The card of Mr. Powys found Arabella alone in the house. Mrs. Lupin
was among village school-children; Mrs. Chump had gone to London to see
whether anything was known of Mr. Pole at his office, where she fell
upon the youth Braintop, and made him her own for the day. Adela was
out in the woods, contemplating nature; and Cornelia was supposed to be
walking whither her stately fancy drew her.
“Will you take long solitary walks unprotected?” she was asked.
“I have a parasol,” she replied; and could hear, miles distant, the
domestic comments being made on her innocence; and the story it would
be--“She thinks of no possible danger but from the sun.”
A little forcing of her innocence now was necessary as an opiate for her
conscience. She was doing what her conscience could only pardon on
the plea of her extreme innocence. The sisters, and the fashion at
Brookfield, permitted the assumption, and exaggerated it willingly. It
chanced, however, that Adela had reason to feel discontented. It was a
breach of implied contract, she thought, that Cornelia should, as she
did only yesterday, tell her that she had seen Edward Buxley in the
woods, and that she was of opinion that the air of the woods was bad
for her. Not to see would have been the sisterly obligation, in Adela's
idea--especially when seeing embraced things that no loving sister
should believe.
Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not
our master; and--so are the senses generally. We are not bound to accept
more than we choose from them. Thus we obtain delicacy; and thus, as you
will perceive, our civilization, by the aid of the sentimentalists, has
achieved an effective varnish. There, certainly, to the vulgar, mind a
tail is visible. The outrageous philosopher declares vehemently that no
beast of the field or the forest would own such a tail. (His meaning is,
that he discerns the sign of the animal slinking under the garb of the
stately polished creature. I have all the difficulty in the world to
keep him back and let me pursue my course.) These philosophers are a
bad-mannered body. Either in opposition, or in the support of them,
I maintain simply that the blinking sentimentalist helps to make
civilization what it is, and civilization has a great deal of merit.
“Did you not leave your parasol behind you at Ipley?” said Adela, as she
met Cornelia in the afternoon.
Cornelia coloured. Her pride supported her, and she violated fine shades
painfully in her response: “Mr. Barrett left me there. Is that your
meaning?”
Adela was too much shocked to note the courageousness of the reply.
“Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!” was her horrified
mental ejaculation.
The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies. They found
Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their
first idea was one of intense condemnation--fresh offences on the part
of Mrs. Chump being conjectured. Little by little Arabella sobbed out
what she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.
After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and
then suggested that they should all go. She continued talking in random
suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the
sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused. By moving and acting,
it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged,
and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella's
shamefully-discoloured face. It was impossible for her to realize grief
in her own bosom. She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a
note of sympathy to one sister and to the other. At last Arabella got
fuller command of her voice. When she had related that her father's
positive wish, furthered by the doctor's special injunction to obey it
scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to
breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertaining
friends, Adela stamped her foot, saying that it was more than human
nature could bear.
“If we go,” said Arabella, “the London doctor assured Mr. Powys that he
would not answer for papa's life.”
“But, good heavens! are we papa's enemies? And why may Mr. Powys see him
if we, his daughters, cannot? Tell me how Mr. Powys met him and knew of
it! Tell me--I am bewildered. I feel that we are cheated in some way.
Oh! tell me something clear.”
Arabella said calmingly: “Emilia is with papa. She wrote to Mr. Powys.
Whether she did rightly or not we have not now to inquire. I believe
that she thought it right.”
“Entertain friends!” interjected Adela. “But papa cannot possibly mean
that we are to go through--to--the fete on Besworth Lawn, Bella! It's in
two days from this dreadful day.”
“Papa has mentioned it to Mr. Powys; he desires us not to postpone it.
We...” Arabella's voice broke piteously.
“Oh! but this is torture!” cried Adela, with a deplorable vision of
the looking-glass rising before her, as she felt the tears sting her
eyelids. “This cannot be! No father would...not loving us as dear papa
does! To be quiet! to sit and be gay! to flaunt at a fete! Oh, mercy!
mercy! Tell me--he left us quite well--no one could have guessed. I
remember he looked at me from the carriage window. Tell me--it must be
some moral shock--what do you attribute it to? Wilfrid cannot be the
guilty one. We have been only too compliant to papa's wishes about that
woman. Tell me what you think it can be!”
A voice said, “Money!”
Which of the sisters had spoken Adela did not know. It was bitter enough
that one could be brought to utter the thing, even if her ideas were so
base as to suspect it. The tears now came dancing over her under-lids
like triumphing imps. “Money!” echoed through her again and again.
Curiously, too, she had no occasion to ask how it was that money might
be supposed to have operated on her father's health. Unable to realize
to herself the image of her father lying ill and suffering, but just
sufficiently touched by what she could conceive of his situation, the
bare whisper of money came like a foul insult to overwhelm her in floods
of liquid self-love. She wept with that last anguish of a woman who
is compelled to weep, but is incapable of finding any enjoyment in her
tears. Cornelia and Arabella caught her hands; she was the youngest, and
had been their pet. It gratified them that Adela should show a deep
and keen feeling. Adela did not check herself from a demonstration that
enabled her to look broadly, as it were, on her own tenderness of heart.
Following many outbursts, she asked, “And the illness--what is it? not
its cause--itself!”
A voice said, “Paralysis!”
Adela's tears stopped. She gazed on both faces, trying with open mouth
to form the word.