"Will you send it me in a letter?" said Wilfrid, out of patience.
"I'll send it you in a letter," assented his father. Upon which Wilfrid changed his mind. "I can take a chair, though. I can easily wait for it now."
"Save trouble, if I send it. Eh?"
"Do you wish to see whether you can afford it, sir?"
"I wish to see you show more sense—with your confounded 'afford.' Have you any idea of bankers' books?—bankers' accounts?" Mr. Pole fished his cheque-book from a drawer and wrote Wilfrid's name and the sum, tore out the leaf and tossed it to him. "There, I've written to-day. Don't present it for a week." He rubbed his forehead hastily, touching here and there a paper to put it scrupulously in a line with the others. Wilfrid left him, and thought: "Kind old boy! Of course, he always means kindly, but I think I see a glimpse of avarice as a sort of a sign of age coming on. I hope he'll live long!"
Wilfrid was walking in the garden, imagining perhaps that he was thinking, as the swarming sensations of little people help them to imagine, when Cornelia ran hurriedly up to him and said: "Come with me to papa. He's ill: I fear he is going to have a fit."
"I left him sound and well, just now," said Wilfrid. "This is your mania."
"I found him gasping in his chair not two minutes after you quitted him.Dearest, he is in a dangerous state!"
Wilfrid stept back to his father, and was saluted with a ready "Well?" as he entered; but the mask had slipped from half of the old man's face, and for the first time in his life Wilfrid perceived that he had become an old man.
"Well, sir, you sent for me?" he said.
"Girls always try to persuade you you're ill—that's all," returned Mr. Pole. His voice was subdued; but turning to Cornelia, he fired up: "It's preposterous to tell a man who carries on a business like mine, you've observed for a long while that he's queer!—There, my dear child, I know that you mean well. I shall look all right the day you're married."
This allusion, and the sudden kindness, drew a storm of tears toCornelia's eyelids.
"Papa! if you will but tell me what it is!" she moaned.
A nervous frenzy seemed to take possession of him. He ordered her out of the room.
She was gone, but his arm was still stretched out, and his expression of irritated command did not subside.
Wilfrid took his arm and put it gently down on the chair, saying: "You're not quite the thing to-day, sir."
"Are you a fool as well?" Mr. Pole retorted. "What do you know of, to make me ill? I live a regular life. I eat and drink just as you all do; and if I have a headache, I'm stunned with a whole family screaming as hard as they can that I'm going to die. Damned hard! I say, sir, it's—" He fell into a feebleness.
"A little glass of brandy, I think," Wilfrid suggested; and when Mr. Pole had gathered his mind he assented, begging his son particularly to take precautions to prevent any one from entering the room until he had tasted the reviving liquor.
A half-circle of high-banked greensward, studded with old park-trees, hung round the roar of the water; distant enough from the white-twisting fall to be mirrored on a smooth-heaved surface, while its out-pushing brushwood below drooped under burdens of drowned reed-flags that caught the foam. Keen scent of hay, crossing the dark air, met Emilia as she entered the river-meadow. A little more, and she saw the white weir-piles shining, and the grey roller just beginning to glisten to the moon. Eastward on her left, behind a cedar, the moon had cast off a thick cloud, and shone through the cedar-bars with a yellowish hazy softness, making rosy gold of the first passion of the tide, which, writhing and straining on through many lights, grew wide upon the wonderful velvet darkness underlying the wooded banks. With the full force of a young soul that leaps from beauty seen to unimagined beauty, Emilia stood and watched the picture. Then she sat down, hushed, awaiting her lover.
Wilfrid, as it chanced, was ten minutes late. She did not hear his voice till he had sunk on his knee by her side.
"What a reverie!" he said half jealously. "Isn't it lovely here?"
Emilia pressed his hand, but without turning her face to him, as her habit was. He took it for shyness, and encouraged her with soft exclamations and expansive tenderness.
"I wish I had not come here!" she murmured.
"Tell me why?" He folded his arm about her waist.
"Why did you let me wait?" said she.
Wilfrid drew out his watch; blamed the accident that had detained him, and remarked that there were not many minutes to witness against him.
She appeared to throw off her moodiness. "You are here at last. Let me hold your hand, and think, and be quite silent."
"You shall hold my hand, and think, and be quite silent, my own girl! if you will tell me what's on your mind."
Emilia thought it enough to look in his face, smiling.
"Has any one annoyed you?" he cried out.
"No one."
"Then receive the command of your lord, that you kiss him."
"I will kiss him," said Emilia; and did so.
The salute might have appeased an imperious lord, but was not so satisfactory to an exacting lover. He perceived, however, that, whether as lover or as lord, he must wait for her now, owing to her having waited for him: so, he sat by her, permitting his hand to be softly squeezed, and trying to get at least in the track of her ideas, while her ear was turned to the weir, and her eyes were on the glowing edges of the cedar-tree.
Finally, on one of many deep breaths, she said: "It's over. Why were you late? But, never mind now. Never let it be long again when I am expecting you. It's then I feel so much at his mercy. I mean, if I am where I hear falling water; sometimes thunder."
Wilfrid masked his complete mystification with a caressing smile; not without a growing respect for the only person who could make him experience the pangs of conscious silliness. You see, he was not a coxcomb.
"That German!" Emilia enlightened him.
"Your old music-master?"
"I wish it, I wish it! I should soon be free from him. Don't you know that dreadful man I told you about, who's like a black angel to me, because there is no music like his? and he's a German! I told you how I first dreamed about him, and then regularly every night, after talking with my father about Italy and his black-yellow Tedeschi, this man came over my pillow and made me call him Master, Master. And he is. He seems as if he were the master of my soul, mocking me, making me worship him in spite of my hate. I came here, thinking only of you. I heard the water like a great symphony. I fell into dreaming of my music. That's when I am at his mercy. There's no one like him. I must detest music to get free from him. How can I? He is like the God of music."
Wilfrid now remembered certain of her allusions to this rival, who had hitherto touched him very little. Perhaps it was partly the lovely scene that lifted him to a spiritual jealousy, partly his susceptibility to a sentimental exaggeration, and partly the mysterious new charm in Emilia's manner, that was as a bordering lustre, showing how the full orb was rising behind her.
"His name?" Wilfrid asked for.
Emilia's lips broke to the second letter of the alphabet; but she cut short the word. "Why should you hear it? And now that you are here, you drive him away. And the best is," she laughed, "I am sure you will not remember any of his pieces. I wish I could not—not that it's the memory; but he seems all round me, up in the air, and when the trees move all together…you chase him away, my lover!"
It was like a break in music, the way that Emilia suddenly closed her sentence; coming with a shock of flattering surprise upon Wilfrid.
