This book gives a comprehensive overview of lighting equipment and techniques for digital production. Suitable for either beginners or more advanced users, the fully updated fourth edition covers human sight vs. film or video, the basic issues of contrast and exposure, with explanation of how exposure of digital video differs from analog video or film, electrical connectors, requirements, electrical load management, safety issues, and the latest LED systems.
A variety of basic lighting setups for different situations are explained, with clear diagrams and photos showing the “look” of each approach. Techniques for shooting in available light and dealing with color problems in mixed lighting situations is examined. More advanced film-style lighting is covered, especially techniques in creating a convincing realistic look. A special section deals with solutions to common problems, ranging from reflections on glasses and dealing with white walls, to lighting very lightskinned and very dark-skinned subjects in the same shot. Special lighting situations, such as lighting night scenes or bluescreen sets, are covered in detail, with studio lighting covered in a dedicated separate chapter. The book is also peppered with anecdotes and trivia about lighting techniques and the lighting trade.
It is the ideal text for both beginners studying lighting and cinematography, as well as more advanced practitioners.
John Jackman is an author and filmmaker who has been involved in dramatic and video production since the mid-1970s. He has produced several feature films and documentaries and has contributed to numerous industry magazines.
Lighting for Digital Video and Television
Fourth Edition
John Jackman
Fourth edition published 2020 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
The right of John Jackman to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published 2004
Third edition published by Focal Press 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jackman, John, 1957- author.
Title: Lighting for digital video and television / John Jackman.
Description: Fourth edition. | London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes index.
Identifers: LCCN 2019046131 (print) | LCCN 2019046132 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138937963 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138937956 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315676005 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Video recording—Lighting. | Digital video—Lighting. | Television—Lighting.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046131
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046132
ISBN: 978-1-138-93796-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-93795-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67600-5 (ebk)
Typeset in ITC Stone Serif by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 Why Is Lighting Important for Television and Video? 1
Exposure and Contrast 3
Beyond Basic Exposure 6
Chapter 2 Human Vision, the Camera, and Exposure 12
What You See 12
What the Audience Sees 14
Fitting in the Window 19
So What Happens If We Don’t? 20
Inside the Legal Video Signal 21
Proper Exposure 30
Controlling Contrast 35
Controlling Color 41
The Kelvin Scale 41
Chapter 3 Volts, Amps, and Watts 45
Standard Connectors 52
Power Tie-Ins and Contractor Connections 57
Electrical Safety 57
Chapter 4 Lighting Instruments 60
Open-Faced Instruments 60
Lensed Instruments 64
Fluorescent Instruments 68
HMI Instruments 73
Ceramic Discharge Metal Halide 75
Plasma 76
Soft Lights 76
Specialty Instruments 80
LED Instruments 83
LED = Battery Power! 84
Cookies and Snack Boxes Aren’t for Lunch 86
Chapter 5 Lighting Controls and Uses
Gels 87
Diffusion 93
Chapter 6 Basic Lighting Techniques
A Sense of Depth 102
Basic Lighting Setups 107
Lighting Jiu-Jitsu, or the Art of the Reflector 113
Using a Kicker for Modeling 114
Using Soft Lights 115 Hard or Soft? 117
Chapter 7 Interview Setups
Basic Three-Point Interview Setup 120 Hard or Soft? 125
Simplifying the Soft Look 128 But Wait, There’s More! 131
Chapter 8 Solving Common Problems
Hot Spots: Film Folks, Be Vigilant! 132
Eyeglasses 134
Practicals and Light Sources in Frame 138
Lighting Dark Complexions 140
Too Much Light in All the Wrong Places! 144
Different Color Temperatures in the Scene 146
Chapter 9 Studio Lighting
Power System and Grid 153
Fluorescent Instruments 159
LED Lighting 160
Designing a Lighting Plan With Flos or LEDs 161
Flat Lighting 162
Chapter 10 Advanced Lighting Setups
Establishing Mood 178
Lighting Darkness: Interiors 179
Lighting Darkness: Exteriors 183
Daytime Exterior Contrast Management 191
Light Surgery 194
Chapter 11 Lighting Low-Budget Locations 197
Make Location Lemonade 198
Low-Budget Lighting Principles 199
Low-Budget Lighting Process 200
Using Light and Improvised Cheap Lighting 209
Chapter 12 Specialized Lighting 211
Product Shots 211
Food Shots 215
Lightning and Fire 218
Automobile Interiors 222
Blue- and Greenscreen 225
Church and Wedding Lighting 233
Live Theatre Taping 238
Chapter 13 Imagination and Invention
appendix 1 Using a Light Meter for Video
252
Acknowledgements
Dedicated to my amazing wife Debbie, who has had to listen to me criticize the lighting of movies and television for donkey’s years, and without whose help and support my production work – and this book – would not have been possible. And to my kids, Andrew and Abby – and “extra daughter” Laurel Clabaugh – who have put up with being involuntary subjects more often than they wanted. Special thanks also to my technical editor, DP Arledge Armenaki, who helped make sure that even the most technical stuff was both correct and understandable. Similar thanks to DP Richard Clabaugh, a friend who is always interested in talking “shop,” and who always has a good idea to make the show better! Special thanks also to Nic Morris, BSC, who helped us make sure that we included European and British terminology instead of only American slang. And a special tip of the hat to the late Bob Collins, SOC, who was going to be our original technical editor. You are much missed, Bob!
Introduction
Over the years, I have participated in or moderated a number of Internet forums related to video production, and often field questions about lighting issues. After a thread where several of us explained to a beginner why he needed to light his videos, one wag posted:
“Remember, without lighting all you have is a black picture.”
Facetious, tongue-in-cheek, but true! The most common mistake beginning video shooters do is to overlook the importance of good lighting.
