"We have been so anxious about Elma, who now however is picking up. But we have the saddest news of Miss Annie. It seems as though she would not live more than a day or two. If I have bad news to send to Mabel and Jean, may I send it through you? It would be such a kindness to me if I knew you were there to tell them."
Mrs. Clutterbuck responded in that loving tremulous way she had of delighting in being useful. She could not believe in her good fortune with the Professor. After all, it had been worry, concern about material things, which had clouded his affection for a time. He had never been able to give himself to the world, as he desired to give himself, because of that grind at lectures which he so palpably abhorred. Now even the lectures were a delight, since he had leisure besides where he did not need to reflect on the certainty of "the rainy day." He was once more the hero of her girlish dreams. How magnificent not to lose one's ideal! They both rejoiced in the young ardour of Elsie, whose courage made leaps at each new unfolding of the "loveliness of life."
It was very delightful now that the two Leightons should come under those gently stretching wings of the reinvigorated Professor's wife.
At the time of a call from Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mabel and Jean had just received tickets from Lady Emily for a concert at a great house. The concert, to those who bought guinea tickets, was not so important as the fact that royal ears would listen to it. Herr Slavska disposed of the affair in a speech which could not be taken down in words. His theme was the rush of the "stupids" to see a royal personage, and the tragedy of the poor "stars" of artists who could hardly afford the cab which protected their costumes. Yet some members of his profession, he averred, would rather lose a meal or two than lose the chance of seeing their name in red letters and of bowing to encores from royalty.
"And why not?" asked Jean. "I think it would be lovely to bow to royalty."
"Where is ze art?" he asked as a wind-up. "Nowhere!"
"That's nonsense, you know," Jean confided afterwards. "I think there must be a lot of art in being able to sing to kings and queens. Besides, why shouldn't they wave their royal hands, and produce us, as it were--like Aladdin, you know."
Jean already saw herself at Windsor.
Mabel merely concerned herself with the fact that Mr. Green was to play. He had not the scruples of Herr Slavska. "Although it's an abominable practice," said he. "It is the artists who make the sacrifice. Everybody else gets something for it. The crowd gets royalty, royalty gets music, charities get gold. We get momentary applause--that is all."
"That's what I'm living for," declared Jean, "just a little, a very little momentary applause. Then I would swell like a peacock, Mabel, I really should. The artists don't get nothing out of it after all. They get appreciation."
Mrs. Clutterbuck was intensely interested in the concert. "Do you mean to say there's to be a prince at it?" she asked.
There were to be princesses also, it seemed.
"Oh," said Mabel, "how lovely it would have been for Elsie and you to go."
She saw the experience that it would be for a little home bird of the Mrs. Clutterbuck type. She considered for a moment--"Couldn't she give up her ticket for one of them?"
Mrs. Clutterbuck saw the indecision in her face.
"No, my dear, no," said she, "I know the thought in your mind. I have a much better plan."
The pleasure of being at last able to dispense favours--transformed her face. She turned with an expectant, delighted look to Elsie.
"If we could go together," said she, "and it wouldn't be a bore to both of you to sit with two country cousins like ourselves, I should take two tickets. It would be charming."
This plan was received with the greatest acclamation.
"We ought to have a chaperon anyhow," said Jean.
It seemed the funniest thing in the world to Mabel that they should be about to be chaperoned by Mrs. Clutterbuck. In some unaccountable way it drew her more out of her loneliness than anything she had experienced in London. On the other hand, she was constantly reminding herself how much amused some people in Ridgetown would be if they only knew.
They drove to the concert on a spring day when the air had suddenly turned warm. The streets were sparkling with a radiance of budding leaves, of struggling blossom; and all the world seemed to be turning in at the great gates of the house beyond St. James'.
It was not to be expected that one should know these people, though, as Jean declared, "Every little boarding-house keeper in Bayswater could tell you who was stepping out of the carriage in front of you."
There was a great crowd inside; heated rooms and a wide vestibule, and a hall where a platform was arranged with crimson seats facing it and denoting royalty.
Mrs. Clutterbuck's timidity came on her with a rush. She could hardly produce her two tickets. It was Mabel who saved the situation and piloted them in as though she understood exactly where to go. There was a hush of expectancy in the beautifully costumed crowd within. Everybody looked past one with craning neck. Mabel began to laugh. "It's exactly as though they were built on a slant," she declared.
