Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v3

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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.

CHAPTER XXIII

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.

When the sermon commenced, Emilia quitted the organ and took his hand.
In very low whispers, they spoke:

"I have wanted to see you so!"

"You see me now, little woman."

"On Friday week next I am to go away."

"Nonsense! You shall not."

"Your sisters say, yes! Mr. Pericles has got my father's consent, they
say, to take me to Italy."

"Do you think of going?"

Emilia gazed at her nerveless hands lying in her lap.

"You shall not go!" he breathed imperiously in her ear.

"Then you will marry me quite soon?" And Emilia looked as if she would
be smiling April, at a word.

"My dear girl!" he had an air of caressing remonstrance.

"Because," she continued, "if my father finds me out, I must go to Italy,
or go to that life of torment in London--seeing those Jew-people--
horrible!--or others and the thought of it is like being under the earth,
tasting bitter gravel! I could almost bear it before you kissed me, my
lover! It would kill me now. Say! say! Tell me we shall be together.
I shudder all day and night, and feel frozen hands catching at me. I
faint--my heart falls deep down, in the dark...I think I know what dying
is now!"

She stopped on a tearless sob; and, at her fingers' ends, Wilfrid felt
the quivering of her frame.

"My darling!" he interjected. He wished to explain the situation to her,
as he then conceived it. But he had, in his calculation, failed also to
count on a peculiar nervous fretfulness, that the necessity to reiterate
an explanation in whispers must superinduce. So, when Emilia looked
vacant of the intelligence imparted to her, he began anew, and
emphatically; and ere he was half through it, Mr. Marter, from the pulpit
underneath, sent forth a significant reprimand to the conscience of a
particular culprit of his congregation, in the form of a solemn cough.
Emilia had to remain unenlightened, and she proceeded to build on her
previous assumption; doing the whispering easily and sweetly; in the
prettiest way from her tongue's tip, with her chin lifted up; and sending
the vowels on a prolonged hushed breath, that seemed to print them on the
hearing far more distinctly than a volume of sound. Wilfrid fell back on
monosyllables. He could not bring his mouth to utter flinty negatives,
so it appeared that he assented; and then his better nature abused him
for deluding her. He grew utterly ashamed of his aimless selfish double-
dealing. "Can it be?" he questioned his own mind, and listened greedily
to any mental confirmations of surpassing excellence in her, that the
world might possibly acknowledge. Having, with great zeal, created a set
of circumstances, he cursed them heartily, after the fashion of little
people. He grew resigned to abandon Lady Charlotte, and to give his name
to this subduing girl; but a comfortable quieting sensation came over
him, at the thought that his filial duty stood in the way. His father,
he knew, was anxious for him to marry into a noble family--
incomprehensibly anxious to have the affair settled; and, as two or three
scenes rose in his mind, Wilfrid perceived that the obstacle to his
present fancy was his father.

As clearly as he could, with the dread of the preacher's admonishing
cough before him, Wilfrid stated the case to Emilia; saying that he loved
her with his whole heart; but that the truth was, his father was not in a
condition of health to bear contradiction to his wishes, and would, he
was sure, be absolutely opposed to their union. He brought on himself
another reprimand from Mr. Marter, in seeking to propitiate Emilia's
reason to comprehend the position rightly; and could add little more to
the fact he had spoken, than that his father had other views, which it
would require time to combat.

Emilia listened attentively, replying with a flying glance to the squeeze
of his hand. He was astonished to see her so little disconcerted. But
now the gradual fall of Mr. Marter's voice gave them warning.

"My lover?" breathed Emilia, hurriedly and eagerly; questioning with eye
and tone.

"My darling!" returned Wilfrid.

She sat down to the organ with a smile. He was careful to retreat before
the conclusion of the service; somewhat chagrined by his success. That
smile of hers was inexplicable to him.

