A Woman's Soul by Charles Garvice

Originally Published: December 9, 1901

Genres: Romance

Dime Novel Bibliography: https://dimenovels.org/Item/283/Show

Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216955781-a-woman-s-soul

Gutenberg link: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/74103

Chapters: 38

CHAPTER I

BEHIND THE FOOTLIGHTS

“Good-night! Good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good-night till it be morrow!”

The speaker was a young girl, who stood in the middle of the room, her hands clasped, her head bent forward, her eyes fixed in a dreamy rapture, and the remark was addressed to—no one.

She paused, sighed a little—not from impatience, but with a wistful dissatisfaction—and absently moved to the window, through which the last rays of the June sun were flickering redly.

She stood there for a moment or two, then began to pace the room with a lithe, undulating grace. It was a pity that she was alone, because such beauty and grace were wasted on the desert air of the rather grim and dingy room. It was a pity that Sir John Everett Millais, or Mr. Edwin Long, or some other of the great portrait painters were not present to transfer her beauty of face and form, for it was a loveliness of no common order.

Many a poet’s pen had attempted to describe Doris Marlowe, but it may safely be said that not one had succeeded; and not even a great portrait painter could have depicted the mobility of her clear, oval face, and its dark eyes and sensitive lips—eyes and lips so full of expression that people were sometimes almost convinced that she had spoken before she had uttered a word.

This evening, and at this moment, her face was all alive, as it were, with expression, as she put up her hand to smooth back the thick tresses of dark brown hair—so dark that it was almost black—and, stopping suddenly before a pier glass which stood at the end of the room, repeated the familiar lines:

“Good-night! Good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good-night till it be morrow!”

“Ah, no! No, no, no!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot and drawing her brows together at the reflection in the glass. “That is not it, nor anything like it. I shall never get it! Never! Nev—”

The door opened behind her, and she turned her wistful, dissatisfied, restless face over her shoulder toward the comer. It was an old man, bent almost double, with a thin and haggard face, from which gleamed a pair of dark eyes so brilliant and peering that they made the rest of the face look almost lifeless. He looked at her keenly, as he paused as if for breath, and, still looking at her, went to the table and laid a long roll of paper upon it; then he sank into a chair, and, leaning on his stick, said, in a hollow voice:

“Well?”

“But it isn’t well, Jeffrey. It’s bad, as bad as could be!” and the mobile lips allowed a quick, impatient laugh to escape, then compressed themselves as if annoyed at their levity. “I cannot do it! I cannot! I have tried it a hundred times, a thousand times! And it sounds more like—oh, it sounds more like a servant-maid saying, ‘Good-night, good-night, call me at seven to-morrow!’ than Juliet’s immortal adieu!”

“Does it?” said the old man, calmly.

“Yes, it does; very much!” she retorted, half laughing again. “Oh, Jeffrey, I can’t do it, and that is the simple truth! Tell them I cannot do it, and—and beg me off.”

The old man stretched out his hand slowly, and taking the paper from the table, as slowly unfastened it and displayed it at full length.

It was a playbill, printed in the usual style, in red and blue ink—

Theatre Royal, Barton.
“Romeo and Juliet.”
Miss Doris Marlowe as Juliet.

The girl looked at it, a faint color coming into her face; then she raised her eyes to the glittering ones above the placard and shook her head.

“Miss Doris Marlowe will murder Juliet!” she said; “that is what it will be, Jeffrey—simple murder. You must prevent the perpetration of so hideous a crime!”

“Too late!” he said in his hollow voice; “the bills are already out. The play is advertised in the papers; they were booking at the theatre when I left. You must play it. What is the matter?”

“The matter—” she began, then stopped abruptly, as if in despair. “I don’t know what is the matter. I only feel as if—oh, as if I were any one but Juliet. Why didn’t you let me go on playing little comedy parts, Jeffrey? I could do those after a fashion—but Juliet! I ought to be flattered,” and she looked at the bill, “but I am very frightened!” and she laughed again.

“Frightened!” he said, his thick white brows coming together. “Why should you be frightened? Have I not told you you could do it, and do I not know? Am I ever wrong?”

“No, no,” she hastened to reply. “You are always right, and it is I who am always wrong. And indeed, Jeffrey, dear, I will try! I will try for your sake!” and she glided across to his chair and laid her hand—a long, white hand, soft and slim as a child’s—upon his shoulder with tender docility.

