Emilia's conscience smote her with a verification of this charge, and she trembled, half-intoxicated for the moment, by the aspect of her power. This filled her likewise with a dangerous pity for its victim; and now, putting out both hands to him, her chin and shoulders raised entreatingly, she begged the victim to spare her any word of marriage.
"But you go, you run away from meI don't know where you are or what you are doing," said Wilfrid. "And you leave me to that woman. She loves the Austrians, as you know. There! I will ask nothingonly this: I will promise, if I quit the Queen's service for good, not to wear the white uniform"
"Oh!" Emilia breathed inward deeply, scarce noticing the 'if' that followed; nodding quick assent to the stipulation before she heard the nature of it. It was, that she should continue in England.
"Your word," said Wilfrid; and she pledged it, and did not think she was granting much in the prospect of what she gained.
"You will, then?" said he.
"Yes, I will."
"On your honour?"
These reiterated questions were simply pretexts for steps nearer to the answering lips.
"And I may see you?" he went on.
"Yes."
"Wherever you are staying? And sometimes alone? Alone!"
"Not if you do not know that I am to be respected," said Emilia, huddled in the passionate fold of his arms. He released her instantly, and was departing, wounded; but his heart counselled wiser proceedings.
"To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me, near me! is enough. Since we are to meet on those terms, let it be so. Let me only see you till some lucky shot puts me out of your way."
This 'some lucky shot,' which is commonly pointed at themselves by the sentimental lovers, with the object of hitting the very centre of the hearts of obdurate damsels, glanced off Emilia's, which was beginning to throb with a comprehension of all that was involved in the word she had given.
"I have your promise?" he repeated: and she bent her head.
"Not," he resumed, taking jealousy to counsel, now that he had advanced a step: "Not that I would detain you against your will! I can't expect to make such a figure at the end of the piece as your Count Brancianiwho, by the way, served his friends oddly, however well he may have served his country."
"His friends?" She frowned.
"Did he not betray the conspirators? He handed in names, now and then."
"Oh!" she cried, "you understand us no better than an Austrian. He handed in namesyes he was obliged to lull suspicion. Two or three of the least implicated volunteered to be betrayed by him; they went and confessed, and put the Government on a wrong track. Count Branciani made a dish of traitorsnot true mento satisfy the Austrian ogre. No one knew the head of the plot till that night of the spy. Do you not see?he weeded the conspiracy!"
"Poor fellow!" Wilfrid answered, with a contracted mouth: "I pity him for being cut off from his handsome wife."
"I pity her for having to live," said Emilia.
And so their duett dropped to a finish. He liked her phrase better than his own, and being denied any privileges, and feeling stupefied by a position which both enticed and stung him, he remarked that he presumed he must not detain her any longer; whereupon she gave him her hand. He clutched the ready hand reproachfully.
"Good-bye," said she.
"You are the first to say it," he complained.
"Will you write to that Austrian colonel, your cousin, to say "Never! never!" to-morrow, Wilfrid?"
"While you are in England, I shall stay, be sure of that."
She bade him give her love to all Brookfield.
"Once you had none to give but what I let you take back for the purpose!" he said. "Farewell! I shall see the harp to-night. It stands in the old place. I will not have it moved or touched till you"
"Ah! how kind you were, Wilfrid!"
"And how lovely you are!"
There was no struggle to preserve the backs of her fingers from his lips, and, as this time his phrase was not palpably obscured by the one it countered, artistic sentiment permitted him to go.
CHAPTER LIII
A minute after his parting with Emilia, Wilfrid swung round in the street and walked back at great strides. "What a fool I was not to see that she was acting indifference!" he cried. "Let me have two seconds with her!" But how that was to be contrived his diplomatic brain refused to say. "And what a stiff, formal fellow I was all the time!" He considered that he had not uttered a sentence in any way pointed to touch her heart. "She must think I am still determined to marry that woman."
Wilfrid had taken his stand on the opposite side of the street, and beheld a male figure in the dusk, that went up to the house and then stood back scanning the windows. Wounded by his audacious irreverence toward the walls behind which his beloved was sheltered, Wilfrid crossed and stared at the intruder. It proved to be Braintop.
"How do you do, sir!no! that can't be the house," stammered Braintop, with a very earnest scrutiny.