In the end they found seats on the stairs beside the wife of an ambassador.
"My dear," said Mrs. Clutterbuck in rather a breathless way to Mabel. "My dear, just think of it."
Mabel immediately regretted having brought her there.
"But everybody is sitting on the stairs," she said gravely. "It's quite all right. Lady Emily told me she once took a seat in an elevator in somebody's house because there was no room elsewhere. She spent an hour going up and down, not having the courage to get out."
Mrs. Clutterbuck smiled nervously.
"It isn't that, my dear. It's the gown, that one in front of you. Every inch of the lace is hand-made."
Mrs. Clutterbuck was quite enervated by the discovery.
"Oh," said Mabel in quite a relieved way, "was that it? I began to blame myself for bringing you to the stairs."
"Isn't it fun?" said Elsie. "Much funnier looking at these people than it will be looking at royalty. I never saw so many lorgnettes."
A sudden movement made them rise. A group of princesses with bouquets appeared and took their seats on the red chairs.
"Oh," said Jean with a sigh, as they sat down again. "Think of the poor artists now."
She had grown quite pale.
"I don't think I shall ever be able to perform," she said. "My heart simply stops beating on an occasion of this sort."
The crowd parted again, and a singer, radiant in white chiffon with silver embroidery, and wearing a black hat with enormous plumes, ascended the platform. She curtseyed elaborately to the princesses, and casually bowed in the direction of the applause which reached her from other sources. She began to sing, and in that hall of reserved voices, of deferential attitudes, of eager, searching glances and general ceremonious curiosity, her voice rang out a clear, beautiful, alien thing. It danced into the shadows of minds merely occupied with staring, it filled up crevices as though she had appeared in an empty room. One moment every one had been girt with a kind of fashionable melancholy which precluded anything but polite commonplaces. The next minute something living had appeared, a liquid voice sang notes of joy, mockery and despair; it lit on things which cannot be touched upon with the speaking voice, and it brought tears to the eyes of one little princess.
Jean was shrouded in longing. Nothing so intimately delicious had ever come near her. She might as well shut up her music books and say good-bye to Herr Slavska. Elsie sat beside the lady in real lace. She was in the woods with the fresh air blowing over her; buttercups and daisies at her feet.
"Is she not then charming?" asked a voice at her side. The real lace had spoken at last. That was how they discovered afterwards that she was the wife of an ambassador. The lady had her mind distracted first by the sheer beauty of a famous voice which she loved, next by the delicate profile of the face beside her--a type not usual in London.
Elsie turned her eyes with a start.
"It's like summer, the voice," she said simply.
"It's like the best method I've ever heard," said Jean darkly. (Oh, how to emulate such a creature!)
"Ah, yes. But she returns. And now, while yet she bows and does not sing--a leetle vulgar is it not?"
The ambassador's wife could discount her favourite it seemed. That was just the difficulty in art. To remain supreme in one art and yet recognize other forms of it, that was the fortune of few. The singer had enormous jewels at her neck.
"She would wear cabbage as diamonds," said the lady, "but with her voice one forgives."
Thereafter there was a procession of the most talented performers at that moment in London. Magicians with violins drew melodies in a faultless manner from smooth strings and a bow which seemed to be playing on butter. Technique was evident nowhere, only the easy lovely result of it. In an hour it became as facile a thing to play any instrument, sing any song, as though practice and discouragement did not exist in any art at all.
"Mr. Green played decorously and magnificently," said Elsie. "They are all a little decorous, aren't they?" she asked, "except that wonderful thing in the white and silver gown."
Nothing had touched the daring beauty of that voice.
Mrs. Clutterbuck leant forward to Elsie eagerly.
"I was right, Elsie," said she. "You know I was right."
"Right?" asked Elsie. Her eyes shone with a. dark glamour. "You mean about it's being so nice here, romantic and that sort of thing?"
"No," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. She sometimes had rather a superb way of treating Elsie's little imaginative extravagances. "I mean about mauve--mauve is the colour this year, don't you see?"
"Mamma," she said radiantly, "I quite forgot. I was simply wondering how long all this would last, or whether they'd suddenly cut us off the way Jean says they do."
"They do," said Jean, "at these charity concerts. One after another runs on and makes its little bow. And some are detained, you know, and then the programme just comes to an end."
