JANE SHORE
the inhibitions of her Calvinistic and Quaker ancestors. The nearest she ever came to scandal—
12
It was quite recently, at Madame Bernhardt's professional matinée, in the Empire Theater, on her last tour. Jane Shore was in the stage-box on the right-hand side with her old admirer, Tom the Gum-man. A wife and three children had not prevented him from returning to an apparently Platonic devotion for his first love. And from the rise of the curtain, from the first sight of Bernhardt as Hecube on her throne, Jane Shore wept quietly, continuously, without a word of explanation, without a movement of applause. She wept, not at the tragedy of the queen, or the soldier mortally wounded on the "field of honor," or Camille dying in her lover's arms; she wept for the greater tragedy of that indomitable artist, pinned down by bodily infirmity, with nothing left to her but her head and her hands, struggling—and with such heartrending success, with the voice of a young, unconquerable spirit, with an art that ought to be eternal—struggling to hold her little circle of light and brilliance against the dark stifle of oblivion that was closing in on her, that was creeping up on her, that had risen already to her throat. Here, after such a career as Jane Shore could never hope for, here was the visible end. When that voice ceased, when that unsubmerged, defiant head sank under
[ 81 ]