I’ve always been interested in lighting. In my earlier days it was theatrical lighting; I just loved playing with the light boards (built one myself) and figuring out dramatic lighting effects. Then I became interested in video production. That was back in the days of the Sony PortaPak®, the genesis of “guerilla video,” however, and we didn’t do no stinkin’ lighting. Pointand-shoot was pretty much all we did outside of the studio. The PortaPaks® ran ½" reel-to-reel tape, black and white only, about 150 lines of resolution on a good day. The tape deck was about the size of a mini-tower computer today, with a shoulder strap and batteries that seemed to last about ten minutes. Then along came ¾" U-Matic® and then ¾" SP. And then came the day when a great program I had done was rejected for network broadcast because of poor lighting in some critical interview scenes.
I got back “into” lighting with a vengeance. My earlier fascination with theatrical lighting effects was reawakened, and I started to experiment. When the first 3D programs came out (anyone remember DKBTrace, the original Caligari, and Turbo Silver?), everyone else was playing with reflective surfaces –but I was playing with the lights! I’ve been playing with lights ever since.
Once you discover the difference great lighting can make, you’ll be playing along with me!
John
Jackman Lewisville, NC Summer, 2019
CHAPTER 1
Why Is Lighting Important for Television and Video?
If you’re fairly new to television, video, and digital movie production, you may not really have a sense of why lighting is so important. After all, today’s cameras are so light sensitive you can often get away without any additional lighting. The only thing you don’t understand is why sometimes your shots are overexposed or contrasty; and you may not be able to figure out why one shot will look like a Hollywood film and the next will look like a really bad YouTube video.
If, on the other hand, you’re more experienced in television and event video production, you may understand a lot about the basic issues of controlling contrast and exposure – but would find it challenging to light a realistic night scene or simulate natural lighting in a living room for a dramatic movie. These situations are very different from flat studio lighting and a classic three-point interview setup.
Whether you’re a rank beginner with a video camera or a moderately experienced video user who wants to get into the more advanced world of dramatic moviemaking, I hope this book will prove to be a helpful guide to understanding lighting and how it contributes to effective image making.
The real key to fine lighting is not only to simulate reality, but to communicate the proper mood and feeling to the viewer. You need to know more than just basic techniques or tricks, it’s best to have an understanding of how certain looks will communicate to your viewers. You need to develop an artist’s eye for light and shadow and color, and the techniques for reproducing them. Ultimately, great lighting is an ongoing learning experience that can graduate from craft and technique to the realm of art.
In this book, we’re going to travel through the world of television, video, and digital movie lighting in a fairly methodical way, so that you build an understanding of the “why” behind the “how to.” If you’ll come along for the journey (rather than cheating and just flipping through to
Like a magician, we’re trying to convince the viewer of something that isn’t quite true.
find a setup diagram or two), by the time we’re finished you’ll understand the principles behind the techniques. At that point, you’ll be able to improvise, to create new techniques for unique situations, rather than having to fall back on some textbook diagrams; and it means you’ll be able to do a better job at any lighting scenario.
Why is lighting so important to great video? There are a number of different reasons, some of which have to do with the camera itself and the way the imaging system translates light into an electrical signal, and some of which have to do with the fundamentals of human perception. But just as important is the fact that we’re creating an illusion. Like a magician, we’re trying to convince the viewer of something that isn’t quite true. We’re trying to make it seem as if colored plasma flickering across a flat glass screen are actually lions and tigers and bears and people, the great outdoors, the grandeur of space, and the depths of the sea. We’re trying to create the illusion of depth and size in a tiny flat plane. And, even more difficult, we’re not really trying to capture what the eye sees. We’re trying to capture the mind’s interpretation of what the eye sees, which can be a wholly different thing. But more on that later!
Figure 1.1 Owen Stephens, Society of Operating Cameramen (SOC), lights an intimate lunch in Naples, Florida, with his Pampa portable fluorescent instruments.
Good lighting is important for quality video in three different ways:
• First, you have to have proper exposure, enough light to generate a signal from the imaging device and raise the signal to a proper level, but not exceed the limits.
• Second, you have to create the illusion of depth through use of highlights and shadows so that they viewer forgets they are watching a 50" × 29" rectangle of glass with LED illumination behind it.
• Third, you have to use tricks and illusions to create mood and feeling with the lighting, just as the music director will create mood and feeling with the music.
exposure and Contrast
The most obvious way in which lighting is important for video is in basic exposure. Like the wag said, “without lighting all you have is a black picture!” You have to have enough light on your subject to excite the electrons in the camera’s imaging chips to a certain level. It doesn’t matter that you can see it – if the camera can’t see it, your video is toast. You’d think this would be obvious, but it’s amazing how many people will try to create a night scene by just shooting in the dark.
1.2 The Sony VX-1000 revolutionized digital moviemaking, but had very poor low-light characteristics.
Figure
This is probably one of the most common “postmortems” that I do, when folks bring me their video and ask what went wrong. One producer of an independent short brought me some raw camera footage to review of a scene they had shot out in a field at night with a Sony VX-1000 (the first popular DV camcorder – and one that was notorious for its poor low-light performance). They had (almost) all the right equipment, but really had no idea how to use it, and the result was dreadful. They’d shot in a field with no easily available power, so they brought a small generator and several lights. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring enough “stingers” (extension cords), so when they got the generator far away enough to not interfere with the audio, they couldn’t get the lights very close to the subjects. Then, rather than concentrating the light all on one side (which might have just barely worked), they distributed them around to create a flood of weak, flat lighting. Then they turned on the AUTO EXPOSURE control on the VX-1000 – a true beginner’s mistake. Since the VX-1000 was very poor at low-light situations to begin with, the AUTO circuits kicked in full gain to try and make the scene look like a fully lit room, rather than a dark night scene. With the gain all the way up to +18 db, the result was a flat, grainy picture that looked like surveillance video. The one thing it didn’t look like was a night scene. “What can we do?” wailed the producer, who had now wasted a whole day on this scene.
Figure 1.3 Lighting diagram for the VX1000 night shoot.
