Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER VI. Page 2
Everything indeed went off smoothly and according to expectation--all thatwas improvised and accidental being of a probable sort--until the incidentoccurred which showed Gwendolen in an unforeseen phase of emotion. How itcame about was at first a mystery.
The tableau of Hermione was doubly striking from its dissimilarity withwhat had gone before: it was answering perfectly, and a murmur of applausehad been gradually suppressed while Leontes gave his permission thatPaulina should exercise her utmost art and make the statue move.
Hermione, her arm resting on a pillar, was elevated by about six inches,which she counted on as a means of showing her pretty foot and instep,when at the given signal she should advance and descend.
"Music, awake her, strike!" said Paulina (Mrs. Davilow, who, by specialentreaty, had consented to take the part in a white burnous and hood).
Herr Klesmer, who had been good-natured enough to seat himself at thepiano, struck a thunderous chord--but in the same instant, and beforeHermione had put forth her foot, the movable panel, which was on a linewith the piano, flew open on the right opposite the stage and disclosedthe picture of the dead face and the fleeing figure, brought out in paledefiniteness by the position of the wax-lights. Everyone was startled, butall eyes in the act of turning toward the open panel were recalled by apiercing cry from Gwendolen, who stood without change of attitude, butwith a change of expression that was terrifying in its terror. She lookedlike a statue into which a soul of Fear had entered: her pallid lips wereparted; her eyes, usually narrowed under their long lashes, were dilatedand fixed. Her mother, less surprised than alarmed, rushed toward her, andRex, too, could not help going to her side. But the touch of her mother'sarm had the effect of an electric charge; Gwendolen fell on her knees andput her hands before her face. She was still trembling, but mute, and itseemed that she had self-consciousness enough to aim at controlling hersigns of terror, for she presently allowed herself to be raised from herkneeling posture and led away, while the company were relieving theirminds by explanation.
"A magnificent bit of _plastik_ that!" said Klesmer to Miss Arrowpoint.And a quick fire of undertoned question and answer went round.
"Was it part of the play?"
"Oh, no, surely not. Miss Harleth was too much affected. A sensitivecreature!"
"Dear me! I was not aware that there was a painting behind that panel;were you?"
vibration fromthe piano that sent it open."andevidently determined to ignore as far as she could the striking ?
"No; how should I? Some eccentricity in one of the Earl's family long ago,I suppose."
"How very painful! Pray shut it up."
"Was the door locked? It is very mysterious. It must be the spirits."
"But there is no medium present."
"How do you know that? We must conclude that there is, when such thingshappen."
"Oh, the door was not locked; it was probably the sudden vibration fromthe piano that sent it open."
This conclusion came from Mr. Gascoigne, who begged Miss Merry if possibleto get the key. But this readiness to explain the mystery was thought byMrs. Vulcany unbecoming in a clergyman, and she observed in an undertonethat Mr. Gascoigne was always a little too worldly for her taste. However,the key was produced, and the rector turned it in the lock with anemphasis rather offensively rationalizing--as who should say, "it will notstart open again"--putting the key in his pocket as a security.
However, Gwendolen soon reappeared, showing her usual spirits, andevidently determined to ignore as far as she could the striking change shehad made in the part of Hermione.
But when Klesmer said to her, "We have to thank you for devising a perfectclimax: you could not have chosen a finer bit of _plastik_," there was aflush of pleasure in her face. She liked to accept as a belief what wasreally no more than delicate feigning. He divined that the betrayal into apassion of fear had been mortifying to her, and wished her to understandthat he took it for good acting. Gwendolen cherished the idea that now hewas struck with her talent as well as her beauty, and her uneasiness abouthis opinion was half turned to complacency.
But too many were in the secret of what had been included in therehearsals, and what had not, and no one besides Klesmer took the troubleto soothe Gwendolen's imagined mortification. The general sentiment wasthat the incident should be let drop.
There had really been a medium concerned in the starting open of thepanel: one who had quitted the room in haste and crept to bed in muchalarm of conscience. It was the small Isabel, whose intense curiosity,unsatisfied by the brief glimpse she had had of the strange picture on theday of arrival at Offendene, had kept her on the watch for an opportunityof finding out where Gwendolen had put the key, of stealing it from thediscovered drawer when the rest of the family were out, and getting on astool to unlock the panel. While she was indulging her thirst forknowledge in this way, a noise which she feared was an approachingfootstep alarmed her: she closed the door and attempted hurriedly to lockit, but failing and not daring to linger, she withdrew the key and trustedthat the panel would stick, as it seemed well inclined to do. In thisconfidence she had returned the key to its former place, stilling anyanxiety by the thought that if the door were discovered to be unlockednobody would know how the unlocking came about. The inconvenient Isabel,like other offenders, did not foresee her own impulse to confession, afatality which came upon her the morning after the party, when Gwendolensaid at the breakfast-table, "I know the door was locked before thehousekeeper gave me the key, for I tried it myself afterward. Some onemust have been to my drawer and taken the key."
It seemed to Isabel that Gwendolen's awful eyes had rested on her morethan on the other sisters, and without any time for resolve, she said,with a trembling lip:
"Please forgive me, Gwendolen."
The forgiveness was sooner bestowed than it would have been if Gwendolenhad not desired to dismiss from her own and every one else's memory anycase in which she had shown her susceptibility to terror. She wondered atherself in these occasional experiences, which seemed like a briefremembered madness, an unexplained exception from her normal life; and inthis instance she felt a peculiar vexation that her helpless fear hadshown itself, not, as usual, in solitude, but in well-lit company. Herideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, bothmoral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal,this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, thenarrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceiveherself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which wouldlack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness of otherfetters, or of more spiritual restraints, having always disliked whateverwas presented to her under the name of religion, in the same way that somepeople dislike arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion inher, no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed ithad not occurred to her any more than it had occurred to her to inquireinto the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she hadhad many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was dependent. Allthese facts about herself she would have been ready to admit, and even,more or less indirectly, to state. What she unwillingly recognized, andwould have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability ofhers to fits of spiritual dread, though this fountain of awe within herhad not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or withany human relations. She was ashamed and frightened, as at what mighthappen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone,when, for example, she was walking without companionship and there camesome rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed herwith an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in themidst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. Thelittle astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set herimagination at work in a way that made her tremble: but always when someone joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which sheseemed an exile; she found again her usual world in which her will was ofsome avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to this world was nomore identified for her with those uneasy impressions of awe than heruncle's surplices seen out of use at the rectory. With human ears and eyesabout her, she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt thepossibility of winning empire.
To her mamma and others her fits of timidity or terror were sufficientlyaccounted for by her "sensitiveness" or the "excitability of her nature";but these explanatory phrases required conciliation with much that seemedto be blank indifference or rare self-mastery. Heat is a great agent and auseful word, but considered as a means of explaining the universe itrequires an extensive knowledge of differences; and as a means ofexplaining character "sensitiveness" is in much the same predicament. Butwho, loving a creature like Gwendolen, would not be inclined to regardevery peculiarity in her as a mark of preeminence? That was what Rex did.After the Hermione scene he was more persuaded than ever that she must beinstinct with all feeling, and not only readier to respond to a worshipfullove, but able to love better than other girls. Rex felt the summer on hisyoung wings and soared happily.