It was midnight. Mr. Pole had appeased his imagination with a chop, and
was trying to revive the memory of his old after-theatre night carouses
by listening to a song which Emilia sang to him, while he sipped at a
smoking mixture, and beat time on the table, rejoiced that he was warm
from head to foot at last.
“That's a pretty song, my dear,” he said. “A very pretty song. It does
for an old fellow; and so did my supper: light and wholesome. I'm an old
fellow; I ought to know I've got a grown-up son and grown-up daughters.
I shall be a grandpa, soon, I dare say. It's not the thing for me to go
about hearing glees. I had an idea of it. I'm better here. All I want is
to see my children happy, married and settled, and comfortable!”
Emilia stole up to him, and dropped on one knee: “You love them?”
“I do. I love my girls and my boy. And my brandy-and-water, do you mean
to say, you rogue?”
“And me?” Emilia looked up at him beseechingly.
“Yes, and you. I do. I haven't known you long, my dear, but I shall be
glad to do what I can for you. You shall make my house your home as long
as you live; and if I say, make haste and get married, it's only just
this: girls ought to marry young, and not be in an uncertain position.”
“Am I worth having?”
“To be sure you are! I should think so. You haven't got a penny; but,
then, you're not for spending one. And”--Mr. Pole nodded to right and
left like a man who silenced a host of invisible logicians, urging this
and that--“you're a pleasant companion, thrifty, pretty, musical: by
Jingo! what more do they want? They'll have their song and chop at
home.”
“Yes; but suppose it depends upon their fathers?”
“Well, if their fathers will be fools, my dear, I can't help 'em. We
needn't take 'em in a lump: how about the doctor? I'll see him to-morrow
morning, and hear what he has to say. Shall I?”
Mr. Pole winked shrewdly.
“You will not make my heart break?” Emilia's voice sounded one low chord
as she neared the thing she had to say.
“Bless her soul!” the old merchant patted her; “I'm not the sort of man
for that.”
“Nor his?”
“His?” Mr. Pole's nerves became uneasy in a minute, at the scent of a
mystification. He dashed his handkerchief over his forehead, repeating:
“His? Break a man's heart! I? What's the meaning of that? For God's
sake, don't bother me!”
Emilia was still kneeling before him, eyeing him with a shadowed
steadfast air.
“I say his, because his heart is in mine. He has any pain that hurts
me.”
“He may be tremendously in love,” observed Mr. Pole; “but he seems a
deuced soft sort of a doctor! What's his name?”
“I love Wilfrid.”
The merchant appeared to be giving ear to her, long after the words had
been uttered, while there was silence in the room.
“Wilfrid? my son?” he cried with a start.
“He is my lover.”
“Damned rascal!” Mr. Pole jumped from his chair. “Going and playing
with an unprotected girl. I can pardon a young man's folly, but this is
infamous. My dear child,” he turned to Emilia, “if you've got any notion
about my son Wilfrid, you must root it up as quick as you can. If he's
been behaving like a villain, leave him to me. I detest, I hate, I
loathe, I would kick, a young man who deceives a girl. Even if he's my
son!--more's the reason!”
Mr. Pole was walking up and down the room, fuming as he spoke. Emilia
tried to hold his hand, as he was passing, but he said: “There, my
child! I'm very sorry for you, and I'm damned angry with him. Let me
go.”
“Can you, can you be angry with him for loving me?”
“Deceiving you,” returned Mr. Pole; “that's what it is. And I tell you,
I'd rather fifty times the fellow had deceived me. Anything rather than
that he should take advantage of a girl.”
“Wilfrid loves me and would die for me,” said Emilia.
“Now, let me tell you the fact,” Mr. Pole came to a halt, fronting her.
“My son Wilfrid Pole may be in love, as he says, here and there, but he
is engaged to be married to a lady of title. I have his word--his oath.
He got near a thousand pounds out of my pocket the other day on
that understanding. I don't speak about the money, but--now--it's a
lump--others would have made a nice row about it--but is he a liar? Is
he a seducing, idling, vagabond dog? Is he a contemptible scoundrel?”
“He is my lover,” said Emilia.
