Half of a rosy mounting full moon was on the verge of the East as the
ladies, with attendant cavaliers, passed, humming softly, through
the garden-gates. Arabella had, by right of birth, made claim to Mr.
Pericles: not without an unwontedly fretful remonstrance from Cornelia,
who said, “My dear, you must allow that I have some talent for drawing
men out.”
And Arabella replied: “Certainly, dear, you have; and I think I have
some too.”
The gentle altercation lasted half-an-hour, but they got no farther than
this. Mr. Pericles was either hopeless of protecting himself from
such shrewd assailants, or indifferent to their attacks, for all his
defensive measures were against the cold. He was muffled in a superbly
mounted bearskin, which came up so closely about his ears that Arabella
had to repeat to him all her questions, and as it were force a way
for her voice through the hide. This was provoking, since it not only
stemmed the natural flow of conversation, but prevented her imagination
from decorating the reminiscence of it subsequently (which was her
profound secret pleasure), besides letting in the outer world upon her.
Take it as an axiom, when you utter a sentimentalism, that more than one
pair of ears makes a cynical critic. A sentimentalism requires secresy.
I can enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it
to me alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.
“Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight?” for instance. Arabella,
after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr. Pericles, in
subdued impressive tones. She had to repeat her phrase; Mr. Pericles
then echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, “Sol?”--whereupon “Soul!”
was reiterated, somewhat sharply: and Mr. Pericles, peering over the
collar of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in the
manner of one sent thereby farther from its meaning: “Ze moonlight?”
Despairing and exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh: “I said,
there seems a soul in it”; and Mr. Pericles assented bluntly: “In ze
light!”--which sounded so little satisfactory that Arabella explained,
“I mean the aspect;” and having said three times distinctly what she
meant, in answer to a terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the
eyes of Mr. Pericles, this was his comment, almost roared forth:
“Sol! you say so-whole--in ze moonlight--Luna? Hein? Ze aspect is of
Sol!--Yez.”
And Mr. Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was
swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner,
a rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of
extreme rigidity. Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth.
She heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr.
Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was
well sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it.
In advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich alderman's
only son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of drawing
caricatures, and was therefore useful in exaggerating the features of
disagreeable people, and showing how odious they were: besides endearing
pleasant ones exhibiting how comic they could be. Gossips averred that
before Mr. Pole had been worried by his daughters into giving that
mighty sum for Brookfield, Arabella had accepted Edward as her suitor;
but for some reason or other he had apparently fallen from his high
estate. To tell the truth, Arabella conceived that he had simply obeyed
her wishes, while he knew he was naughtily following his own; and
Adela, without introspection at all, was making her virgin effort at
the caricaturing of our sex in his person: an art for which she promised
well.
Out of the long black shadows of the solitary trees of the park, and
through low yellow moonlight, they passed suddenly into the muffed
ways of the wood. Mr. Pericles was ineffably provoking. He had come
for gallantry's sake, and was not to be rallied, and would echo every
question in a roar, and there was no drawing of the man out at all. He
knocked against branches, and tripped over stumps, and ejaculated with
energy; but though he gave no heed or help to his fair associate, she
thought not the worse of him, so heroic can women be toward any creature
that will permit himself to be clothed by a mystery. At times the party
hung still, fancying the voice aloft, and then, after listening to the
unrelieved stillness, they laughed, and trod the stiff dry ferns and
soft mosses once more. At last they came to a decided halt, when the
proposition to return caused Adela to come up to Mr. Pericles and say
to him, “Now, you must confess! You have prohibited her from singing
to-night so that we may continue to be mystified. I call this quite
shameful of you!”
And even as Mr. Pericles was protesting that he was the most mystified
of the company, his neck lengthened, and his head went round, and his
ear was turned to the sky, while he breathed an elaborate “Ah!” And
sure enough that was the voice of the woods, cleaving the night air,
not distant. A sleepy fire of early moonlight hung through the dusky
fir-branches. The voice had the woods to itself, and seemed to fill them
and soar over them, it was so full and rich, so light and sweet. And
now, to add to the marvel, they heard a harp accompaniment, the strings
being faintly touched, but with firm fingers. A woman's voice: on that
could be no dispute. Tell me, what opens heaven more flamingly to heart
and mind, than the voice of a woman, pouring clear accordant notes to
the blue night sky, that grows light blue to the moon? There was no
flourish in her singing. All the notes were firm, and rounded, and
sovereignly distinct. She seemed to have caught the ear of Night, and
sang confident of her charm. It was a grand old Italian air, requiring
severity of tone and power. Now into great mournful hollows the voice
sank steadfastly. One soft sweep of the strings succeeded a deep final
note, and the hearers breathed freely.
