Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/273

1868.] succor, to whom he would like to stretch out loving, helpful hands—a little child who has wetted his cheeks with unusual tears.

Again, in the second act, where at the festival the boorish peasantry offer her the violence of scorn and blows, the actress gives noble assurance of her power. The opportunity is a great one, and she acts greatly. Small and insignificant as her form, features and gestures are, no actor upon the stage, since the elder Kean played Zanga, has thrown into any single situation the nervous force and bewildering concentration of scorn and hatred which the actress hurls upon her tormentors in this scene. Her words seemed to blister and scorch the creatures they fell upon, the tiny gestures were charged with a nameless evil against those at whom they were directed, the little, trembling body was regnant, fiery with a passion that had power to wither or to kill; her very laughter, that had been but a moment before soft and melodious as the music of the dance, was full of stinging, savage bitterness, creating an atmosphere of poisoned malice in which the very actors there seemed to shrink and cower.

There are other individual beauties in this performance of Miss Mitchell's which must forever rank with the noblest traditions of the theatre, and one of them occurs in her interview with Landry as he returns from the festival. He finds her weeping by her door; the contumely of her neighbors at the dance in the morning has rankled within and stung her all day, their cruel taunts have awakened a hundred memories of like wrongs and shames that had else forever slept. The night is coming on, and as she lies upon the ground weeping and sobbing, it is not a clever artist, but a sorely stricken girl that the audience recognize. She sobs as if her grief had exhausted physical nature and she could weep no more; but she stretches her hands out straight before her with infinite weariness, clasps them about her neck as her head droops to her breast; her eyes are swollen and dry, her dress disordered, and all that is heard is the sound of the painful, tearless sobs; but underneath all this, the spectator sees that a child's heart is breaking, She does not speak; her pain, and wrong, and misery are too deep for words, and they find more suitable expression in a certain nervous caressing of her arms, and hands, and face, which are more pitiful to see than language would be to hear. The tenderness and pathos of the picture are unutterable; its very poverty of words is an additional appeal for sympathy and tears.

When Landry finds her thus, and she can speak of her troubles, her voice echoes all the pain and sadness in it of youth suddenly grown old, robbed of its just inheritance of love and joy, and all that leads it on to gracious ends. She says to him, "Since my mother kissed me last, no mild breath has ever touched my face."

And in that speech the artist rises to great heights. Her tones linger on the words with marvellous sweetness and beauty, evoking sounds that crowd the air with their music—the child's presence appears to fill the scene, for in that burst of grief, which was but the reflex and echo of all the cruelty, neglect and shame she had ever borne, it seems to summon to the memory of her audience the images of all the neglected, forgotten children of whom she is the type and semblance, and whose cheeks their mother's breath will no more touch. The silence, the awe and tears upon the faces in the audience there, bear tribute to the artist's power.

It is not well done in Miss Mitchell that in another moment she should destroy the memory of this masterly touch of art, and shock her admirers by a mis-