I drew a diagram, using the same lights they had used but lots more stingers to bring the lights closer to the subjects. I put most of the lights in a group on one side with quarter-blue gels. I used one ungelled light as a kicker from the rear on the other side, leaving the camera side unlit. Then I showed their young shooter how to expose manually. The results were pretty good, giving a feeling of a moonlit night. I think they even gave me a credit in the roll!
But just as you must have enough light, too much light or too much contrast can be a problem as well. If a backlight is too intense compared to the key, the highlights will be “hot” – over the electronic definition for full white – and may “clip” so there is no detail in that area of picture. If the camera operator stops down to expose for the backlight, then the rest of the subject will be underexposed and the picture will seem too contrasty.
Overexposing causes worse problems than underexposure, because sometimes the result can’t be repaired. There’s a local station where I live (whose call letters shall remain anonymous) where nearly all the location news footage is grossly overexposed. I don’t mean a little bit, I mean grossly. Large portions of the picture are clipped white, the dark areas are medium gray. When they interview a person of color, it’s not uncommon for the person to look almost Caucasian. When they interview a Caucasian, the face is a white blob with little detail. The studio (though I don’t like the lighting
Figure 1.4 Sam Waterston, Steven Hill, and Angie Harmon in the original Law and Order series, which ran from 1990 to 2010. This show set new standards for filmic-style lighting in a television series. Photo courtesy of Jessica Burstein.
esthetically) is at least properly exposed, accentuating the difference in the location footage.
But once you have a basic level of exposure, what do you do with it? It’s fairly easy to blast several thousand watts on a scene so that it gets the electrons in the camera hopping, and then stop down until the viewfinder’s zebra indicator goes away and you’re not overexposed. But it’s much harder to find the nuances that will really convince the viewer’s eye and mind of texture, of feeling, of mood. This is where the acceptable gets separated from the great.
Beyond BasiC exposure
Great lighting begins with the creation of an illusion of depth. Keep in mind that no matter how much television is a part of our lives, the TV screen is still just a flat piece of glass with flickering colored lights. Though it has height and width, a television screen is fundamentally two-dimensional: it has no depth. No amount of great acting or wonderful music will create that illusion of the third dimension; it’s entirely up to the lighting designer to create the feeling of depth. This is done through careful crafting of highlights and shadows, the visual cues that the brain uses to interpret depth. In fine art, the use of light and shadow to create a sense of depth is known as
Figure 1.5 This chiaroscuro woodcut of The Virgin and Child by Bartolomeo Coriolano, created between 1630 and 1655, uses light and dark lines to create the impression of dimension.
chiaroscuro. Together with the refinement of perspective, it is an essential element of great Renaissance art.
Most local news studios, talk shows, and soap opera sets are flat lit with loads of light and almost complete elimination of shadows. This is done for convenience and economy. The result is a very flat, two-dimensional feeling. The eye doesn’t find the cues that help the brain interpret depth, so it’s hard to figure out how deep the set is and how far the anchors (or actors) are from one another. We’re used to the look from seeing the evening news regularly, so it doesn’t bother us, but boy does it telegraph “LOCAL NEWS” to the viewer. Use that lighting scheme for a drama, and it just won’t work.
Contrast this to the realistic lighting used in many TV dramas of the last three decades, which have moved further into filmic lighting that captures a sense of reality. Though earlier shows such as Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) broke new ground in camera work, the lighting was not much different from earlier television series. Dick Wolf’s Law and Order (1990–2010) or Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing (1999–2006) moved to much more filmic lighting. These shows make very heavy use of light and shadow, often lighting closeup subjects heavily from one side with a large, diffused lighting source, and leaving the other side in near darkness. The standards for television drama lighting have increased dramatically in recent years. Shows such as Breaking Bad (2008–2013) often use very dark interior scenes with extremely
Figure 1.6 This scene from Breaking Bad (2008–2013) shows the very dark interior lighting used on the show, which conveys the series’ stark and dark feeling. Here fog is used in the scene to make light rays visible and give them substance. Michael Slovis was the cinematographer.
limited key light, a style which would never have been used in earlier television series – and perhaps not even in most theatrical films. Despite intense production schedules, the production teams on these shows work hard on their lighting to convey the feeling of depth and dimension. Light patterns on walls, mixed color temperatures, shadows, the use of fog on set to give shape to light, all create a feeling of the depth of the scene – but also clearly cue the viewer as to an off-screen light source that is appropriate to the set.
While some of these shows write new rules for lighting, most films and dramatic programs borrow heavily from what I call Hollywood visual vernacular, the peculiar set of visual cheats and shortcuts that have developed over the last hundred years of filmmaking. Vernacular, of course just refers to “common language.” These tricks are part and parcel of the common visual language of movies. Many of these aren’t very realistic at all, but are a type of visual shorthand that we have been indoctrinated to by years of watching Hollywood films. It’s important to have a sense of these cheats and what they are associated with in the minds of viewers. Why? Because they work. They are much like the tried-and-true cheats of the theatre, techniques that work, that the audiences are used to and accept without question.
In the live theatre, there’s an expression that’s quite important: “suspension of disbelief.” The phrase, which originates with Coleridge(he was talking about poetry), has come to mean the state where the audience is fully engaged in the illusion of the drama.* In practice, it is a balance where the actors, director, and crew use techniques and conventions to create a certain semblance of reality – and then the audience meets them halfway by “suspending disbelief” in the patent fakery. It’s a delicate balance, easily broken; the audience will only go so far. If an actor drops out of character, or does something utterly incongruent, the spell will be broken. The audience’s attention will be focused on the fact that this is an actor pretending to be Romeo, not Romeo himself. If the tech crew makes a gross mistake (the phone rings long after it has been answered or the gunshot sounds before the policeman has gotten the pistol out of his holster) so too the spell will be broken. The audience will go so far, but no farther.
But those tried-and-true “cheats” that I mentioned above are, in a way, a part of the unconscious contract between audience and play actors. They are a set of conventions everyone accepts more or less willingly, cheats that the audience will accept, obvious artifices that still will not break the all-important suspension of disbelief. That’s what the Hollywood visual vernacular is about – artificial devices that work without interrupting or unduly jostling the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter 14.
