Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete

The Spring was putting out primroses,—the first handwriting of the year,—as Sir Purcell wrote to er prettily. Deire for fresh air, and the neighbourhood of his beloved, sent him on a journey down to Hillford. Near the gates of the Hillford station, he passed Wilfrid and Adela, hurrying to catch the up-train, and received no recognition. His face scarcely changed colour, but the birds on a sudden seemed to pipe far away from him. He asked himself, presently, what were those black circular spots which flew chasing along the meadows and the lighted walks. It was with an effort that he got the landscape close about his eyes, and remembered familiar places. He walked all day, making occupation by directing his steps to divers eminences that gave a view of the Brookfield chimneys. After night-fall he found himself in the firwood, approaching the ‘fruitless tree.’ He had leaned against it musingly, for a time, when he heard voices, as of a couple confident in their privacy.

The footman, Gainsford, was courting a maid of the Tinley’s, and here, being midway between the two houses, they met. He had to obtain pardon for tardiness, by saying that dinner at Brookfield had been delayed for the return of Mr. Pole. The damsel’s questions showed her far advanced in knowledge of affairs at Brookfield and may account for Laura Tinley’s gatherings of latest intelligence concerning those ‘odd girls,’ as she impudently called the three.

“Oh! don’t you listen!” was the comment pronounced on Gainsford’s stock of information. But, he told nothing signally new. She wished to hear something new and striking, “because,” she said, “when I unpin Miss Laura at night, I’m as likely as not to get a silk dress that ain’t been worn more than half-a-dozen times—if I manage. When I told her that Mr. Albert, her brother, had dined at your place last Thursday—demeaning of himself, I do think—there!—I got a pair of silk stockings,—not letting her see I knew what it was for, of coursed and about Mrs. Dump,—Stump;—I can’t recollect the woman’s name; and her calling of your master a bankrupt, right out, and wanting her money of him,—there! if Miss Laura didn’t give me a pair of lavender kid-gloves out of her box!—and I wish you would leave my hands alone, when you know I shouldn’t be so silly as to wear them in the dark; and for you, indeed!”

But Gainsford persisted, upon which there was fooling. All this was too childish for Sir Purcell to think it necessary to give warning of his presence. They passed, and when they had gone a short way the damsel cried, “Well, that is something,” and stopped. “Married in a month!” she exclaimed. “And you don’t know which one?”

“No,” returned Gainsford; “master said ‘one of you’ as they was at dinner, just as I come into the room. He was in jolly spirits, and kept going so: ‘What’s a month! champagne, Gainsford,’ and you should have sees Mrs.—not Stump, but Chump. She’ll be tipsy to-night, and I shall bust if I have to carry of her upstairs. Well, she is fun!—she don’t mind handin’ you a five-shilling piece when she’s done tender: but I have nearly lost my place two or three time along of that woman. She’d split logs with laughing:—no need of beetle and wedges! ‘Och!’ she sings out, ‘by the piper!’—and Miss Cornelia sitting there—and, ‘Arrah!’—bother the woman’s Irish,” (thus Gainsford gave up the effort at imitation, with a spirited Briton’s mild contempt for what he could not do) “she pointed out Miss Cornelia and said she was like the tinker’s dog:—there’s the bone he wants himself, and the bone he don’t want anybody else to have. Aha! ain’t it good?”

“Oh! the tinker’s dog! won’t I remember that!” said the damsel, “she can’t be such a fool.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Gainsford meditated critically. “She is; and yet she ain’t, if you understand me. What I feel about her is—hang it! she makes ye laugh.”

Sir Purcell moved from the shadow of the tree as noiselessly as he could, so that this enamoured couple might not be disturbed. He had already heard more than he quite excused himself for hearing in such a manner, and having decided not to arrest the man and make him relate exactly what Mr. Pole had spoken that evening at the Brookfield dinner-table, he hurried on his return to town.