"They seem to be going on all right," said Mrs. Clutterbuck placidly, "and mauve is the colour, you see."
Another singer appeared, and Jean's heaven was cleared of clouds by the evidence in this performer of a bad method. Now, indeed, it seemed an easy matter to believe that one could triumph over anything.
That first, victorious, delicious voice had trodden on every ambition Jean ever possessed. But the frailty of a newcomer set her once more on her enthusiastic feet.
"I should say it would be easy enough to get appearing at a concert like this," she said dimly to Elsie. Her eye was on the future, and the platform was cleared. At the piano sat Mr. Green, grown older a little, and more companionable as an accompanist; and in the centre, in radiant silver and white, and--and diamonds, sang Jean, the prima donna, Jean!
She was startled by the sudden departure of the ambassador's wife.
"For the leaving of the princess I wait not," said this lady. With a cool little nod to Elsie, she descended the crowded stairs.
Her remarks on the vulgarity of the singer rankled with Jean. The costume seemed so appropriate to that other fair dream.
"I didn't think her vulgar, did you?" she asked Elsie.
"Not on a platform, perhaps," said Elsie vaguely. Her thoughts invariably strayed from dress. "But in a drawing-room she would look, look----"
"Well, what Elsie?" asked Jean impatiently.
Elsie's dreamy eyes came down on her suddenly. "In a drawing-room she would look like a lamp shade," she blurted.
It really was rather a tragedy for them that the golden voice should have been framed in so doubtful a setting.
Elsie's eyes were on the princesses.
"They have eyes like calm lakes," said she. "How clever it must be to look out and feel and know, only to express very often something entirely different. Don't you wonder what princesses say to themselves when they get alone together after an affair of this sort?"
"I know," said Mabel. "They say, 'I wonder what girls like these girls on the stairs say of us after we are gone; do they say we are charming, as the newspapers do, or do they say----' But they couldn't think that, for they are charming, aren't they?" asked Mabel.
"Yes," said Elsie sadly. "But I never could keep a bird in a cage. It must be like being in a cage sometimes for them."
There was an abrupt movement among the royal party. The last of the illustrious performers had appeared, and it was time to go. Everybody rose once more. Then there was a hurried fight for a tea-room where countesses played hostess.
Mrs. Clutterbuck, now finally in the spirit of the thing, moved along blithely. She spoke, however, in low modulated whispers as though she were attending some serious ceremony.
"I'm sure your mother would have enjoyed this," she said, as they sat down to ices served in filagree boats. "The countesses and, you know, the general air of the thing--so different to Ridgetown."
"Ridgetown!" The girl laughed immoderately. "We couldn't sit on the stairs at Ridgetown, could we?" Mrs. Clutterbuck was getting away from her subject.
"Take some tea, my dear," she said to Mabel in the tone of voice as one who should say, "you will need it." "It's invigorating after the ice," said the Professor's wife.
Mabel took tea.
Now that the great event of the concert was over, they were a little tired, and glad of the idea of fresh air.
"Miss Grace, dear--have you heard from Miss Grace lately?" asked Mrs. Clutterbuck.
"No. It's a funny thing," said Mabel. "We supposed it was because of Elma's illness, you know. Miss Grace would be in such a state. Shall we go now?"
They got out and arranged to walk through St. James' Park together.
"I had a message," said Mrs. Clutterbuck quietly, "about Miss Grace. I am to have another when I get back just now. Will you come with me? It's about Miss Annie. She has been very ill."
It was impossible for her to tell them that the same illness as Elma's had done its work there. They seemed to have no suspicion of that.
"Oh, poor Miss Annie!" said Mabel. "If I had only known!"
"That was just it; they couldn't tell you that too with all you had to hear about Elma. Elma is very well now, you understand, but Miss Annie--well, Miss Annie is not expected to live over to-night."
The news came to them in an unreal way. It was the break-up of their childhood. That Miss Annie should not always be there, the charming beautiful invalid, seemed impossible.
"Oh, but," said Mabel, "she has been so ill before, won't she get better?"
"She was never ill like this before," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. "We will see what the message says."
They found a wire at home. At the end of a sparkling day, it came to that. While they had listened to these golden voices, Miss Annie had----
The telegram lay there to say that Miss Annie had died.