A great example of “stock” Hollywood vernacular lighting occurs in one of Elvis’s films, G.I. Blues (1960). It’s a scene where he sings a lullaby to Marla’s baby. This room was lit pretty much in Hollywood formula fashion, effective, but certainly not breaking any new ground in lighting design. The bed and Elvis are intensely lit with thousands of watts of studio lights, while the rest of the bedroom is broken into a pattern with several blue-gelled lights with cookies. I think I even recognize the pattern of the standard Mole-Richardson cookie! This broken pattern of blue light on the walls is Hollywood code for “this is nighttime.” The light level in the room is actually quite excessive for what the scene portrays, and it really doesn’t actually look like any dimly lit real bedroom I’ve ever seen. But, with the exception of DPs, lighting designers, and gaffers, no one notices! Most viewers accept the scene without question, their “suspension of disbelief” fully engaged.
As unrealistic as some of these tricks are, they are effective. The viewer will watch the scene and accept the effect and the mood without question. While it may be exciting to rewrite the rule book and create new techniques that speak to the viewer, let’s face it: it’s not always going to work. Sometimes it will; other times, it will flop or call such self-conscious attention to itself that it disrupts the viewer’s involvement in the story. But, even more to the point, most of the time you don’t have the luxuries of either time or
Figure 1.7 Filmmaker Elyse Couvillion and DP Allen Daviau ASC used light to help convey storyline to the viewer in the independent short Sweet. Photo courtesy of Bruce Coughran.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
more than his satiric reply:
“What man can bear refutation?”
“You seem to think it beneath your dignity to deny slander,” she went on. “You always did. I thought it would be different after we were married. But it has grown worse. The papers print more and more horrible things of you, and you do not care—either for yourself or for me!”
He gazed at her with a curious intentness.
“Surely you pay no heed to such irresponsible tales?”
“If they were all! Do you suppose I do not hear what people say besides? They do not spare my ears! Do you think I do not know the stories—what they used to say of your bachelor affairs—with Lady Oxford, and Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster—and Caro Lamb?”
“Is there none more recent?” A bitter smile had appeared, called by the veiled insinuation in her tone.
Another name flew to her tongue, for malicious rumor had credited him with a footlight amour. “Yes—Jane Clermont!”
A frown of incredulity and annoy hung blackly on his brow an instant. Had this baseless gratuitous fling gone beyond the circle of Drury Lane gossipers? Had it even reached his wife’s ears? Aloud he said:
“Really, I can scarcely hold myself responsible for silly chatterers who are determined to Rochefoucauld my motives. I seem to be fast becoming the moral Æsop of the community. I am judged by what I presume Dr. Cassidy would call a dramatic Calvinism—predestined damnation without a sinner’s own fault.”
Her control was gone. She could not trust herself to speak further and turned away. He waited a moment in the doorway, but she did not move, and with an even “good night” he left her.
At the foot of the stair, during Gordon’s painful interview, a blackgowned woman had noiselessly bent over the hall table. A letter, arrived by the post, had been laid there by Fletcher for his master. She lifted it and examined it closely. The address was written in a peculiar, twirly handwriting, on blue-tinted paper that bore in each corner the device of a cockle-shell. She listened, then passed with it into the library.
The room was unlighted, but a spring fire flickered on the hearth. She caught up a paper-knife and crouching by the hearth held its thin blade in the flame. When the metal was warmed, she softened the edges of the seal and with deftness that betrayed long practice, split it off without its breaking, opened the note and read it. Her basilisk eyes lighted with satisfaction—the triumph of a long quest rewarded. Then she warmed the wax again, replaced it, and as it hardened, broke it across as if the letter had been opened in the ordinary manner.
As Mrs. Clermont rose to her feet, a thin, severe figure stood on the threshold. She saw with relief that it was Lady Noël, and handed her the letter with a feline smile.
“Perhaps your ladyship will know if this should be preserved,” she said. “I found it just now on the floor.”
Lady Noël’s eyes glittered at sight of the cockle-shells. She read it hastily by the firelight. Her look was coldly yet triumphantly malignant as she leaned forward.
“Put an outer wrapper on this,” she ordered in an undertone, “seal it, and take it at once to Melbourne House. Give it into William Lamb’s hands—to no one else. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my lady,” the other replied, and left her noiselessly, as Gordon came slowly down the stair.
“I have left your lordship this evening’s Courier,” said Lady Noël, forbiddingly.
“Thank you,” he answered and looked at it carelessly. On its exposed page a pencil had marked an article of considerable length
whose title was: “The Poetical Works of a Peer of the Realm, viewed in connection with Christianity and the Obligations of Social Life.”
Its final paragraph was underscored with meaning heaviness:
“We have less remorse in quoting the noble lord,”—he read—“for, by this time, we believe the whole world is inclined to admit that he can pay no compliment so valuable as his censure, nor offer any insult so intolerable as his praise. Crede Gordon is the noble lord’s armorial motto: ‘Trust Gordon’ is the translation in the Red-Book. We cannot but admire the ingenuity with which his lordship has converted the good faith of his ancestors into a sarcasm on his own duplicity.”
A simmer of rage rose in Gordon’s throat. He tore the paper twice across, flung it down, and passed on to the drawing-room. Seeing no one, he rang for the valet.
“Where is Mr. Sheridan?” he demanded.
Fletcher was carrying a wine-glass and seemed surprised at the query.
“He was here five minutes ago, your lordship. Mr. Sheridan looked very bad when I let him in, sir. I was just getting him this brandy.”
“I suppose he tired of waiting,” thought Gordon. “The Clermont has a new part to-night, and Sherry’s bound for Fops’ Alley.”
As he buttoned his great-coat, he heard a cry from the valet, and ran into the drawing-room to find Fletcher bending over the form of the old wit, prostrate on the floor, moveless, speechless, his face swept by a bluish pallor.