Then she pursued: "My English lover! I am like Italy, in chains to that German, and you…but no, no, no! It's not quite a likeness, for my German is not a brute. I have seen his picture in shop-windows: the wind seemed in his hair, and he seemed to hear with his eyes: his forehead frowning so. Look at me, and see. So!"
Emilia pressed up the hair from her temples and bent her brows.
"It does not increase your beauty," said Wilfrid.
"There's the difference!" Emilia sighed mildly. "He sees angels, cherubs, and fairies, and imps, and devils; or he hears them: they come before him from far off, in music. They do to me, now and then. Only now and then, when my head's on fire.—My lover!"
Wilfrid pressed his mouth to the sweet instrument. She took his kiss fully, and gave her own frankly, in return. Then, sighing a very little, she said: "Do not kiss me much."
"Why not?"
"No!"
"But, look at me."
"I will look at you. Only take my hand. See the moon is getting whiter. The water there is like a pool of snakes, and then they struggle out, and roll over and over, and stream on lengthwise. I can see their long flat heads, and their eyes: almost their skins. No, my lover! do not kiss me. I lose my peace."
Wilfrid was not willing to relinquish his advantage, and the tender deep tone of the remonstrance was most musical and catching. What if he pulled her to earth from that rival of his in her soul? She would then be wholly his own. His lover's sentiment had grown rageingly jealous of the lordly German. But Emilia said, "I have you on my heart more when I touch your hand only, and think. If you kiss me, I go into a cloud, and lose your face in my mind."
"Yes, yes;" replied Wilfrid, pleased to sustain the argument for the sake of its fruitful promises. "But you must submit to be kissed, my darling. You will have to."
She gazed inquiringly.
"When you are married, I mean."
"When will you marry me?" she said.
The heir-apparent of the house of Pole blinked probably at that moment more foolishly than most mortal men have done. Taming his astonishment to represent a smile, he remarked: "When? are you thinking about it already?"
She answered, in a quiet voice that conveyed the fact forcibly, "Yes."
"But you're too young yet; and you're going to Italy, to learn in the schools. You wouldn't take a husband there with you, would you? What would the poor devil do?"
"But you are not too young," said she.
Wilfrid supposed not.
"Could you not go to my Italy with me?"
"Impossible! What! as a dangling husband?" Wilfrid laughed scornfully.
"They would love you too," she said. "They are such loving people. Oh, come! Consent to come, my lover! I must learn. If I do not, you will despise me. How can I bring anything to lay at your feet, my dear! my dear! if I do not?"
"Impossible!" Wilfrid reiterated, as one who had found moorings in the word.
"Then I will give up Italy!"
He had not previously acted hypocrite with this amazing girl. Nevertheless, it became difficult not to do so. He could scarcely believe that he had on a sudden, and by strange agency, slipped into an earnest situation. Emilia's attitude and tone awakened him to see it. Her hands were clenched straight down from the shoulders: all that she conceived herself to be renouncing for his sake was expressed in her face.
"Would you, really?" he murmured.
"I will!"
"And be English altogether?"
"Be yours!"
"Mine?"
"Yes; from this time."
Now stirred his better nature: though not before had he sceptically touched her lips and found them cold, as if the fire had been taken out of them by what they had uttered. He felt that it was no animal love, but the force of a soul drawn to him; and, forgetting the hypocritical foundation he had laid, he said: "How proud I shall be of you!"
"I shall go with you to battle," returned Emilia.
"My little darling! You won't care to see those black fellows killed, will you?"
Emilia shuddered. "No; poor things! Why do you hurt them? Kill wicked people, tyrant white-coats! And we will not talk of killing now. Proud of me? If I can make you!"
"You sigh so heavily!"
"Something makes me feel like a little beggar."
"When I tell you I love you?"
"Yes; but I only feel rich when I am giving; and I seem to have nothing to give now:—now that I have lost Italy!"
"But you give me your love, don't you?"
"All of it. But I seem to give it to you in tatters it's like a beggar; like a day without any sun."
"Do you think I shall have that idea when I hear you sing to me, and know that this little leaping fountain of music here is mine?"
Dim rays of a thought led Emilia to remark, "Must not men keel to women?I mean, if they are to love them for ever?"
Wilfrid smiled gallantly: "I will kneel to you, if it pleases you."
"Not now. You should have done so, once, I dreamed only once, just for a moment, in Italy; when all were crying out to me that I had caught their hearts. I fancied standing out like a bright thing in a dark crowd, and then saying "I am his!" pointing to you, and folding my arms, waiting for you to take me."
The lover's imagination fired at the picture, and immediately he told a lover's lie; for the emotion excited by the thought of her glory coloured deliciously that image of her abnegation of all to him. He said: "I would rather have you as you are."
Emilia leaned to him more, and the pair fixed their eyes on the moon, that had now topped the cedar, and was pure silver: silver on the grass, on the leafage, on the waters. And in the West, facing it, was an arch of twilight and tremulous rose; as if a spirit hung there over the shrouded sun.
"At least," thought Wilfrid, "heaven, and the beauty of the world, approve my choice." And he looked up, fancying that he had a courage almost serene to meet his kindred with Emilia on his arm.
She felt his arm dreamily stressing its clasp about her, and said: "Now I know you love me. And you shall take me as I am. I need not be so poor after all. My dear! my dear! I cannot see beyond you."
"Is that your misery?" said he.
"My delight! my pleasure! One can live a life anywhere. And how can I belong to Italy, if I am yours? Do you know, when we were silent just now, I was thinking that water was the history of the world flowing out before me, all mixed up of kings and queens, and warriors with armour, and shouting armies; battles and numbers of mixed people; and great red sunsets, with women kneeling under them. Do you know those long low sunsets? I love them. They look like blood spilt for love. The noise of the water, and the moist green smell, gave me hundreds of pictures that seemed to hug me. I thought—what could stir music in me more than this? and, am I not just as rich if I stay here with my lover, instead of flying to strange countries, that I shall not care for now? So, you shall take me as I am. I do not feel poor any longer."
With that she gave him both her hands.
"Yes," said Wilfrid.
As if struck by the ridicule of so feeble a note, falling upon her passionate speech, he followed it up with the "yes!" of a man; adding: "Whatever you are, you are my dear girl; my own love; mine!"
Having said it, he was screwed up to feel it as nearly as possible, such virtue is there in uttered words.