“Try for your own,” he said, not unkindly, but gravely. “Try for art’s sake, and yet—yes, try for mine! You know how I have set my dream on your success—you know that it is the dream, the aim of my life! Ever since you were a child and sat upon my knee looking up into my face with your great eyes, I have looked forward to the day when the world should acknowledge that Jeffrey Flint could make a great actor though he failed himself!”

The dark eyes glittered still more keenly as he spoke, and the hand that held the playbill tightened.

“You will succeed if you set your heart on it,” he said more calmly. “You have done well up to now; I haven’t praised you: that is not my way; but—but—I am satisfied. Up to now you have got on in regular strides—tomorrow night is the great leap! The great chance that seldom comes more than once in a life. Take it, Doris, take it!”

“Yes, Jeffrey,” she said, softly; but he heard the sigh she tried to stifle and looked up.

“Well?” he said grimly. “You would say—”

She moved away from him and leaned against the table, her hands clasped loosely.

“I was going to say that it seems to me as if all the trying in the world would not make me a Shakespeare’s Juliet! The lines are beautiful, and I know them—oh, yes, I know them, but—” she paused, then went on dreamily: “Do you think any young girl, any one so young as I am, could play it properly, Jeffrey?”

“Juliet was fourteen,” he said, grimly.

Doris smiled.

“That’s a mistake, I think, Jeffrey; she was eighteen, most people say! Oh, she was young enough; yes, but—but then you see she had met Romeo.”

The old man looked at her attentively, then his keen gaze dropped to the floor.

“Is it necessary for an actor to have actually died before he can perfectly represent a death scene?” he asked.

She laughed, and a faint blush rose to her face.

“Perhaps dying isn’t so important as falling in love, Jeffrey; but it seems to me that one must have loved—and lost—before one can play Juliet, and I’ve done neither.”

He made no response to this piece of speculation; but after some minutes’ silence he said:

“Do some of it, Doris.”

She started slightly, as if he had awakened her from a dream, and recited some of the lines.

The old man watched her, and listened anxiously at first, then with rapt attention, as, losing herself in the part, she grew more emphatic and spontaneous; but suddenly she stopped.

“It will not do, Jeffrey, will it?” she said, quickly. “There—there is no heart in it, is there? Don’t tell me it’s all right!” she pleaded. “I always like the truth from you—at least!”

“And you get it,” he said, grimly. “No, it is not all right. You look—” he stopped—“and your voice is musical and thrilling, but—there is something wanting yet. Do not give it up—it will all come right. Tomorrow with the lights and the people—there will be a full house, crammed—the feeling you want will come, and I shall be satisfied.”

He rose and rolled up the paper.

“I have to go back to the theatre.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said, quickly.

“No,” he said; “you are better alone. Take your book and go out into the fields. This room is not large enough—” and he passed out.

She understood him and, after a moment or two of reflection, got her hat, murmuring as she ran down the stairs—

“Dear old Jeffrey, I must do it for his sake.”

Doris Marlowe, as she passed down the quiet street, was as unlike the popular idea of an actress as it is possible to imagine. It is too generally supposed by the great public that an actress must necessarily be “loud” in word, dress and voice, that she must be affected on and off the stage, and that her behavior is as objectionable as her manner and attire. If the usual run of actresses are of this fashion, Doris was a singular exception to this rule. Her voice was soft and low, and as refined in its tones as the daughter of an earl; her manner was as quiet as any well-bred lady’s could be, and in her plain white dress and straw hat she looked as much like a schoolgirl as anything else, especially as she had a copy of “Romeo and Juliet” in her hand, which might have been mistaken for a French grammar.

There was in fact nothing “loud” about her; indeed, when off the stage she was rather silent and shy, and the color was as apt to come into her pale white cheeks as into those of the schoolgirl she resembled. It was only from the quiet play of the dark thick brows, and the ever changing expression of the eloquent eyes, that the keenest observer would ever have detected that Doris Marlowe was something different from the ordinary young lady whom one meets—and forgets—every day.