“Good God!” cried Gordon. “Help me lift him and fetch a doctor at once!”
With Fletcher’s aid the old man was placed upon a sofa, and Gordon loosed the stiff neckerchief, put a cushion under the recumbent head and chafed the sick man’s hands.
The physician looked grave when he came.
“A paralytic stroke,” he said. “He must be taken home.”
CHAPTER XV THE PITFALL
It was later evening. Gordon sat in the library, the diary in which he had written those lines to Ada open before him.
Since the scene with Annabel whose dark aftermath had been the illness of his old friend, a deeper sense of pain had oppressed him. His marriage had sprung from an inarticulate divining of the infinite need of his nature for such a spiritual influence as he had imagined she possessed. It had ended in failure. A mood of hopelessness was upon him now as he wrote:
“Man is a battle-ground between angel and devil. Tenderness and roughness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed in one compound of inspired clay. Marriage is the hostage he gives to his better nature. What if this hostage conspire with his evil side to betray the citadel?
“Nature made me passionate of temper but with an innate tendency to the love of good in my mainspring of mind. I am an atom jarring between these great discords. Sympathy is the divine lifter—the supreme harmonizer. And shall that evade me forever? Where shall I find it? In the cheap intrigue that absorbs half the life of those around me? Shall I turn to the fairest of those blandishments, and, like the drunkard, forget my penury in the hiccough and happiness of intoxication?”
The thought of the delicate coquetry of Jane Clermont and of the ripe beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb flashed across the page, an insistent vision. He saw the latter’s eyes, eager and inviting, as he had so often seen them at Melbourne House, when he had turned from them to a paler beauty. He thought of a past season when the whirlwind of her infatuation had wound their two names in gossip that had never tired. Love with her would have counted all sacrifice
cheap, all obstacles gossamer Could such a passion yield him what he craved? Was he bound to live pent within the palisade a priest’s ceremony had reared about him? Of what virtue were honor and faith to a bond where love was not?
But this picture faded as he wrote across it the answer to its question:
“No! I will not. I will keep the bond. Yet I and the mother of my child are far apart as the two poles! I am a toy of inborn unbeliefs, linked to unemotional goodness, merciless virtue and ice-girdled piety. I am asked to bow down to arcana which to me are bagatelles. As well believe in Roberts the Prophet, or Breslau the Conjurer if he had lived in the reign of Tiberius! The everlasting why which stares me in the face is an unforgivable thing. Yet to yield—to go the broad, easy way of conventional belief and smug morality—to shackle the doubts I feel! To anchor myself to the frozen molehills and write, like other men, glozed comfortable lines on which friend and foe can batten alike, and with which reviewer and reviewee, rhinoceros and elephant, mammoth and megalonyx can lie quietly together!”
He threw down his pen, and leaned his forehead in his hands.
“Would to God I had nothing better in this soul of mine!” he exclaimed. “The rest of the world can game and kiss and besot themselves in peace. Only I—I—must writhe and struggle unsatisfied!”
“There is a carboy outside, your lordship, who wishes to see you.”
“A carboy!” Gordon raised his head. “What does he want?”
“He says he has a message for your lordship’s own hands. He’s a likely-looking lad.”
“Very well, show him in. Hasn’t Rushton returned from Mr. Sheridan’s yet?” he added.
“Yes, my lord. But Lady Noël sent him out again with a letter for Sir Ralph to his club.”
Gordon heaved a sigh of relief. “Sherry must be better,” he thought. He waited on the threshold till Fletcher ushered in a slim figure in the
round coat and buttons of a carman. His chin was muffled in a coarse neckerchief, and a rumpled mass of brown hair showed beneath the edges of the cloth cap whose visor was pulled over his eyes.
“Well, my lad?”
The boy stood still, twisting his fingers in his jacket till the valet had retired. Then suddenly as the door closed, the cap was snatched off, a mass of brown hair dropped curling about the boyish shoulders— the silver-buttoned jacket fell open, revealing a softly rounded throat and delicate slope of breast. Gordon uttered an astonished and bewildered exclamation:
“Caro! What mad masquerade is this?”
She drew back under the pale intensity, the controlled agitation of his face. “Forgive me! forgive me!” Tumult was looking from her eyes, and her shoulders were heaving. “I could not help it! I have tried to forget you during all this past year. I cannot bear to see you only at Melbourne House and at parties and on the street. How pale you always are!” she went on. “Like a statue of marble, and your dark hair such a contrast. I never see you without wanting to cry. If any painter could paint me your face as it is, I would give anything I possess!”
She had touched his hand, but he drew it away sharply, feeling a black sense of entanglement in the touch.
“Lady Caroline! This is unthinkable! To come here in that dress— here, to this house, is sheer madness! I did not imagine you capable of such folly.”
“You think I am weak and selfish,” she pleaded. “You have always thought I did not struggle to withstand my feelings. But indeed, indeed, it is more than human nature can bear! I loved you before you married Bella—loved you better than name, than religion, than any prospects on earth! You must have loved me more if you had never seen her! She has never cared for you as I do.”
He darted a glance at the door. His wife! A rebellious anger rose in him at being thrust into such a predicament.
“You have taken a strange way to show that love.”
“Oh, I could show it other ways!” She was looking at him with tremulous daring. “They used to say that once in the East, to prove to a Greek girl that you loved her, you wounded yourself in the breast. Would such a thing make you believe how I love you?”
At that moment both heard a voice in the hallway.
“Bella!” he said in a whisper
“Oh, I thought she had gone to Seaham,” she breathed. “You must believe I did not know she was here!” She buttoned the coat over her breast with nervous fingers and put on the cloth cap. The sound had thrown her into a paroxysm of dread.
“Quick, quick!” she urged.
“Not that way. Here, to the garden entrance!” He caught her hand, drew her sharply toward the rear door and opened it.
The retreat was closed. Lady Noël, with sparkling eyes and spare figure leaning on her cane, faced them at the threshold, her gaze leaping with flickering triumph. At the same instant Annabel entered by the other door.