Then he set about resolutely studying to appreciate her in the new character she had assumed to him. It is barely to be supposed that he should understand what in her love for him she sacrificed in giving up Italy, as she phrased it. He had some little notion of the sacrifice; but, as he did not demand any sacrifice of the sort, and as this involved a question perplexing, irritating, absurd, he did not regard it very favourably. As mistress of his fancy, her prospective musical triumphs were the crown of gold hanging over her. As wife of his bosom, they were not to be thought of. But the wife of his bosom must take her place by virtue of some wondrous charm. What was it that Emilia could show, if not music? Beautiful eyebrows: thick rare eyebrows, no doubt couched upon her full eyes, they were a marvel: and her eyes were a marvel. She had a sweet mouth, too, though the upper lip did not boast the aristocratic conventional curve of adorable pride, or the under lip a pretty droop to a petty rounded chin. Her face was like the aftersunset across a rose-garden, with the wings of an eagle poised outspread on the light. Some such coloured, vague, magnified impression Wilfrid took of her. Still, it was not quite enough to make him scorn contempt, should it whisper: nor even quite enough to combat successfully the image of elegant dames in their chosen attitudes—the queenly moments when perhaps they enter an assembly, or pour out tea with an exquisite exhibition of arm, or recline upon a couch, commanding homage of the world of little men. What else had this girl to count upon to make her exclusive? A devoted heart; she had a loyal heart, and perfect frankness: a mind impressible, intelligent, and fresh. She gave promise of fair companionship at all seasons. She could put a spell upon him, moreover. By that power of hers, never wilfully exercised, she came, in spite of the effect left on him by her early awkwardnesses and 'animalities,' nearer to his idea of superhuman nature than anything he knew of. But how would she be regarded when the announcement of Mrs. Wilfrid Pole brought scrutinizing eyes and gossiping mouths to bear on her?
It mattered nothing. He kissed her, and the vision of the critical world faded to a blank. Whatever she was, he was her prime luminary, so he determined to think that he cast light upon a precious, an unrivalled land.
"You are my own, are you not, Emilia?"
"Yes; I am," she answered.
"That water seems to say 'for ever,'" he murmured; and Emilia's fingers pressed upon his.
Of marriage there was no further word. Her heart was evidently quite at ease; and that it should be so without chaining him to a date, was Wilfrid's peculiar desire. He could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o'clock on the morrow morning.
So, now, the soft Summer hours flew like white doves from off the mounting moon, and the lovers turned to go, all being still: even the noise of the waters still to their ears, as life that is muffled in sleep. They saw the cedar grey-edged under the moon: and Night, that clung like a bat beneath its ancient open palms. The bordering sward about the falls shone silvery. In its shadow was a swan. These scenes are but beckoning hands to the hearts of lovers, waving them on to that Eden which they claim: but when the hour has fled, they know it; and by the palpitating light in it they know that it holds the best of them.
At this season Mr. Pericles reappeared. He had been, he said, through "Paris, Turin, Milano, Veniss, and by Trieste over the Summering to Vienna on a tour for a voice." And in no part of the Continent, his vehement declaration assured the ladies, had he found a single one. It was one universal croak—ahi! And Mr. Pericles could, affirm that Purgatory would have no pains for him after the torments he had recently endured. "Zey are frogs if zey are not geese," said Mr. Pericles. "I give up. Opera is dead. Hein? for a time;" and he smiled almost graciously, adding: "Where is she?" For Emilia was not present.
The ladies now perceived a greatness of mind in the Greek's devotion to music, and in his non-mercenary travels to assist managers of Opera by discovering genius. His scheme for Emilia fired them with delight. They were about to lay down all the material arrangements at once, but Mrs. Chump, who had heard that there was a new man in the house, now entered the room, prepared to conquer him. As thus, after a short form of introduction: "D'ye do, sir! and ye're Mr. Paricles. Oh! but ye're a Sultan, they say. Not in morr'ls, sir. And vary pleasant to wander on the Cont'nent with a lot o' lacqueys at your heels. It's what a bachelor can do. But I ask ye, sir, is ut fair, ye think, to the poor garls that has to stop at home?"
Hereat the ladies of Brookfield, thus miserably indicated, drew upon their self-command that sprang from the high sense of martyrdom.
Mr. Pericles did not reply to Mrs. Chump at all. He turned to Adela, saying aloud: "What is zis person?"
It might have pleased them to hear any slight put publicly on Mrs. Chump in the first resistance to the woman, but in the present stage their pride defended her. "Our friend," was the reply with which Arabella rebuked his rudeness; and her sister approved her. "We can avoid showing that we are weak in our own opinion, whatsoever degrades us," they had said during a consultation. Simultaneously they felt that Mr. Pericles being simply a millionaire and not In Society, being also a middle-class foreigner (a Greek whose fathers ran with naked heels and long lank hair on the shores of the Aegean), before such a man they might venture to identify this their guest with themselves an undoubted duty, in any case, but not always to be done; at least, not with grace and personal satisfaction. Therefore, the "our friend" dispersed a common gratulatory glow. Very small points, my masters; but how are coral-islands built?
Mrs. Chump fanned her cheek, in complete ignorance of the offence and defence. Chump, deceased, in amorous mood, had praised her management of the fan once, when breath was in him: "'Martha,' says he, winkin' a sort of 'mavourneen' at me, ye know—'Martha! with a fan in your hand, if ye're not a black-eyed beauty of a Spaniard, ye little devil of Seville!' says he." This she had occasionally confided to the ladies. The marital eulogy had touched her, and she was not a woman of coldly-flowing blood, she had an excuse for the constant employment of the fan.
"And well, Mr. Paricles! have ye got nothin' to tell us about foreign countesses and their slips? Because, we can listen, sir, garls or not. Sure, if they understand ye, ye teach 'em nothin'; and if they don't understand ye, where's the harm done? D'ye see, sir? It's clear in favour of talkin'."
Mr. Pericles administered consolation to his moustache by twisting it into long waxy points. "I do not know; I do not know," he put her away with, from time to time. In the end Mrs. Chump leaned over to Arabella. "Don't have 'm, my dear," she murmured.
"You mean—?" quoth Arabella.
"Here's the driest stick that aver stood without sap."
Arabella flushed when she took the implication that she was looking on the man as a husband. Adela heard the remarks, and flushed likewise. Mrs. Chump eyed them both. "It's for the money o' the man," she soliloquized aloud, as her fashion was. Adela jumped up, and with an easy sprightly posture of her fair, commonly studious person, and natural run of notes "Oh!" she cried, "I begin to feel what it is to be like a live fish on the fire, frying, frying, frying! and if he can keep his Christian sentiments under this infliction, what a wonderful hero he must be! What a hot day!"
She moved swiftly to the door, and flung it open. A sight met her eyes at which she lost her self-possession. She started back, uttering a soft cry.
"Ah! aha! oh!" went the bitter ironic drawl of Mr. Pericles, whose sharp glance had caught the scene as well.
Emilia came forward with a face like sunset. Diplomacy, under the form of Wilfrid Pole, kicked its heels behind, and said a word or two in a tone of false cheerfulness.
"Oh! so!" Mr. Pericles frowned, while Emilia held her hand out to him. "Yeas! You are quite well? H'm! You are burnt like a bean—hein? I shall ask you what you have been doing, by and by."
