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.