She stood without changing a feature; as in a darkness, holding to the
one thing she was sure of. Then, with a sudden track of light in her
brain: “I know the mistake,” she said. “Pardon him. He feared to offend
you, because you are his father, and he thought I might not quite please
you. For, he loves me. He has loved me from the first moment he saw
me. He cannot be engaged to another. I could bring him from any woman's
side. I have only to say to myself--he must come to me. For he loves me!
It is not a thing to doubt.”
Mr. Pole turned and recommenced his pacing with hasty steps. All the
indications of a nervous tempest were on him. Interjecting half-formed
phrases, and now and then staring at Emilia, as at an incomprehensible
object, he worked at his hair till it lent him the look of one in horror
at an apparition.
“The fellow's going to marry Lady Charlotte Chillingworth, I tell you.
He has asked my permission. The infernal scamp! he knew it pleased me.
He bled me of a thousand pounds only the other day. I tell you, he's
going to marry Lady Charlotte Chillingworth.”
Emilia received this statement with a most perplexing smile. She shook
her head. “He cannot.”
“Cannot? I say he shall, and must, and in a couple of months, too!”
The gravely sceptical smile on Emilia's face changed to a blank pallor.
“Then, you make him, sir--you?”
“He'll be a beggar, if he don't.”
“You will keep him without money?”
Mr. Pole felt that he gazed on strange deeps in that girl's face. Her
voice had the wire-like hum of a rising wind. There was no menace in her
eyes: the lashes of them drooped almost tenderly, and the lips were but
softly closed. The heaving of the bosom, though weighty, was regular:
the hands hung straight down, and were open. She looked harmless; but
his physical apprehensiveness was sharpened by his nervous condition,
and he read power in her: the capacity to concentrate all animal and
mental vigour into one feeling--this being the power of the soul.
So she stood, breathing quietly, steadily eyeing him.
“No, no;” went on Mr. Pole. “Come, come. We'll sit down, and see, and
talk--see what can be done. You know I always meant kindly by you.”
“Oh, yes!” Emilia musically murmured, and it cost her nothing to smile
again.
“Now, tell me how this began.” Mr. Pole settled himself comfortably to
listen, all irritation having apparently left him, under the influence
of the dominant nature. “You need not be ashamed to talk it over to me.”
“I am not ashamed,” Emilia led off, and told her tale simply, with here
and there one of her peculiar illustrations. She had not thought of love
till it came to life suddenly, she said; and then all the world looked
different. The relation of Wilfrid's bravery in fighting for her, varied
for a single instant the low monotony of her voice. At the close of the
confession, Mr. Pole wore an aspect of distress. This creature's utter
unlikeness to the girls he was accustomed to, corroborated his personal
view of the case, that Wilfrid certainly could not have been serious,
and that she was deluded. But he pitied her, for he had sufficient
imagination to prevent him from despising what he did not altogether
comprehend. So, to fortify the damsel, he gave her a lecture: first, on
young men--their selfish inconsiderateness, their weakness, the wanton
lives they led, their trick of lying for any sugar-plum, and how they
laughed at their dupes. Secondly, as to the conduct consequently to
be prescribed to girls, who were weaker, frailer, by disposition more
confiding, and who must believe nothing but what they heard their elders
say.
Emilia gave patient heed to the lecture.
“But I am safe,” she remarked, when he had finished; “for my lover is
not as those young men are.”
To speak at all, and arrange his ideas, was a vexation to the poor
merchant. He was here like an irritable traveller, who knocks at a
gate, which makes as if it opens, without letting him in. Emilia's naive
confidence he read as stupidity. It brought on a fresh access of the
nervous fever lurking in him, and he cried, jumping from his
seat: “Well, you can't have him, and there's an end. You must give
up--confound! why! do you expect to have everything you want at
starting? There, my child--but, upon my honour! a man loses his temper
at having to talk for an hour or so, and no result. You must go to bed;
and--do you say your prayers? Well! that's one way of getting out of
it--pray that you may forget all about what's not good for you. Why,
you're almost like a young man, when you set your mind on a thing.