Happily for decency, Mrs. Chump had not participated in the fact presented by ocular demonstration. She turned about comfortably to greet Wilfrid, uttering the inspired remark: "Ye look red from a sly kiss!"
"For one?" said he, sharpening his blunted wits on this dull instrument.
The ladies talked down their talk. Then Wilfrid and Mr. Pericles interchanged quasi bows.
"Oh, if he doesn't show his upper teeth like an angry cat, or a leopardI've seen!" cried Mrs. Chump in Adela's ear, designating Mr. Pericles."Does he know Mr. Wilfrud's in the British army, and a new lieuten't,gazetted and all?"
Mr. Pericles certainly did not look pleasantly upon Wilfrid: Emilia received his unconcealed wrath and spite.
"Go and sing a note!" he said.
"At the piano?" Emilia quietly asked.
"At piano, harp, what you will—it is ze voice I want."
Emilia pitched her note high from a full chest and with glad bright eyes, which her fair critics thought just one degree brazen, after the revelation in the doorway.
Mr. Pericles listened; wearing an aching expression, as if he were sending one eye to look up into his brain for a judgement disputed in that sovereign seat.
Still she held on, and then gave a tremulous, rich, contralto note.
"Oh! the human voice!" cried Adela, overcome by the transition of tones.
"Like going from the nightingale to the nightjar," said Arabella.
Mrs. Chump remarked: "Ye'll not find a more susceptible woman to musuc than me."
Wilfrid looked away. Pride coursed through his veins in a torrent.
When the voice was still, Mr. Pericles remained in a pondering posture.
"You go to play fool with zat voice in Milano, you are flogged," he cried terribly, shaking his forefinger.
Wilfrid faced round in wrath, but Mr. Pericles would not meet his challenge, continuing: "You hear? you hear?—so!" and Mr. Pericles brought the palms of his hands in collision.
"Marcy, man!" Mrs. Chump leaped from her chair; "d'ye mean that those horrud forr'ners'll smack a full-grown young woman?—Don't go to 'm, my dear. Now, take my 'dvice, little Belloni, and don't go. It isn't the sting o' the smack, ye know—"
"Shall I sing anything to you?" Emilia addressed Mr. Pericles. The latter shrugged to express indifference. Nevertheless she sang. She had never sung better. Mr. Pericles clutched his chin in one hand, elbow on knee. The ladies sighed to think of the loss of homage occasioned by the fact of so few being present to hear her. Wilfrid knew himself the fountain of it all, and stood fountain-like, in a shower of secret adulation: a really happy fellow. This: that his beloved should be the centre of eyes, and pronounced exquisite by general approbation, besides subjecting him to a personal spell: this was what he wanted. It was mournful to think that Circumstance had not at the same time created the girl of noble birth, or with an instinct for spiritual elegance. But the world is imperfect.
Presently he became aware that she was understood to be singing pointedly to him: upon which he dismissed the council of his sensations, and began to diplomatize cleverly. Leaning over to Adela, he whispered:
"Pericles wants her to go to Italy. My belief is, that she won't."
"And why?" returned Adela, archly reproachful.
"Well, we've been spoiling her a little, perhaps. I mean, we men, of course. But, I really don't think that I'm chiefly to blame. You won't allow Captain Gambier to be in fault, I know."
"Why not?" said Adela.
"Well, if you will, then he is the principal offender."
Adela acted disbelief; but, unprepared for her brother's perfectly feminine audacity of dissimulation, she thought: "He can't be in earnest about the girl," and was led to fancy that Gambier might, and to determine to see whether it was so.
By this manoeuvre, Wilfrid prepared for himself a defender when the charge was brought against him.
Mr. Pericles was thunderstruck on hearing Emilia refuse to go to Italy. A scene of tragic denunciation on the one hand, and stubborn decision on the other, ensued.
"I shall not mind zis" (he spoke of Love and the awakening of the female heart) "not when you are trained. It is good, zen, and you have fire from it. But, now! little fool, I say, it is too airly—too airly! How shall you learn—eh? with your brain upon a man? And your voice, little fool, a thing of caprice, zat comes and goes as he will, not you will. Hein? like a barrel-organ, which he turns ze handle.—Mon Dieu! Why did I leave her?" Mr. Pericles struck his brow with his wrist, clutching at the long thin slice of hair that did greasy duty for the departed crop on his poll. "Did I not know it was a woman? And so you are, what you say, in lofe."
Emilia replied: "I have not said so," with exasperating coolness.
"You have your eye on a man. And I know him, zat man! When he is tired of you—whiff, away you go, a puff of smoke! And you zat I should make a Queen of Opera! A Queen? You shall have more rule zan twenty Queens—forty! See" (Mr. Pericles made his hand go like an aspen-leaf from his uplifted wrist); "So you shall set ze hearts of sossands! To dream of you, to adore you! and flowers, flowers everywhere, on your head, at your feet. You choose your lofer from ze world. A husband, if it is your taste. Bose, if you please. Zen, I say, you shall, you shall lofe a man. Let him tease and sting—ah! it will be magnifique: Aha! ze voice will sharpen, go deep; yeas! to be a tale of blood. Lofe till you could stab yourself:—Brava! But now? Little fool, I say!"
Emilia believed that she was verily forfeiting an empire. Her face wore a soft look of delight. This renunciation of a splendid destiny for Wilfrid's sake, seemed to make her worthier of him, and as Mr. Pericles unrolled the list of her rejected treasures, her bosom heaved without a regret.
"Ha!" Mr. Pericles flung away from her: "go and be a little gutter-girl!"
The musical connoisseur drew on his own disappointment alone for eloquence. Had he been thinking of her, he might have touched cunningly on her love for Italy. Music was the passion of the man; and a millionaire's passion is something that can make a stir. He knew that in Emilia he had discovered a pearl of song rarely to be found, and his object was to polish and perfect her at all cost: perhaps, as a secondary and far removed consideration, to point to her as a thing belonging to him, for which Emperors might envy him. The thought of losing her drove him into fits of rage. He took the ladies one by one, and treated them each to a horrible scene of gesticulation and outraged English. H accused their brother of conduct which they were obliged to throw (by a process of their own) into the region of Fine Shades, before they dared venture to comprehend him. Gross facts in relationship with the voice, this grievous "machine, not man,"—as they said—stated to them, harshly, impetuously. The ladies felt that he had bored their ears with hot iron pins. Adela tried laughter as a defence from his suggestion against Wilfrid, but had shortly afterwards to fly from the fearful anatomist. She served her brother thoroughly in the Council of Three; so that Mr. Pericles was led by them to trust that there had; been mere fooling in his absence, and that the emotions he looked to as the triumphant reserve in Emilia's bosom, to be aroused at some crisis when she was before the world, slumbered still. She, on her part, contrasting her own burning sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets. Mr. Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability: "You will come to Italy to-morrow?—Ze day after?—not at all?" The last was given with a roar, for lack of her immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at times. Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she had no resting-place in Wilfrid's heart, and knew it. She knew it as the young know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the sadness of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is therefore incomplete. And again her blood, as with a wave of rich emotion, washed out the blank spot. She thought: "What can he want but my love?" And thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to supply an answer to his.