The trap had sprung, the joints were working with precision. Gordon’s first glance at his wife’s face told him there had been betrayal, for the look he saw was not of surprise or wonder, though its indignant lines set themselves deeper in presence of the visible fact. The jaws of this trap had not been set by accident. How had Lady Noël and Annabel guessed? The latter’s eyes were on the carboy’s costume, as if she would convince herself doubly by every evidence of her senses. The grim figure on the threshold pointed one thin forefinger at the shrinking form in the boy’s dress.
“Take off that cap!”
Annabel took a quick step forward, as Lady Caroline snatched off the covering to show a face flaming with defiance. “Caro!” she exclaimed —“Caro!”
As she looked from one to the other, contempt rose in a frigid wave over her features and she drew herself up to her full height and stood stonily erect.
Lady Noël laughed with an echoing amusement, as Lady Caroline burst out in a torrent:
“You can hate and despise me if you want to, Bella. It can make no difference to me. Why did you come between us in the first place? You never loved him, at least. You had nothing to give him but that horrible virtuous indifference of yours—nothing! nothing! You have nothing to give him now You have made his life wretched with your perfectness and your conventions! Everybody knows that!”
Annabel’s look swept her with its sharp edge of scorn; then flashed on Gordon, who stood composed, motionless, in a grip of repression.
“Is it not enough for you to have made me the butt of your daily caprice, your shameless atheism?”—she drove the words at her husband—“for all London to gossip of your social ‘conquests’ and your dissolute affairs? Is this not enough—that you offer me the final dishonor of such planned meetings, under this roof?”
“It was not his fault!” cried Lady Caroline. “Bella! I will tell you the truth!”
Gordon put out his hand with a gesture of protest as Lady Noël laughed again, musically, maliciously.
A knock at the door silenced all voices. It heralded Fletcher, whose eyes, habitually discreet, seemed to see no further than his master.
“Mr. Somers is outside, sir, with the Melbourne coach, to wait for Lady Caroline Lamb.”
Lady Caroline’s blank, terror-struck eyes turned to Gordon, and she began to tremble. She ran and pulled aside the portière from the window She shrank back with a gasping cry, for she recognized the coach drawn up at the curb, whose lighted lanterns, reflected from fawn-covered panels emblazoned with the Melbourne arms, lit plainly the figure of William Lamb’s confidential factotum waiting by its step. Her husband had known she was coming there! He had sent
Somers instead of the coachman—he even knew of the carboy’s dress!
A slow change passed over her face. Fear and dread had shown there an instant pallidly—dread of the malignant fury she knew lay couched beneath the cold exterior of her husband; now these were swallowed up in a look more burning, more intense, more terrible—a look of sudden, savage certainty. She turned this new countenance upon Gordon.
“So!” she said in a stifled voice. “You sent my letter to my husband! You did not count on a scene with Bella—but for me who have bored you, you took this cruel way to end it all! Well, you have succeeded. Now I know Madame de Staël was right when she called you ‘demon.’ You are without a heart. How I have loved you—and now I hate you. I hate you!”
He made no reply. Her letter? As she spoke he had had a vision of Mrs. Clermont’s noiseless movements and thin secret mouth, and suspicion clogged his tongue.
Lady Caroline looked at him an instant with a shudder as she passed out. “I shall always hate you,” she said with vengeful emphasis. They heard the outer door close heavily behind her and the dulled sound of wheels.
As Gordon turned again to meet his wife’s flinty gaze, the footman appeared.
“Sir Ralph wished me to say he would answer at once, your ladyship,” he said to Lady Noël.
“There was no change in Mr. Sheridan’s condition, Rushton?” asked Gordon.
“Change, my lord?” the boy stammered. “Why, I—” He looked from him to the others, his jaw dropped.
Lady Noël shifted her cane. “I received Rushton’s report. I thought it a pity anything should interfere with your lordship’s evening engagement.”
“Mr Sheridan was thought to be dying, my lord,” said the boy, “and had asked for you.”
CHAPTER XVI THE DESPOILING
As his hackney-coach sped through the night, Gordon’s anger at the inhumanity that had kept from him the sick man’s message, faded gradually into a duller resentment that held most of grief.
The words of his wife recurred to his mind: “A doddering old man!” She had seen only the uncertain walk, the trembling hand, the dying down of the brilliance and fire into crumbling ashes. Not the past, the career in Parliament, the masterly craft of the playwright, the years of loyalty to his friends. Social morality had been a lifelong jest to Sheridan—a veritable “School for Scandal” from which he drew his choicest bon-mots, yet his whole character had been sweetened with the milk of human kindness. Annabel walked a moral princess of parallelograms, viciously virtuous, mercilessly inflexible. “And the greatest of these is charity”—whose was it? Annabel’s or Sheridan’s?
On the steps of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West stood Dr. Cassidy with his friend, the under-curate, and he caught a glimpse of the coach that whirled by.
“Yonder,” said Cassidy, “rides London’s poet-apostate, known by his limp and his profligacy. The devotees are tiring. How long can the idol stand?”
The other turned to gaze. “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!” he quoted, “for so did their fathers, to the false prophets!” He also was a sanctimonious young man.
The house that sheltered the old wit was dark as Gordon ascended the steps, and the hollow echoes from the knocker, reverberating through the hall, chilled him with dread. “He died an hour ago, your lordship,” the servant said.
An hour! And but for the delay, he would have been in time! As Gordon entered, a prey to this reflection, a thick-set man dressed shabbily, ascended the steps. He had once been the dead man’s groom, he explained, and begged awkwardly to be allowed to look upon his face. The servant hesitated, but at the grief in the stranger’s voice, he let him in, and the new-comer pushed quickly past Gordon and entered the darkened bedroom before him.
There his profound emotion vanished. He drew a bailiff’s wand from beneath his coat and touching the rigid figure that lay there, proclaimed with gruff triumph: “I arrest this body in the king’s name, for five hundred pounds.”
