"She"s botherin" of ye, Pole, the puss!" said Mrs. Chump, certain that she had hit a weak point in that mention of the yacht. "Ask her what sorrt of behaviour--"
"And he didn"t speak to any of you?" said Mr. Pole.
"No, Papa."
"He looked the other way?"
"He did us that honour."
"Ask her, Pole, how she behaved to "m on board the yacht," cried Mrs.
Chump. "Oh! there was flirtin", flirtin"! And go and see what the n.o.ble poet says of tying up in sacks and plumpin" of poor bodies of women into forty fathoms by them Turks and Greeks, all because of jeal"sy. So, they make a woman in earnest there, the wretches, "cause she cann"t have onny of her jokes. Didn"t ye tease Mr. Paricles on board the yacht, Ad"la?
Now, was he there?"
"Martha! you"re a fool!" said Mr. Pole, looking the victim of one of his fits of agitation. "Who knows whether he was there better than you?
You"ll be forgetting soon that we"ve ever dined together. I hate to see a woman so absurd! There--never mind! Go in: take off bonnet something--anything! only I can"t bear folly! Eh, Mr. Runningbrook?"
""Deed, Pole, and ye"re mad." Mrs. Chump crossed her hands to reply with full repose. "I"d like to know how I"m to know what I never said."
The scene was growing critical. Adela consulted the eyes of her sisters, which plainly said that this was her peculiar sc.r.a.pe. Adela ended it by going up to Mrs. Chump, taking her by the shoulders, and putting a kiss upon her forehead. "Now you will see better," she said. "Don"t you know Mr. Pericles was not with us? As surely as he was with the Tinleys this morning!"
"And a nice morning it is!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Pole, trotting off hurriedly.
"Does Pole think--" Mrs. Chump murmured, with reference to her voyaging on the yacht. The kiss had bewildered her sequent sensations.
"He does think, and will think, and must think," Adela prattled some persuasive infantine nonsense: her soul all the while in revolt against her sisters, who left her the work to do, and took the position of spectators and critics, condemning an effort they had not courage to attempt.
"By the way, I have to congratulate a friend of mine," said Tracy, selecting Adela for an ironical bow.
"Then it is Captain Gambier," cried Mrs. Chump, as if a whole revelation had burst on her. Adela blushed. "Oh! and what was that I heard?"
continued the aggravating woman.
Adela flashed her eyes round on her sisters. Even then they left her without aid, their feeling being that she had debased the house by her familiarity with this woman before Tracy.
"Stay! didn"t ye both--" Mrs. Chump was saying.
"Yes?"--Adela pa.s.sed by her--"only in your ears alone, you know!" At which hint Mrs. Chump gleefully turned and followed her. A rumour was prevalent of some misadventure to Adela and the captain on board the yacht. Arabella saw her depart, thinking, "How singular is her propensity to imitate me!" for the affirmative uttered in the tone of interrogation was quite Arabella"s own; as also occasionally the negative,--the negative, however, suiting the musical indifference of the sound, and its implied calm breast.
"As for Pericles," said Tracy, "you need not wonder that the fellow prays in other pews than yours. By heaven! he may pray and pray: I"d send him to Hades with an epigram in his heart!"
From Tracy the ladies learnt that Wilfrid had inflicted public chastis.e.m.e.nt upon Mr. Pericles for saying a false thing of Emilia. He danced the prettiest pas seal that was ever footed by debutant on the hot iron plates of Purgatory. They dared not ask what it was that Mr.
Pericles had said, but Tracy was so vehement on the subject of his having met his deserts, that they partly guessed it to bear some relation to their s.e.x"s defencelessness, and they approved their brother"s work.
Sir Twickenham and Captain Gambier dined at Brookfield that day. However astonishing it might be to one who knew his character and triumphs, the captain was a b.u.t.terfly netted, and was on the highroad to an exhibition of himself pinned, with his wings outspread. During the service of the table Tracy relieved Adela from Mrs. Chump"s inadvertencies and little bits of feminine malice, but he could not help the captain, who blundered like a schoolboy in her rough hands. It was noted that Sir Twickenham reserved the tolerating smile he once had for her. Mr.