Bad! won't do! Say your prayers regularly. And, please, pour me out a
mouthful of brandy. My hand trembles--I don't know what's the matter
with it;--just like those rushes on the Thames I used to see when out
fishing. No wind, and yet there they shake away. I wish it was daylight
on the old river now! It's night, and no mistake. I feel as if I had a
fellow twirling a stick over my head. The rascal's been at it for the
last month. There, stop where you are, my dear. Don't begin to dance!”
He pressed at his misty eyes, half under the impression that she was
taking a succession of dazzling leaps in air. Terror of an impending
blow, which he associated with Emilia's voice, made him entreat her to
be silent. After a space, he breathed a long breath of relief, saying:
“No, no; you're firm enough on your feet. I don't think I ever saw you
dance. My girls have given it up. What led me to think...but, let's to
bed, and say our prayers. I want a kiss.”
Emilia kissed him on the forehead. The symptoms of illness were strange
to her, and passed unheeded. She was too full of her own burning passion
to take evidence from her sight. The sun of her world was threatened
with extinction. She felt herself already a wanderer in a land of tombs,
where none could say whether morning had come or gone. Intensely she
looked her misery in the face; and it was as a voice that said, “No sun:
never sun any more,” to her. But a blue-hued moon slipped from among
the clouds, and hung in the black outstretched fingers of the tree of
darkness, fronting troubled waters. “This is thy light for ever! thou
shalt live in thy dream.” So, as in a prison-house, did her soul now
recall the blissful hours by Wilming Weir. She sickened but an instant.
The blood in her veins was too strong a tide for her to crouch in that
imagined corpse-like universe which alternates with an irradiated Eden
in the brain of the passionate young.
“Why should I lose him!” The dry sob choked her.
She struggled with the emotion in her throat, and Mr. Pole, who had
previously dreaded supplication and appeals for pity, caressed her.
Instantly the flood poured out.
“You are not cruel. I knew it. I should have died, if you had come
between us. Oh, Wilfrid's father, I love you!--I have never had a very
angry word on my mouth. Think! think! if you had made me curse you. For,
I could! You would have stopped my life, and Wilfrid's. What would our
last thoughts have been? We could not have forgiven you. Take up dead
birds killed by frost. You cry: Cruel winter! murdering cold! But I
knew better. You are Wilfrid's father, whom I can kneel to. My lover's
father! my own father! my friend next to heaven! Oh! bless my love,
for him. You have only to know what my love for him is! The thought of
losing him goes like perishing cold through my bones;--my heart jerks,
as if it had to pull up my body from the grave every time it beats....”
“God in heaven!” cried the horrified merchant, on whose susceptible
nerves these images wrought with such a force that he absolutely had
dread of her. He gasped, and felt at his heart, and then at his pulse;
rubbed the moisture from his forehead, and throwing a fixedly wild look
on her eyes, he jumped up and left her kneeling.
His caress had implied mercy to Emilia: for she could not reconcile it
with the rejection of the petition of her soul. She was now a little
bewildered to see him trotting the room, frowning and blinking, and
feeling at one wrist, at momentary pauses, all his words being: “Let's
be quiet. Let's be good. Let's go to bed, and say our prayers;” mingled
with short ejaculations.
“I may say,” she intercepted him, “I may tell my dear lover that you
bless us both, and that we are to live. Oh, speak! sir! let me hear
you!”
“Let's go to bed,” iterated Mr. Pole. “Come, candles! do light them. In
God's name! light candles. And let's be off and say our prayers.”
“You consent, sir?”
“What's that your heart does?” Mr. Pole stopped to enquire; adding:
“There, don't tell me. You've played the devil with mine. Who'd ever
have made me believe that I should feel more at ease running up and down
the room, than seated in my arm-chair! Among the wonders of the world,
that!”
Emilia put up her lips to kiss him, as he passed her. There was
something deliciously soothing and haven-like to him in the aspect of
her calmness.
“Now, you'll be a good girl,” said he, when he had taken her salute.
“And you,” she rejoined, “will be happier!”
His voice dropped. “If you go on like this, you've done for me!”
But she could make no guess at any tragic meaning in his words. “My
father--let me call you so!”
“Will you see that you can't have him?” he stamped the syllables into
her ears: and, with a notion of there being a foreign element about her,
repeated:--“No!--not have him!--not yours!--somebody else's!”