The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the generous offer of Mr. Pericles. They thought, too, that she might—might she? Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection. "Would you let one of your blood?" asked Wilfrid brutally. With some cunning he led them to admit that Emilia's parents should rightly be consulted in such a case.
One day Mr. Pericles said to the ladies: "I shall give a fete: a party monstre. In ze air: on grass. I beg you to invite friends of yours."
Before the excogitation of this splendid resolve, he had been observed to wear for some period a conspiratorial aspect. When it was delivered, and Arabella had undertaken the management of the "party monstre"—(which was to be on Besworth Lawn, and, as it was not their own party, could be conducted with a sort of quasi-contemptuous superiority to incongruous gatherings)—this being settled, the forehead of Mr. Pericles cleared and he ceased to persecute Emilia.
"I am not one that is wopped," he said significantly; nodding to his English hearers, as if this piece of shrewd acquaintance with the expressive mysteries of their language placed them upon equal terms.
It was really 'a providential thing' (as devout people phrase it) thatLaura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invitethe ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On BesworthLawn, of all places! and they used the word 'picnic.'
"A word suggestive of gnawed drumstick and ginger-beer bottles." Adela quoted some scapegoat of her acquaintance, as her way was when she wished to be pungent without incurring the cold sisterly eye of reproof for a vulgarism.
Both Laura and Mabel, when they heard of the mighty entertainment fixed for Besworth Lawn by Mr. Pericles, looked down. They were invited, and looked up. There was the usual amount of fencing with the combative Laura, who gave ground at all points, and as she was separating, said (so sweetly!) "Of course you have heard of the arrest of your—what does one call him?—friend?—or a French word?"
"You mean?" quoth Arabella.
"That poor, neatly brushed, nice creature whom you patronized—who played the organ!" she jerked to Arabella's dubious eyes.
"And he?" Arabella smiled, complacently.
"Then perhaps you may know that all is arranged for him?" said Laura, interpreting by the look more than the word, after a habit of women.
"Indeed, to tell you the truth, I know nothing," said Arabella.
"Really?" Laura turned sharply to Cornelia, who met her eyes and did not exhibit one weak dimple.
The story was, that Mr. Chips, the Bookseller of Hillford, objected to the departure of Mr. Barrett, until Mr. Barrett had paid the bill of Mr. Chips: and had signified his objection in the form of a writ. "When, if you know anything of law," said Laura, "you will see why he remains. For, a writ once served, you are a prisoner. That is, I believe, if it's above twenty pounds. And Mr. Chips' bill against Mr. Barrett was, I have heard, twenty-three pounds and odd shillings. Could anything be more preposterous? And Mr. Chips deserves to lose his money!"
Ah! to soar out of such a set as this, of which Laura Tinley is a sample, are not some trifling acts of inhumanity and practices in the art of 'cutting' permissible? So the ladies had often asked of the Unseen in their onward course, if they did not pointedly put the question now. Surely they had no desire to give pain, but the nature that endowed them with a delicate taste, inspired them to defend it. They listened gravely to Laura, who related that not only English books, but foreign (repeated and emphasized), had been supplied by Mr. Chips to Mr. Barrett.
They were in the library, and Laura's eyes rested on certain yellow and blue covers of books certainly not designed for the reading of Mr. Pole.
"I think you must be wrong as to Mr. Barrett's position," said Adela.
"No, dear; not at all," Laura was quick to reply. "Unless you know anything. He has stated that he awaits money remittances. He has, in fact, overrun the constable, and my brother Albert says, the constable is very likely to overrun ham, in consequence. Only a joke! But an organist with, at the highest computation—poor absurd thing!—fifty-five pounds per annum: additional for singing lessons, it is true,—but an organist with a bookseller's bill of twenty-three pounds! Consider!"
"Foreign books, too!" interjected Adela.
"Not so particularly improving to his morals, either!" added Laura.
"You are severe upon the greater part of the human race," said Arabella.
"So are the preachers, dear," returned Laura.
"The men of our religion justify you?" asked Arabella.
"Let me see;—where were we?" Laura retreated in an affected mystification.
"You had reached the enlightened belief that books written by any but English hands were necessarily destructive of men's innocence," said Arabella; and her sisters thrilled at the neatness of the stroke, for the moment, while they forgot the ignoble object it transfixed. Laura was sufficiently foiled by it to be unable to return to the Chips-Barrett theme. Throughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a triumphant posture, superior to Arabella's skill in fencing, seeing that it exposed no weak point of the defence by making an attack, and concealed especially the confession implied by a relish for the conflict. Her sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after this mighty exercise of silence.
Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. "You are rich and he is poor," was the keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. "And it is gold gives you the right in the world's eye to despise him!" she apostrophized the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of that person. Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one's fellows. The tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is to try to stem the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations of the sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine feelers by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a growth due to it, nevertheless. Those 'fine feelers,' or antennae of the senses, come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our island-latitude. The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized species. It is they that sensitively touch and reject, touch and select; whereby the laws of the polite world are ultimately regulated, and civilization continually advanced, sometimes ridiculously. The sentimentalists are ahead of us, not by weight of brain, but through delicacy of nerve, and, like all creatures in the front, they are open to be victims. I pray you to observe again the shrinking life that afflicts the adventurous horns of the snail, for example. Such are the sentimentalists to us—the fat body of mankind. We owe them much, and though they scorn us, let us pity them.
Especially when they are young they deserve pity, for they suffer cruelly. I for my part prefer to see boys and girls led into the ways of life by nature; but I admit that in many cases, in most cases, our good mother has not (occupied as her hands must be) made them perfectly presentable; by which fact I am warned to have tolerance for the finer beings who labour under these excessive sensual subtleties. I perceive their uses. And they are right good comedy; for which I may say that I almost love them. Man is the laughing animal: and at the end of an infinite search, the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit, purely human, and sane, and comforting. So let us be cordially thankful to those who furnish matter for sound embracing laughter.
Cornelia detested gold—entirely on general grounds and for abstract reasons. Not a word of Mr. Barrett was shaped, even in fancy; but she interjected to herself, with meditative eye and mouth: "The saints were poor!" (the saints of whom he had read, translating from that old Latin book) "St. Francis! how divine was his life!" and so forth, until the figure of Mr. Penniless Barrett walked out in her imagination clad in saintly garments, superior not only to his creditor, Mr. Chips, but to all who bought or sold.
