Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/272

248 Her arms, her legs, her feet, her hands, her head and tongue, all are in motion. She dances about the scene, now merry as the Cricket she is called, now sad; again resigned to her bitter life, again rebellious against it; but whatever her mood, she is all action and vitality. The fiery spirit in the tiny form imparts to it an eternal unrest. It is scarcely possible to look at the curiously dressed figure, which seems to be strung upon wires and impelled by electric shocks, as it gives way to laughter or subsides into tears, whose voice suddenly sinks from the most boisterous mirth into the most profound depths of pathos in a breath, without feeling that the girl's mind has suffered some rude shock. Yet when her clear, strange voice breaks into speech, its music is wedded to words of noble simplicity. When sorrow moves them, they fall upon the ear softly as rippling water, in slow, measured cadences; but when an ugly wrong has wrought upon her mind,, the actress, who is utterly forgotten in the part, flings them out with quick and savage hatred; they rise, and swell and fill the air, until each hurtling word seems potent as a curse or witch's spell.

The infinite charm and grace of childhood, the jubilant sense of an innocent triumph obtained over the youth she loves, but who has not dealt kindly, fairly with her, which are shown in the last scene of the first act, are very beautifully and naturally done by the actress. She has cheated her lover into a rash promise; he is to do anything she may ask him to do, no matter how great or how absurd the thing she may exact. To-morrow she means to ask Landry, the pride and flower of village beaux, to dance with her, the poor, despised Cricket, about the garlanded pole, at the festival of St. Androché. He is an honest fellow, and will keep his word with her, though the whole village scoff and scorn both him and his eccentric partner. The knowledge of this has filled her life full to the brim, with a simple, childish joy, which at first finds vantage ground in wild, exuberant laughter, and in mad, frolicsome gestures, which are interrupted presently by her catching sight of her own weird and fantastic shadow in the moonlight. The rays fall through a break in the trees, forming a sort of fairy circle, into which she steps, and to a blithesome song that bubbles up from her full heart, she begins a strange, fantastic dance, full of artless grace and freedom. Her whole body vibrates, moves to and fro to the measured rhythm of her song. The lithe limbs, the undulating body, the bending head crowned with its wealth of hair, are instinct with happiness, swayed and impelled by the music of her own voice. Directly her shoe falls off, and she stoops to put it on, still singing, but in a softer key, her jubilant song to which still sways her body and bends her head. But as she stoops lower, the tiny, tawdry figure and its shadow meet and start appalled apart, then the sweet song dies on her lips, an awful pain fills up her face, a terror, very pitiful to see in any child, animates her form, and bending still lower, till her loose hair touches the little black shadow of herself, she addresses it familiarly, bitterly, as if it had life, and were sentient as her own self.

All this action lasts scarcely longer than a minute. But in that minute the shadow has shown her herself; she has seen in that little moment how her childhood has been abused by circumstance, how tawdry, eccentric and mean is her dress, her fantastic and uncouth appearance, and her lack of all that is debonair and beautiful in childhood, and though the few words with which she addresses it are a child's simple language, they are so full of nature, so burdened with her trouble, loss and pain, so nearly underlying all human sympathy, that no one who looks upon the actress now, sees any actress there, but only a little child to