CHAPTER XXIV

Mr. Pole was closeted in his City counting-house with Mr. Pericles,
before a heap of papers and newly-opened foreign letters; to one of
which, bearing a Russian stamp, he referred fretfully at times, as if to
verify a monstrous fact. Any one could have seen that he was not in a
condition to transact business. His face was unnaturally patched with
colour, and his grey-tinged hair hung tumbled over his forehead like
waves blown by a changeing wind. Still, he maintained his habitual
effort to look collected, and defeat the scrutiny of the sallow-eyed
fellow opposite; who quietly glanced, now and then, from the nervous feet
to the nervous fingers, and nodded to himself a sardonic outlandish nod.

"Now, listen to me," said Mr. Pericles. "We shall not burst out about
zis Riga man. He is a villain,--very well. Say it. He is a villain,--
say so. And stop. Because" (and up went the Greek's forefinger), "we
must not have a scandal, in ze fairst place. We do not want pity, in ze
second. Saird, we must seem to trust him, in spite. I say, yeas! What
is pity to us of commerce? It is contempt. We trust him on, and we lose
what he pocket--a sossand. We burst on him, and we lose twenty, serty,
forty; and we lose reputation."

"I'd have every villain hanged," cried Mr. Pole. "The scoundrel! I'd
hang him with his own hemp. He talks of a factory burnt, and dares to
joke about tallow! and in a business letter! and when he is telling one
of a loss of money to that amount!"

"Not bad, ze joke," grinned Mr. Pericles. "It is a lesson of coolness.
We learn it. But mind! he say, 'possible loss.' It is not positif.
Hein! ze man is trying us. So! shall we burst out and make him
desperate? We are in his hand at Riga, you see?"

"I see this," said Mr. Pole, "that he's a confounded rascal, and I'll
know whether the law can't reach him."

"Ha! ze law!" Mr. Pericles sneered. "So you are, you. English. Always,
ze law! But, we are men--we are not machine. Law for a machine, not a
man! We punish him, perhaps. Well; he is punished. He is imprisoned--
forty monz. We pay for him a sossand pound a monz. He is flogged--forty
lashes. We pay for him a sossand pound a lash. You can afford zat? It
is a luxury like anozer. It is not for me."

"How long are we to trust the villain?" said Mr. Pole. "If we trust him
at all, mind! I don't say I do, or will."

"Ze money is locked up for a year, my friend. So soon we get it, so soon
he goes, from ze toe off." Mr. Pericles' shining toe's-tip performed an
agile circuit, and he smoothed his square clean jaw and venomous
moustache reflectively. "Not now," he resumed. "While he hold us in his
hand, we will not drive him to ze devil, or we go too, I believe, or part
of ze way. But now, we say, zat money is frozen in ze Nord. We will
make it in Australie, and in Greek waters. I have exposed to you my
plan."

"Yes," said Mr. Pole, "and I've told you I've no pretensions to be a
capitalist. We have no less than three ventures out, already."

"It is like you English! When you have ze world to milk, you go to one
point and stick. It fails, and you fail. What is zat word?"--Mr.
Pericles tapped his brow--"pluck,--you want pluck. It is your decadence.
Greek, and Russian, and Yankee, all zey beat you. For, it is pluck. You
make a pin's head, not a pin. It is in brain and heart you do fail. You
have only your position,--an island, and ships, and some favour. You are
no match in pluck. We beat you. And we live for pleasure, while you
groan and sweat--mon Dieu! it is slavery."

Mr. Pericles twinkled his white eyes over the blinking merchant, and rose
from his chair, humming a bit of opera, and announcing, casually, that a
certain prima-donna had obtained a divorce from her husband.

"But," he added suddenly, "I say to you, if you cannot afford to
speculate, run away from it as ze fire. Run away from it, and hold up
your coat-tail. Jump ditches, and do not stop till you are safe home--
hein? you say 'cosy?' I hear my landlady. Run till you are safe cosy.
But if you are a man wis a head and a pocket, zen you know that
'speculate' means a dozen ventures. So, you come clear. Or, it is ruin.
It is ruin, I say: you have been playing."

"An Englishman," returned Mr. Pole, disgusted at the shrugs he had
witnessed--"an Englishman's as good as any of you. Look at us--look at
our history--look at our wealth. By Jingo! But we like plain-dealing
and common sense; and as to afford, what do you mean?"

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