“Stradella!” said the Greek, folding his arms.
The ladies were too deeply impressed to pursue their play with him. Real
emotions at once set aside the semi-credence they had given to their own
suggestions.
“Hush! she will sing again,” whispered Adela. “It is the most delicious
contralto.” Murmurs of objection to the voice being characterized at all
by any technical word, or even for a human quality, were heard.
“Let me find zis woman!” cried the prose enthusiast Mr. Pericles,
imperiously, with his bearskin thrown back on his shoulders, and forth
they stepped, following him.
In the middle of the wood there was a sandy mound, rising half the
height of the lesser firs, bounded by a green-grown vallum, where
once an old woman, hopelessly a witch, had squatted, and defied the
authorities to make her budge: nor could they accomplish the task before
her witch-soul had taken wing in the form of a black night-bird, often
to be heard jarring above the spot. Lank dry weeds and nettles, and
great lumps of green and gray moss, now stood on the poor old creature's
place of habitation, and the moon, slanting through the fir-clumps, was
scattered on the blossoms of twisted orchard-trees, gone wild again.
Amid this desolation, a dwarfed pine, whose roots were partially bared
as they grasped the broken bank that was its perch, threw far out a
cedar-like hand. In the shadow of it sat the fair singer. A musing touch
of her harp-strings drew the intruders to the charmed circle, though
they could discern nothing save the glimmer of the instrument and one
set of fingers caressing it. How she viewed their rather impertinent
advance toward her, till they had ranged in a half-circle nearer and
nearer, could not be guessed. She did not seem abashed in any way, for,
having preluded, she threw herself into another song.
The charm was now more human, though scarcely less powerful. This was a
different song from the last: it was not the sculptured music of the old
school, but had the richness and fulness of passionate blood that marks
the modern Italian, where there is much dallying with beauty in the
thick of sweet anguish. Here, at a certain passage of the song, she
gathered herself up and pitched a nervous note, so shrewdly triumphing,
that, as her voice sank to rest, her hearers could not restrain a deep
murmur of admiration.
Then came an awkward moment. The ladies did not wish to go, and they
were not justified in stopping. They were anxious to speak, and they
could not choose the word to utter. Mr. Pericles relieved them by moving
forward and doffing his hat, at the same time begging excuse for the
rudeness they were guilty of.
The fair singer answered, with the quickness that showed a girl: “Oh,
stay; do stay, if I please you!” A singular form of speech, it was
thought by the ladies.
She added: “I feel that I sing better when I have people to listen to
me.”
“You find it more sympathetic, do you not?” remarked Cornelia.
“I don't know,” responded the unknown, with a very honest smile. “I like
it.”
She was evidently uneducated. “A professional?” whispered Adela to
Arabella. She wanted little invitation to exhibit her skill, at all
events, for, at a word, the clear, bold, but finely nervous voice, was
pealing to a brisker measure, that would have been joyous but for one
fall it had, coming unexpectedly, without harshness, and winding up the
song in a ringing melancholy.
After a few bars had been sung, Mr. Pericles was seen tapping his
forehead perplexedly. The moment it ended, he cried out, in a tone
of vexed apology for strange ignorance: “But I know not it? It is
Italian--yes, I swear it is Italian! But--who then? It is superbe! But I
know not it!”
“It is mine,” said the young person.
“Your music, miss?”
“I mean, I composed it.”
“Permit me to say, Brava!”
The ladies instantly petitioned to have it sung to them again; and
whether or not they thought more of it, or less, now that the authorship
was known to them, they were louder in their applause, which seemed to
make the little person very happy.
“You are sure it pleases you?” she exclaimed.
They were very sure it pleased them. Somehow the ladies were growing
gracious toward her, from having previously felt too humble, it may be.
She was girlish in her manner, and not imposing in her figure. She would
be a sweet mystery to talk about, they thought: but she had ceased to be
quite the same mystery to them.
“I would go on singing to you,” she said; “I could sing all night long:
but my people at the farm will not keep supper for me, when it's late,
and I shall have to go hungry to bed, if I wait.”
“Have you far to go?” ventured Adela.
“Only to Wilson's farm; about ten minutes' walk through the wood,” she
answered unhesitatingly.
Arabella wished to know whether she came frequently to this lovely spot.