"I have been false," she said; implying the "to him." Seeing him on that radiant height above her, she thought "How could I have fallen so!" It was impossible for her mind to recover the delusion which had prompted her signing herself to bondage—pledging her hand to a man she did not love. Could it have been that she was guilty of the immense folly, simply to escape from that piece of coarse earth, Mrs. Chump? Cornelia smiled sadly, saying: "Oh, no! I should not have committed a wickedness for so miserable an object." Despairing for a solution of the puzzle, she cried out, "I was mad!", and with a gasp of horror saw herself madly signing her name to perdition.
"I was mad!" is a comfortable cloak to our sins in the past. Mournful to think that we have been bereft of reason; but the fit is over, and we are not in Bedlam!
Cornelia next wrestled with the pride of Mr. Barrett. Why had he not come to her once after reading the line pencilled in the book? Was it that he would make her his debtor in everything? He could have reproached her justly; why had he held aloof? She thirsted to be scourged by him, to hang her head ashamed under his glance, and hug the bitter pain he dealt her. Revolving how the worst man on earth would have behaved to a girl partially in his power (hands had been permitted to be pressed, and the gateways of the eyes had stood open: all but vows had been interchanged), she came to regard Mr. Barrett as the best man on the earth. That she alone saw it, did not depreciate the value of her knowledge. A goal gloriously illumined blazed on her from the distance. "Too late!" she put a curb on the hot courses in her brain, and they being checked, turned all at once to tears and came in a flood. How indignant would the fair sentimentalist have been at a whisper of her caring for the thing before it was too late!
Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett there at last. Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch. She beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep down a thumping heart.
"We are taking our last walk in the old wood," said, Mr. Barrett, admirably collected. "That is, I must speak for myself."
"You leave early?" Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.
"In two days, I expect—I hope," said he.
"Why does he hope?" thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.
She turned to Emilia. "Our dear child is also going to leave us."
"I?" cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.
"Does not your Italy claim you?"
"I am nothing to Italy any more. Have I not said so? I love England now."
Cornelia smiled complacently. "Let us hope your heart is capacious enough to love both."
"Then your theory is" (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old style), "that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?"
"Should it not?" She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she contrasted her own husky tones with it.
Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless matters. "And yet he is her lover," she thought. "When they meet they talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does not gripe her wrist and drag her away!" The sense that she had no kinship with such flesh shut her mouth faster than Wilfrid's injunctions (which were ordinarily conveyed in too subtle a manner for her to feel their meaning enough to find them binding). Cornelia, for a mask to her emotions, gave Emilia a gentle, albeit high-worded lecture on the artist's duty toward Art, quoting favourite passages from Mr. Barrett's favourite Art-critic. And her fashion of dropping her voice as she declaimed the more dictatorial sentences (to imply, one might guess, by a show of personal humility that she would have you to know her preaching was vicarious; that she stood humbly in the pulpit, and was but a vessel for the delivery of the burden of the oracle), all this was beautiful to him who could see it. I cannot think it was wholesome for him; nor that Cornelia was unaware of a naughty wish to glitter temporarily in the eyes of the man who made her feel humble. The sorcery she sent through his blood communicated itself to hers. When she had done, Emilia, convincedly vanquished by big words, said, "I cannot talk," and turned heavily from them without bestowing a smile upon either.
Cornelia believed that the girl would turn back as abruptly as she had retreated; and it was not until Emilia was out of sight that she remembered the impropriety of being alone with Mr. Barrett. The Pitfall of Sentiment yawned visible, but this lady's strength had been too little tried for her to lack absolute faith in it. So, out of deep silences, the two leapt to speech and immediately subsided to the depths again: as on a sultry summer's day fishes flash their tails in the sunlight and leave a solitary circle widening on the water.
Then Cornelia knew what was coming. In set phrase, and as one who performs a duty frigidly pleasant, he congratulated her on her rumored union. One hand was in his buttoned coat; the other hung elegantly loose: not a feature betrayed emotion. He might have spoken it in a ballroom. To Cornelia, who exulted in self-compression, after the Roman method, it was more dangerous than a tremulous tone.
"You know me too well to say this, Mr. Barrett."
The words would come. She preserved her steadfast air, when they had escaped, to conceal her shame. Seeing thus much, he took it to mean that it was a time for plain-speaking. To what end, he did not ask.
"You have not to be told that I desire your happiness above all earthly things," he said: and the lady shrank back, and made an effort to recover her footing. Had he not been so careful to obliterate any badge of the Squire of low degree, at his elbows, cuffs, collar, kneecap, and head-piece, she might have achieved it with better success. For cynicism (the younger brother of sentiment and inheritor of the family property) is always on the watch to deal fatal blows through such vital parts as the hat or the H's, or indeed any sign of inferior estate. But Mr. Barrett was armed at all points by a consummate education and a most serviceable clothesbrush.
"You know how I love this neighbourhood!" said she.
"And I! above all that I have known!"
They left the pathway and walked on mosses—soft yellow beds, run over with grey lichen, and plots of emerald in the midst.
"You will not fall off with your reading?" he recommenced.
She answered "Yes," meaning "No"; and corrected the error languidly, thinking one of the weighty monosyllables as good as the other: for what was reading to her now?
"It would be ten thousand pities if you were to do as so many women do, when…when they make these great changes," he continued.
"Of what avail is the improvement of the mind?" she said, and followed his stumble over the "when," and dropped on it.
"Of what avail! Is marriage to stop your intellectual growth?"
"Without sympathy," she faltered, and was shocked at what she said; but it seemed a necessity.
"You must learn to conquer the need for it."
Alas! his admonition only made her feel the need more cravingly.
"Promise me one thing," he said. "You will not fall into the rut? Let me keep the ideal you have given me. For the sake of heaven, do not cloud for me the one bright image I hold! Let me know always that you are growing, and that the pure, noble intelligence which distinguishes you advances, and will not be subdued."
Cornelia smiled faintly. "You have judged me too generously, Mr.Barrett."
"Too little so! might I tell you!" He stopped short, and she felt the silence like a great wave sweeping over her.
They were nearing the lake, with the stump of the pollard-willow in sight, and toward it they went.
"I shall take the consolation of knowing that I shall hear of you, some day," she said, having recourse to a look of cheerfulness.
He knew her to allude to certain hopes of fame. "I am getting wiser, I fear—too wise for ambition!"
"That is a fallacy, a sophism."
He pointed to the hollow tree. "Is there promise of fruit from that?"
"You…you are young, Mr. Barrett."
"And on a young, forehead it may be written, 'Come not to gather more.'"