It was not till he had sight of his poor home; the solitary company of chairs; the sofa looking bony and comfortless as an old female house drudge; the table with his desk on it; and, through folding-doors, his cold and narrow bed; not till then did the fact of his great loss stand before him, and accuse him of living. He seated himself methodically and wrote to Cornelia. His fancy pictured her now as sharp to every turn of language and fall of periods: and to satisfy his imagined, rigorous critic, he wrote much in the style of a newspaper leading article. No one would have thought that tragic meaning underlay those choice and sounding phrases. On reperusing the composition, he rejected it, but only to produce one of a similar cast. He could not get to nature in his tone. He spoke aloud a little sentence now and then, that had the ring of a despairing tenderness. Nothing of the sort inhabited his written words, wherein a strained philosophy and ironic resignation went on stilts. “I should desire to see you once before I take a step that some have not considered more than commonly serious,” came toward the conclusion; and the idea was toyed with till he signed his name. “A plunge into the deep is of little moment to one who has been stripped of all clothing. Is he not a wretch who stands and shivers still?” This letter, ending with a short and not imperious, or even urgent, request for an interview, on the morrow by the ‘fruitless tree,’ he sealed for delivery into Cornelia’s hands some hours before the time appointed. He then wrote a clear business letter to his lawyer, and one of studied ambiguity to a cousin on his mother’s side. His father’s brother, Percival Barrett, to whom the estates had gone, had offered him an annuity of five hundred pounds: “though he had, as his nephew was aware, a large family.” Sir Purcell had replied: “Let me be the first to consider your family,” rejecting the benevolence. He now addressed his cousin, saying: “What would you think of one who accepts such a gift?—of me, were you to hear that I had bowed my head and extended my hand? Think this, if ever you hear of it: that I have acceded for the sake of winning the highest prize humanity can bestow: that I certainly would not have done it for aught less than the highest.” After that he went to his narrow bed. His determination was to write to his uncle, swallowing bitter pride, and to live a pensioner, if only Cornelia came to her tryst, “the last he would ask of her,” as he told her. Once face to face with his beloved, he had no doubt of his power; and this feeling which he knew her to share, made her reluctance to meet him more darkly suspicious.

As he lay in the little black room, he thought of how she would look when a bride, and of the peerless beauty towering over any shades of earthliness which she would present. His heated fancy conjured up every device and charm of sacredness and adoring rapture about that white veiled shape, until her march to the altar assumed the character of a religious procession—a sight to awe mankind! And where, when she stood before the minister in her saintly humility, grave and white, and tall—where was the man whose heart was now racing for that goal at her right hand? He felt at the troubled heart and touched two fingers on the rib, mock-quietingly, and smiled. Then with great deliberation he rose, lit a candle, unlocked a case of pocket-pistols, and loaded them: but a second idea coming into his head, he drew the bullet out of one, and lay down again with a luxurious speculation on the choice any hand might possibly make of the life-sparing or death-giving of those two weapons. In his neat half-slumber he was twice startled by a report of fire-arms in a church, when a crowd of veiled women and masked men rushed to the opening, and a woman throwing up the veil from her face knelt to a corpse that she lifted without effort, and weeping, laid it in a grave, where it rested and was at peace, though multitudes hurried over it, and new stars came and went, and the winds were strange with new tongues. The sleeper saw the morning upon that corpse when light struck his eyelids, and he awoke like a man who knew no care.

His landlady’s little female scrubber was working at the grate in his sitting-room. He had endured many a struggle to prevent service of this nature being done for him by one of the sex—at least, to prevent it within his hearing and sight. He called to her to desist; but she replied that she had her mistress’s orders. Thereupon he maintained that the grate did not want scrubbing. The girl took this to be a matter of opinion, not a challenge to controversy, and continued her work in silence. Irritated by the noise, but anxious not to seem harsh, he said: “What on earth are you about, when there was no fire there yesterday?”

“There ain’t no stuff for afire now, sir,” said she.

“I tell you I did not light it.”

“It’s been and lit itself then,” she mumbled.

“Do you mean to say you found the fire burnt out, when you entered the room this morning?”

She answered that she had found it so, and lots of burnt paper lying about.

The symbolism of this fire burnt out, that had warmed and cheered none, oppressed his fancy, and he left the small maid-of-all-work to triumph with black-lead and brushes.

She sang out, when she had done: “If you please, sir, missus have had a hamper up from the country, and would you like a country aig, which is quite fresh, and new lay. And missus say, she can’t trust the bloaters about here bein’ Yarmouth, but there’s a soft roe in one she’ve squeezed; and am I to stop a water-cress woman, when the last one sold you them, and all the leaves jellied behind ‘em, so as no washin’ could save you from swallowin’ some, missus say?”