She passed up the street, her book held lightly in her hand, her eyes fixed dreamily on the roseate sky, and watching the din and bustle of the big manufacturing town which climbed up the hill in front of her, turned aside, and, making her way up a leafy lane, reached the fields which are as green as if Barton and its score of factory chimneys were a hundred miles away.

There was not only green grass, but clumps of trees and a running brook, and Doris, casting herself, after the fashion of her sex, on the bank by the stream, opened the book and began to study.

But after a few minutes, during which she kept her eyes upon the page with knitted brows, her thoughts began to wander, and, letting the book slip to the ground, she leaned against the trunk of a tree, and, clasping her hands around her knees, gave herself up to maiden meditation, fancy-free.

And it was of herself—of all people in the world!—she was thinking. She was looking back, recalling her past life, and marveling over it with a pleasant little wonder.

And yet there was nothing very marvelous in it after all.

Ever since she could remember she and Jeffrey—“dear old Jeffrey!”—had been alone. Ever since she could remember he had seemed to her as bent and white-haired and old as he was now, and she knew no more of him, or how it happened that he had stood to her in place of mother and father, and kith and kin, than she knew now.

Of her real father and her mother she had always been totally ignorant. As a child she had accepted Jeffrey as a fact, without questioning, and when, in later years, she had put some questions about her parents to him, she had equally accepted the answer.

“Ask me nothing, Doris. Your mother was an angel; your father—” Then he had stopped and left her; and, from that day to this, Doris had not repeated the question.

They had lived, she remembered, in complete solitude. Of Jeffrey’s early life she knew nothing for certain, excepting that he had been an actor; that he had been—and was—a gentleman; and that he had received a good education.

She had no other tutor than he, and she could have had no better. With a skill and patience which sprang from his love for her, he had taught her as few girls are taught. As a child, she would speak and write with wonderful fluency, and at the age most girls are struggling with five-finger exercises, she could play a sonata of Beethoven’s with a touch and brilliance which a professional might have envied.

Her strange guardian’s patience was untiring. He ransacked the stores of his memory on her behalf, he spent hours explaining the inner meaning of some line from Shakespeare—in showing her how to render a difficult piece of music.

And when, one day, when her beautiful girlhood was rich with the promise of a still more beautiful womanhood, she had looked up at him laughingly, and said:

“Why do you take all this trouble with me, Jeffrey? What shall I do with all these things you have taught me?” he had startled her by turning to her with flashing eyes, and saying, with grim earnestness:

“I have taken all this trouble, as you call it, for this reason—because I love you, and because I mean you to be a great actress!”

She accepted his dictum without a word, or a thought of questioning it. She knew, then, why he had taught her to love the great poet—why he had made her, and still made her, recite whole plays of Shakespeare—why he spent hours in showing her how such and such a speech should be delivered. And she was grateful—as grateful as if he had been rich and surrounded her with luxury, instead of being poor and sharing with her the shabby rooms and simple fare which were the best he could afford.

It was a gray and sober life, enlivened only by frequent visits to the theatre. They had lived in France and Germany as well as in England, and he had taken her to see the first players in each country.

“Remember,” he would say, when they had returned from seeing some famous actress, “remember how she spoke that line, that is how it should be delivered,” or, “Did you notice how Madame So-and-so went off in the second scene? Then don’t go and do likewise!” and Doris’s trained intellect had stored up the hints for future use.

It was a life of hard work, and some girls would have become dull and listless, but Doris was light-hearted; her laugh was always ringing in the dingy lodgings as if they were palaces and she was happy and content.

Then had come the time of her first appearance on the stage. It is the fashion nowadays for an actor to begin at the top of the ladder—and, alas, how often he works downward! Jeffrey chose that the beautiful girl whom he had trained so carefully should begin at the bottom.

“Learn to walk the stage, and deliver a simple message: that is difficult enough at first, easy as it seems,” he had said; and Doris put on cotton frocks and white caps, and played servant maids for a time. From them she rose to young lady parts—always easy, unpretentious ones, and always in the country theatres.

“When we take London it shall be by storm,” he said.

And so she went from one country town to another, and the young actress grew more familiar with her art each month, and the critics began to notice her, and to praise not only her beauty but her talent.

And all this time, Doris, even in the gayest surroundings of her daily life, remained unsophisticated and natural. Jeffrey watched over her as jealously as a father could have done.

