“My voice! I have my voice!”
Emilia had cried it out to herself almost aloud, on the journey from
Devon to London. The landscape slipping under her eyes, with flashing
grey pools and light silver freshets, little glades, little copses,
farms, and meadows rounding away to spires of village churches under
blue hills, would not let her sink, heavy as was the spirit within her,
and dead to everything as she desired to be. Here, a great strange old
oak spread out its arms and seemed to hold the hurrying train a minute.
When gone by, Emilia thought of it as a friend, and that there, there,
was the shelter and thick darkness she had hoped she might be flying
to. Or the reach of a stream was seen, and in the middle of it one fair
group of clouds, showing distance beyond distance in colour. Emilia shut
her sight, and tried painfully to believe that there were no distances
for her. This was an easy task when the train stopped. It was surprising
to her then why the people moved. The whistle of the engine and rush
of the scenery set her imagination anew upon the horror of being
motionless.
“My voice! I have my voice!” The exclamation recurred at intervals, as
a quick fear, that bubbled up from blind sensation, of her being utterly
abandoned, and a stray thing carrying no light, startled her. Darkness
she still had her desire for; but not to be dark in the darkness. She
looked back on the recent night as a lake of fire, through which she had
plunged; and of all the faculties about her, memory had suffered most,
so that it could recall no images of what had happened, but lay against
its black corner a shuddering bundle of nerves. The varying fields and
woods and waters offering themselves to her in the swiftness, were as
wine dashed to her lips, which could not be dead to it. The wish to be
of some worth began a painful quickening movement. At first she could
have sobbed with the keen anguish that instantaneously beset her.
For--“If I am of worth, who looks on me?” was her outcry, and the
darkness she had previously coveted fell with the strength of a mace on
her forehead; but the creature's heart struggled further, and by-and-by
in despite of her the pulses sprang a clear outlook on hope. It struck
through her like the first throb of a sword-cut. She tried to blind
herself to it; the face of hope was hateful.
This conflict of the baffled spirit of youth with its forceful flood of
being continued until it seemed that Emilia was lifted through the
fiery circles into daylight; her last cry being as her first: “I have my
voice!”
Of that which her voice was to achieve for her she never thought. She
had no thought of value, but only an eagerness to feel herself possessor
of something. Wilfrid had appeared to her to have taken all from her,
until the recollection of her voice made her breathe suddenly quick and
deep, as one recovering the taste of life.
Despair, I have said before, is a wilful business, common to corrupt
blood, and to weak woeful minds: native to the sentimentalist of the
better order. The only touch of it that came to Emilia was when she
attempted to penetrate to Wilfrid's reason for calling her down to Devon
that he might renounce and abandon her. She wanted a reason to make him
in harmony with his acts, and she could get none. This made the world
look black to her. But, “I have my voice!” she said, exhausted by the
passion of the night, tearless, and only sensible to pain when the keen
swift wind, and the flying squares of field and meadow prompted her
nature mysteriously to press for healthy action.
A man opposite to her ventured a remark: “We're going at a pretty good
pace now, miss.”
She turned her eyes to him, and the sense of speed was reduced in her at
once, she could not comprehend how. Remembering presently that she had
not answered him, she said: “It is because you are going home, perhaps,
that you think it fast.”
“No, miss,” he replied, “I'm going to market. They can't put on steam
too stiff for me when I'm bound on business.”
Emilia found it impossible to fathom the sensations of the man, and
their common desire for speed bewildered her more. She was relieved
when the train was lightened of him. Soon the skirts of red vapour were
visible, and when the guard took poor Braintop's return-ticket from her
petulant hand, all of the journey that she bore in mind was the sight
of a butcher-boy in blue, with a red cap, mounted on a white horse, who
rode gallantly along a broad highroad, and for whom she had struck out
some tune to suit the measure of his gallop.
She accepted her capture by the Marinis more calmly than Merthyr had
been led to suppose. The butcher-boy's gallop kept her senses in motion
for many hours, and that reckless equestrian embodied the idea of the
vivifying pace from which she had dropped. He went slower and slower.
By degrees the tune grew dull, and jarred; and then Emilia looked out
on the cold grey skies of our autumn, the rain and the fogs, and roaring
London filled her ears. So had ended a dream, she thought. She would
stand at the window listening to street-organs, whose hideous discord
and clippings and drawls did not madden her, and whose suggestion of
a lovely tune rolled out no golden land to her. That treasure of her
voice, to which no one in the house made allusion, became indeed a
buried treasure.