Sir Purcell rolled over on his side. “Is this going to be my epitaph?” he groaned; for he was not a man particular in his diet, or exacting in choice of roes, or panting for freshness in an egg. He wondered what his landlady could mean by sending up to him, that morning of all others, to tempt his appetite after her fashion. “I thought I remembered eating nothing but toast in this place;” he observed to himself. A grunting answer had to be given to the little maid, “Toast as usual.” She appeared satisfied, but returned again, when he was in his bath, to ask whether he had said “No toast to-day?”

“Toast till the day of my death—tell your mistress that!” he replied; and partly from shame at his unaccountable vehemence, he paused in his sponging, meditated, and chilled. An association of toast with spectral things grew in his mind, when presently the girl’s voice was heard: “Please, sir, did say you’d have toast, or not, this morning?” It cost him an effort to answer simply, “Yes.”

That she should continue, “Not sir?” appeared like perversity. “No aig?” was maddening.

“Well, no; never mind it this morning,” said he.

“Not this morning,” she repeated.

“Then it will not be till the day of your death, as you said,” she is thinking that, was the idea running in his brain, and he was half ready to cry out “Stop,” and renew his order for toast, that he might seem consecutive. The childishness of the wish made him ask himself what it mattered. “I said ‘Not till the day;’ so, none to-day would mean that I have reached the day.” Shivering with the wet on his pallid skin, he thought this over.

His landlady had used her discretion, and there was toast on the table. A beam of Spring’s morning sunlight illuminated the toast-rack. He sat, and ate, and munched the doubt whether “not till” included the final day, or stopped short of it. By this the state of his brain may be conceived. A longing for beauty, and a dark sense of an incapacity to thoroughly enjoy it, tormented him. He sent for his landlady’s canary, and the ready shrill song of the bird persuaded him that much of the charm of music is wilfully swelled by ourselves, and can be by ourselves withdrawn: that is to say, the great chasm and spell of sweet sounds is assisted by the force of our imaginations. What is that force?—the heat and torrent of the blood. When that exists no more—to one without hope, for instance—what is music or beauty? Intrinsically, they are next to nothing. He argued it out so, and convinced himself of his own delusions, till his hand, being in the sunlight, gave him a pleasant warmth. “That’s something we all love,” he said, glancing at the blue sky above the roofs. “But there’s little enough of it in this climate,” he thought, with an eye upon the darker corners of his room. When he had eaten, he sent word to his landlady to make up his week’s bill. The week was not at an end, and that good woman appeased before him, astonished, saying: “To be sure, your habits is regular, but there’s little items one I’ll guess at, and how make out a bill, Sir Purcy, and no items?”

He nodded his head.

“The country again?” she asked smilingly.

“I am going down there,” he said.

“And beautiful at this time of the year, it is! though, for market gardening, London beats any country I ever knew; and if you like creature comforts, I always say, stop in London! And then the policemen! who really are the greatest comfort of all to us poor women, and seem sent from above especially to protect our weakness. I do assure you, Sir Purcy, I feel it, and never knew a right-minded woman that did not. And how on earth our grandmothers contrived to get about without them! But there! people who lived before us do seem like the most uncomfortable! When—my goodness! we come to think there was some lived before tea! Why, as I say over almost every cup I drink, it ain’t to be realized. It seems almost wicked to say it, Sir Purcy; but it’s my opinion there ain’t a Christian woman who’s not made more of a Christian through her tea. And a man who beats his wife my first question is, ‘Do he take his tea regular?’ For, depend upon it, that man is not a tea-drinker at all.”

He let her talk away, feeling oddly pleased by this mundane chatter, as was she to pour forth her inmost sentiments to a baronet.

When she said: “Your fire shall be lighted to-night to welcome you,” the man looked up, and was going to request that the trouble might be spared, but he nodded. His ghost saw the burning fire awaiting him. Or how if it sparkled merrily, and he beheld it with his human eyes that night? His beloved would then have touched him with her hand—yea, brought the dead to life! He jumped to his feet, and dismissed the worthy dame. On both sides of him, ‘Yes,’ and ‘No,’ seemed pressing like two hostile powers that battled for his body. They shrieked in his ears, plucked at his fingers. He heard them hushing deeply as he went to his pistol-case, and drew forth one—he knew not which.

