The Soul of Countess Adrian. Rosa Campbell Praed

I am never ill," she answered. "I like the sea; I like it even when it is rough."

      He remarked that he had not seen her in the saloon till yesterday.

      "Oh," she answered, with a charming little blush, "I was very lazy. I had an interesting book, and felt a little shy. I have never crossed alone before. My people are to meet me at Southampton." She went on to say that she had enjoyed lying quiet is her cabin and being waited upon. "Before I left America I had scarcely a moment to myself; I had worked very hard."

      He glanced at the book in the sober binding. "You are a student of Shakespeare, I see?

      "I am an actress," she answered, as though the one thing implied the other. "Of course I study Shakespeare; I study a great many dramatists."

      "And?" … he asked, and added, "I wonder if theoretical knowledge is of much use?"

      "Oh, well," she replied, laughing slightly, "I am bound to confess that my theories don't serve me at critical moments. It is something outside oneself that really helps. But I always remember what a great actress told me once. Inspiration is a capricious goddess, and it is well to have knowledge ready to take her place in case she should desert one in the hour of need."

      "Does she ever desert in the hour of need? It always seemed to me that inspiration came with the desperate need."

      "Ah, you know all about it," she said, and went on with the questioning air of a child. "The captain told me your name. You are the artist, are you not?"

      He could not help being pleased at the indirect compliment which her use of the definite article conveyed.

      "I know all about you," she went on. "My uncle, Professor Viall, bought one of your pictures two years ago from a dealer in England. It is a desolate little hit of landscape—an autumn evening, a wintry-looking pool, with sedges and rushes bending over it, and dying leaves floating upon its surface. I like the picture, but it always makes me melancholy."

      "I think the picture is called 'A Pool of Melancholy,'" he said. "I remember it very well. I am glad that your uncle liked it, and still more glad that it pleases you; but I am sorry that it makes you sad."

      "I like everything that is sad," she answered. "It is my temperament. I adore moonlight; I love grey skies, and wintry effects, and autumnal tints, and melancholy music—all that is flickering, vague, and suggestive. It is the temperament of the artist. You have it too."

      "How do you know that?" he asked.

      "By your face—your eyes—something—I can't tell you what. I have my intuitions I can always tell beforehand whether I shall like people or things."

      "Is it your intuition that you will like England and the English, might one ask? Or perhaps you have been there already?"

      "No, I have never yet been there."

      "Shall you like it?"

      "Like it? I love it!"

      "But you don't know England."

      "Don't I? Yes, indeed I do. Why it's the home and the cradle of all my race—the old dead-and-gone ones I mean. I feel like a girl going home."

      "I knew a scholar once," said Lendon gravely, "who said that when he first went to Greece—and he wasn't a young man then, far from it—he felt that he had long been an exile, and that now he had come home."

      "Yes," she said, thoughtfully, "I think I can understand. I think I shall perhaps feel like that when I stand by some quiet English stream."

      "What do you most wish to see in England?"

      "A stream, a country churchyard—the churchyard in Stratford perhaps, or the Gray's Elegy one—and an old castle. And I want to hear the nightingale—Matthew Arnold's nightingale."

      "Don't you want to see the Queen, and to be presented at Court?" he asked, with a smile.

      "Oh no; I haven't thought about it. Why should I?"

      "I thought that every American girl was like that."

      "I am not every American girl. But you must not believe in the caricatures of American girls. You must not disparage my countrywomen."

      "I greatly admire your countrywomen."

      "I am glad," she said simply.

      "Well, tell me what other things you want to see and hear in England."

      "No; we have got out of tune, I think." She sank back in her chair with a little sigh as if she were disappointed. He felt a pang of something like guilt. How had he jarred upon her? He wondered if he ought to go away. In fact, he moved a few steps towards the bulwarks, and then came back. A movement of hers, an ineffectual effort to tuck her buffalo robe a little more closely round her, gave him an excuse for going to her aid. "Thank you," she said, and was silent again. He lingered. Presently she asked abruptly, "Do you know Miravoglia?"

      "Miravoglia?" he repeated.

      "The artist, the musician, the person who trains young actresses. I am going to him. He saw me act once, at Philadelphia, and he was impressed. He advised me. Now I am going to take his advice. Then I was not of age, and my guardian, Professor Viall, had an objection to my going on the stage; but during these two years I have done my best to train myself."

      "And your guardian has relented?"

      "Oh, he had no very rooted objection; it was on psychological grounds. My uncle is a great psychologist. Lately he has been so much occupied with his new invention that he has not thought much of me."

      "And what is the invention?"

      "You haven't heard of it? But you soon will, and I won't forestall my uncle's pleasure in describing it to you. We are sure to meet in London."

      "There are many eddies and currents in London society," said Lendon. "How can I be certain of such good fortune?"

      "But you, are an artist; and I—I am an artist, Miravoglia is an artist. All artists know each other in London—at least, so Mrs. Walcot Valbry tells me—"

      "Ah, I know Mrs. Walcot Valbry," said Lendon.

      "There. Did I not say? We shall meet at Mrs. Walcot Valbry's. I have known her in America, of course. She adores artists, and she is interested in everything that is mystic and out of the common. Therefore, naturally, she is interested in my uncle."

      "And you?" asked Lendon. "Are you a mystic too?"

      The girl seemed to consider for a moment, and looked at him seriously with a certain questioning in her eyes.

      It was clear to him, however, that she was not in doubt as to her own views on the subject, but rather as to the manner in which ho might receive them.

      "Everyone is a mystic," she answered gravely. "Everyone, that is, who feels and thinks, and analyzes feelings and thoughts—artists most peculiarly so. Surely you must often have been conscious of forces within you which base come from outside yourself?"

      "Ah!" he said, "that is true; and more than once I have solved the mystery of some unaccountable impulse, some prompting to evil, by the exploded theory of ghostly possession. Ghosts! Do you know Ibsen's fine lines?"

      "Yes;" and she recited, with a dramatic intensity which took him by surprise, Mrs. Alving's speech to the Pastor.

      "Well," he said, "it is the ghosts of dead faiths, dead conventions, dead traditions, which turn us this way and that, and more or less determine our lives."

      "I did not mean such forces as those," she replied. "No, I would allow no dead faith to rule my life. I meant, Mr. Lendon, that you and I ought to be proud and happy that we are artists; for Art is the door through which the undying dead ones can come into our lives and teach us how to move our world as they themselves once moved theirs. If ever I am a great actress, as indeed I think I shall be some day, it will not be I myself who have any power, but the ghosts who have given to me of theirs."