In the South-western suburb where the Marinis lived, plots of foliage
were to be seen, and there were lanes not so black but that they showed
the hues of the season. These led to the parks and to noble gardens.
Emilia daily went out to keep the dying colours of the year in view, and
walked to get among the trees, where, with Madame attendant on her, she
sat counting the leaves as each one curved, and slid, and spun to earth,
or on a gust of air hosts went aloft; but it always ended in their
coming down; Emilia verified that fact repeatedly. However high they
flew, the ground awaited them. Madame entertained her with talk of
Italy, and Tuscan wine, and Lombard bread, and Turin chocolate.
Marini never alluded to his sufferings for the loss of these cruelly
interdicted dainties, never! But Madame knew how his exile affected him.
And in England the sums one paid for everything! “One fancies one pays
for breath,” said Madame, shivering.
One day the ex-organist of Hillford Church passed before them. Emilia
let him go. The day following he passed again, but turned at the end of
the alley and simulated astonishment at the appearance of Emilia, as he
neared her. They shook hands and talked, while Madame zealously eyed any
chance person promenading the neighbourhood. She wrote for instructions
concerning this gentleman calling himself Sir Purcell Barrett, and
receiving them, she permitted Emilia to invite him to their house. “He
is an Englishman under a rope, ready for heaven,” Madame described him
to her husband, who, though more at heart with Englishmen, could not but
admit that this one wore a look that appeared as a prognostication of
sadness.
Sir Purcell informed Emilia of his accession to title; and in reply to
her “Are you not glad?” smiled and said that a mockery could scarcely
make him glad; indicating nevertheless how feeble the note of poverty
was in his grand scale of sorrow. He came to the house and met them in
the gardens frequently. With some perversity he would analyze to herself
Emilia's spirit of hope, partly perhaps for the sake of probing to what
sort of thing it might be in its nature and defences; and, as against an
accomplished disputant she made but a poor battle, he injured what was
precious to her without himself gaining any good whatever.
“Why, what do you look forward to?” she said wondering, at the end of
one of their arguments, as he courteously termed this play of logical
foils with a baby.
“Death,” answered the grave gentleman, striding on.
Emilia pitied him, thinking: “I might feel as he does, if I had not my
voice.” Seeing that calamity very remote, she added: “I should!”
She knew of his position toward Cornelia: that is, she knew as much
as he did: for the want of a woman's heart over which to simmer
his troubles was urgent within him and Emilia's, though it lacked
experience, was a woman's regarding love. And moreover, she did not
weep, but practically suggested his favourable chances, which it was a
sad satisfaction to him to prove baseless, and to knock utterly over.
The grief in which the soul of a human creature is persistently seeking
(since it cannot be thrown off) to clothe itself comfortably, finds in
tears an irritating expression of sympathy. Hints of a brighter future
are its nourishment. Such embryos are not tenacious of existence, and
when destroyed they are succulent food for a space to the moody grief I
am describing.
The melancholy gentleman did Emilia this good, that, never appearing to
imagine others to know misery save himself, he gave her full occupation
apart from the workings of her own mind. As to her case, he might
have offered the excuse that she really had nothing of the aspect of a
lovesick young lady, and was not a bit sea-green to view, or lamentable
in tone. He was sufficiently humane to have felt for anyone suffering,
and the proof of it is, that the only creature he saw under such an
influence he pitied so deplorably, as to make melancholy a habit with
him. He fretted her because he would do nothing, and this spectacle of
a lover beloved, but consenting to be mystified, consentingly
paralyzed:--of a lover beloved--!
“Does she love you?” said Emilia, beseechingly.
“If the truth is in her, she does,” he returned.
“She has told you she loves you?--that she loves no one else?”
“Of this I am certain.”
“Then, why are you downcast? my goodness! I would take her by the hand
'Woman; do you know yourself? you belong to me!'--I would say that; and
never let go her hand. That would decide everything. She must come
to you then, or you know what it is that means to separate you. My
goodness! I see it so plain!”