Cornelia put her hand out: "Oh, Mr. Barrett! unsay it!" The nakedness of her spirit stood forth in a stinging tear. "The words were cruel."
"But, if they live, and are?"
"I feel that you must misjudge me. When I wrote them…you cannot know! The misery of our domestic life was so bitter! And yet, I have no excuse, none! I can only ask for pity."
"And if you are wretched, must not I be? You pluck from me my last support. This, I petitioned Providence to hear from you—that you would be happy! I can have no comfort but in that."
"Happy!" Cornelia murmured the word musically, as if to suck an irony from the sweetness of the sound. "Are we made for happiness?"
Mr. Barrett quoted the favourite sage, concluding: "But a brilliant home and high social duties bring consolation. I do acknowledge that an eminent station will not only be graced by you, but that you give the impression of being born to occupy it. It is your destiny."
"A miserable destiny!"
It pleased Cornelia to become the wilful child who quarrels with its tutor's teachings, upon this point.
Then Mr. Barrett said quickly: "Your heart is not in this union?"
"Can you ask? I have done my duty."
"Have you, indeed!"
His tone was severe in the deliberation of its accents.
Was it her duty to live an incomplete life? He gave her a definition of personal duty, and shadowed out all her own ideas on the subject; seeming thus to speak terrible, unanswerable truth.
As one who changes the theme, he said: "I have forborne to revert to myself in our interviews; they were too divine for that. You will always remember that I have forborne much."
"Yes!" She was willing at the instant to confess how much.
"And if I speak now, I shall not be misinterpreted?"
"You never would have been, by me."
"Cornelia!"
Though she knew what was behind the door, this flinging of it open with her name startled the lady; and if he had faltered, it would not have been well for him. But, plainly, he claimed the right to call her by her Christian name. She admitted it; and thenceforward they were equals.
It was an odd story that he told of himself. She could not have repeated it to make it comprehensible. She drank at every sentence, getting no more from it than the gratification of her thirst. His father, at least, was a man of title, a baronet. What was meant by estates not entailed? What wild freak of fate put this noble young man in the power of an eccentric parent, who now caressed him, now made him an outcast? She heard of the sum that was his, coming from his dead mother to support him just one hundred pounds annual! Was ever fate so mournful?
Practically, she understood that if Mr. Barrett would write to his father, pledging himself to conform to his mysterious despotic will in something, he would be pardoned and reinstated.
He concluded: "Hitherto I have preferred poverty. You have taught me at what a cost! Is it too late?"
The fall of his voice, with the repetition of her name, seemed as if awakening her, but not in a land of reason.
"Why…why!" she whispered.
"Beloved?"
"Why did you not tell me this before?"
"Do you upbraid me?"
"Oh, no! Oh, never!" she felt his hand taking hers gently. "My friend," she said, half in self-defence; and they, who had never kissed as lovers, kissed under the plea of friendship.
All Wilfrid's diplomacy was now brought into play to baffle Mr. Pericles, inspire Emilia with the spirit of secresy, and carry on his engagement to two women to their common satisfaction. Adela, whose penetration he dreaded most, he had removed by a flattering invitation to Stornley; and that Emilia might be occupied during his absences, and Mr. Pericles thrown on a false scent, he persuaded Tracy Runningbrook to come to Brookfield, and write libretti for Emilia's operas. The two would sit down together for an hour, drawing wonderful precocious noses upon juvenile visages, when Emilia would sigh and say: "I can't work!"—Tracy adding, with resignation: "I never can!" At first Mr. Pericles dogged them assiduously. After a little while he shrugged, remarking: "It is a nonsense."
They were, however, perfectly serious about the production of an opera, Tracy furnishing verse to Emilia's music. He wrote with extraordinary rapidity, but clung to graphic phrases, that were not always supple enough for nuptials with modulated notes. Then Emilia had to hit his sense of humour by giving the words as they came in the run of the song. "You make me crow, or I croak," she said.
"The woman follows the man, and music fits to verse," cried Tracy."Music's the vine, verse the tree."
Emilia meditated. "Not if they grow up together," she suggested, and broke into a smile at his rapture of amusement; which was succeeded by a dark perplexity, worthy of the present aspect of Mr. Pericles.
"That's what has upset us," he said. "We have been trying to 'grow up together,' like first-cousins, and nature forbids the banns. To-morrow you shall have half a libretto. And then, really, my child, you must adapt yourself to the words."
"I will," Emilia promised; "only, not if they're like iron to the teeth."
"My belief is," said Tracy savagely, "that music's a fashion, and as delusive a growth as Cobbett's potatoes, which will go back to the deadly nightshade, just as music will go back to the tom-tom."
"What have you called out when I sang to you!" Emilia reproached him for this irreverent nonsense.
"Oh! it was you and not the music," he returned half-cajolingly, while he beat the tom-tom on air.
"Hark here!" cried Emilia. She recited a verse. "Doesn't that sound dead? Now hark!" She sang the verse, and looked confidently for Tracy's verdict at the close.
"What a girl that is!" He went about the house, raving of her to everybody, with sundry Gallic interjections; until Mrs. Chump said: "'Deed, sir, ye don't seem to have much idea of a woman's feelin's."
Tracy produced in a night two sketches of libretti for Emilia to choose from—the Roman Clelia being one, and Camillus the other. Tracy praised either impartially, and was indifferent between them, he told her. Clelia offered the better theme for passionate song, but there was a winning political object and rebuff to be given to Radicalism in Camillus. "Think of Rome!" he said.
Emilia gave the vote for Camillus, beginning forthwith to hum, with visions of a long roll of swarthy cavalry, headed by a clear-eyed young chief, sunlight perching on his helm.
"Yes; but you don't think of the situations in Clelia, and what I can do with her," snapped Tracy. "I see a song there that would light up all London. Unfortunately, the sentiment's dead Radical. It wouldn't so much matter if we were certain to do Camillus as well; because one would act as a counterpoise to the other, you know. Well, follow your own fancy. Camillus is strictly classical. I treat opera there as Alfieri conceived tragedy. Clelia is modern style. Cast the die for Camillus, and let's take horse. Only, we lose the love-business—exactly where I show my strength. Clelia in the camp of the king: dactyllic chorus-accompaniment, while she, in heavy voluptuous anapaests, confesses her love for the enemy of her country. Remember, this is our romantic opera, where we do what we like with History, and make up our minds for asses telling us to go home and read our 'student's Rome.' Then that scene where she and the king dance the dactyls, and the anapaests go to the chorus. Sublime! Let's go into the woods and begin. We might give the first song or two to-night. In composition, mind, always strike out your great scene, and work from it—don't work up to it, or you've lost fire when you reach the point. That's my method."
