Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete

This allusion, and the sudden kindness, drew a storm of tears to Cornelia’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.

CHAPTER XX

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.

CHAPTER XXI

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 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.