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.
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.