Pole"s nervous fretfulness had increased. He complained in occasional underbreaths, correcting himself immediately with a "No, no!" and blinking briskly.
But after dinner came the time when the painfullest scene was daily enacted. Mrs. Chump drank Port freely. To drink it fondly, it was necessary that she should have another rosy winegla.s.s to nod to, and Mr. Pole, whose taste for wine had been weakened, took this post as his duty. The watchful, pinched features of the poor pale little man bloomed unnaturally, and his unintelligible eyes sparkled as he emptied his gla.s.s. His daughters knew that he drank, not for his pleasure, but for their benefit; that he might sustain Martha Chump in the delusion that he was a fitting bridegroom, and with her money save them from ruin.
Each evening, with remorse that blotted all perception of the tragic comicality of the show, they saw him, in his false strength and his anxiety concerning his pulse"s play, act this part. The recurring words, "Now, Martha, here"s the Port," sent a cold wave through their blood.
They knew what the doctor remarked on the effect of that Port. "Ill!"
Mrs. Chump would cry, when she saw him wink after sipping; "you, Pole!
what do they say of ye, ye deer!" and she returned the wink, the ladies looking on. Not to drink a proper quantum of Port, when Port was on the table, was, in Mrs. Chump"s eyes, mean for a man. Even Chump, she would say, was master of his bottle, and thought nothing of it. "Who does?"
cried her present suitor, and the Port ebbed, and his cheeks grew crimson.
This frightful rivalry with the ghost of Alderman Chump continued night after night. The rapturous Martha was incapable of observing that if she drank with a ghost in memory, in reality she drank with nothing better than an animated puppet. The nights ended with Mr. Pole either sleeping in his arm-chair (upon which occasions one daughter watched him and told dreadful tales of his waking), or staggering to bed, debating on the stairs between tea and brandy, complaining of a loss of sensation at his knee-cap, or elbow, or else rubbing his head and laughing hysterically.
His bride was not at such moments observant. No wonder Wilfrid kept out of the way, if he had not better occupation elsewhere. The ladies, in their utter anguish, after inveighing against the baneful Port, had begged their father to delay no more to marry the woman. "Why?" said Mr.
Pole, sharply; "what do you want me to marry her for?" They were obliged to keep up the delusion, and said, "Because she seems suited to you as a companion." That satisfied him. "Oh! we won"t be in a hurry," he said, and named a day within a month; and not liking their unready faces, laughed, and dismissed the idea aloud, as if he had not earnestly been entertaining it.
The ladies of Brookfield held no more their happy, energetic midnight consultations. They had begun to crave for sleep and a s.n.a.t.c.h of forgetfulness, the scourge being daily on their flesh: and they had now no plans to discuss; they had no distant horizon of low vague lights that used ever to be beyond their morrow. They kissed at the bedroom door of one, and separated. Silence was their only protection to the Nice Feelings, now that Fine Shades had become impossible. Adela had almost made herself distinct from her sisters since the yachting expedition. She had grown severely careful of the keys of her writing-desk, and would sometimes slip the bolt of her bedroom door, and answer "Eh?" dubiously in tone, when her sisters had knocked twice, and had said "Open" once. The house of Brookfield showed those divisional rents which an admonitory quaking of the earth will create. Neither sister was satisfied with the other. Cornelia"s treatment of Sir Twickenham was almost openly condemned, but at the same time it seemed to Arabella that the baronet was receiving more than the necessary amount of consolation from the bride of Captain Gambier, and that yacht habits and moralities had been recently imported to Brookfield. Adela, for her part, looked sadly on Arabella, and longed to tell her, as she told Cornelia, that if she continued to play Freshfield Sumner purposely against Edward Buxley, she might lose both. Cornelia quietly measured accusations and judged impartially; her mind being too full to bring any personal observations to bear. She said, perhaps, less than she would have said, had she not known that hourly her own Nice Feelings had to put up a pet.i.tion for Fine Shades: had she not known, indeed, that her conduct would soon demand from her sisters an absolutely merciful interpretation. For she was now simply attracting Sir Twickenham to Brookfield as a necessary medicine to her Papa. Since Mrs. Chump"s return, however, Mr. Pole had spoken cheerfully of himself, and, by innuendo emphasized, had imparted that his mercantile prospects were brighter. In fact, Cornelia half thought that he must have been pretending bankruptcy to gain his end in getting the consent of his daughters to receive the woman. She, and Adela likewise, began to suspect that the parental transparency was a little mysterious, and that there is, after all, more than we see in something that we see through.