"What house? what do you want?" enquired Wilfrid.
"Jenkinson," was the name that won the honour of rescuing Braintop from this dilemma.
"No; it is Lady Gosstre's house: Miss Belloni is living there; and stop: you know her. Just wait, and take in two or three words from me, and notice particularly how she is looking, and the dress she wears. You can saysay that Mrs. Chump sent you to enquire after Miss Belloni's health."
Wilfrid tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and wrote:
"I can be free to-morrow. One word! I shall expect it, with your name in full."
But even in the red heat of passion his born diplomacy withheld his own signature. It was not difficult to override Braintop's scruples about presenting himself, and Wilfrid paced a sentinel measure awaiting the reply. "Free to-morrow," he repeated, with a glance at his watch under a lamp: and thus he soliloquized: "What a time that fellow is! Yes, I can be free to-morrow if I will. I wonder what the deuce Gambier had to do in Monmouthshire. If he has been playing with my sister's reputation, he shall have short shrift. That fellow Braintop sees her nowmy little Emilia! my bird! She won't have changed her dress till she has dined. If she changes it before she goes outby Jove, if she wears it to-night before all those people, that'll mean 'Good-bye' to me: 'Addio, caro,' as those olive women say, with their damned cold languor, when they have given you up. She's not one of them! Good God! she came into the room looking like a little Empress. I'll swear her hand trembled when I went, though! My sisters shall see her in that dress. She must have a clever lady's maid to have done that knot to her back hair. She's getting as full of art as any of themOh! lovely little darling! And when she smiles and holds out her hand! What is itwhat is it about her? Her upper lip isn't perfectly cut, there's some fault with her nose, but I never saw such a mouth, or such a face. "Free to-morrow?" Good God! she'll think I mean I'm free to take a walk!"
George Meredith
Sandra Belloni Volume 7
CHAPTER L
Emilia remained locked up with her mother all that evening. The good little shrill woman, tender-eyed and slatternly, had to help try on dresses, and run about for pins, and express her critical taste in undertones, believing all the while that her daughter had given up music to go mad with vanity. The reflection struck her, notwithstanding, that it was a wiser thing for one of her sex to make friends among rich people than to marry a foreign husband.
The girl looked a brilliant woman in a superb Venetian dress of purple velvet, which she called 'the Branciani dress,' and once attired in it, and the rich purges and swelling creases over the shoulders puffed out to her satisfaction, and the run of yellow braid about it properly inspected and flattened, she would not return to her more homely wear, though very soon her mother began to whimper and say that she had lost her so long, and now that she had found her it hardly seemed the same child. Emilia would listen to no entreaties to put away her sumptuous robe. She silenced her mother with a stamp of her foot, and then sighed: "Ah! Why do I always feel such a tyrant with you?" kissing her.
"This dress," she said, and held up her mother's chin fondlingly between her two hands, "this dress was designed by my friend Merthyrthat is, Mr. Powysfrom what he remembered of a dress worn by Countess Branciani, of Venice. He had it made to give to me. It came from Paris. Countess Branciani was one of his dearest friends. I feel that I am twice as much his friend with this on me. Mother, it seems like a deep blush all over me. I feel as if I looked out of a rose."
She spread her hands to express the flower magnified.
"Oh! what silly talk," said her mother: "it does turn your head, this dress does!"
"I wish it would give me my voice, mother. My father has no hope. I wish he would send me news to make me happy about him; or come and run his finger up the strings for hours, as he used to. I have fancied I heard him at times, and I had a longing to follow the notes, and felt sure of my semi-tones. He won't see me! Mother! he would think something of me if he saw me now!"
Her mother's lamentations reached that vocal pitch at last which Emilia could not endure, and the little lady was despatched to her home under charge of a servant.
Emilia feasted on the looking-glass when alone. Had Merthyr, in restoring her to health, given her an overdose of the poison?
"Countess Branciani made the Austrian Governor her slave," she uttered, planting one foot upon a stool to lend herself height. "He told her who were suspected, and who would be imprisoned, and gave her all the State secrets. Beauty can do more than music. I wonder whether Merthyr loved her? He loves me!"