This was clear enough.
“Only you can separate us,” said Emilia, with a brow levelled intently.
“Well, and I--” Mr. Pole was pursuing in the gusty energy of his
previous explanation. His eyes met Emilia's, gravely widening. “I--I'm
very sorry,” he broke down: “upon my soul, I am!”
The old man went to the mantel-piece and leaned his elbow before the
glass.
Emilia's bosom began to rise again.
She was startled to hear him laugh. A slight melancholy little burst;
and then a louder one, followed by a full-toned laughter that fell short
and showed the heart was not in it.
“That boy Braintop! What fun it was!” he said, looking all the while
into the glass. “Why can't we live in peace, and without bother! Is your
candle alight, my dear?”
Emilia now thought that he was practising evasion.
“I will light it,” she said.
Mr. Pole gave a wearied sigh. His head being still turned to the glass,
he listened with a shrouded face for her movements: saying, “Good night;
good night; I'll light my own. There's a dear!”
A shouting was in his ears, which seemed to syllable distinctly: “If she
goes at once, I'm safe.”
The sight of pain at all was intolerable to him; but he had a prophetic
physical warning now that to witness pain inflicted by himself would be
more than he could endure.
Emilia breathed a low, “Good night.”
“Good night, my love--all right to-morrow!” he replied briskly; and
remorse touching his kind heart as the music of her 'good night'
penetrated to it by thrilling avenues, he added injudiciously: “Don't
fret. We'll see what we can do. Soon make matters comfortable.”
“I love you, and I know you will not stab me,” she answered.
“No; certainly not,” said Mr. Pole, still keeping his back to her.
Struck with a sudden anticipating fear of having to go through this
scene on the morrow, he continued: “No misunderstands, mind! Wilfrid's
done with.”
There was a silence. He trusted she might be gone. Turning round, he
faced her; the light of the candle throwing her pale visage into ghostly
relief.
“Where is sleep for you if you part us?”
Mr. Pole flung up his arms. “I insist upon your going to bed. Why
shouldn't I sleep? Child's folly!”
Though he spoke so, his brain was in strings to his timorous ticking
nerves; and he thought that it would be well to propitiate her and get
her to utter some words that would not haunt his pillow.
“My dear girl! it's not my doing. I like you. I wish you well and happy.
Very fond of you;--blame circumstances, not me.” Then he murmured: “Are
black spots on the eyelids a bad sign? I see big flakes of soot falling
in a dark room.”
Emilia's mated look fleeted. “You come between us, sir, because I have
no money?”
“I tell you it's the boy's only chance to make his hit now.” Mr. Pole
stamped his foot angrily.
“And you make my Cornelia marry, though she loves another, as Wilfrid
loves me, and if they do not obey you they are to be beggars! Is it you
who can pray? Can you ever have good dreams? I saved my father from the
sin, by leaving him. He wished to sell me. But my poor father had no
money at all, and I can pardon him. Money was a bright thing to him:
like other things to us. Mr. Pole! What will any one say for you!”
The unhappy merchant had made vehement efforts to perplex his hearing,
that her words might be empty and not future dragons round his couch.
He was looking forward to a night of sleep as a cure for the evil
sensations besetting him--his only chance. The chance was going; and
with the knowledge that it was unjustly torn from him--this one gleam of
clear reason in his brain undimmed by the irritable storm which plucked
him down--he cried out, to clear himself:--
“They are beggars, both, and all, if they don't marry before two months
are out. I'm a beggar then. I'm ruined. I shan't have a penny. I'm in
a workhouse. They are in good homes. They are safe, and thank their old
father. Now, then; now. Shall I sleep?”
Emilia caught his staggering arm. The glazed light of his eyes went out.
He sank into a chair; white as if life had issued with the secret of
his life. Wonderful varying expressions had marked his features and
the tones of his voice, while he was uttering that sharp, succinct
confession; so that, strange as it sounded, every sentence fixed itself
on her with incontrovertible force, and the meaning of the whole flashed
through her mind. It struck her too awfully for speech. She held fast
to his nerveless hand, and kneeling before him, listened for his long
reluctant breathing.
The 'Shall I sleep?' seemed answered.