They were now in danger of supposing that because the old man had possibly deceived them to some extent, he had deceived them altogether.
But was not the after-dinner scene too horribly true? Were not his hands moist and cold while the forehead was crimson? And could a human creature feel at his own pulse, and look into vacancy with that intense apprehensive look, and be but an actor? They could not think so. But his conditions being dependent upon them, the ladies felt in their hearts a spring of absolute rebellion when the call for fresh sacrifices came.
Though they did not grasp the image, they had a feeling that he was nourished bit by bit by everything they held dear; and though they loved him, and were generous, they had begun to ask, "What next?"
The ladies were at a dead-lock, and that the heart is the father of our histories, I am led to think when I look abroad on families stagnant because of so weak a motion of the heart. There are those who have none at all; the ma.s.s of us are moved from the propulsion of the toes of the Fates. But the ladies of Brookfield had hearts lively enough to get them into sc.r.a.pes. The getting out of them, or getting on at all, was left to Providence. They were at a dead-lock, for Arabella, flattered as she was by Freshfield Sumner"s wooing, could not openly throw Edward over, whom indeed she thought that she liked the better of the two, though his letters had not so wide an intellectual range. Her father was irritably anxious that she should close with Edward. Adela could not move: at least, not openly. Cornelia might have taken an initiative; but tenderness for her father"s health had hitherto restrained her, and she temporized with Sir Twickenham on the n.o.blest of principles. She was, by the devotion of her conduct, enabled to excuse herself so far that she could even fish up an excuse in the shape of the effort she had made to find him entertaining: as if the said effort should really be re-payment enough to him for his a.s.siduous and most futile suit. One deep grief sat on Cornelia"s mind. She had heard from Lady Gosstre that there was something like madness in the Barrett family. She had consented to meet Sir Purcell clandestinely (after debate on his claim to such a sacrifice on her part), and if, on those occasions, her lover"s tone was raised, it gave her a tremour. And he had of late appeared to lose his n.o.ble calm; he had spoken (it might almost be interpreted) as if he doubted her. Once, when she had mentioned her care for her father, he had cried out upon the name of father with violence, looking unlike himself.
His condemnation of the world, too, was not so Christian as it had been; it betrayed what the vulgar would call spite, and was not all compa.s.sed in his peculiar smooth shrug--expressive of a sort of border-land between contempt and charity: which had made him wear in her sight all the superiority which the former implies, with a considerable share of the benign complacency of the latter. This had gone. He had been sarcastic even to her; saying once, and harshly: "Have you a will?"
Personally she liked the poor organist better than the poor baronet, though he had less merit. It was unpleasant in her present mood to be told "that we have come into this life to fashion for ourselves souls;"
and that "whosoever cannot decide is a soulless wretch fit but to pa.s.s into vapour." He appeared to have ceased to make his generous allowances for difficult situations. A senseless notion struck Cornelia, that with the baronetcy he had perhaps inherited some of the madness of his father.
The two were in a dramatic tangle of the Nice Feelings worth a glance as we pa.s.s on. She wished to say to him, "You are unjust to my perplexities;" and he to her, "You fail in your dilemma through cowardice." Instead of uttering which, they chid themselves severally for entertaining such coa.r.s.e ideas of their idol. Doubtless they were silent from consideration for one another: but I must add, out of extreme tenderness for themselves likewise. There are people who can keep the facts that front them absent from their contemplation by not framing them in speech; and much benevolence of the pa.s.sive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself. "My duty to my father," being cited by Cornelia, Sir Purcell had to contend with it.