But he declined to look thus low, and stood pitifully smiling:--This
spectacle, together with some subtle spur from the talk of love, roused
Emilia from her lethargy. The warmth of a new desire struck around her
heart. The old belief in her power over Wilfrid joined to a distinct
admission that she had for the moment lost him; and she said, “Yes; now,
as I am now, he can abandon me:” but how if he should see her and hear
her in that hushed hour when she was to stand as a star before men?
Emilia flushed and trembled. She lived vividly though her far-projected
sensations, until truly pity for Wilfrid was active in her bosom, she
feeling how he would yearn for her. The vengeance seemed to her so keen
that pity could not fail to come. Thus, to her contemplation, their
positions became reversed: it was Wilfrid now who stood in the darkness,
unselected. Her fiery fancy, unchained from the despotic heart,
illumined her under the golden future.
“Come to us this evening, I will sing to you,” she said, and the
'Englishman under a rope' bowed assentingly.
“Sad songs, if you like,” she added.
“I have always thought sadness more musical than mirth,” said he.
“Surely there is more grace in sadness!”
Poetry, sculpture, and songs, and all the Arts, were brought forward in
mournful array to demonstrate the truth of his theory.
When Emilia understood him, she cited dogs and cats, and birds, and all
things of nature that rejoiced and revelled, in support of the opposite
view.
“Nay, if animals are to be your illustration!” he protested. He had been
perhaps half under the delusion that he spoke with Cornelia, and with a
sense of infinite misery, he compressed the apt distinction that he had
in his mind; which was to show where humanity and simple nature drew a
line, and wherein humanity claimed the loftier seat.
“But such talk must be uttered to a soul,” he phrased internally, and
Emilia was denied what belonged to Cornelia.
Hitherto Emilia had refused to sing, and Madame Marini, faithful to her
instructions, had never allowed her to be pressed to sing. Emilia would
brood over notes, thinking: “I can take that; and that; and dwell on
such and such a note for any length of time;” but she would not call up
her voice; she would not look at her treasure. It seemed more to her,
untouched; and went on doubling its worth, until doubtless her idea
of capacity greatly relieved her of the burden on her breast, and
the reflection that she held a charm for all, and held it from all,
flattered one who had been cruelly robbed.
On their way homeward, among the chrysanthemums in the long garden-walk,
they met Tracy Runningbrook, between whose shouts of delight and
Emilia's reserve there was so marked a contrast that one would have
deemed Tracy an offender in her sight. She had said to him entreatingly,
“Do not come,” when he volunteered to call on the Marinis in the
evening; and she got away from him as quickly as she could, promising to
be pleased if he called the day following. Tracy flew leaping to one of
the great houses where he was tame cat. When Sir Purcell as they passed
on spoke a contemptuous word of his soft habits and idleness, Emilia
said: “He is one of my true friends.”
“And why is he interdicted the visit this evening?”
“Because,” she answered, and grew pale, “he--he does not care for music.
I wish I had not met him.”
She recollected how Tracy's flaming head had sprung up before her--he
who had always prophesied that she would be famous for arts unknown to
her, and not for song just when she was having a vision of triumph and
caressing the idea of her imprisoned voice bursting its captivity, and
soaring into its old heavens.
“He does not care for music!” interjected Sir Purcell, with something
like a frown. “I have nothing in common with him. But that I might
have known. I can have nothing in common with a man who is not to be
impressed by music.”
“I love him quite as well,” said Emilia. “He is a quick friend. I am
always certain of him.”
“And I imagine also that you are quits with your quick friend,” added
Sir Purcell. “You do not care for verse, or he for voices!”
“Poetry?” said Emilia; “no, not much. It seems like talking on tiptoe;
like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again....”
“And making the same noise when they get at the end--like the bears!”
Sir Purcell slightly laughed. “You don't approve of the rhymes?”
“Yes, I like the rhymes; but when you use words--I mean, if you are
in earnest--how can you count and have stops, and--no, I do not care
anything for poetry.”
Sir Purcell's opinion of Emilia, though he liked her, was, that if a
genius, she was an incomplete one; and his positive judgement (which
I set down in phrase that would have startled him) ranked both her and
Tracy as a pair of partial humbugs, entertaining enough. They were both
too real for him.
Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled
by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. “I
wonder whether I have a cold!” she said.
Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding
that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English
scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge
of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky
sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really
like a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and,
entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded
like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung
about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes
that broke on a cough. “Did I cough purposely?” she asked herself;
but she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she
hummed a passage, and sought stealthily to pass the barrier of her own
watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise
bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But
her breath failed. She stared into the glass and forced the note. A
panic caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. “Am
I ill? I must be hungry!” she exclaimed. “It is a cough! But I don't
cough! What is the matter with me?”
Under these auspices she forced her voice again, and subsequently
loosened her dress, complaining of the dressmaker's affection for
tightness. “Now,” she said, having fallen upon an attempt at simple “do,
re, me, fa,” and laughed at herself. Was it the laugh, that stopping
her at “si,” made that “si” so husky, asthmatic, like the wheezing of a
crooked old witch? “I am unlucky, to-night,” said Emilia. Or, rather,
so said her surface-self. The submerged self--self in the depths--rarely
speaks to the occasions, but lies under calamity quietly apprehending
all; willing that the talker overhead should deceive others, and herself
likewise, if possible. Emilia found her hands acting daintily and
critically in the attirement of her person; and then surprised herself
murmuring: “I forgot that Tracy won't be here to-night.” By which she
betrayed that she had divined those arts she was to shine in, according
to Tracy; and betrayed that she had a terrible fear of a loss of all
else. It pained her now that Tracy should not be coming. “Can I send
for him?” she thought, as she looked winningly into the glass, trying to
feel what sort of a feeling it was to be in love with a face like
that one fronting her, so familiar in its aspects, so strange when
scrutinized studiously! She drew a chair, and laying her elbow on the
toilet-table, gazed hard, until the thought: “What face did Wilfrid see
last?” (meaning, “when he saw me last”) drove her away.
Not only did she know herself now a face of many faces; but the
life within her likewise as a soul of many souls. The one Emilia, so
unquestioning, so sure, lay dead; and a dozen new spirits, with but
a dim likeness to her, were fighting for possession of her frame, now
occupying it alone, now in couples; and each casting grim reflections on
the other. Which is only a way of telling you that the great result of
mortal suffering--consciousness--had fully set in; to ripen; perhaps to
debase; at any rate, to prove her.
To be of worth was still her fixed idea--all that was clear in the
thickening mist. “I cannot be ugly,” she said, and reproved herself for
simulating a childish tone. “Why do I talk in that way? I know I am not
ugly. But if a fire scorched my face? There is nothing that seems safe!”
The love of friends was suggested to her as something to rely on; and
the loving them. “But if I have nothing to give!” said Emilia, and
opened both her empty hands. She had diverted her mind from the pressure
upon it, by this colloquy with a looking-glass, and gave herself a great
rapture by running up notes to this theme:--
“No, no, no, no, no!--nothing! nothing!”
Clear, full, sonant notes; the notes of her true voice. She did not
attempt them a second time; nor, when Sir Purcell requested her to sing
in the course of the evening, did she comply. “The Signora thinks I have
a cold,” she said. Madame Marini protested that she hoped not, she even
thought not, though none could avoid it at this season in this climate,
and she turned to Sir Purcell to petition for any receipts he might have
in his possession, specifics for warding off the frightful affliction of
households in England.
“I have now twenty,” said Madame, and throwing up her eyes; “I have
tried all! oh! so many lozenge!”
Marini and Emilia laughed. While Sir Purcell was maintaining the fact of
his total ignorance of the subject against Madame's incredulity, Emilia
left the room. When she came back Madame was pressing her visitor to
be explicit with regard to a certain process of cure conducted by an
application of cold water. The Neapolitan gave several shudders as she
marked him attentively. “Water cold!” she murmured with the deepest
pathos, and dropped her face in her hands with narrowed shoulders.
Emilia held a letter over to Sir Purcell. He took it, first assuring
himself that Marini was in complicity with them. To Marini Emilia
addressed a Momus forefinger, and Marini shrugged, smiling. “Water
cold!” ejaculated Madame, showing her countenance again. “In winter!
Luigi, they are mad!” Marini poked the fire briskly, for his sensations
entirely sided with his wife.
The letter Sir Purcell held contained these words:
“Be kind, and meet me to-morrow at ten in the morning, at that place
where you first saw me sitting. I want you to take me to one who
will help me. I cannot lose time any more. I must work. I have
been dead for I cannot say how long. I know you will come.
“I am, for ever,
“Your thankful friend,
“Emilia.”