Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v3
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George Meredith >> Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v3
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"Oh, if he doesn't show his upper teeth like an angry cat, or a leopard
I'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) that
Laura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invite
the ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On Besworth
Lawn, 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.
CHAPTER XXII
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.'"
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