"True love excludes no natural duty," she said.
And he: "Love discerns unerringly what is and what is not duty."
"In the case of a father, can there be any doubt?" she asked, the answer shining in her confident aspect.
"There are many things that fathers may demand of us!" he interjected bitterly.
She had a fatal glimpse here of the false light in which his resentment coloured the relations between fathers and children; and, deeming him incapable of conducting this argument, she felt quite safe in her opposition, up to a point where feeling stopped her.
"Devotedness to a father I must conceive to be a child"s first duty,"
she said.
Sir Purcell nodded: "Yes; a child"s!"
"Does not history give the higher praise to children who sacrifice themselves for their parents?" asked Cornelia.
And he replied: "So, you seek to be fortified in such matters by history!"
Courteous sneers silenced her. Feeling told her she was in the wrong; but the beauty of her sentiment was not to be contested, and therefore she thought that she might distrust feeling: and she went against it somewhat; at first very tentatively, for it caused pain. She marked a line where the light of duty should not encroach on the light of our human desires. "But love for a parent is not merely duty," thought Cornelia. "It is also love;--and is it not the least selfish love?"
Step by step Sir Purcell watched the clouding of her mind with false conceits, and knew it to be owing to the heart"s want of vigour. Again and again he was tempted to lay an irreverent hand on the veil his lady walked in, and make her bare to herself. Partly in simple bitterness, he refrained: but the chief reason was that he had no comfort in giving a shock to his own state of deception. He would have had to open a dark closet; to disentangle and bring to light what lay in an undistinguishable heap; to disfigure her to herself, and share in her changed eyesight; possibly to be, or seem, coa.r.s.e: so he kept the door of it locked, admitting sadly in his meditation that there was such a place, and saying all the while: "If I were not poor!" He saw her running into the shelter of egregious sophisms, till it became an effort to him to preserve his reverence for her and the s.e.x she represented.
Finally he imagined that he perceived an idea coming to growth in her, no other than this: "That in duty to her father she might sacrifice herself, though still loving him to whom she had given her heart; thus enn.o.bling her love for father and for lover." With a wicked ingenuity he tracked her forming notions, encouraged them on, and provoked her enthusiasm by putting an ironical question: "Whether the character of the soul was subdued and shaped by the endurance and the destiny of the perishable?"
"Oh! no, no!" she exclaimed. "It cannot be, or what comfort should we have?"
Few men knew better that when lovers" sentiments stray away from feeling, they are to be suspected of a disloyalty. Yet he admired the tone she took. He had got an "ideal" of her which it was pleasanter to magnify than to distort. An "ideal" is so arbitrary, that if you only doubt of its being perfection, it will vanish and never come again.
Sir Purcell refused to doubt. He blamed himself for having thought it possible to doubt, and this, when all the time he knew.
Through endless labyrinths of delusion these two unhappy creatures might be traced, were it profitable. Down what a vale of little intricate follies should we be going, lighted by one ghastly conclusion! At times, struggling from the midst of her sophisms, Cornelia prayed her lover would claim her openly, and so nerve her to a pitch of energy that would clinch the ruinous debate. Forgetting that she was an "ideal"--the accredited mistress of pure wisdom and of the power of deciding rightly--she prayed to be dealt with as a thoughtless person, and one of the herd of women. She felt that Sir Purcell threw too much on her. He expected her to go calmly to her father, and to Sir Twickenham, and tell them individually that her heart was engaged; then with a stately figure to turn, quit the house, and lay her hand in his. He made no allowance for the weakness of her s.e.x, for the difficulties surrounding her, for the consideration due to Sir Twickenham"s pride, and to her father"s ill-health. She half-protested to herself that he expected from her the mechanical correctness of a machine, and overlooked the fact that she was human. It was a grave comment on her ambition to be an "ideal."