“When it does not rain, every evening,” was the reply.
“You feel that the place inspires you?” said Cornelia.
“I am obliged to come,” she explained. “The good old dame at the farm is
ill, and she says that music all day is enough for her, and I must come
here, or I should get no chance of playing at all at night.”
“But surely you feel an inspiration in the place, do you not?” Cornelia
persisted.
She looked at this lady as if she had got a hard word given her to
crack, and muttered: “I feel it quite warm here. And I do begin to love
the place.”
The stately Cornelia fell back a step.
The moon was now a silver ball on the edge of the circle of grey blue
above the ring of firs, and by the light falling on the strange little
person, as she stood out of the shadow to muffle up her harp, it could
be seen that she was simply clad, and that her bonnet was not of the
newest fashion. The sisters remarked a boot-lace hanging loose. The
peculiar black lustre of her hair, and thickness of her long black
eyebrows, struck them likewise. Her harp being now comfortably mantled,
Cornet Wilfrid Pole, who had been watching her and balancing repeatedly
on his forward foot, made a stride, and “really could not allow her to
carry it herself,” and begged her permission that he might assist her.
“It's very heavy, you know,” he added.
“Too heavy for me,” she said, favouring him with a thankful smile. “I
have some one who does that. Where is Jim?”
She called for Jim, and from the back of the sandy hillock, where he had
been reclining, a broad-shouldered rustic came lurching round to them.
“Now, take my harp, if you please, and be as careful as possible of
branches, and don't stumble.” She uttered this as if she were giving Jim
his evening lesson: and then with a sudden cry she laughed out: “Oh! but
I haven't played you your tune, and you must have your tune!”
Forthwith she stript the harp half bare, and throwing a propitiatory
bright glance at her audience on the other side of her, she commenced
thrumming a kind of Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten
air, while Jim smeared his mouth and grinned, as one who sees his love
dragged into public view, and is not the man to be ashamed of her,
though he hopes you will hardly put him to the trial.
“This is his favourite tune, that he taught me,” she emphasized to the
company. “I play to him every night, for a finish; and then he takes
care not to knock my poor harp to pieces and tumble about.”
The gentlemen were amused by the Giles Scroggins air, which she had
delivered with a sufficient sense of its lumping fun and leg-for-leg
jollity, and they laughed and applauded; but the ladies were silent
after the performance, until the moment came to thank her for the
entertainment she had afforded them: and then they broke into gentle
smiles, and trusted they might have the pleasure of hearing her another
night.
“Oh! just as often and as much as you like,” she said, and first held
her hand to Arabella, next to Cornelia, and then to Adela. She seemed to
be hesitating before the gentlemen, and when Wilfrid raised his hat, she
was put to some confusion, and bowed rather awkwardly, and retired.
“Good night, miss!” called Mr. Pericles.
“Good night, sir!” she answered from a little distance, and they
could see that she was there emboldened to drop a proper curtsey in
accompaniment.
Then the ladies stood together and talked of her, not with absolute
enthusiasm. For, “Was it not divine?” said Adela; and Cornelia asked
her if she meant the last piece; and, “Oh, gracious! not that!” Adela
exclaimed. And then it was discovered how their common observation had
fastened on the boot-lace; and this vagrant article became the key to
certain speculations on her condition and character.
“I wish I'd had a dozen bouquets, that's all!” cried Wilfrid, “she
deserved them.”
“Has she sentiment for what she sings? or is it only faculty?” Cornelia
put it to Mr. Sumner.
That gentleman faintly defended the stranger for the intrusion of the
bumpkin tune. “She did it so well!” he said.
“I complain that she did it too well,” uttered Cornelia, whose use of
emphasis customarily implied that the argument remained with her.
Talking in this manner, and leisurely marching homeward, they were
startled to hear Mr. Pericles, who had wrapped himself impenetrably in
the bear, burst from his cogitation suddenly to cry out, in his harshest
foreign accent: “Yeaz!” And thereupon he threw open the folds, and laid
out a forefinger, and delivered himself: “I am made my mind! I send her
abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year. She shall be instructed
as was not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. No--Paris! No--London! She
shall astonish London fairst.--Yez! if I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a
newspaper! Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!”
His singular outlandish vehemence, and the sweeping grandeur of a
determination that lightly assumed the corruptibility of our Press,
sent a smile circling among the ladies and gentlemen. The youth who
had wished to throw the fair unknown a dozen bouquets, caught himself
frowning at this brilliant prospect for her, which was to give him his
opportunity.