The exultant bailiff started at the touch of fingers gripping his wrist. Something in Gordon’s face, though now distorted with feeling, was familiar.
“Why,” he said, “I’m a turnkey, if you ain’t the gent that took the young ladies into the Fleet!”
“Come with me,” rasped Gordon between his teeth, and the bailiff followed. In the next room he drew from his pocket a draft from John Murray, his publisher, for four hundred and eighty guineas. Without a word he indorsed this and handed it to the bailiff, who scrutinized it and counted out the four pounds change.
“Now go!” said Gordon.
The clock of St. Paul’s was pealing the hour of eleven as the hackney-coach drove back to the house on Piccadilly Terrace. A light low-lying mist softened the outlines of the alley-ways and purified the filth of the street. Overhead, it frayed into a night of wonderful starshine, where, beyond the soiled sordidness of the clamorous city, the sky spread a web of diamonds and sifted gold dust.
While the wheels rattled onward, Gordon’s white whimsical face, lifted to those presences above the smoky roofs, gradually lost its
bitter glaze and expressed a curious wistfulness—a vague, appealing weariness and speculation.
“Matter is eternal,” he reflected, “always changing, but reproduced and eternal. May not mind be also? Is its inner spark celestial? Or, like the cells that produce it, is it a creature of the mold, doomed to extinction with the brain, sinking as the candle-flame perishes when the wick falls? I remember when I viewed the planets through Herschel’s telescope and saw all at once that they were worlds. What has eternity to do with the congregated cosmic dust we call mankind? What are our little passions and resentments before the least of those stars?”
His gaze and his thought fell from the sky.
Had he any right to the stubborn pride which would not bemean itself by self-defense? Would his own silence not abet the calculating hatred of Lady Noël’s and add to that monstrous estrangement that was steadily carrying his soul further and further from the soul of Annabel? The question of whether his wife believed or disbelieved aside, was he justified in such a course now? A softer feeling took possession of him. Appearances had been against him. To speak could make the matter no worse for Lady Caroline. He would go to Annabel and assure her of the truth. Perhaps even out of such a catastrophe as to-night’s might arise a truer and a nearer confidence.
He threw off his great-coat in the empty hall and ascended the stair. The door of the chamber where sat the little white bed was open. He went in. The lamp still shed its radiance on the pillow, but the tiny fragrant mould where a baby head had lain, now held only a note, bearing Gordon’s name.
With a puzzled look he tore it open.
A white anguish spread over his features. A cry broke from his lips. He flung wide the door of his wife’s room—it was empty. He ran down the stair, where the footman met him, turning a wondering face to his question.
“My lady went out with Lady Noël, my lord,” Rushton answered, “and took the baby with her. Sir Ralph came for them a half-hour ago. Here is a letter he left for your lordship.”
Gordon took it mechanically and read the few curt lines that burned into his sight like points of pain. It was the end, then! Annabel had gone, not to return—gone with only a hastily pencilled note for farewell, laid with refinement of cruelty on his baby’s pillow! That, and these blunt, peremptory lines of her father’s menace!
He found himself at length in the library, feeling his way blindly to his chair What to do? Could there be reconciliation? Could she, with her cold prudent resolve, her fixed principles squared mathematically, her starched life which counted even forgiveness a Christ-like sin, retract a step of such moment? He told himself it was not to be hoped for; her pride would make her decision irrevocable.
What then? To pursue? Invoke the law to restore his child? Plunge into publicity to set right his own name? When had he cared for reputation in the world’s eyes! Dare her father’s threat? Drag his wife’s name and his own in the dust and infamy of the courts, and bare the festering sore of his heart to the world? Dare it, and shut the gate of society on another woman, too, whose punishment already would be more than she could bear? Most of all, cloud his daughter’s young years with a lasting stain?
He rose and paced the floor, his step halting, fighting out the struggle. Once he sat down and wrote, scarce seeing the lines his pen traced—and rose and paced the floor again. He took the black phial from its drawer, but put it back. There was something in him which in this fierce crisis disdained to blunt the pain.
After a while he left the library and went slowly up the stair to the little carved white bed. He sank into a chair and hid his face in his folded arms. The agony of childlessness came down on him. Home! A year ago how fondly he had desired it! Yet it had become the winding-sheet of his heart!
Mrs. Clermont saw him sitting there as she passed the door By Lady Noël’s command, she had waited to pack some smaller articles, and was now ready for departure.
On the lower floor she entered the library for a last survey. Some loose sheets of paper were scattered on the desk, the ink scarce yet dry on them. Laying them together she slowly deciphered the tense, uneven handwriting. The lines had been dragged from the deeps of Gordon’s despairing, from his pent grief that found its natural vent in verse. Was it what it seemed—his heart’s final word to Annabel? Or rather was it a last yearning call to the woman he had dreamed her to be—an adieu to his lost ideal of her?
Mrs. Clermont’s eyes gloated. Two spots of dull vermilion grew in her sallow cheeks. Her hands shook with the delight of an inspiration. Bending over the table she muttered the written lines:
“Fare thee well! and if forever, Still forever, fare thee well—”
How carefully she had gathered them all along—these garish strands of scandal which had come to her hands! How deftly her fingers had cast them here and there in the woof of dislike the great loom of London had been weaving! This was a thread of bright red for her to use. What if the poem were printed—now, now, with the first rumor of the separation? She could fancy what would be the world’s verdict on such an address, penned in the first hour of his bereavement, and offered to the public ostensibly by his own hand. Publicity would be just the note to make the whole strain ring false. It would recoil upon him in open disapproval and contempt! It would rouse new voices in the clarion-tongued clamor of abuse that her jubilant ear had heard swelling through the past year—forge a new link in the chain that would bind him to disgrace, the disgrace she believed he had had share in heaping upon her niece!
The mainspring of the woman’s hatred leaped. The world had coupled their names long ago, when the girl had first stolen away from the dreary Godwin house to the glamour and allurements of Drury Lane! And the world no doubt told the truth. If she could help
to ruin him, line for line, name and fame—as he had ruined Jane Clermont!