CHAPTER LVI

On a wild April morning, Emilia rose from her bed and called to mind a day of the last year’s Spring when she had watched the cloud streaming up, and felt that it was the curtain of an unknown glory. But now it wore the aspect of her life itself, with nothing hidden behind those stormy folds, save peace. South-westward she gazed, eyeing eagerly the struggle of twisting vapour; long flying edges of silver went by, and mounds of faint crimson, and here and there a closing space of blue, swift as a thought of home to a soldier in action. The heavens were like a battle-field. Emilia shut her lips hard, to check an impulse of prayer for Merthyr fighting in Italy: for he was in Italy, and she once more among the Monmouth hills: he was in Italy fighting, and she chained here to her miserable promise! Three days after she had given the promise to Wilfrid, Merthyr left, shaking her hand like any common friend. Georgiana remained, by his desire, to protect her. Emilia had written to Wilfrid for release, but being no apt letter-writer, and hating the task, she was soon involved by him in a complication of bewildering sentiments, some of which she supposed she was bound to feel, while perhaps one or two she did feel, at the summons. The effect was that she lost the true wording of her blunt petition for release: she could no longer put it bluntly. But her heart revolted the more, and gave her sharp eyes to see into his selfishness. The purgatory of her days with Georgiana, when the latter was kept back from her brother in his peril, spurred Emilia to renew her appeal; but she found that all she said drew her into unexpected traps and pitfalls. There was only one thing she could say plainly: “I want to go.” If she repeated this, Wilfrid was ready with citations from her letters, wherein she had said ‘this,’ and ‘that,’ and many other phrases. His epistolary power and skill in arguing his own case were creditable to him. Affected as Emilia was by other sensations, she could not combat the idea strenuously suggested by him, that he had reason to complain of her behaviour. He admitted his special faults, but, by distinctly tracing them to their origin, he complacently hinted the excuse for them. Moreover, and with artistic ability, he painted such a sentimental halo round the ‘sacredness of her pledged word,’ that Emilia could not resist a superstitious notion about it, and about what the breaking of it would imply. Georgiana had removed her down to Monmouth to be out of his way. A constant flight of letters pursued them both, for Wilfrid was far too clever to allow letters in his hand-writing to come for one alone of two women shut up in a country-house together. He saw how the letterless one would sit speculating shrewdly and spitefully; so he was careful to amuse his mystified Dragon, while he drew nearer and nearer to his gold apple. Another object was, that by getting Georgiana to consent to become in part his confidante, he made it almost a point of honour for her to be secret with Lady Charlotte.

At last a morning came with no Brookfield letter for either of them. The letters stopped from that time. It was almost as if a great buzzing had ceased in Emilia’s ears, and she now heard her own sensations clearly. To Georgiana’s surprise, she manifested no apprehension or regret. “Or else,” the lady thought, “she wears a mask to me;” and certainly it was a pale face that Emilia was beginning to wear. At last came April and its wild morning. No little female hypocrisies passed between them when they met; they shook hands at arm’s length by the breakfast-table. Then Emilia said: “I am ready to go to Italy: I will go at once.”

Georgiana looked straight at her, thinking: “This is a fit of indignation with Wilfrid.” She answered: “Italy! I fancied you had forgotten there was such a country.”

“I don’t forget my country and my friends,” said Emilia.

“At least, I must ask the ground of so unexpected a resolution,” was rejoined.

“Do you remember what Merthyr wrote in his letter from Arona? How long it takes to understand the meaning of some, words! He says that I should not follow an impulse that is not the impulse of all my nature—myself altogether. Yes! I know what that means now. And he tells me that my life is worth more than to be bound to the pledge of a silly moment. It is! He, Georgey, unkind that you are!—he does not distrust me; but always advises and helps me: Merthyr waits for me. I cannot be instantly ready for every meaning in the world. What I want to do, is to see Wilfrid: if not, I will write to him. I will tell him that I intend to break my promise.”

A light of unaffected pride shone from the girl’s face, as she threw down this gauntlet to sentimentalism.

“And if he objects?” said Georgiana.

“If he objects, what can happen? If he objects by letter, I am gone. I shall not write for permission. I shall write what my will is. If I see him, and he objects, I can look into his eyes and say what I think right. Why, I have lived like a frozen thing ever since I gave him my word. I have felt at times like a snake hissing at my folly. I think I have felt something like men when they swear.”

Georgiana’s features expressed a slight but perceptible disgust. Emilia continued humbly: “Forgive me. I wish you to know how I hate the word I gave that separates me from Merthyr in my Italy, and makes you dislike your poor Emilia. You do. I have pardoned it, though it was twenty stabs a day.”

“But, why, if this promise was so hateful to you, did you not break it before?” asked Georgiana.