Emilia was smitten with a fear that he would speak of it when she next saw him. "Oh! I hope he will be just the same as he has been," she sighed; and with much melancholy shook her head at her fair reflection, and began to undress. It had not struck her with surprise that two men should be loving her, until, standing away from the purple folds, she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, as a fire-log robbed of its flame, and felt insufficient and weak. This was a new sensation. She depended no more on her own vital sincerity. It was in her nature, doubtless, to crave constantly for approval, but in the service of personal beauty instead of divine Art, she found herself utterly unwound without it: victim of a sense of most uncomfortable hollowness. She was glad to extinguish the candle and be covered up dark in the circle of her warmth. Then her young blood sang to her again.
An hour before breakfast every morning she read with Merthyr. Now, this morning how was she to appear to him? There would be no reading, of course. How could he think of teaching one to whom he trembled. Emilia trusted that she might see no change in him, and, above all, that he would not speak of his love for her. Nevertheless, she put on her robe of conquest, having first rejected with distaste a plainer garb. She went down the stairs slowly. Merthyr was in the library awaiting her. "You are late," he said, eyeing the dress as a thing apart from her, and remarking that it was hardly suited for morning wear. "Yellow, if you must have a strong colour, and you wouldn't exhibit the schwartz-gelb of the Tedeschi willingly. But now!"
This was the signal for the reading to commence.
"Wilfrid would not have been so cold to me," thought Emilia, turning the leaves of Ariosto as a book of ashes. Not a word of love appeared to be in his mind. This she did not regret; but she thirsted for the assuring look. His eyes were quietly friendly. So friendly was he, that he blamed her for inattention, and took her once to task about a melodious accent in which she vulgarized the vowels. All the flattery of the Branciani dress could not keep Emilia from her feeling of smallness. Was it possible that he loved her? She watched him as eagerly as her shyness would permit. Any shadow of a change was spied for. Getting no softness from him, or superadded kindness, no shadow of a change in that direction, she stumbled in her reading purposely, to draw down rebuke; her construing was villanously bad. He told her so, and she replied: "I don't like poetry." But seeing him exchange Ariosto for Roman History, she murmured, "I like Dante." Merthyr plunged her remorselessly into the second Punic war.
But there was worse to follow. She was informed that after breakfast she would be called upon to repeat the principal facts she had been reading of. Emilia groaned audibly.
"Take the book," said Merthyr.
"It's so heavy," she complained.
"Heavy?"
"I mean, to carry about."
"If you want to 'carry it about,' the boy shall follow you with it."
She understood that she was being laughed at. Languor, coupled with the consciousness of ridicule, overwhelmed her.
"I feel I can't learn," she said.
"Feel, that you must," was replied to her.
"No; don't take any more trouble with me!"
"Yes; I expect you to distinguish Scipio from Cicero, and not make the mistake of the other evening, when you were talking to Mrs. Cameron."
Emilia left him, abashed, to dread shrewdly their meeting within five minutes at the breakfast-table; to dread eating under his eyes, with doubts of the character of her acts generally. She was, indeed, his humble scholar, though she seemed so full of weariness and revolt. He, however, when alone, looked fixedly at the door through which she had passed, and said, "She loves that man still. Similar ages, similar tastes, I suppose! She is dressed to be ready for him. She can't learn: she can do nothing. My work mayn't be lost, but it's lost for me."
Merthyr did not know that Georgiana had betrayed him, but in no case would he have given Emilia the signs she expected: in the first place, because he had self-command; and, secondly, because of those years he counted in advance of her. So she had the full mystery of his loving her to think over, without a spot of the weakness to fasten on.
Georgiana's first sight of Emilia in her Branciani dress shut her heart against the girl with iron clasps. She took occasion to remark, "We need not expect visitors so very early;" but the offender was impervious. Breakfast finished, the reading with Merthyr recommenced, when Emilia, having got over her surprise at the sameness of things this day, acquitted herself better, and even declaimed the verses musically. Seeing him look pleased, she spoke them out sonorously. Merthyr applauded. Upon which Emilia said, with odd abruptness and solemnity, "Will he come to-day?" It was beyond Merthyr's power of self-control to consent to be taken into a consultation on this matter, and he attempted to put it aside. "He may or he may notprobably to-morrow."