece, I ventured to remark: “But Simpson says....” “Simpson is an ass!” snarled my uncle, and I at once assented, and declared my belief that Simpson was an ass.
The moment we had finished our Château Lafitte we rose and left the crowded room, where new-comers were still pouring in to seize upon every seat as it was vacated. I had been casting uneasy glances towards the door, after first quickly scanning the three hundred heads that were bobbing up and down over as many soup-plates when we entered; but my fears were vain. Isabel was not likely to run such a risk, if she wished—as evidently she did wish—to remain undiscovered. I overheard some persons near us discussing the appearance of the prima donna, who, they observed, never showed herself off the stage. Many curious idlers had wasted hours lolling about the hotel door, in hopes of seeing her come out to walk or bathe; but since she had been in Dieppe—four days now—no one had caught a glimpse of her. They little dreamed, as they bandied this gossip with one another, that they were stabbing a heart with every word. The persistent avoidance of notice was but too significant to me of the prima donna's identity. It wanted yet half an hour of the time for the theatre, and my uncle said we might as well spend it inhaling the fresh breeze that was blowing from the north, borne in by the advancing tide. He linked his arm in mine, and we sauntered down to the beach. The waves were breaking in low thunder-sobs upon [pg 752] the shingles, and all the town that was not dining was out of doors watching them. The Etablissement was crowded, and the music of the band that was playing there came floating towards us with every roll of the waves; but the hum of the chattering crowd rose distinctly above the sobbing of the sea and the murmur of the more distant orchestra. I was too excited, too absorbed in my own thoughts, to realize distinctly anything around me, but I quite well remember how I was impressed in a vague yet vivid way by the contrast between the sad, majestic tide heaving and surging on one side, and the human stream rippling to and fro on the other, dressed out in such tawdry gear, and simpering and chattering and subsiding like the frothy foam on the billows. I can remember, too, how I turned, irritated and sick, from the sight of it to the prettier, purer one of children playing on the sward beside the beach. The peals of their innocent laughter did not jar upon me; there was no discord between it and the dirge-like sound of the water washing the shore. All this passed and repassed before me like something in a dream.
But the time was hurrying on, and now I was impatient to see my doom with my own eyes, or to know that the reprieve was prolonged, and that I might yet cling to a plank of hope.
“I think it's time we were going,” I remarked, pulling out my watch; “the crowd is thinning, and I suppose it is bound in the same direction.” We were late, as I expected; every spot was filled in the little theatre when we arrived, and the performance had begun. As the box-keeper opened the door to admit us to our standing-post on the first tier, we were almost thrown back by the roar of applause that burst upon our ears; it rose and fell like a mighty gust of wind, and seemed literally to make the ground shake under our feet and the walls tremble round us. For a moment I was stunned. There was a lull, and then we went in. The singer had left the stage, but the air was still vibrating with the melody of her voice and of the rapturous echoes it had awakened. A fine barytone was confiding his despair and his hopes to the audience, but it fell idly on their ears after what had gone before. The Sonnambula appeared again; the first notes were greeted by another salvo of bravos, louder, more impassioned and prolonged, than the first; again and again the plaudits rose, handkerchiefs fluttered, and hands clapped—the house was electrified. She could bear it no longer; overcome by emotion, she held out her arms to the spectators in an entreating gesture that seemed to say: “Enough! Spare me; I can bear no more!” It was either an impulse of childlike nature or the most finished piece of art ever seen on the stage. Whatever it was, the effect was tremendous. I suppose it could not really have been so, but I would have sworn that the house rocked. It was a sustained roll of human thunder from the pit to the gallery, and from the gallery to the pit. Isabel—for it was she—made another passionate response with the same childlike, bewitching grace, and rushed off the scene. I was rooted to the spot, not daring to look at my uncle; not thinking of him, of anything. I was like a man in a nightmare, held fast in the grasp of a spectre, longing to call for help, but powerless to utter a sound.
The manager came forward and addressed a few words of expostulation to the audience; implored them to control their ecstasies a little for [pg 753] the sake of the sensitive and gifted being who had called them forth. He was nervous and at the same time triumphant. He was answered by a loud buzz of assent. The Sonnambula once more came forth, and this time a deep, suppressed murmur was the only interruption. The dress, the glare, the gaslight, the strange way the lustrous coils of her black hair were arranged—tumbled in a sort of studied tangle all over the forehead—while a veil, half on, half off, concealed part of the face, the entire transformation of the mise-en-scène, in fact, might easily have disguised her identity from eyes less preternaturally keen than mine; but my glance had scarcely fallen on the frail, shrouded figure, as it glided in from the background, than I knew that I beheld my wife; beheld her clasped—gracious heavens! yes, I saw it, and stood there motionless and dumb—clasped by the man who was howling out some idiotic lamentations. She stepped forward, and began to sing. Her head was first slightly bowed over her breast, and her hands clasped and hanging. The first bars were warbled out in a kind of bird-like whisper, as if she were in a dream; but little by little they grew higher, more sonorous, until, carried away by the power of the music and her own magnificent interpretation of it, she flung back her head, and let the gossamer cloud fall from it, revealing the unshrouded contour of the face, upturned, inspired, all alight with the triumph of the hour, while the bell-like notes rang out with a breadth and pathos that melted and stirred every heart in that vast crowd like touches of fire. It was a vision of beauty that defies all words. I neither spoke nor moved while the song lasted; but when the last chord died out, and the pent-up hearts of the listeners broke forth in new peals that seemed to sweep over the songstress in a flood of joy and triumph, I awoke and came to my senses.