"You excuse him for writing to me in that style?"
"Yes; he may write to any woman like that."
"He has lat.i.tude! You really fancy that"s the sort of letter a friend would write?"
"That is how Mr. Powys would write to me," said Emilia. Lady Charlotte laughed. "My unhappy Merthyr!"
"Only if I could be a great deal older," Emilia hastened to add; and Lady Charlotte slightly frowned, but rubbed it out with a smile.
Rising, the lady said: "I have spoken to you upon equal terms; and remember, very few women would have done what I have done. You are cared for by Merthyr Powys, and that"s enough. It would do you no harm to fix your eyes upon him. You won"t get him; but it would do you no harm. He has a heart, as they call it; whatever it is, it"s as strong as a cable.
He is a knight of the antique. He is specially guarded, however. Well, he insists that you are his friend; so you are mine, and that is why I have come to you and spoken to you. You will be silent about it, I need not say. No one but yourself is aware that Lieutenant Pole does me the honour to liken me to the good old gentleman who accompanied Telemachus in his voyages, and chooses me from among the handmaidens of earth. On this head you will promise to be silent."
Lady Charlotte held forth her hand. Emilia would not take it before she had replied, "I knew this before you came," and then she pressed the extended fingers.
Lady Charlotte drew her close. "Has Wilfrid taken you into his confidence so far?"
Emilia explained that she had heard it from his father.
The lady"s face lit up as from a sting of anger. "Very well--very well,"
she said; and, presently, "You are right when you speak of the power of lying in men. Observe--Wilfrid told me that not one living creature knew there was question of an engagement between us. What would you do in my case?"
Emilia replied, "Forgive him; and I should think no more of it."
"Yes. It would be right; and, presuming him to have the vice, I could be of immense service to him, if at least he does not lie habitually. But this is a description of treachery, you know."
"Oh!" cried Emilia, "what kind of treachery is that, if he only will keep his heart open for me to give all mine to it!"
She stood clutching her hands in the half-sobbing ecstasy which signalises a spiritual exaltation built on disquiet. She had shown small emotion hitherto. The sight of it was like the sight of a mighty hostile power to Lady Charlotte--a power that moved her--that challenged, and irritated, and subdued her. For she saw there something that she had not; and being of a nature leaning to great-mindedness, though not of the first rank, she could not meanly mask her own deficiency by despising it. To do this is the secret evil by which souls of men and women stop their growth.
Lady Charlotte decided now to say good-bye. Her parting was friendly--the form of it consisting of a nod, an extension of the hand, and a kind word or two.
When alone, Emilia wondered why she kept taking long breaths, and tried to correct herself: but the heart laboured. Yet she seemed to have no thought in her mind; she had no active sensation of pity or startled self-love. She went to smooth Mr. Pole"s pillow, as to a place of forgetfulness. The querulous tyrannies of the invalid relieved her; but the heavy lifting of her chest returned the moment she was alone. She mentioned it to the doctor, who prescribed for liver, informing her that the said organ conducted one of the most important functions of her bodily system.
Emilia listened to the lecturer, and promised to take his medicine, trusting to be perfectly quieted by the nauseous draught; but when Mr.
Powys came, she rushed up to him, and fell with a cry upon his breast, murmuring broken words that Georgiana might fairly interpret as her suspicions directed. Nor had she ever seen Merthyr look as he did when their eyes next met.
CHAPTER XXIX
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 a.s.sumption, 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.
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 a.s.sured 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-gla.s.s 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.
CHAPTER x.x.x
Flying from port to port to effect an exchange of stewards (the endless occupation of a yacht proprietor), Wilfrid had no tidings from Brookfield. The night before the gathering on Besworth Lawn he went to London and dined at his Club--a place where youths may drink largely of the milk of this world"s wisdom. Wilfrid"s romantic sentiment was always corrected by an hour at his Club. After dinner he strolled to a not perfectly regulated theatre, in company with a brother officer; and when they had done duty before the scenes for a s.p.a.ce of time, they lounged behind to disenchant themselves, in obedience to that precocious cynicism which is the young man"s extra-Luxury. The first figure that caught Wilfrid"s attention there was Mr. Pericles, in a white overcoat, stretched along a sofa--his eyelids being down, though his eyes were evidently vigilant beneath. A t.i.tter of ladies present told of some recent interesting commotion.
"Only a row between that rich Greek fellow who gave the supper, and Marion," a vivacious dame explained to Wilfrid. "She"s in one of her jealous fits; she"d be jealous if her poodle-dog went on its hind-legs to anybody else."
"Poodle, by Jove!" said Wilfrid. "Pericles himself looks like an elongated poodle shaved up to his moustache. Look at him. And he plays the tyrant, does he?"