“I had not the courage,” Emilia stooped her head to confess; “and besides,” she added, curiously half-closing her eyelids, as one does to look on a minute object, “I could not see through it before.”

“If,” suggested Georgiana, “you break your word, you release him from his.”

“No! if he cannot see the difference,” cried Emilia, wildly, “then let him keep away from me for ever, and he shall not have the name of friend! Is there no difference—I wish you would let me cry out as they do in Shakespeare, Georgey!” Emilia laughed to cover her vehemence. “I want something more than our way of talking, to witness that there is such a difference between us. Am I to live here till all my feelings are burnt out, and my very soul is only a spark in a log of old wood? and to keep him from murdering my countrymen, or flogging the women of Italy! God knows what those Austrians would make him do. He changes. He would easily become an Austrian. I have heard him once or twice, and if I had shut my eyes, I might have declared an Austrian spoke. I wanted to keep him here, but it is not right that I—I should be caged till I scarcely feel my finger-ends, or know that I breathe sensibly as you and others do. I am with Merthyr. That is what I intend to tell him.”

She smiled softly up to Georgiana’s cold eyes, to get a look of forgiveness for her fiery speaking.

“So, then, you love my brother?” said Georgiana.

Emilia could have retorted, “Cruel that you are!” The pain of having an unripe feeling plucked at without warning, was bitter; but she repressed any exclamation, in her desire to maintain simple and unsensational relations always with those surrounding her.

“He is my friend,” she said. “I think of something better than that other word. Oh, that I were a man, to call him my brother-in-arms! What’s a girl’s love in return for his giving his money, his heart, and offering his life every day for Italy?”

As soon as Georgiana could put faith in her intention to depart, she gave her a friendly hand and embrace.

Two days later they were at Richford, with Lady Gosstre. The journals were full of the Italian uprising. There had been a collision between the Imperial and patriotic forces, near Brescia, from which the former had retired in some confusion. Great things were expected of Piedmont, though many, who had reason to know him, distrusted her king. All Lombardy awaited the signal from Piedmont. Meanwhile blood was flowing.

In the excitement of her sudden rush from dead monotony to active life, Emilia let some time pass before she wrote to Wilfrid. Her letter was in her hand, when one was brought in to her from him. It ran thus:—

“I have just returned home, and what is this I hear? Are you utterly faithless? Can I not rely on you to keep the word you have solemnly pledged! Meet me at once. Name a place. I am surrounded by misery and distraction. I will tell you all when we meet. I have trusted that you were firm. Write instantly. I cannot ask you to come here. The house is broken up. There is no putting to paper what has happened. My father lies helpless. Everything rests on me. I thought that I could rely on you.”

Emilia tore up her first letter, and replied:—

“Come here at once. Or, if you would wish to meet me elsewhere, it shall be where you please: but immediately. If you have heard that I am going to Italy, it is true. I break my promise. I shall hope to have your forgiveness. My heart bleeds for my dear Cornelia, and I am eager to see my sisters, and embrace them, and share their sorrow. If I must not come, tell them I kiss them. Adieu!”

Wilfrid replied:—

“I will be by Richford Park gates to-morrow at a quarter to nine. You speak of your heart. I suppose it is a habit. Be careful to put on a cloak or thick shawl; we have touches of frost. If I cannot amuse you, perhaps the nightingales will. Do you remember those of last year? I wonder whether we shall hear the same?—we shall never hear the same.”

This iteration, whether cunningly devised or not, had a charm for Emilia’s ear. She thought: “I had forgotten all about them.” When she was in her bedroom at night, she threw up her window. April was leaning close upon May, and she had not to wait long before a dusky flutter of low notes, appearing to issue from the great rhododendron bank across the lawn, surprised her. She listened, and another little beginning was heard, timorous, shy, and full of mystery for her. The moon hung over branches, some that showed young buds, some still bare. Presently the long, rich, single notes cut the air, and melted to their glad delicious chuckle. The singer was answered from a farther bough, and again from one. It grew to be a circle of melody round Emilia at the open window. Was it the same as last year’s? The last year’s lay in her memory faint and well-nigh unawakened. There was likewise a momentary sense of unreality in this still piping peacefulness, while Merthyr stood in a bloody-streaked field, fronting death. And yet the song was sweet. Emilia clasped her arms, shut her eyes, and drank it in. Not to think at all, or even to brood on her sensations, but to rest half animate and let those divine sounds find a way through her blood, was medicine to her.