They ran into the woods, skipping like schoolboy and schoolgirl. On hearing that Camillus would not be permitted to love other than his ungrateful country, Emilia's conception of the Roman lord grew pale, and a controversy ensued-she maintaining that a great hero must love a woman; he declaring that a great hero might love a dozen, but that it was beneath the dignity of this drama to allow of a rival to Rome in Camillus's love.
"He will not do for music," said Emilia firmly, and was immoveable. In despair, Tracy proposed attaching a lanky barbarian daughter to Brennus, whose deeds of arms should provoke the admiration of the Roman.
"And so we relinquish Alfieri for Florian! There's a sentimental burlesque at once!" the youth ejaculated, in gloom. "I chose this subject entirely to give you Rome for a theme."
Emilia took his hand. "I do thank you. If Brennus has a daughter, why not let her be half Roman?"
Tracy fired out: "she's a bony woman, with a brawny development; mammoth haunches, strong of the skeleton; cheek-bones, flat-forward, as a fish 's rotting on a beach; long scissor lips-nippers to any wretched rose of a kiss! a pugilist's nose to the nostrils of a phoca; and eyes!—don't you see them?—luminaries of pestilence; blotted yellow, like a tallow candle shining through a horny lantern."
At this horrible forced-poetic portrait, Emilia cried in pain: "You hate her suddenly!"
"I loathe the creature—pah!" went Tracy.
"Why do you make her so hideous?" Emilia complained. "I feel myself hating her too. Look at me. Am I such a thing as that?"
"You!" Tracy was melted in a trice, and gave the motion of hugging, as a commentary on his private opinion.
"Can you also be sure that Camillus can love nothing but his country? Would one love stop the other?" she persisted, gazing with an air of steady anxiety for the answer.
"There isn't a doubt about it," said Tracy.
Emilia caught her face in her hands, and exclaimed in a stifling voice:"It's true! it's true!"
Tracy saw that her figure was shaken with sobs—unmistakeable, hard, sorrowful convulsions.
"Confound historical facts that make her cry!" he murmured to himself, in a fury at the Roman fables. "It's no use comforting her with Niebuhr now. She's got a live Camillus in her brain, and there he'll stick." Tracy began to mutter the emphatic D.; quite cognizant of her case, as he supposed. This intensity of human emotion about a dry faggot of history by no means surprised him; and he was as tender to the grief of his darling little friend as if he had known the conflict that tore her in two. Subsequently he related the incident, in a tone of tender delight, to Wilfrid, whom it smote. "Am I a brute?" asked the latter of the Intelligences in the seat of his consciousness, and they for the moment gravely affirmed it. I have observed that when young men obtain this mental confirmation of their suspicions, they wax less reluctant to act as brutes than when the doubt restrained them.
He reasoned thus: "I can bring my mind to the idea of losing her, if it must be so." (Hear, hear! from the unanimous internal Parliament.) "But I can't make her miserable (cheers)—I can't go and break her heart" (loud cheers, drowning a faint dissentient hum).—The scene, of which Tracy had told him, gave Wilfrid a kind of dread of the girl. If that was her state of feeling upon a distant subject, how would it be when he applied the knife. Simply, impossible to use the knife at all! Wield it thou, O Circumstance, babe-munching Chronos, whosoever thou art, that jarrest our poor human music effectually from hour to hour!
Colonel Pierson paid his promised visit, on his way back to his quarters at Verona. His stay was shortened by rumours of anticipated troubles in Italy. One day at table he chanced to observe, speaking of the Milanese, that they required another lesson, and that it would save the shedding of blood if, annually, the chief men of the city took a flogging for the community (senseless arrogance that sensible, and even kindly, men will sometimes be tempted to utter, and prompted to act on, in that deteriorating state of a perpetual repressive force).—Emilia looked at him till she caught his eye: "I hope I shall never meet you there," she said.
The colonel coloured, and drew his finger along each curve of his moustache. The table was silent. Colonel Pierson was a gentleman, but a false position and the irritating topic deprived him of proper self-command.
"What would you do?" he said, not gallantly.
Emilia would have been glad to have been allowed to subside, but the tone stung her.
"I could not do much; I am a woman," said she.
Whereto the colonel: "It's only the women who do anything over there."
"And that is why you flog them!"
The colonel, seeing himself surrounded by ladies, lost the right guidance of his wits, at this point, reddened, and was saved by an Irish outcry of horror from some unpleasant and possibly unmanly retort. "Mr. Paricles said exactly the same. Oh, sir! do ye wear an officer's uniform to go about behavin' in that shockin' way to poor helpless females?"
This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the Brookfield dining-table. Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and the matter passed.
He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in the world. "You beat us in pace and weight; but you can't skirmish, you can't manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty," said the colonel. Wilfrid promised to visit him some day: a fact he denied to Emilia, when she charged him with it. Her brain seemed to be set on fire by the presence of an Austrian officer. The miserable belief that she had abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost appetite, briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her cheeks sweet to contemplate. She looked worn, small, wretched: her very walk indicated self-contempt. Wilfrid was keen to see the change for which others might have accused a temporary headache. Now that she appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him—remember the constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness, and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer life)—his magnanimity, I say, being under this favourable sun, he said to himself that there should be an end of double-dealing; and, possibly consoled by feeling a martyr, he persuaded himself to act the gentle ruffian. To which end, he was again absent from Brookfield, for a space, and bitterly missed.
Emilia, for the last two Sundays, had taken Mr. Barrett's place at the organ. She was playing the prelude to one of the evening hymns, when the lover, whose features she dreaded to be once more forgetting, appeared in the curtained enclosure. A stoppage in the tune, and a prolonged squeal of the instrument, gave the congregation below matter to speculate upon. Wilfrid put up his finger and sat reverently down, while Emilia plunged tremblingly at the note that was howling its life away. And as she managed to swim into the stream of the sacred melody again, her head was turned toward her lover under a new sensation; and the first words she murmured were, "We have never been in church together, before."
"Not in the evening," he whispered, likewise impressed.
"No," said Emilia softly; flattered by his greater accuracy.
If Wilfrid could have been sure that he would be perfect master of that sentimental crew known to him under the denomination of his feelings, the place he selected for their parting interview might be held creditable to this young officer's acknowledged strategical ability. It was a place where any fervid appeals were impossible; where he could contemplate her, listen to her, be near her, alone with her, having nothing to dread from tears, supplications, or passion, as a consequence of the short indulgence of his tenderness. But he had failed to reckon on the chances that he himself might prove weak and be betrayed by the crew for whose comfort he was always providing; and now, as she sat there, her face being sideways to him, the flush of delight faint on her cheek, and her eyelids half raised to the gilded pipes, while full and sonorous harmony rolled out from her touch, it seemed the very chorus of the heavens that she commanded, and a subtle misty glory descended upon her forehead, which he was long in perceiving to be cast from a moisture on his eyelids.