He could not prevent people admiring her, but he kept the love letter, the neat little cases of jewelry from her, and Doris—Doris Marlowe the actress—was as ignorant and unconscious of the wickedness of the world as the daughter of a country rector.

And as ignorant and innocent of love, save the love she had for the strange, grim being who had lavished so much on her.

She had read of love in books, had acted it on the stage, but it was as one who speaks a language he does not understand, and who marvels at the effect his words have upon his initiated hearers.

Once a young actor, who had played lovers’ parts with her during a season, had managed to speak with her alone—it was during the “wait” between acts—and in faltering accents had tried to tell her that he had dared to fall in love with the beautiful being so jealously guarded by the dragon. Doris had listened for a moment or two, with her lovely eyes wide open, with puzzled astonishment, then she said:

“Oh, please, don’t go on! I thought it was a part of the play,” and a smile flashed over her face.

The young fellow grew black, and as he passed her to go on the stage, muttered, “Heartless!”

But Doris was not heartless. She had smiled because her heart lay too deep for him to touch, because, like the Sleeping Beauty, it was waiting for the coming prince who should wake it into life and love, and the young actor was not that prince.

Doris sat thinking of the past, quite lost, until the striking of a church clock recalled her to the fact that a certain young lady was to play Juliet tomorrow, and that the aforesaid young lady had come out into the field to study it!

She took up the book with a sigh.

“I wish I could see some one play it,” she thought; and then there flashed into her mind the memory of one night Jeffrey had taken her to Drury Lane to see a famous actress in the part; but they did not see her after all, for during the first act there had been one of those slight but unmistakable movements in the audience which announces the entrance of some one of importance.

Doris looked round, with the rest, and saw some persons come into a box on the grand tier. Among them was an old gentleman, tall and thin, with a remarkably distinguished presence. He wore a blue ribbon across his waistcoat, but Doris had been attracted more by his face even than by the ribbon.

It was a handsome face, but there was something in it, a certain cold and pitiless hauteur, that seemed to strike a chill almost to Doris’ heart. As he stood in front of the box, and looked around the house with an expression of contempt that was just too indolent to be sheer hatred, she met the hard, merciless eyes and shuddered.

“Who is he, Jeffrey?” she asked, in a whisper, and touching his arm with a hand that trembled a little.

Jeffrey’s rapt face had been fixed on the stage, but he turned and looked at the distinguished personage, and Doris remembered now the sudden pallor of his face, from which his glittering eyes had flashed like two spots of red fire set in white ashes.

The look vanished in a moment and he made no reply, and a few minutes afterward had said:

“It is too hot—let us go.”

Doris recalled the incident now, and wished they had stopped and seen the great actress; especially as Jeffrey had always afterward avoided “Romeo and Juliet,” as if the play had some painful association.

“I shall have to draw on Shakespeare alone for inspiration,” she thought, looking at the brook. “But, ah! if only some one could only teach me to say that ‘Good-night, good-night!’ properly.”

She was repeating the words in a dozen different tones, and shrugging her shoulders discontentedly over each, when suddenly there came another sound upon her ears beside that of her voice and the brook.

It was a dull thud, thud, on the meadow in front of her, and as it came nearer a voice broke out in a kind of accompaniment, a voice singing not unmusically:

“The Maids of Merry England, the Merry, Merry Maids of England!”

There was a hedge on the other side of the brook, and Doris raised herself on her elbow and looked over.

What she saw was a young man galloping across the meadow at a breakneck speed, which the horse seemed to enjoy as much as his rider.

Doris had never seen any one ride like that, and she was too absorbed in the general spectacle to notice that the young man was singularly handsome, and that he made, as he sat slightly in the saddle, with the sunset rays turning the yellow of his mustache and hair to pure gold, a picture which Murillo might have painted and christened “Youth and Health.”

She watched for a moment or two; then, thinking herself safe from observation behind her hedge, sank down again, and took up her book.

But the thud, thud, and the “Maids of Merry England” came nearer and nearer. Then they stopped together, and a voice, speaking this time, said:

“Hallo, old girl!—over with you!”

The next moment Doris saw horse and rider in the air, almost above her head, and the next the horse was on its knees, with its nose on the ground, and the rider lay stretched at her feet, as if a hand from the blue sky had hurled him from his seat.