In her vision rose the stooped figure of William Godwin, Jane’s foster-father. He hated Gordon, she knew—and he had a connection with the Courier, the bitterest of them all.
Fletcher was in the lower hall as Mrs. Clermont passed out the street door. He knew the catastrophe that had befallen. Now his honest old eyes were full of grief and perplexity.
It was long past midnight when he ascended to his master’s room. Gordon had thrown off his clothing and was stretched on the bed. He was asleep.
As the grizzled valet’s eyes rested on the recumbent figure, he could see that one foot—the lame one—was uncovered. Through all the years of his service, he had never seen the member which Gordon’s sensitiveness concealed. He had often wondered curiously what was the nature of the deformity. How did it look?
Fletcher turned away, took a counterpane from a chair and with face averted, drew it over the uncovered foot. Then he shaded the candle and went out, and as he went, a tear splashed down his seamed and weather-beaten cheek.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BURSTING OF THE STORM
Over the great, crow-footed face of London, full of tragedies, a heavy fog had fallen. Dismal and murky, it lay like a bodiless incubus, shutting out the shining sun and the sweet smells of spring and showers. To Gordon, in the house on Piccadilly Terrace, the colorless dun had seemed to reflect his own feelings. He was numbed. His mind was stumbling through wastes of dumb protest.
The links of Mrs. Clermont’s forging had held. The story of his wife’s flight which the Courier had displayed on its front page had been a masterpiece of dark hints and veiled insinuations. To Gordon, who had read it with aching eyeballs, it had seemed printed in monstrous symbols of flame.
It was to prove the opening note of a chorus whose vicious strength he had not comprehended till the following day, when the avalanche of abuse broke over him with the morning newspapers. Every personal grudge, every pygmean hater of success, every cowering enmity that had sickened under his splendor had roused. He shut himself in the library, telling Fletcher he was at home to no one, and read grimly the charges they preferred: he had carried his unprincipled profligacy into his home and ensconced beneath his own roof a Drury Lane inamorata; he had persecuted his wife with inhuman cruelties, denied her the offices of religion, fired pistols in her bedroom to frighten her while she slept—these were the lightest of their accusations.
Gordon’s mind, racing over the pages, was catching glimpses of heterogeneous elements which blended in a dim, dread futurity. He saw suddenly the inertia of Annabel’s passive correctness—saw why his own name, with its eccentric dazzle, had stood forth blackly against her even ways, her spotless, conventional pureness. The
mute contrast had always been there, and he had suffered accordingly. To the world she stood a martyr—a stony pillar, once a woman, who had looked back to catch some lurid fume from doomed cities sinking under Dead Sea waters.
Could the great world credit these monstrous calumnies? Might the reiterate malice of the public prints infect his nearer acquaintances— those at whose tables he had sat almost weekly, the cliques of the clubs, the gay set at Almack’s, the circle of Melbourne House?
He drew a sharp breath, for he thought of William Lamb, heir to the Melbourne title, from whom he had daily expected a cartel. He would leave no path of revenge untrod; nor would Lady Caroline. Could their disassociate hatred envenom even the few for whose opinion he cared?
The Courier had reserved its bitterest attack. On the second day it published the stanzas entitled “Fare Thee Well,” signed by Gordon’s name. He saw them with a strange sensation, his mind grasping for the cords he felt enmeshing him, his eyes fully opened now to the devilish ingenuity of his persecution.
But he himself stood appalled at the deadly effect of this attack. Innuendo was thrown aside; invective took its place. Paragraph, pamphlet and caricature held the lines up to odium. The hypocrisy of a profligate! A cheap insincere appeal to mawkish sympathy! A tasteless vulgar parade of a poseur strumming his heartstrings on the highway!
It came to Gordon with a start that during the past forty-eight hours he had forgotten his mail. He rang the bell and asked for his letters.
“There are none, my lord.”
No letters? And daily for a year his table had been deluged with tinted and perfumed billets crested and sealed with signets of great houses. No letters!
“Who has called to-day?”
Fletcher’s honest eyes could scarcely meet his master’s. “Mr. Hobhouse called this morning, and Mr. Dallas this afternoon.”
“That is all?”
“Yes, your lordship.”
Gordon went to the fireplace and stared down dazedly into the embers. He had been a santon; now he was an Ishmaelite, a mark for the thrust of every scurrillous poetaster who wielded a pen—a chartered Blue-Beard—another Mirabeau whom the feudalists discovered to be a monster! The world had learned with pleasure that he was a wretch. Tom Moore was in Ireland, Sheridan dead. Of all he knew, only two rallied to his support: Hobhouse, the sturdy, undemonstrative, likable companion of his early travels, and— Dallas!
Gordon laughed bitterly. He had been London’s favorite. Now, without justice or reason, it covered him with obloquy and went by on the other side.
There had followed days and nights of mental agony, of inner cryingout for reprisal—hours of fierce longing for his child, when he had sought relief in walking unfrequented streets from dark to dawn, in desultory composition, more often in the black bottle that lay in the library drawer. Meager news had reached his sister, and a brave, true message from her was the only cooling dew that fell into his fiery Sahara of suffering. A packet left by a messenger roused him to a white fury. It was from Sir Samuel Romilly, the solicitor under his retainer Sir Samuel had reversed his allegiance. His curt note inclosed a draft of separation proposed by Sir Ralph Milbanke, and though couched in judicial phrases, voiced a threat unmistakable.
Almost a round of the clock Gordon sat with this paper before him, his meals untasted. His wife at that moment was with Ada—his child and hers!—at her father’s house in Seaham. She had read the attacks—knew their falseness—knew and would not deny. Now he knew why. What she wanted was written in that document: freedom and her daughter. She would engulf him in calumny only so the world would justify her in her self-righteous desertion. And lest he put it to the test, lest he refuse to be condemned unheard and demand the arbitrament of an open though prejudiced tribunal, she threatened him with what further veiled accusations he could not imagine. Good
